It wasn't easy under ANY circumstances but Hasim "The Rock" Rahman stopped a game Zuri Lawrence in the 10th round tonight in Reading, PA.
Rahman knocked Lawrence down and out of the ring in the sixth round, only to have Lawrence storm back and take a semblance of control.
However, in the 10th and final round, Lawrence ran completely out of gas and Rahman was able to stop his foe at 2:20 of the round. According to the Versus telecast, Rahman was leading on two of the scorecards going into the last round.
With the win, Rahman hangs on to his NABF Heavyweight title and raises his record to 45-6-2, 36 KO's. Lawrence, who took the bout on two days notice, falls to 23-13-4.
UPDATE: Fightnews.com is reporting that on Friday, hours after his bout with Lawrence, Rahman appeared and spoke at a Reading, PA children's home for troubled and abused boys. Rahman shared life experiences, signed autographs and posed with the teenagers for photos. Undefeated super middleweight Tarvis Simms also participated in the engagement.
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6 comments:
It's time Rock.You have done your job. You won a World Championship and made the USA and Baltimore proud by bringing it back home where it belonged. Now,I hope you put some cash away so you can enjoy a good life and watch your son follow in your footsteps. Unless you need another payday, I think that the fight with Lawrence put it all in perspective. You could go out with everyone knowing that even though you have aged and can not perform as you once did you got the job done in the end. What a great way to leave the game. Now, you have the opportunity to give back to boxing in other ways, including supporting the amateurs. What ever you do, I hope you take a realistic look at it and do it for the right reason. Good Luck.
I appreciate any fight where I learn something about the sport that I didn't know before. In this case, it was that when a fighter gets knocked OUT of the ring, he has a 20-count to re-enter the ring and get settled on his feet to the ref's satisfaction.
But I agree with the ring commentator who observed that the second rope from the bottom gave way awfully easily and was likely strung way-too loosely. A number of people should be thanking their lucky stars that Lawrence didn't land head-first on the concrete.
I didn't see the fight but I have always thought that a boxing ring has to be re-designed. At a bare minimum a ring apron needs to be big enough that if they fall through the ropes they don't fall on the floor. What a joke! And this is what government regulation of the sport gets you. They only want the money, it has nothing to do with fighter's safety.
Digital, you know an awful lot about boxing. Why is it that of almost every sport I can think of: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, and on and on is boxing the only sport (and now MMA) that is regulated by the government? And I know it's been like that since the sport's early days. What is the history behind this? Whatever it is, it needs to stop and boxing needs to be a completely privatized sport 100% free of the government's grasp!
While I couldn't tell exactly from the camera angle, I'm pretty sure that Lawrence fell on a judge and rolled onto the floor, as opposed to hitting the floor head-on. That was my point earlier, that it could have easily been catastrophic. The ring wasn't that high, but it was plenty high enough that somebody of that size flipping back with that much force could have easily broken his neck or worse, had there been nothing (or nobody) to break his fall.
Although in this case I'm not sure it was a government problem, as I trust the government a lot more than I trust a lot of these "alphabet soup" sanctioning bodies.
But there is plenty of blame to go around, assuming that the second from the bottom rope was loose, as it appeared to be.
I remember at Jimmy Lange's last fight I saw three different people check the ropes before the first fighter entered the ring--a ref, Angelo Dundee, and Dave Holland, the Virginia Boxing honcho whose exact title escapes me at the moment. And I'm sure there were others who I didn't see.
Finally, in response to the previous poster's question, I think that horse racing is run by the goverment, but I see your point, as the only other example I could think of, besides boxing and MMA, was with animals.
I think it all started back in the early days when there was so much corruption in the sport. The mob controlled boxing at one time and something had to be done to clean the sport up. From the 30's and even in the 50's and early 60's there is so many stories of fixed fights and other things. Horse racing was the same situation. I never heard of the mob controlling football or baseball but then it would have taken a much bigger effert with all the players.
RockHead looked really bad in that fight.
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