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Boxing
Release the Ben Whittaker handbrake, but don't floor it
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The trouble with sporting prodigies is never that they arrive too soon, but that they are often kept waiting once they do.
In the case of Ben Whittaker , the suspicion lingers that the velvet rope is being draped a little too lovingly across the doorway to real contender status at 175lbs.
He has dazzled. He has shown impressive KO power. He has danced and he’s wiggled, at times treating the ring less as a testing ground for toughness and more as a stage upon which mischief might be performed with gloves on.
Whittaker did his job on Saturday night. He produced a first-round KO against Argentina's Braian Suarez at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool.
Whittaker sets up US debut with second successive first round KO
Watch Whittaker vs. Suarez highlights
The wins took his record to 11-0-1 (8), but the reaction to another highlight reel KO was mixed.
To be fair to the Birmingham puncher, he had not been preparing for main event status. An injury to Callum Smith - endured during the Liverpool fighter’s final stages of training camp - had ruled him out of his fight with the classy David Morrell and so Whittaker’s fight with Suarez was bumped up to the top of the bill.
Suarez was no joke and was 21-4 going in with all but one of his wins coming inside schedule.
For some context, it had taken one-time Commonwealth, European and IBO light-heavyweight champion Lyndon Arthur 10 rounds to get rid of Suarez in 2023.
However, in 2022 in his homeland he had also been bombed out inside a round by rough Venezuelan southpaw Albert Ramirez.
Talent such as Whittaker’s does not come along every week, and when it does, the instinct is to preserve it, to polish it, to present it under lighting that flatters rather than exposes.
But boxing is not a museum. It is a marketplace of risk. That is why we love it.
Sugar Ray Leonard did not become an all-time great by fencing with the agreeable.
In his thirteenth contest he boxed the gifted Dick Eklund. Eklund was a tough night for anyone if he had enjoyed a full camp and not been partying on the mean streets of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Fight number fourteen for Sugar Ray? That would be his 1978 encounter with then 15-1 Floyd Mayweather Sr, a still ambitious and very capable fighter. At the time the Mayweather win was considered a major test for Leonard, who while destined for stardom was taking a step up in class in Mayweather, who was a respected opponent known for his defensive smarts.
Bottom line. Just fighting cans and getting early KOs will only endear him to the online video editors, not hardcore boxing fans who know what they are watching. We know after last night ‘The Surgeon’ can punch with accuracy. His next move will tell us whether they're running an entertainment business with Whittaker or building a serious fighter towards elite world level (both things can be true of course).
In Eddie Hearn and Frank Smith's defence, boxing has a long memory for rushed prospects. For every Sugar Ray Leonard, there are plenty of Francisco Bojado's or Audley Harrison's. Confidence, once dented, rarely returns in its original shape.
He’s 28, slap bang in his athletic prime so while he needs to be moved, he needs to be moved in the right way. A carefully built fighter is a valuable commodity. A prematurely exposed one just becomes a bad investment and a cautionary tale.
One senses that when it comes to Whittaker the public - that most fickle of patrons - is beginning to shift in its seat.
They have smiled at the swagger and applauded the trickery of a man who is supremely comfortable in his own skin. Whittaker has also shown in his last three fights that he is turning into a spiteful puncher too. He has the look of a superstar.
However, there is nothing new under the sun and when it comes to boxing prospects, the crowd does not merely want to see that a fighter can win; it wants to know what happens when winning is no longer assured.
An Olympic silver medallist and now unbeaten in 12 professional bouts, at the risk of telling the well-oiled machine that is Matchroom what to do, now is surely the time to take the handbrake off a little?
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