Forgive me if you’ve heard or read me tell this story elsewhere (I’ve at least mentioned it on a podcast or three), but I can pinpoint the exact moment I began to fall in love with the sport of boxing.
The date was October 4, 1997. I was about a month into my first real job, as associate editor at The Ring magazine, fairly new to the sport, only moderately interested in it, figuring this gig was just a brief entry-level experience on the road to covering something else.
But then the co-feature of the first fight card I attended starred some guy named Arturo Gatti, whom I’d been told was developing a reputation for scoring dramatic, come-from-behind knockouts with his left hook. And wouldn’t you know, he was nearly crumpled by Gabriel Ruelas in the fourth round, only to storm back and level his opponent in the fifth with one of those left hooks I was warned about.
When the fight was waved off, Gatti sank to his knees in triumph and relief, and that was it for me. That was all I needed to see. I’d gotten a taste of the sort of drama only boxing can provide.
A replay of the fight aired the next weekend on HBO. I recorded it on something called a VCR and I watched those five rounds over and over for the next few weeks. I kept watching even after I had every punch and every line of the commentary memorized.
I was hooked.
That’s the effect a truly special fight can have. The right combination of literal blood and figurative guts, the right bone-crunching exchanges, the right indelible images of warriors persevering through scrambled brains and wobbly knees – all adding up to just the right dose of the unthinkable.
Naoya Inoue’s 12-round unanimous decision victory over Junto Nakatani at the Tokyo Dome on Saturday provided none of those things. It is borderline impossible to imagine a general sports fan who has barely sampled boxing watching Inoue-Nakatani and getting hooked. This was not the fight you show someone to make them fall in love with this crazy sport.
What it was, instead, was the absolute perfect fight to show someone to make them respect this beautiful sport.
Gennadiy Golovkin famously told us he respects box. It would be impossible to watch Inoue-Nakatani and not respect box.
To continue with the GGG-isms: Inoue-Nakatani was not a big drama show. It was a big show, to be sure – some 55,000 fans packed into the stadium attest to that. But the drama measured out to medium at best.
It was a big discipline show, a big dexterity show, a big deftness show. It was a big dignified show.
Actually, Inoue vs. Nakatani was one of those tale-of-two-fights situations. The first half was careful, classy boxing of the highest order. The second half saw just enough of that carefulness fall by the wayside to allow for a moderate dose of the action and intensity we crave. Had the entire fight looked the way the back half did – well, it still wouldn’t have been a Fight of the Year candidate, but it would have been good enough for some impulsive lunatic to post “Fight of the Year!” on social media and not get horribly ratio’d.
In the early rounds, Nakatani wanted to use his length and his jab from the southpaw stance to try to score while staying at the least risky range possible. Inoue, meanwhile, wanted to close the distance with his extraordinary footwork and obscenely explosive speed but get out of the way without putting himself in real danger.
Inoue is called “The Monster” for a reason, but his most exceptional quality early in the fight was his defense, his ability to almost always position his head a half-inch outside the path of Nakatani’s punches. And Nakatani’s defense was solid too. He didn’t make Inoue swing and miss quite as often, but he frequently made him swing and land something not quite flush.
The rounds were not necessarily easy to score, but it was obvious at the midway point that defending undisputed 122lbs champion Inoue had a lead. One judge had him up 60-54, which was perhaps a reach. The other two had The Monster ahead 58-56.
It was up to Nakatani to change something and start forcing a fight, and, beginning in the seventh, he did. It wasn’t Gatti-Ruelas, but the tempo picked up, and Inoue showed flickers of distress – while also finding the opportunities to counter that he’d been patiently waiting for.
There was less distance between the two boxers, more two-way exchanges. Less emphasis on defense, more of the sort of aggression that makes a crowd roar.
Nakatani swept rounds 8 and 10 on all three scorecards – the only two such instances of the fight. Entering the championship rounds, he had momentum, and he had a shot at a draw if he kept that momentum going, or an upset win if he could score a knockdown.
He also had a cut between his eyes and an all-time great fighter in front of him, so the momentum proved fleeting.
Inoue was absolutely brilliant in the 11th – perhaps the finest round of his career that didn’t feature a knockdown or knockout – and close enough to brilliant in the 12th against a Nakatani who was still game but seemed resigned to second place.
