SHANE MOSLEY KO9 ANTONIO MARGARITO

It is hours after the fight, and I am still in awe at Sugar Shane Mosley’s performance in destroying Antonio Margarito in nine rounds. This was one of the great victories in boxing’s modern era. At the age of 37, Mosley looked like a young man in the ring. Margarito, a 4-1 on favourite to retain his welterweight title, was beaten out of sight. It was master against pupil, virtually no contest.

This was the best Mosley has looked in years. He not only outboxed Margarito, he outfought and outpunched him.

Margarito has started slowly in the past and come back to grind out wins. He lost most of the early rounds in his win over Miguel Cotto and he struggled early against Joshua Clottey. Each time he was able to build up a head of steam. Not this time. Mosley started fast and strong, and he stayed that way. He blasted Margarito’s body and he bombed him with right hands over the top. Heavens, it was as if Mosley could have closed his eyes and hit Margarito. As a stunned Emanuel Steward said in the HBO commentary: “He can’t miss the right hand.”

Margarito had the support of the packed, 20,820 crowd at the Staples Center in Los Angeles but Mosley quickly dampened their enthusiasm. There was very little for Margarito supporters to cheer about. Just an occasional hopeful rush, a few right hands. At no stage did Margarito look like turning the fight in his favour. Mosley wasn’t going to stand for it.

What I particularly loved about Mosley’s performance was the way he fired right back at Margarito every time the Mexican fighter tried to mount a bit of a rally. It was as if Shane was saying: “OK, that wasn’t bad, now have some of this!”

There were body shots that almost seemed to be caving in Margarito, as if he had been hit by a cannon ball. The right hands upstairs were swivelling his head around. In the fourth round, I wrote in my notebook: “This fight is over.” There would be no come-from-behind surge from Margarito on this night. He had taken too many heavy, flush, punches. Tough though he is, the blows had taken too much out of him.

Mosley looked as fast as he did when he was blazing through the lightweight division years ago. He was so quick that he had Margarito floundering. The so-called “Tijuana Tornado” was like the puff of wind in the desert that briefly stirs up the sand and just as quickly subsides.

Was Margarito this inept, or was Mosley this good? As always, it was probably a combination of both.

A fighter of Margarito’s type needs always to be in prime condition physically but just as important he needs to bring an iron determination to his fights. Margarito just didn’t seem to have the tunnel vision that he showed in the back-to-back wins over Kermit Cintron and Cotto. He fought hard and gamely, but he just didn’t appear to have that same “walk through anything” mindset. My suspicion is that he eased back a little too much after the tremendous, upset win over Cotto, and in so doing lost some of his focus.

I didn’t like the look of Margarito as he entered the arena. He looked a little uncertain, I thought — a similar expression, it seemed to me, to the one that Oscar De La Ha Hoya wore on his way to the ring to meet Manny Pacquiao. Mosley, meanwhile, was like a man prepared to go to war: he seemed in every fibre of his being to be ready to fight and he seemed to emanate a positive energy.

My first real doubt about Margarito’s chances came when HBO analyst Larry Merchant revealed before the fight that the Mexican boxer’s hands were wrapped three times in the dressing room after it was noticed that a pad-like contrivance had been inserted into the wraps.

This reminded me of Felix Trinidad having his hands rewrapped at Madison Square Garden at the insistence of the Bernard Hopkins camp. The beating that Mosley administered to Margarito was eerily similar to the one that Hopkins dished out to Trinidad.

One now has to wonder if Margarito had scored some of his biggest wins with a little help in the hand-wrap department, because his punches just didn’t seem as forceful in this fight as they had in his most recent KO wins (over Golden Johnson, Cintron and Cotto). Then again, Mosley is one very tough fighter, and never tougher than he was on Saturday night.

When Margarito started complaining about Mosley’s head in the first round I sensed that he was in trouble; when he grinned at Mosley at the end of the fourth I took it as an admission of defeat, a sort of “You’re too good for me tonight, Shane,” type of grin.

In the sixth, Larry Merchant noticed that Margarito was “starting to retreat ... His arms appear weary.”

In the seventh, commentator Jim Lampley exclaimed: “Oh my gosh!” as yet another right hand bounced off of Margarito’s head, and now a stoppage win for Mosley — something that very few could have expected — was beginning to look a distinct possibility.

When Margarito got hurt, staggered and beaten to the canvas late in the eighth it was clear that the end was near, and I was relieved to see the towel come in from his corner in the ninth, with referee Raul Caiz Sr. waving the finish after 43 seconds of the round as the Mexican fighter slumped to the ring floor, every last vestige of resistance pounded out of him.

Fighters have come back from bad beatings but I doubt if Margarito is ever going to be the same. I was in the majority who thought that Margarito’s pressure and workrate would win him the fight, but Mosley knew better. He had talked of feeling “special” before the fight. Now we know what he meant.