Twenty-five years ago today, at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, headlining on Showtime Championship Boxing for the first time, Zab Judah offered fight fans the full Zab Judah experience.
The date was August 5, 2000, and the opponent was Terronn Millett, the most highly regarded foe of Zab’s career to that point. It was a bout to settle an ownership dispute over a junior welterweight alphabet belt, and perhaps to tell us how prophetic ESPN’s Max Kellerman’s (in)famous “Pernell Whitaker with power” hype for “Super” Judah was.
By the end of four frantic rounds against Millett, it was a Y-E-S on the power, and an L-O-L on the Pernell.
Not that “Sweet Pea” never got hit and never got sent to the canvas, but when Judah got dropped by a wicked Millett left hook in the opening round, it marked the second time in three fights the Brooklynite had hit the deck. Judah was no Whitaker defensively. Not even close.
But he could be a hell of a lot more fun than Pernell. He got off the mat and dropped Millett in the second and twice more in the fourth, prompting ref Mike Ortega to call a halt at 2:47 of the round, ending what has become, over the ensuing quarter-century, a largely forgotten thriller.
There were other elements of trademark Judah along the way: his almost Manny Pacquiao-fast southpaw left hand; his showboating and shimmying in the third round after he made Millett miss; his holding his hands insultingly low; his throwing wild uppercuts from dangerously far away, a recklessness seemingly bred of overconfidence; his later hurting Millett with one of those very same uppercuts he never should have been throwing.
And the post-fight interviews were telling. Zab’s father and trainer, Yoel Judah, graded his performance “an A, a double A, and a triple A,” despite Judah suffering a knockdown. That Yoel took this fight as a sign that his son was unstoppable and not that improvements needed to be made helps explain why, for the most part, Zab peaked in his early 20s.
Meanwhile, Zab declared: “I’m going to go down in the Hall of Fame as one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world.” A lot of people would have figured at the time that such lofty proclamations weren’t a reach.
With this fourth-round TKO win, Judah improved to 24-0 (18 KOs) with one “no contest.” He was inching toward pound-for-pound consideration, gaining recognition among much of the boxing universe – not merely behind one end of the Friday Night Fights studio desk, but in general, among fans and media – as the best junior welterweight in the world, and starting to dream out loud about moving up to welter for a showdown with “Sugar” Shane Mosley.
He had his whole career in front of him at just 22 years old.
Judah’s final fight came in 2019, when he was 41 years old, a stoppage loss to Cletus Seldin that lowered his record to 44-10.
The math is easy. Nice, round numbers. Following the Millett fight, Judah won 20 times and lost 10 times.
And it’s largely the losses that he’ll be remembered for.
The first thing anyone thinks of when they think of Judah is the way his legs looked like they were trying to start a car on The Flintstones after a knockdown at the hands of Kostya Tszyu in a career-defining, division-unifying face-off in 2001.
The second fight people think of is probably his unfathomable upset lineal welterweight title loss to Carlos Baldomir in 2006, seemingly blowing a payday against Floyd Mayweather.
The third fight that boxing fans think of is the fight he didn’t deserve but got next anyway against Mayweather, in which Judah started fast, should have been credited with a right-hook knockdown in the second round, helped invite a mini-riot that arguably should have gotten Mayweather DQ’d, and ultimately ran out of steam and got soundly outboxed over 12 rounds.
The fourth fight that comes to mind is his 2007 thriller in front of a deafening crowd on Puerto Rican Day Parade weekend at Madison Square Garden against Miguel Cotto, in which Judah acquitted himself damned well early on before Cotto wore him down – with lots of legal punches and maybe a few low ones.
After that, the defining fights are a mix of successes and failures.
There was the career-best ninth-round KO rematch road win over Cory Spinks in St. Louis in 2005 to claim the welterweight championship. There was the close decision loss to Spinks the year before in their first fight.
There was a fifth-round borderline-bodyshot loss to Amir Khan in 2011. There was that fourth-round stoppage of Millett more than a decade earlier.
There were “that’s not the Zab Judah I remember” decision losses back-to-back in 2013 to Danny Garcia and Paulie Malignaggi. There were impressive-in-retrospect early-career victories over Micky Ward and Junior Witter.
There were defeats to the likes of the forgettable Seldin and the formidable Joshua Clottey. There were disputed but notable wins over Lucas Matthysse and an undefeated DeMarcus “Chop Chop” Corley.
Judah fought a crazy quantity of quality fighters. In addition to all the names above, he scored victories over Reggie Green, Jan Bergman, Hector Quiroz, Omar Weis, Rafael Pineda, Jose Armando Santa Cruz, Kaizer Mabuza and Vernon Paris.
Nobody talks about Judah much anymore, it seems, except to recall the end of the Tszyu fight or to maybe blurt, “Hey, it’s Zab!” when he pops up on the big screen ringside at Barclays Center. But people should talk about him. He had a highly memorable career. Not a great career. But a darned good one that included a lineal championship and lots of edge-of-your-seat moments.
“He was ultimately kind of an enigma,” says Kurt Emhoff, who got up close and personal with Zab several times as the manager of both Millett and Spinks. “I mean, he could look so spectacular when things were going his way. He was this super-talented guy, such hand speed, and he had an absolute bazooka for a left hand. If he hit you with that left hand, he was going to hurt you, no matter who you were.
“I mean, he’s really the only guy to knock down Mayweather. And he dropped Spinks and knocked Spinks out in the rematch. My guys went up against him so many times, I have tremendous respect for him.
“But in so many fights, his chin betrayed him. Or you had Mayweather talking after their fight about Judah the front-runner, and how he knew that he just had to get through those first couple of rounds and then he could just walk him down after that. Zab was a really talented guy, but for whatever reason, just couldn’t put it all together and came up short in the big fights.”
Judah had more than his share of spectacular moments, of wins that made you think he was going to live up to the hype – but he could never sustain it.
He seems back on track with three wins after the Tszyu flop, then loses to Spinks. He climbs to the mountaintop in the Spinks rematch, then chokes against Baldomir two fights later. He puts together five straight wins including Matthysse, Santa Cruz and Mabuza, then get stopped by Khan as a headliner on HBO.
I don’t think any reasonable observer can make a case that Judah belongs in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. But he belongs on the ballot just as much as some ex-fighters who are on there. For example, I don’t know what makes Shawn Porter’s career better than Judah’s, other than Porter retiring younger, before the losses piled up.
Because he was so athletically gifted, because he arrived absolutely drenched in New York hype, because he seemed to stop learning at an early age, because he so often did his best work in the first four rounds, it’s easy to label Judah an underachiever.
And maybe he was.
But for an underachiever, he still achieved a heck of a lot.
Twenty-five years on from his win over Millett, it’s worth revisiting a fight that was quintessential Judah.
In his prime, he was always one punch from victory or defeat.
The lowlights were indeed low. But the highlights were higher than you probably remember.
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.
