| 30 December 2010
Maybe it was due to the fact that it was fresh in our minds. But in a year that didn't have a Gatti-Ward or a Marquez-Vazquez (well, at least not one like the first three), perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that our 2010 Fight of the Year took place just a few weeks ago.
I'm talking about Amir Khan vs. Marcos Maidana, which ended up as a narrow unanimous decision for Khan. It certainly didn't look like it was going to be a great fight early, as Khan sent Maidana down in Round 1.
Yet we all know that Maidana has an iron chin and heavy hands. He persevered and even started winning some of the middle rounds.
Then in Round 10, high drama. Maidana started off slowly, getting caught with some flush shots. But he found his range, started landing on Khan's famously shaky chin, and all of a sudden it was a nail-biter the rest of the way.
An all-time great? Not hardly. And maybe it really was the fact that it came so late in the year that pushed it over the top in our minds.
Still, Khan-Maidana had plenty of exciting action, several momentum shifts and a serious feeling that either man could get knocked out in the second half of the fight. Not too shabby, any way you slice it.
Other fights we considered:
It didn't have a realistic shot since not all of us saw it, but Humberto Soto-Urbano Antillon may have been the best fight of the year in terms of sustained action and two guys willing to swing away from bell to bell. Even though Soto won fairly comfortably on the cards, there was nothing comfortable about his night in the ring thanks to Antillon's relentlessness... Carl Froch-Mikkel Kessler stands out in my mind as the best fight of the Super Six so far. It was tight and had excellent action, and the final round was a thriller... If you saw the Yonnhy Perez-Abner Mares fight, you understood why Showtime was willing to spring for the bantamweight tournament. Very evenly matched and neither man ran out of gas despite throwing tons of punches. Perez showed why he has been underrated for quite some time and Mares served notice that he was a young star on the rise... We got pretty much what we expected out of the Juan Manuel Lopez-Rafael Marquez fight, which was both men landing some serious bombs and a scary moment or two for Juanma. If Rafa had just a little more left in his tank, this one easily could have been elevated to Fight of the Year... Many boxing experts thought Juan Manuel Marquez-Michael Katsidis had a chance to be excellent entertainment, but I confess I was surprised at how much fun it turned out to be. JMM is a more exciting fighter since he has slowed down just a tad, and Katsidis has long been one to engage in all-action bouts.
Special Award: Most Entertaining Round of the Year: Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Bernabe Concepcion, Round 1
This one is all my doing. This year had a handful of compelling final rounds (the aforementioned Froch-Kessler and the recent Jean Pascal-Bernard Hopkins, to name just two), and any of them could be considered the mythical Round of the Year for 2010.
For my money, though, the wildest and most fun round of the year was the opening frame in Juanma's brawl with Concepcion. Two smoking left hands sent Bernabe down early, and it looked like it was going to be a short night for Lopez.
As Juanma battered his way into the corner, Concepcion simply started swinging for the fences to connect with his own crushing left. Lopez went down and had plenty of cobwebs to clear out before the start of Round 2.
It's that vulnerability that adds that extra bit of spice to almost every one of Juanma's fights. He's not the best boxer in the world, but he may be the most consistently exciting performer. That earns him the nod here.
