- Azumah Nelson speaking after his draw with Jeff Fenech in Las Vegas, June 1991.
WBC president Jose Sulaiman was keen for a rematch and was concerned that Fenech would opt to take on WBA champion Hector Lopez, as they had installed him as their number-one contender. Eventually, an agreement was reached. Fenech signed a new contract with Don King for one fight only; the Australian would receive a percentage of the television rights and $2 million. Azumah would receive the same pay prior to paying expenses to his management support staff. The fight was scheduled for March 1, 1992, and would be staged in Melbourne. The rematch was good news for Azumah, as it finally guaranteed him a substantial payday to match his glittering career. He had only suffered one defeat in the past nine years, and that was to Pernell Whitaker on the eve of his wife’s passing away.
Azumah had headed to Spain for an operation on his elbow, which had troubled him in the first fight. He had the operation in Zaragoza and based himself there for his recuperation and training with Buffalo before heading to Melbourne.
Fenech was quoted in Fist magazine as saying, “I’ve really lived for this moment, when I can get Nelson into the ring again. Now that we’ve signed and got a date and a venue, I’m a very relieved and happy man. There have been some great sporting events in Australia, and this will be as big as any.” He went on to “guarantee” there would be no draw in the rematch. Probably his most shocking statement was when he was quoted in the media as saying, “The only way they’re going to take him home to Ghana is in a body bag.”
Azumah’s reported response was, “Tell Fenech he is playing with fire, and it will burn him.”
Finally, the day of the most anticipated sporting event in Australia arrived. The fight was to take place on a Sunday to tie in with television in the U.S. On the undercard that night was another boxer with a bright future from the Johnny Lewis stable making his professional debut, Kostya Tszyu, who knocked out Australian Darrell Hiles in just seventy seconds.
The rain started to fall in Melbourne, which reduced the crowd from an expected sell-out to close to thirty-seven thousand. However, many Australian highfliers were ringside, including media tycoon Kerry Packer, Olympian Dawn Fraser, iconic Aussie actor Paul Hogan, and former WBC featherweight world champion Johnny Famechon, who arrived in a wheelchair after having been hit by a car while jogging outside Sydney’s Warwick Farm racecourse the previous year.
This was Azumah’s seventeenth world title fight in almost ten years. He was thirty-three years of age; he had fought in seven different countries; and he had been a world champion for eight years. Yet few gave him any chance of victory against a younger fighter in his own backyard.
Azumah was incredibly confident going into this rematch and, as he had done previously, had ensured that the fight would be aired live on television back home in Ghana. Knowing that there would be plenty of excitement back home, he contacted his good friend, Obi Oblitey. Obi recalls, “He sent a message to me and one of our friends, who has now died, as he knew the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation would come and interview us. He said they will ask us how we see the fight and told us to tell them he would stop Fenech in round seven. So we did.”
In his corner, Azumah had his brother, and he had told him to tell him when round six had finished so that he could be true to that prediction.
It took Azumah one minute and forty-five seconds of the first round to have Fenech on the canvas. “Before the fight, I hear his coach telling him—he is a good coach—he is telling him, ‘Be careful.
Azumah’s left hook is dangerous. Watch out.’ So from the first round, the guy was watching my left hook. All of a sudden in the first round, I just jab, one, two, three, four, and then boom—I landed a right and he went down. The left hook didn’t come because I knew he was looking for the left hook. I changed the style and I put him down. I knocked him down again in the second and almost in the third,” Azumah remembers with a trademark smile.
Round two saw Fenech come back well from the knockdown, but Azumah was still the aggressor and benefitted when what appeared to be a slip by Fenech was ruled a knockdown by Mercante. This was a very different fight from the one in Las Vegas. Azumah looked stronger, fitter, and much sharper than his opponent, and went forward more often than he had in the first encounter. Round three saw the two toe-to-toe, as they had been in Las Vegas, and Fenech landed some telling blows. The bell sounded and Mercante struggled to separate the two, and words were exchanged. Azumah, despite his prediction, failed to knock out Fenech in round seven, and he explains why this was the case. “I told my brother, ‘Listen, I will knock this guy out in the seventh round. I will set him up, and after the sixth round I will knock him out in the seventh, so when we get to the sixth round let me know.’ But in between the rounds, my brother was enjoying watching the fight so much and he was so happy. At the seventh round, he came to me and said, ‘Brother, sorry I forgot to tell you it was the sixth round. It’s the seventh round.’ I said, ‘I told you to tell me the sixth round, so I could knock him out in the seventh. Now I cannot knock him out in the seventh. I will have to do it in the eighth and set him up this round.’ The bell went for the seventh round, and I start setting him up. At the end of the round, I looked at my brother, and I said to him, ‘Now I am going to knock him out this round'.
“In the seventh and eighth rounds, I give myself to him and he just starts punching. When I set him up, I went to the corner. He is throwing the punches and I am blocking, but I slow my punches down, so I am just touching him. I am hardly hitting him, just touching him. Then he realises the punches are slow and there is no power. He could lose himself and start throwing punches, trying to knock me out. As soon as he did that, his guard came down and I went boom, boom, and landed the punches and he went down.”
Ever the warrior, Fenech quickly leapt to his feet, but that could have been his mistake. His trainer, Johnny Lewis, climbed the steps to the ring, towel in hand, desperately trying to see how his fighter was, but Mercante, who waved the fight on, obstructed his view. Azumah turned Fenech back onto the ropes and fired off six unanswered blows to the head before Mercante stepped in and stopped the fight at the same moment that Lewis’s towel hit the canvas behind him.
Two minutes and twenty seconds into round eight, Jeff Fenech had lost his first professional fight, and Azumah had recorded a victory that was named the “Upset of the Year for 1992” by The Ring magazine. The disappointed Australian crowd that had booed Azumah when his name was announced at the start of the bout showed great sportsmanship at the end of the bout, acknowledging a great champion. Many realised that they had just witnessed two great champions go head-to-head in their own backyard.
It was after this fight with Jeff Fenech that Azumah went from being “The Terrible Warrior” in the ring to being known as “The Professor,” a moniker that certainly suited his age far better. There has been conjecture over who gave the champ his new ring name, but it would appear that it was in fact Azumah himself. At the press conference after the fight, where both fighters complimented each other, Azumah said, “I am a professor of boxing. Fenech is a great fighter, but today I proved that I’m better.” The media around the world appeared to love the description, as the title “Professor” was linked to his name by more than one media outlet in their post-fight write-ups. Ultimately, the origin matters not, but from that day forward Azumah Nelson became known as “The Professor.”
(by Ashley Morrison)
