AMERICA AT LARGE: Champion's decision to drop to his knee to take mandatory count was ill-advised, not clever

POLITE AND well-spoken in an age of trash-talkers, Timothy Bradley is 25 years old and, at least when he’s in training, a practising vegan. Until the events of last Saturday night at Montreal’s Bell Centre began to unfold, we hadn’t made him for a student of boxing history as well, but by the time the first round was over it became apparent he had committed Charlie Goldman’s ancient apothegm to memory.

In his litany of instructions for novice boxers, the late cornerman who trained, among others, Rocky Marciano, would caution his young charges – “If you’re ever knocked down, don’t be no hero and jump right up. Take a count.”

Less than two minutes into his light-welterweight title unification bout against Kendall Holt, Bradley was knocked ass over teakettle by a left hook. Never having been on the canvas in 24 professional bouts, Bradley almost immediately bounced to his feet, at which point Goldman’s admonition apparently resonated in the recesses of his somewhat addled brain. Reconsidering his hasty rise, he dropped back down to one knee and didn’t rise until referee Michael Griffin’s count had reached “eight”.

Having weathered the storm, he not only survived the remaining minute of the first, but over the ensuing 11 rounds piled up enough points to win a unanimous decision despite having suffered two knockdowns. (In the last half-minute of the final round, Bradley was knocked off-balance by a grazing blow and his right glove touched the mat as he struggled to maintain his equilibrium.)

On the Showtime telecast being beamed back to the US, analyst Al Bernstein lauded Bradley for his “quick thinking” in reassuming his position on the canvas, and as the bout wore on repeatedly credited that strategy for having preserved his win. The ringside media chronicling the evening’s events enthusiastically bought into this fiction: various dispatches filed that evening employed terms ranging from “wise” to “clever” to “brilliant” in describing Bradley’s first-round tactic, and were virtually unanimous in declaring that his resourceful decision to re-take a knee had “saved his night”.

What none of these analyses seems to have taken into account is that the mandatory eight-count was in effect, rendering Bradley’s voluntary trip to the floor superfluous at best. Not only was it not especially clever, but for reasons we will enumerate shortly, it was, in the view of more thoughtful observers, a pretty dumb thing to do.

Canadians have long been among the most enthusiastic and appreciative boxing fans in the world, but, unless one counts Lennox Lewis (born in London of Jamaican parents, though he did represent Canada in the 1988 Olympics), they haven’t had much to be enthusiastic or appreciative about since the days of George Chuvalo and Yvon Durelle.

Resourceful promoters have addressed that situation in recent years by adopting more accomplished boxers from elsewhere. Now domiciled in Montreal, Romanian-born champions Lucien Bute and Adrian Diaconu, Haitian Jean Pascal and Cameroon-born Herman Ngoudjo have been embraced by the Quebecois as if they were their own, and regularly attract impressively large audiences to the home of the ice hockey Canadiens.

This has not escaped the attention of the American networks. Last weekend marked the fourth time in five months that a US telecast had emanated from the Bell Centre, but this was the first time it had been tried without a local drawing card in the main event. (Two of the earlier TV cards featured Bute, the other Ngoudjo.) The match-up of the two American champions bore significance beyond mere bragging rights. The biggest fight of the year looms next month when Manny Pacquiao and England’s Ricky Hatton collide as light welterweights in Las Vegas, and the fervour with which that one is being anticipated has already caused Floyd Mayweather Jr to reconsider his retirement.

Problem is, none of the aforementioned trio owns a recognised world title. Since the Bradley-Holt survivor would emerge with two of them, the WBC/WBO winner figured to be a major player in the lucrative 140lb sweepstakes.

Back in Charlie Goldman’s day it made sense for a fallen boxer to remain on the floor while he collected his wits. In the absence of today’s regulation demanding a mandatory eight-count following a knockdown, as the great AJ Liebling put it, “hostilities were de règle as soon as the fallen man got to his feet”. And since the man who stayed down until the count of “eight” was penalised no more than the one who rose at “two”, the fellow who attempted to display his bravery by doing the latter generally marked himself a neophyte.

Even in the age of Goldman and Liebling, the mandatory eight-count was being adopted in some jurisdictions, and today it obtains universally. As we noted on Saturday night, it did not seem particularly material whether Bradley took the count on his feet or on his knees, but once he had risen, he compounded the felony when he went back down.

“Why would he go back down again? Once he was up, he should have stayed up,” said trainer-of- the-year Freddie Roach, who is preparing Pacquiao for Hatton, and who served in a similar capacity in Steve Collins’s corner. Roach noted that in dropping to a knee and getting back up again Bradley had expended considerably more energy than he might have if he’d simply stood there and let Griffin count to eight.

Hall-of-Famer Emanuel Steward, who regularly visits Ireland as the trainer of Andy Lee, concurred with this assessment.

“(Bradley’s decision to take a knee) was not only a big waste of time and energy, but it could have been dangerous,” said Steward. “What if his legs had been shaky when he got back up? The referee might have stopped the fight.”

(And how many times have we seen that happen? Think back to a four-rounder on last month’s Dunne-Cordoba card at the O2 Arena. Knocked down in the second round by a Latvian bum, previously unbeaten Dubliner Anthony Fitzgerald rose in time to beat the count, but when referee David Irving asked him to move toward him, Fitzgerald’s first step resulted in a perceptible lurch, and the fight was over.)

In fairness, Bradley’s wrong-headed decision was taken at the direction of his corner.

Roach pointed out that the tactic could backfire for yet another reason when he cited a 2003 bout in Connecticut we both had witnessed.

Then unbeaten as a pro, Mohamad Abdulaev, the 2000 Olympic champion from Uzbekistan, was handily ahead on the scorecards when he was knocked down in the final round of his bout against Ghanaian journeyman Emmanuel Clottey that night at Foxwoods. More surprised than hurt, Abdulaev looked over to his corner, where his trainer was feverishly motioning him to stay down.

Abdulaev seemed alert as he rested on one knee and looked straight into Mike Ortega’s eyes as the referee administered his count.

“Trouble was, he didn’t speak English,” recalled Roach, “so he just stayed there on his knee and got counted out.”