Five days on from one of the upsets of the year – Filip Hrgovic halting an exhausted Moses Itauma in the ninth round – the conclusions as to what went wrong continue to grow in volume.
Boxing, it’s often rightly said, is one of the most unforgiving of sports. When it goes wrong for a boxer, particularly a hyped unbeaten boxer, there is no hiding place.
No teammates to share the blame, no fixture list that reveals the next game, not even a shirt to dry their eyes or hide their face. They are stripped all but bare before the alien sense of defeat – of failure, of remorse, of mortality – takes hold, refusing to leave.
There is no escaping that horrible feeling.
We’ve all been there to some degree, albeit not on such a grand scale. The biggest mistakes we’ve made and the regrets we choose not to discuss are mercifully locked away from public consumption.
But not for the boxer. And certainly not for Moses Itauma.
Whether it’s the know-it-all armchair experts, the wise-after-the-event vloggers and bloggers, the been-there-done-that boxers, or merely his own conscience, everyone and everything is replaying and retelling the vanquished boxer’s moment of doom.
Whether Itauma made mistakes, or simply got caught in the moment, he gave everything he had and then some – of that he should be proud.
As the situation became too much – the excruciating tiredness and what must have felt like a deranged robot bearing down on him – Itauma did not look to quit, foul, or be counted out on his knee.
Instinctively, he looked to punch his way out of the crisis. It wasn’t the right thing to do, no question, but it revealed something that few are now talking about: his heart and desire, even when everything else failed him, were not found wanting.
When the fight was stopped, he was still trying to muster the energy to hurl the miraculous Hail Mary that would have salvaged everything: his unbeaten record; his pride; his reputation.
He now has no choice, presuming he is to continue his mission to become heavyweight champion, but to risk this all happening again in front of the world.
That’s not to say that the rest of us have no right to analyse and discuss. Of course we do. But only Itauma can claim to have the correct answers.
Only he will know, for example, if his coaching beforehand was adequate. The venom being aimed at his trainer Ben Davison has been incredible this week.
Yet only someone who was there during every moment of his training camp will know exactly what went on. Only someone who was told every intricacy of the gameplan will know if it was followed or not.
Only someone who was sitting where Itauma was sitting between rounds will know exactly what advice was heard. Yet even Itauma, clearly spent between rounds eight and nine, likely won’t remember exactly what advice was given.
In the end, the 21-year-old with the world at his feet was fighting on instinct. That instinct is exactly what made him so special, and the rest of us so excited about what we were seeing. Yet on the night, when all he lacked was experience, that instinct to fight at all costs likely let him down.
Whatever the truth of Davison’s influence – I don’t know, and you don’t know – prodigies like Itauma tend to go their own way.
Do we blame the manager when the most talented footballer on the pitch opts to go past two defenders instead of making the easy pass? Do we blame the coach when the tennis player tries the audacious lob when a groundstroke would have sufficed?
It’s easy – too easy – to look at Itauma gulping back air on unsteady legs in the ninth round and declare he wasn’t fit enough. Yet the exhibition he unleashed beforehand, the power he chose to insert into nearly every blow, the angles he found for those punches, and the ground he covered, will naturally have sapped his reserves.
Doing what he was doing, in the way that he was doing it, in his first truly big fight, would have been impossible for almost any young fighter to sustain.
Whether what we saw on Saturday night is a precursor to weaknesses that will remain, or a lesson from which his strengths will ultimately thrive and prevail, is unknown.
What we can say, however, is that for those first eight rounds, Itauma dominated Hrgovic like the Croat had never been dominated before. For those first eight rounds, Itauma looked at least as good as any heavyweight on the planet.
That he couldn’t finish the job need not be the only focus.
