A Duran-Leonard observation

It's amazing how many punches in that fight aren't conventional textbook shots. The vast majority of hard landed punches are incredibly, incredibly inventive from both men. Thrown from strange angles or body positions or thrown off of elaborate feints whether with their hands or balance. That's how good both men were, THAT's the level they both had to climb to just to compete & keep up with each other.

Really beautiful to watch.:love:

 

Best fight ever.

 

The first fight was a fun affair. Personally I didn't see the brilliance however. I saw Duran doing what he always did while Leonard also tried to do what Duran always did.

Frankly Leonard was a moron in that fight. Only his amazing skill and heart kept it competitive. To me, Leonard trying to fight like Duran made it less than beautiful to watch.

 

Lets not get into this shit. Leonard backs up whenever Duran tries to get inside just as much as he did in the rematch (just in 18ft rather than >21ft ring) until Duran nails him in the second and takes his wits and legs. Leonard doesn't just sleepwalk into a phonebooth, he knew he had to fight on the outside - Duran takes him there.

But whatever the strategy of either man, the way both executed the battle once the fight went that way was just at a honed level of expertise, skill & creativity that's off the charts. I haven't seen anything to compare to it in any other fight.

Just a tribute to both men, I'm not trying to start an argument here. :TLC:

 

Let's not get into this, but I would like to point out that this post is 100 % accurate

 

Excluding the last 30s of the first, where it was obvious Ray had lost the round and better do something about it quick - $1000 prize for anyone who can find me a moment where Leonard initiates or even intentionally aquieces to a bout of infighting before getting his legs taken away by that right hand in the 2nd. And no, the commentators saying it's happening every 5 seconds doesn't count. Leonard backs up & moves every time Roberto comes forward just like the second, he's just in a regulation rather than massive comedy clown ring.

Gee this mythologizing fries my canolis. Leonard tried to keep the first fight on the outside best he could. He just couldn't.

 

I sometimes wonder if people have actually SEEN these fights, rather than just read the lazy 3 line synopsis' of the two fights in big boxing picture books they got for xmas as kids.

 

Good fight. Both men looked good. Nice "Aggregation of talent in one ring" and all that good stuff.

All of Duran's skills and tricks didn't prevent him from getting bounced up and down by Thomas Hearns in humiliating one-sided fashion though.

I preferred Leonard-Hearns 1 as a fight though.

 

I sometimes wonder if people have actually watched the fights rather than made up their minds beforehand and then looking anything at all to confirm that.:nana:

 

I have.

 

Before getting his legs taken away, and excluding the last 20 seconds of the first where he tries to steal the round, show me one moment in the first fight where Leonard doesn't back up and move when Duran closes the range. It doesn't exist, because Leonard tried to fight on the outside like anybody faced with Duran would.

He tries, he just can't, because nobody could against Duran in that form in a regulation sized ring. In the second, he doesn't change tactics apart from fully exploiting the opportunity to shamelessly NOT FIGHT that a huge ring gave him. He can back up and keep backing up and keep backing up and never have to get caught on the ropes because you could swing a liger born with giganticism by the tail and not hit the ropes from centre ring.

You can't win this in this hate filled attempt to mythologize what happened in these fights because it's all right there on film. Leonard tries to keep Duran on the outside, he just can't.

Duran = champ. :bears:

DURAN! DURAN! DURAN!

 

This would have been a great thread in 1980.

Oops, that was before the internet.

 

?

 

::

Stinger is just angry and he doesn't know why.

 

When this fight happened, there was no cable.

I saw it closed circuit at the Houston Astrodome.

If you wanted to comment on it, you had to write to one of the boxing magazines and wait to see if they posted it up in the "Letters to the Editor" section, and you had a wait time from 3-6 months.

Jimmy Carter was President then and Larry Holmes was heavyweight champ, 8 tracks were the thing to have if you wanted to listen to music in your car, and you played vinyl records at home.

Now a thread on the fight 31 years after the fact, probably before many posters here were born.

 

Before I was born. My favourite ever album is from the same year, as it happens. One of the wonders of recorded media isn't it that great artistry can be captured for posterity and be enjoyed forever.

DURAN! DURAN! DURAN!

 

I can remember the card: Trevor Berbick knocked out John Tate in a huge upset, both have been dead for years.

Roger Leonard outpointed a shot Clyde Gray in a dreadfully boring bout, and Gaeton Hart killed Cleveland Denny in a tough, though not exciting fight.

Unleaded gasoline was hard to find and useless as most cars could not use it, Marlboro Reds were smoked by most people, and most people smoked.

Burt Reynolds ruled the Box Office, phone booths were everywhere, there was one lite beer which almost no one drank and Mean Joe Greene was all over the TV in a Coke commercial.

Get the idea?

 

I got your idea from the first post. I just don't agree with it & many others who don't are happy to talk about old fights and fighters regularly, as well. Since we like boxing and boxing has an especially interesting history.

Get that idea?

 

CO-FUCKING-SIGN. Sick of hearing how Leonard "made the mistake of fighting Duran's fight" (Duran made him fight his fight) and then "schooled and humiliated Duran" in the second fight (it was a close fight, if the Duran from Montreal had been in the ring that night it goes the same way the Montreal fight did).

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it might be because he's a fat bald old faggot with no penis

 

:mj:

 

Fuck off and die

you are a useless, steaming pile of bald excrement

 

::

Oh dear....

 

You are a coward, cdogg.

 

Round and round we go ::

 

Why dont you start another thread about some C-Level fighter who's balls you are currently suckling like a little bald sheep at his mother's teat?

Maybe you can start one about a girl boxer and tell us how she could beat Manny Pacquaio?

You are a nobody, Karl Hegman. Were you a jewish prisoner at Dachau, they would have simply told you to leave... you aren't worth gassing, you aren't worth wasting a perfectly good bullet... To put you to work digging graves would have been to allow a shovel to be handled by something beneath it intellectually

If you died tomorrow, the scrotums of shitty never-going-to-be-anything fighters in the Texas area would for once be dry and free of your insipid bacteria... strippers could cancel their restraining orders and move on with their lives... young strip club patrons could finally let their nipples heal from all of the biting... the world of internet journalism would at last have a shred of dignity... fightbeat would be a place filled with smiling, friendly Polar Bears with comically deep cartoon voices, rivers of chocolate, trees with Skittles clusters growing upon their many branches, the sounds of happy, laughing children would fill the air

only your continued respiration is preventing this utopia from becoming real... the only solution is for you to find someway to kill yourself without using (and thus contaminating) a perfectly good length of rope, or a gun, or a car, or a razor, etc.

 

Ill be in Waterbury, CT tomorrow all day... come to Waterbury and I will kick your bald ass all over the place and then spend the next 60 days washing my hands to remove your germs

 

DURA! DURAN! DURAN!

No clown ring, no cry!:mj:

 

Duran was great, and his defense was amazing in that fight

 

:jaw:

 

You're totally right Sly - Duran was just that amazing.:bears: