If you’ve ever watched an entertainment industry award show, you’ve heard someone misuse the word “humbled.” It happens all the time. Someone scores a big win, they’re trying to communicate that they’re “honored” or “proud” while also trying to portray themselves as a modest person whose ego is not running amok, and so they declare themselves “humbled” to receive the award.
But they are not actually humbled. Quite the opposite.
You want to see humbled?
Check out “Prince” Naseem Hamed in the aftermath of his first and only career defeat, 25 years ago today, April 7, 2001, at the hands of Marco Antonio Barrera.
Hamed displayed as cocky a public persona as any seen in boxing since the heyday of Muhammad Ali, and it persisted from his first fight through his 35th. But once Barrera was finished with him in fight number 36, all at once it was gone. “Naz” had been truly and fully, by the proper definition of the word, humbled.
HBO’s Larry Merchant, minutes after the end of the fight, gave Hamed the opportunity to blame some element of his performance on a lengthy pre-fight delay due to a glove issue, or to make some other excuse of his choosing.
Naz refused.
“No delay made no effect,” Hamed said. “The fact is, I got in, the guy boxed probably better than me tonight, and that’s it. … The fact is, he’s the pure winner tonight, I congratulate him, and that’s it.”
He continued later in the interview: “I’m happy that I’ve done 12 rounds and come out safe. … The fact is, I’ve lost the fight. I accept the loss.”
Hamed also insisted, however, that he would be back, he would exercise his rematch clause and he would even the score with Barrera. He spoke like a man whose confidence hadn’t been entirely shattered, whose flame hadn’t been extinguished.
But his actions that followed proved otherwise.
The Prince, who’d long reigned as boxing’s king of braggadocio, was humbled right out of the sport. He fought once more – 13 months later against little-known Manuel Calvo – and quietly retreated and retired.
“I was surprised how quickly and easily he went away after he was exposed by Barrera,” HBO blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley told me in a 2017 interview. “I didn’t expect him to have one more fight and pack it in. But he had made a great deal of money, and he had appetites, and ultimately it became clear that the biggest problem was that he wasn’t going to be 126lbs for long. He was more likely to be 226 given his habits and his worldview and his predilections.
“I guess he made enough money that he was going to be OK, and the embarrassment of the Barrera fight was too great for him to continue on the stage the way he had been.”
Looking back now, a quarter-century later, it might seem there’s nothing embarrassing at all about losing over the distance to a fellow future Hall of Famer like Barrera, one of the finest all-around fighters of his generation.
But you have to understand the perception of both men at the time. Hamed was a 3½-to-1 betting favorite. In a poll of 30 boxing writers before the bout, 28 picked Naz to win. Barrera was also moving up in weight from 122 to 126.
Even though they were both 27 years old – born 26 days apart in 1974 – Barrera already had 55 fights on his resume, had lost three times (even if two were debatable decisions) and looked lousy two fights earlier against Jose Luis Valbuena. There was a reasonable line of thinking that his career was winding down. Hamed, on the other hand, was coming off back-to-back fourth-round KO wins, was undefeated in 35 fights with 31 knockouts, and there was little reason to believe he wasn’t squarely in his physical prime.
So, yeah, this loss came with a dollop of embarrassment. Especially when you consider that the enduring highlight is Barrera giving away a point in the final round for the pleasure of half-nelson-ing Hamed and running him headfirst into a corner pad.
The humiliation actually began as Hamed made his way to the ring. The flamboyant featherweight champion from Sheffield, England, was known for his creative ring entrances (nothing will top the flying carpet ride for his fight with Vuyani Bungu), and this time, he took a skyride to the ringside area seated in a leopard skin-patterned hoop. It was not a smooth flight, however, with wet weather coming in the form of a beverage tossed by a fan at the MGM Grand that splashed home on the champ.
At least Hamed was going to be paid handsomely for his humiliation. He earned a reported $6.5 million and Barrera $1.9 million for what was at the time the richest featherweight fight ever. (HBO Pay-Per-View’s Mark Taffet estimated on the weekend of the fight that it was on track to sell 250,000 units, and it ended up generating a reported 310,000 buys.)
Michael Buffer introduced the fight as matching “the two best featherweights in the world” – a reach since Barrera had no featherweight track record to speak of, but a label that seemed possibly accurate by fight’s end.
Buffer also billed it as “for the featherweight championship of the world,” ignoring the alphabets, as only the vacant IBO title was at stake. Hamed had previously held the WBO, IBF and WBC titles and had beaten WBA titlist Wilfredo Vazquez immediately after the Puerto Rican had been stripped, so even without any of the belts, he was the lineal champion and universally recognized as the division’s kingpin.
And if you didn’t know yet that Naz was the A-side coming in, surely you knew it when Buffer paused mid-intro to hand him the mic so the proudly Muslim fighter could say a few words in praise of his god.
Once the bell rang, however, it was just two mortals in the ring. And that was bad news for Naz.
The Hamed-Barrera fight stands out as one of boxing’s ultimate triumphs for technique. The heavy-handed, spectacularly unorthodox Hamed had gotten away with doing everything wrong, until it finally caught up with him and he ran into the one serious, determined “Baby-Faced Assassin” who wouldn’t let him get away with anything.
