| 25 August 2010
The Super Six World Boxing Classic has been a worthy experiment, even if it had some bumps along the way. Now, though, it's facing it's biggest hurdle so far: losing a boxer to injury just weeks before the final batch of round robin fights.
ESPN's Dan Rafael is reporting that Mikkel Kessler has withdrawn from the tournament, citing an eye injury that affected him even before his initial Super Six fight with Andre Ward. He expects to be able to return to the ring in mid-2011 and hopes to be able to fight the winner of the tourney.
Showtime has said all along that it has a contingency plan for everything, but this is definitely a setback. It's not just losing a fighter - the event proceeded just fine once Jermain Taylor dropped out - but losing one so late in the game that hurts. On top of that, Kessler was coming off a gutsy win over Carl Froch and would have been everyone's pick to beat Allan Green (except for maybe Green himself).
Speaking of Green, he'd be the big loser under the theory floated in Rafael's piece that the upcoming fights will simply become the semifinals. That's because if he knocked out Kessler, Allan still had a chance to make the semis if everything fell just right. But after his lackluster showing against Ward, Green's chances of doing that would fall somewhere between slim and none, so it would hardly be an outrage if he was eliminated now.
Andre Dirrell would be the big winner, as he was facing an uphill battle against the favored Ward to make the semis. Now if The Matrix pulls off the upset, he could be into the final against the winner of the Arthur Abraham-Carl Froch bout, which certainly looks on paper to be a semifinal-worthy collision anyway. Turning Ward-Dirrell into a semifnal might also help it on the marketing side, a definite concern since neither fighter is a big ticket seller and no date or site had been finalized for the match.
So while this is a depressing turn of events, some good can come of it. I still think Showtime, the promoters and fighters deserve kudos for agreeing to the Super Six in the first place, and they will deserve even more if they see it through to the end despite Kessler's departure.
