“I don’t like to be amped or crazy going into the ring because I’m a thinker,” the IBF’s No. 1 ranked contender said on the eve of tonight’s HBO televised showdown with Khan at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, just a few blocks from the White House. “I just think about the game plan, go over that a few times and before I know it, they’re raising my hand at the end of the fight. I just keep going over that over and over again until it’s time to go.”
When that time comes, it appears he’ll be going against someone whose approach is at least a tad less cerebral.
“I have all the power and speed on my side to beat Lamont Peterson,” boasted Khan (26-1, 18 KO). “I’ve got a style that people love. When they see me in real life they see the power, the explosive style. It’s going to be explosive in the ring.”
So when one guy is thinking will the other be exploding his plans? That seems to be Khan’s approach since trainer Freddie Roach took over his preparation several years ago. Roach has always favored aggressive punchers and Khan is certainly that. His style is not only to throw punches in bunches but to have them raise bunches of welts on your head until your plan begins to fade from memory.
Peterson, on the other hand, has gotten to this point not by outslugging opponents but by out-thinking them. Whether that will work against someone who brings to the arena more firepower and apparently more inclination to launch it than Peterson remains to be seen because, as Mike Tyson once put it, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get hit.”
Peterson (29-1-1, 15 KO) learned that in a one-sided loss to then-WBO junior welterweight champion Timothy Bradley two years ago, and again in a hard-fought draw with future welterweight champion Victor Ortiz last year, when the difference between them was Peterson’s unscheduled trip to the canvas on a night many felt he prevailed.
On that day, writers had to decide whether the Peterson-Khan bout or Johnson’s induction was the biggest story – a quandary we have never had before in local boxing circles. Johnson thrust himself into helping sell the fight with bout-related appearances and interviews while being called the best fighter to come out of the DC area since Sugar Ray Leonard. Reportedly in an interview with a local radio station, Leonard himself disputed that saying that he felt Johnson was the best fighter to come out of the Beltway ever, including himself.
The week briefly turned somber when Joseph Robert, Jr., who used boxing as a vehicle to raise millions of dollars for children’s charities through his creation of the Fight Night charity event, passed away after a brave battle against brain cancer. Robert was honored at the weigh-in and the fights with memorial10-counts.
The bout itself was simply, the best bout I have ever seen in 27 years of covering boxing in the Washington, DC area. Peterson and Khan are truly championship-caliber boxers who put on performances that will be talked about for many years to come. Regardless of what fans think about the outcome, no one can deny that they saw a tremendous and compelling boxing match.
Speaking of the crowd itself, DC has been criticized sometimes for being just an event boxing crowd – meaning that there are a lot of casual fans who come to boxing events just to be seen and they are not hardcore boxing fans. That wasn’t the case on Saturday night. There were many passionate boxing fans who attend the club shows and the amateur boxing events in the area as well as the title fights. The partisan DC crowd was loud and raucous with great assistance from the many Khan fans that were in attendance.
Let’s also clear up a statement that has been said a lot over the past few days. To say that this is DC’s first big fight in 18 years is inaccurate. This is the first time HBO has been in DC in 18 years. The DC-area has had big fights after 1993. It had the knockout of the year in 1994 when Vincent Pettway knocked out Simon Brown to defend his IBF Junior Middleweight titles at the old USAir Arena in nearby Landover, MD in 1994. There was the “Triple Jeopardy” card at MCI (now Verizon) Center in 1999 where Keith Holmes and Mark Johnson won world title belts and Sharmba Mitchell defended his title against fellow local Reggie Green. Another Beltway legend, William Joppy also defended his title against Julio Cesar Green in 2000. And of course, Mike Tyson lost his final bout in DC in 2005. All of those bouts were televised by Showtime. ESPN and USA networks have made numerous trips to the Beltway region in the past 18 years.
To say that all of those televised cards went without controversy would also not be true. This most recent discussion is not the first referee controversy we have had in the DC area. Ray Klingmeyer was roundly criticized for his handling of Pettway-Brown. Malik Waleed, who worked the co-feature bout between Seth Mitchell and Timur Ibragimov on Saturday, was caught in the middle of a controversy on an ESPN bout in DC in 2008 involving a head butt. But most major commissions have had their share of controversies. It’s an occupational hazard in this sport.
For the moment, however, Washington, DC is the talk of the boxing world. The Nation’s Capitol has a brand new world’s champion and a number of other young boxers who are putting themselves in positions to replicate what Lamont Peterson accomplished Saturday night. That is something that all Beltway Boxing fans can be very proud of
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