March 31, 1944.

Jake LaMotta beat "Sergeant" Lou Woods by SD over 10 rounds as they battle it out to a state of utter exhaustion.

"Woods used a left jab to hold the bull-like rushes of his Italian foe at bay....
During the eighth round the Sarge barely missed dropping Joltin' Jake. Woods took the offensive at the outset and opened Jake's left eye with right-hand smashes. Midway during ths round, the Detroiter jolted LaMotta with a succession of rights and the Easterner held on. However, just before the bell ended the round, a barrage delivered by Jake floored Woods for a two-count.
In the ninth Woods went down again for a nine-count. These two knockdowns apparently were the deciding factors in the officials' tabulations in awarding LaMotta the laurels."

(by Chicago reporter Gene Engel)

August 17, 1938

It was a split decision win for Henry Armstrong over Lou Ambers at Madison Square Garden. Henry had made history. The magnificent little titan was the simultaneous holder of three world championships. But he had needed to summon up all his phenomenal energy and determination to dethrone the fiery Ambers in a bloody and spectacular fight for Lou’s lightweight belt.

Such was the intensity of Henry’s effort, he finished the fight with leaden arms and close to exhaustion. He looked terrible in his dressing room, with cut and bruised eyes and a damaged lip that required stitches. It was some time before he could haul himself off the rubbing table and walk to the shower.

Armstrong lost three rounds for low blows and then had to contend with a mighty rally from Ambers down the stretch. Henry benefited from a barnstorming start, in which he compiled a significant points lead. Few writers disputed that he was a deserving winner, even though Ambers survived near disaster to charge back and whittle down Henry’s points advantage.

Lou was nearly bowled out of the fight near the close of the fifth round, when he was saved by the bell after being hammered to the canvas by an explosive right to the jaw. Things scarcely improved for Ambers in the sixth, when he was cut down again for a count of eight. Both knockdowns occurred as Lou was trying to escape from close quarters, where Armstrong was in his element as he dug away with his favoured combination of a left to the body and a right to the jaw.

But Ambers was a tough and clever man, a great champion in his own right, who could tilt with the best of them. The so-called Herkimer Hurricane from upstate New York never did know how to blow out gently.

Henry kept punching. He always did. Failure to finish an opponent after an early success never dispirited Armstrong. He believed that if you chop at a tree for long enough, it will eventually fall. In a ferocious eleventh round, he tossed everything he had at Ambers, but Lou would not go and was still full of fight. He fought back to take the next three rounds, two of them due to Armstrong’s infractions. But then Lou faced another major onslaught in the fourteenth as Henry raced for the wire. A right hand catapulted Ambers into the ropes, which saved him from his third trip to the canvas.

In the fifteenth and final frame, Armstrong butted and pounded Ambers into the ropes as blood ran down Lou’s right leg from Henry’s cut mouth. The crowd of 18,240 was roaring as a right to the jaw shook Ambers, but it was Lou who came on strong in the final seconds as the two great warriors traded punches beyond the bell in the bedlam.

Ambers, once again, had shown himself to be a remarkably durable and determined man with excellent recuperative powers. But his brave resistance and spirited counter offence were not enough to save his championship. Most people in the pro-Ambers crowd booed the decision. They had been particularly swayed by Lou’s stirring comeback from adversity, which had resulted in Armstrong walking groggily to the wrong corner at the final bell. Lou said that he had suffered no damage from Henry’s low blows, though manager Al Weill was sufficiently riled to complain to referee Billy Kavanagh at the end of the tenth.

The Associated Press awarded Armstrong a decisive victory.

(By Mike Casey)

Sept 10, 1993.

Chavez came out pressing the attack, and in the first two rounds Whitaker backpedaled to his right and popped the occasional right jab, keeping Chavez out of tempo. Roars went up whenever Chavez landed a punch, and throughout the vast dome the crowds waved the red, white and green flag of Mexico. Chavez was already having difficulty solving Whitaker's elusive movement.

Whitaker came out for the third with a crisper, sharper jab, nailing a pursuing Chavez with three stingers in a row. At once he settled into what he called his "sleeping style," a kind of slippery, loosey-goosey way of carrying himself that made it harder for Chavez to get to him. By the fourth round Whitaker was in control of the fight as Chavez grew increasingly frustrated with his opponent's style.

In the fifth Chavez's corner began yelling at him to renew the attack, and he charged back to score one of his best rounds of the bout. In one flurry he landed two sharp right-hand leads, another left to the body and a third right that had Whitaker, for the only time in the fight, looking chastened and doubtful in the middle of the ring.

Yet Whitaker clearly won the sixth through the eighth, as the crowd fell ominously silent and the flags stopped fluttering. Whitaker had done what he had promised to do: "I like to go on the road and take the hometown fans out of it," he had said earlier in the week.

In the sixth Whitaker accidentally caught Chavez with a low left to the groin. Referee Joe Cortez stopped the fight to give Chavez a minute to kick away the pain, but Chavez needed more than that to shake off the larger effect Whitaker was having on him. Whitaker had taken away most of Chavez's arsenal of punches, save for the occasional right-hand lead, and Chavez had nothing close to Whitaker's jab.

Chavez never mounted a sustained attack to the body, and he began to appear not only feckless and confused but also desperate and despondent as the rounds rolled by. He was losing the fight, and he couldn't come up with anything to turn it around. Chavez did win the ninth, scoring several times with left hooks and right hands.

Chavez came out fast in the tenth, but Whitaker blunted his attack with sharp lefts, and by the round's closing moments Chavez seemed to be underwater. Whitaker won it. He took the eleventh even more easily, and for most of the final round he moved and backpedaled out of harm's way while a tired Chavez chased after him. At the bell, looking perplexed, Chavez raised his arms in a wishful gesture.





Before the scorecards were announced, Showtime television commentators Steve Albert, Bobby Czyz and Ferdie Pacheco were in unanimous agreement that Whitaker had clearly won the bout. When the fight was declared a draw, there was a smattering of boos from the pro-Mexican crowd of about 65,000.

The vast majority of the media had Whitaker winning decisively and wondered what fight the judges were watching. Many also wondered how Dan Duva, Whitaker's promoter, could have yielded so thoroughly to Don King, Chavez's promoter, and the WBC in the selection of the judges, especially knowing, as he must have, that his man was not likely to win by a knockout. In fact, said Duva, after much heated negotiation Texas officials assembled a pool of five judges who had worked fights for the WBC, and he and King were allowed to strike one each. A reasonable compromise? Hardly, said Duva. "It was clear to me that the five were not among the best in the world," he said. "Early on I had suggested getting Jerry Roth of Nevada, the guy who is recognized as the best." But the Chavez camp did not want Roth. "My opinion," Duva said, "is that he was turned down because he had Meldrick Taylor ahead when Taylor fought Chavez." In that 1990 fight Chavez TKO'd Taylor when referee Richard Steele stopped the fight with two seconds remaining in the final round.

After the fight, Duva said a number of WBC officials approached him with strange expressions of condolence. "They said to me, 'What are you complaining about? This is the perfect result. Everyone wins,'" Duva said. "That's just sickening. On the day of the fight everyone who knows me knows that I had one fear: that Pernell would get robbed. That these people, for their own political interest, would deny him his victory."

(Sports Illustrated - Sept 1993)