Barrera was primarily known as a brawler – see his Fight of the Year 14 months earlier against Erik Morales, for example – but on this night he brought the perfect, disciplined boxing game plan. The Mexican constantly circled to his left, staying away from the southpaw Hamed’s power hand. He timed Hamed for counters, punched with him, jabbed sharply. Barrera never lost sight of what angles put him in position to score without enabling the same for the Prince.
“[Hamed] knew that he fought in a high-risk style,” Lampley reflected years later. “He had it in his head that he was so cosmically good and so unusual that it would sustain. … I figured that at some point along the way, somebody would discipline him with a more well-rounded boxing approach. I didn’t know that it was going to be the person who did it at the moment at which he did it. But I did envision in my head that eventually, someone would take the measure of Naseem. Someone who had balance, timing, a good jab, and a more conventional approach to what they were doing.”
Rewatching the fight for its 25th anniversary, it was even more one-sided than I remembered it being – and more one-sided than the judges said it was. I found just a single round to give Hamed and ended up favoring Barrera 118-109, an identical score to that of then-editor-in-chief of The Ring Nigel Collins covering the fight from ringside in Las Vegas.
Whenever Hamed seemed to be having a decent round, he inevitably got knocked off-balance or had his chin popped up in the air by a perfectly timed Barrera punch. The Brit was made to stumble wildly twice in the opening round, setting the tone. It happened again in the third, and the fourth, and the sixth. A short hooking right hand by Barrera in the eighth had Hamed legitimately buzzed, wobbling sideways into the ropes. Again Hamed was knocked off-balance in the ninth, and in the 10th, and Barrera absolutely dominated the 12th.
HBO unofficial scorer Harold Lederman scored the fight closely (115-112), as did the judges (two more 115-112s and a 116-111). But Hamed’s head trainer, Emanuel Steward, believed from very early on that his fighter was behind and was telling him with three rounds to go that he needed a knockout to win. This is the same Steward who watched from ringside as Barrera dominated Jesus Salud on HBO in December 2000 and voiced concerns about Barrera as a Hamed opponent. Steward later revealed that Hamed couldn’t be convinced to train seriously and didn’t want to spar leading up to this fight.
The fight had its share of chippy moments, including an entanglement in the second round that resulted in Hamed just about delivering a DDT to Barrera. One defining moment came late in the sixth, when Hamed popped Barrera in a clinch, and Barrera immediately popped him back, harder and cleaner.
The Mexican warrior had a real air of defiance about him all night, tinged with a hint of disgust. That was especially pronounced with 70 seconds left in the 12th round, when Barrera seized on an awkward tangle to bulldog Hamed into the corner from behind, seemingly unconcerned about referee Joe Cortez taking a point. Afterward, Hamed wanted to touch gloves. Barrera had no interest.
In the 11th round, Merchant summed up what we were witnessing by saying, “The improvisational style that the Prince has developed since he was a boy is being exposed by a well-schooled boxer-puncher-brawler.” A round later, as the final seconds ticked off the clock, the writer-turned-commentator said of Hamed, “His moment of truth has turned into an hour of torture.”
The CompuBox stats told the tale more accurately than did the judges’ cards. Barrera out-landed Hamed 228-141, including nearly doubling him up in power punches, 129-69. The Mexican was also busier, out-throwing him 534-390, and landed at a higher percentage, including scoring with 49% of his power punches against a man reputed in his younger days to be difficult to find.
Hamed’s longtime publicist and friend George Azar told me in a 2017 interview, “Had the fight taken place a few years earlier, I think the result would have been much different. And also, by the time the Barrera fight came around, Naseem’s style had changed and he was a much more flat-footed fighter. He wasn’t the elusive fighter that he was coming up – the elusive fighter with the concussive punch.”
There was talk after this fight that it could set up an epic Barrera-Morales-Hamed round robin, but Hamed didn’t cooperate. (As fight fans, we’ll settle for the Barrera-Morales-Manny Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez round robin we got instead.)
Hamed was just 28 years old when he fought for the last time, finishing with a record of 36-1 (31 KOs) and gaining entry in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2015, some eight years after he first became Hall-eligible.
In contrast, Barrera remained a world-class fighter for another six and a half years and 13 fights, defeating Morales twice, winning titles at 130lbs as well, and only suffering defeats prior to his 35th birthday against fellow Hall of Famers Pacquiao and Marquez. He then hung around a few fights too long and rose a couple of weight classes too high, eventually retiring in 2011 with a record of 67-7 (44 KOs) with 1 no-contest and making the Hall on his first ballot.
Not bad for the guy who was perceived to be an “old 27” heading into the night of April 7, 2001.
Fans are free to debate whether this was Barrera’s greatest performance. There’s certainly a case to be made for the third Morales fight, or even the first Morales fight despite the judges favoring “El Terrible,” or perhaps the 1996 instant-classic win over Kennedy McKinney.
The Hamed fight stands out, though, as Barrera’s reinvention fight. We’d already known the blood-and-guts Mexican slugger had some tactician in him, but we didn’t realize the extent to which he could be a master boxer if he so chose.
Hamed was his ideal unorthodox, deeply flawed foil.
Six years after Barrera’s first title win, his upset of Hamed opened the door to another six-plus years as one of the best in boxing’s smaller weight classes.
This was the first day of the rest of Barrera’s brilliant career. And the first day of the end of Hamed’s.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
