Nice Article on Gerry...
Will Penalosa Win the Triple Crown?
By Brett Conway (Aug 15, 2007) Photo © German Villasenor
Behind on points, chasing a fighter content to keep him at bay with a jab and shoeshine combinations, Gerry Penalosa kept plugging away and didn’t waver from his plan: shots to the body will weaken and put away the already weight drained bantamweight champion.
Finally, the moment came. Jhonny Gonzalez threw a right hand and the southpaw Penalosa dodged it but came back with a left hand of his own. Gonzalez, a good boxer with good fundamentals, brought his right back and with it an elbow to guard the rib cage. It arrived a nanosecond too late. Penalosa’s punch landed just underneath it. It took a second or two before the punch to the liver communicated the pain to his body but when it did he, like Oscar De La Hoya against Bernard Hopkins or Leonard Dorin against Arturo Gatti, collapsed and gasped for breath. All the air in the room must have been sucked down by the audience that witnessed that punch, for Gonzalez hands on the ropes in a corner couldn’t find any for himself. He was counted out with less than a minute remaining in the seventh round. Penalosa became the new WBO bantamweight champion.
Gerry Penalosa, with that one shot, achieved the seemingly impossible. A 35-year old in a division where fighters are usually washed up at the age of 30, Penalosa has beaten down two fighters so far in 2007. Back in March against WBO super bantamweight champion Daniel Ponce De Leon (who defeated Rey Bautista in the first on the same card as Penalosa-Gonzalez), Penalosa withstood an early storm from the hard punching Mexican but came back with precise counters. He threw enough hard stuff at Ponce De Leon that the champion for the first time in his career decided to turn into Sugar Ray Robinson. He danced and moved and jabbed, trying to keep Penalosa away. Although most ringside press appeared to have Penalosa winning, the judges didn’t see it that way and gave the decision to the busier but less effective Ponce De Leon.
With his showings against Ponce De Leon and Jhonny Gonzalez, two fighters ranked highly in the boxing world, both punchers with Gonzalez being a good boxer as well, Penalosa has put himself into an elite position in the sport. In fact, he has shown himself so well that come the end of 2007 I think he will be a candidate for three awards from the bible of boxing, Ring magazine: comeback of the year, knockout of the year, and fight of the year.
Penalosa is probably a no-brainer for comeback of the year. Coming into his fight against Ponce De Leon, many in boxing thought Penalosa a sacrificial lamb for the younger, knockout happy Ponce De Leon. After losing his junior bantamweight title in 1998 to In Joo Cho and the rematch and then twice to Masamori Tokuyama in an attempt to regain his title, Penalosa took a couple of years off. Then, like many ex-champions before and many more to come, he made a come back. Starting in 2004, he had a couple of fights in the Philippines and then took his show to the USA, knocking out Mauricio Martinez on the card of the Ponce De Leon-Al Seeger bout in 2006. When March came and he was about to face Ponce De Leon, many boxing writers worried for his health, hoping that someone in his corner would have the guts to pull the plug if the going got too rough for him and it looked like he was taking too much damage. Instead Penalosa blocked the wild swinging Ponce De Leon’s shots and countered. It was beautiful; it was textbook; but it wasn’t enough to win over the judges who seemed believe that being busy was more important than being effective.
His showing against Ponce De Leon and his knockout of Gonzalez gives Penalosa the comeback of the year. Period.
Awarding a knockout of the year is much more subjective. Really who can choose between two knockouts? Who can decide absolutely which one was better? Even Ring has trouble with that. In 2001 and 2002, Lennox Lewis won knockout of the year honors, the first for his one-punch knockout of Hasim Rahman and the second for his brutal beat down of Mike Tyson. Who’s to say a one-punch knockout or sustained thrashing is better? But arguing the case for one or the other gives us all an excuse to stay in the bar for an extra drink or two. (Disagreement can have its perks.)
But I think southpaw Penalosa’s knockout of Gonzalez is special and should be knockout of the year for a couple of reasons: it was true to boxing fundamentals and its mechanics made it a tough punch to land.
The best knockouts and knockdowns, I think, teach lessons to fighters about boxing fundamentals. When Joe Frazier threw a left hook and knocked down Muhammad Ali, he reminded everyone that a fighter should never lead from the outside with a right uppercut. (Evander Holyfield reviewed this lesson when he knocked out Buster Douglas in 1990.) Penalosa’s shot also taught a lesson. He showed all southpaw fighters how a counter left to the body can beat a straight right hand. The shot he landed is a picture that can be put in any textbook of boxing and therefore is a much better knockout than any eight, ten, or twelve round beat down of a faded ex-champion.
The mechanics of this punch also give it the potential to be knockout of the year. A liver shot is much easier for a conventional fighter to land. His lead hand is right there ready to rip to the body. He can throw a one-two-hook to the body. Or he can counter a right hand with it. For a southpaw it is harder because the hand that throws the punch is much farther away from the target than a conventional fighter’s left. That extra distance should give the fighter receiving that punch an extra moment to block, to brace himself, or to get out of there.
But Gonzalez wasn’t able to do any of those things. Penalosa’s technique on that shot was brilliant and makes him a candidate for knockout of the year.
As for fighter of the year, well, maybe I am overstating the case a bit, but because Penalosa is 35 and we do have over four months of great fights left, I will honor him by saying as of this date, he is my fighter of the year. He is a former junior bantamweight champion and current bantamweight champion without the combination punching usually needed to succeed in either weight class. Instead, he waits for his opponent to make a mistake and makes him pay. In March, he turned Ponce De Leon’s head into a speed bag; this month, he turned Gonzalez’s body into a punching bag. A veteran fighter with smarts, good technique, and a relaxed demeanor in the ring, Penalosa is as good a fighter as someone in his division at his age can be.
There are other candidates for 2007 fighter of the year, sure. Miguel Cotto has beaten Oktay Urkal and Zab Judah. But we can’t make a decision on him until after he faces Shane Mosley. Mosley, too, is in the mix with his win over Luis Collazo but I will wait until after the Cotto bout to settle on him. Ricky Hatton has had a good year beating Juan Urango and Jose Luis Castillo. But in December comes the big test against Floyd Mayweather. Mayweather, with his show-biz victory over De La Hoya, can win it, too. How about Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao? Since they aren’t fighting each other, they are not in the mix. So, if the year ended today, my vote would go to Gerry Penalosa. But judging from the above, it looks like either Hatton or Mayweather will get it, depending on how good the winner of that fight looks.
But there is one way Penalosa can pull it out. If he can get a rematch with Ponce De Leon and beat this guy (again), he is the man, he is the fighter of the year. If that happens, he may become the unlikeliest fighter of the year since Glen Johnson. And all that means is it could happen.
Maybe I’m overstating Penalosa’s case in this piece, but as I pointed out back in April, when the controversy over his loss to Ponce De Leon was raging, he may not have lost a fight since he was under the age of twenty. The four losses to Cho and Tokuyama occurred in those fighters’ home countries and were really, really close – I’m talking “one round different on one card changes the result” close. His loss to Ponce De Leon was a head scratcher to many. Outside of Bernard Hopkins, I can’t think of another current fighter who could say he hasn’t been decisively beaten in over ten years.
And that’s just another reason to give him his due in 2007.
http://www.maxboxing.com/conway/conway081507.asp
1 Comments:
Yeah, great article. Gerry is definitely the comeback fighter of the year. He showed the world that Philippine boxing is not only limited to Pacquiao.
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