LUCIAN BUTE W12 LIBRADO ANDRADE

The term “saved by the bell” has never been more apt than in Friday night’s dramatic 168-pound title fight between Lucian Bute and Librado Andrade in Montreal. Bute was swaying on the precipice. Just one more punch would have tipped him over had there been any more time left in the round, but there wasn't. Bute rightly got the unanimous decision, but escapes don't come any narrower. Andrade simply ran out of time.

Or did he? The action of hometown referee Marlon B. Wright in stopping the count to order Andrade back to a neutral corner will long be debated.

Yet I wonder if this was quite the robbery that many believe it to be. An exhausted Bute collapsed to the canvas with, as the ShoBox commentary said, something like four or five seconds left in the round. There is no dispute that Bute dragged himself up inside eight seconds.

Had Wright simply continued to count, surely the bell would have signalled the end of the fight once the eight count had been completed?

A fighter can no longer be saved by the bell in the last round, true, but this applies to a fighter who is down, as was the case when Ricardo Mayorga was flat on the canvas with one second left in his fight with Shane Mosley.

If a boxer is on his feet and the bell goes, he has survived, no matter how weary, battered — or simply out of it — he might be.

Wright has been much criticised for causing a time out by yelling at Andrade to get back to the corner. Yet just a month earlier, Sugar Shane quietly drifted out of the neutral corner so that he was perfectly positioned to pounce on Mayorga and flatten him almost the very second after the eight count had been completed.

Imagine the controversy if something similar had happened in this fight. On reflection, maybe the referee wasn't so very wrong after all.

To me, the bigger controversy, one that was a bit lost in the shuffle, was whether or not the referee should have stopped the fight in those sensational closing seconds, when Bute was reeling around the ring, a helpless, defenceless fighter.

I believe that many referees would have stopped the fight, and perhaps should have stopped it, because Bute was in such a wretched state that one big punch could have done serious damage. Yet Bute made it to the final bell and retained his IBF title, so the referee could say with justification that he was right to allow the faltering fighter to stagger to the finish line.

This was high drama. Bute had fallen apart, his legs buckling under him. When an Andrade right hand bowled Bute over, I thought that this would be another come-from-behind last-round victory on the lines of LaMotta-Dauthuille, Weaver-Tate, Briggs-Liakhovich or, of course, Chavez-Taylor. Bute looked absolutely spent when he was on the canvas. I was half-expecting referee Wright to wave the finish. There is no doubt that Wright gave Bute every chance.

When Wright started to count, I thought there was no way that Bute would get up. Somehow he did, although he could barely stand.

If there had been just a few more seconds remaining after the eight count had been completed, Andrade would surely have finished off Bute. One more punch was all it would have taken.

Andrade was right when he said afterwards that he had knocked Bute out — the Montreal-domiciled Romanian was out on his feet when the bell sounded.

The only fight I can think of where a fighter had such a narrow last-round escape was when Ingemar Johansson got dropped by Brian London in Sweden and was in parlous condition when the bell went.

Andrade took his defeat with incredible good grace, even hugging the referee. He surely will get another world title chance, and after this near-miss — and the perception of injustice — there are many who will be yearning for him to succeed.

All through the fight, even when Bute seemed to be outclassing Andrade, piling up points with quick bursts of punches from his southpaw stance, I felt that the champion was in danger.

In the fifth round I thought that the tide had turned in Andrade’s favour. He was starting to get close and land his heavy punches, Bute’s technique seemed to be unravelling — and there were seven long rounds to go.

It says a lot for Bute’s tactical acumen that he was able to make adjustments, using the ring and popping away, not trying to hurt Andrade so much as elude his attacks and get back simply to winning the rounds.

By the 10th Bute seemed to be completely in command, with the disputed knockdown, more a trip on Andrade’s part than anything, adding to the Montreal boxer's growing lead on points.

A fighter with the heart and the will of Andrade is not going to be beaten, though, until the fight is over.

I think that the mental and physical strain of the fight, round after round of boxing at full stretch against a brave, iron-willed, almost impossible-to-hurt challenger who never stopped coming at him, just caught up with Bute in the last round. His stamina seemed to be draining away before our eyes, and his resistance was now at such a low ebb that when Andrade caught him with the left hook that started the calamity, it was as if Bute’s muscle tone and nervous system had caved in, and he staggered like a puppet with the strings cut.

The boxing skills that Bute exhibited for almost 12 rounds, and the heart he showed in weathering the rocky patch in the fifth and then in hauling himself off the floor in the 12th, have largely been overlooked in all the fuss over the refereeing in the final seconds. This, though, was Andrade’s night. He deserved to leave the ring as champion, and he was desperately unlucky not to have done so.

Bute had scored more points, no doubt about that, and of course he deserved the unanimous decision — but, for me, and no doubt many others, Andrade was the moral winner of this memorable fight.

This report was updated on Sunday, Oct. 26, with some additional thoughts.