When the final bell rang, we had not witnessed boxing at its apex as a form of entertainment. But we’d witnessed something close to the best boxing could offer as a pure sport, as evidence of the skill and technique required to succeed at the highest levels, as proof that boxing is so much more than just two dudes punching each other (which is surely how many non-fans perceive it).
Plus, Inoue and Nakatani behaved with total sportsmanship every step of the way.
And then came one of the best parts, from a “this sport deserves your respect” standpoint: The scorecards were all totally reflective of the fight we’d just witnessed. Most people never see the round-by-round scores, so let’s not get lost in those details (a couple of which were mildly puzzling). But those final scores were 116-112 from Juan Carlos Pelayo, 116-112 from Patrick Morley and 115-113 from Raul Caiz Snr. Yep, yep and yep.
I know, I know – it speaks to boxing’s pitifully low bar that getting three sensible scorecards is a cause for celebration. But if Inoue-Nakatani was your entry point to boxing, you would have no reason to believe this sport is a mess behind the scenes, and there’s a whole lot of value in avoiding that impression.
The positioning of this particular magnificently classy display to kick off a busy Saturday of fights, some 12 hours before a pay-per-view broadcast emanating from Las Vegas began, proved notable in that the PPV provided a nonstop barrage of the sort of action that can make a casual fan fall in love with boxing.
Jose Tito Sanchez vs. Jorge Chavez was an instant classic with both a Round of the Year frontrunner and a sensational knockout ending. David Benavidez was alarmingly destructive in the main event, causing every amateur doctor on the internet to collectively diagnose a broken orbital bone as Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez waved the white flag. Ismael Flores dished out a stirring beating to previously undefeated Isaac Lucero. Oscar Duarte-Angel Fierro was highly competitive and perpetually captivating. Jaime Munguia-Jose Armando Resendiz was one-sided but never dull.
Action-wise, fun-wise, you could make a case that all five fights on the PPV portion of that card exceeded Inoue-Nakatani. And add to that list Conah Walker’s 10th-round stoppage win over Sam Eggington in England on Saturday too, the kind of blood-curdling brawl that can instantly turn a casual into a hardcore.
But Inoue-Nakatani was a striking success in a different way. It was a fight to be admired and appreciated.
And it was hardly the first of its kind.
As recently as last year, the Terence Crawford-Saul “Canelo” Alvarez bout harnessed much of the same energy. It was not a great fight, but everyone knew they’d seen a great fighter win a good fight.
Both Dmitry Bivol-Artur Beterbiev fights, while probably a notch higher than Inoue-Nakatani on the action scale, were a bit better suited to an arthouse collection than mainstream mass appeal.
Oleksandr Usyk’s two fights with Anthony Joshua never quite lit a fire in a fan’s belly, but they were close and captivating, and you had to admire the mountain Usyk was climbing and the manner in which he scaled it.
Floyd Mayweather vs. Oscar De La Hoya was a high-level fight between two greats where a brawl never quite broke out.
For all the bad blood between Johnny Tapia and Danny Romero, their grudge match proved a bit too technical to earn any Fight of the Year accolades.
Pernell Whitaker’s two fights with Buddy McGirt were two-way boxing master classes (with “Sweet Pea” emerging, unsurprisingly, as the more masterful of the duo).
James Toney’s draw against Mike McCallum was about as sophisticated as boxing gets, although some might say it was too exciting to qualify for this discussion – plus the controversial decision might have left some observers lacking respect for the sport.
And though it featured an early knockdown and a dramatic stoppage with six seconds left in the 15th round, Sugar Ray Leonard’s 1979 win over Wilfred Benitez was an all-time mesmerizing tactical and technical display that one would stop short of calling a scorcher.
Like those examples, Inoue-Nakatani was more a fight for the boxing connoisseur than the boxing newbie. But it was fought at such a high level, with such class, in front of such a massive and passionate crowd, with such sensible officiating, that it would be impossible to watch it and not develop a level of respect for boxing.
The sport of boxing delivering entertainment for the sadists out there is something that happens all the time.
The sport of boxing commanding respect is a decidedly more rare occurrence. Maybe Inoue-Nakatani wasn’t everything we hoped and dreamed it could be, but it was nevertheless precisely what boxing needed it to be.
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.
