Even when playing nicely, Naoya Inoue still breaks things

DOING well in the ring with Naoya Inoue carries the same sense of foreboding a binge drinker will experience at the peak of their euphoria. In other words, you must enjoy it while it lasts. You must enjoy it while it lasts because what follows is inevitable: the vomiting, the genuflecting by the toilet, the begging for mercy. Also to come is the next-day headache, as well as the regret of knowing you were warned and understood the consequences of your actions. This, after all, is the price you pay. The price you pay for having fun. The price you pay for thinking you would get away with it. 

It is odd, too, because no amount of awareness of what is to come dampens the euphoria, nor indeed removes the hope; the hope that it will be different this time; the hope that you will be different from all the others; the hope you can get lucky. 

For most, of course, there is no hope. There is no hope of success being anything other than fleeting and there is no hope of them being anything other than just the latest in a long line of opponents unable to go the distance. The best you can really hope for, in fact, is to get out relatively unscathed, perhaps upright. Manage that and it can be considered a success, particularly when cognizant of how many previous Inoue opponents ended their night either on their back, on their knees, or saying to themselves, “No, never again.”

For TJ Doheny, Inoue’s latest opponent, there was a feeling midway through the sixth round that he could end up being one of the few lucky ones. That is not to say he looked remotely like winning the fight against Inoue at that stage – at least not in any conventional sense – but it is true all the same that he was carrying himself well and that, in round six, he appeared fit, healthy, and not yet close to being stopped. There were body shots landing with regularity, granted, but on the whole Doheny was moving assuredly, covering up when under attack, and winning the odd round, too; no mean feat against a super-bantamweight champion so used to seeing obedience in both the eyes and movements of an opponent.  

Frankly, Doheny, 26-5 (20), would have been forgiven for feeling confident, maybe even hopeful, going into the sixth. His blend of moving and counterpunching, plus his reluctance to give Inoue what he wanted, had the Tokyo crowd a little restless and Inoue, in truth, wasn’t yet firing on all cylinders. Nor for that matter had he deterred Doheny the way he would have probably expected by now. Right hands were landing high and low, with the body blows damaging, but still Doheny was able to take his medicine and remain on the move, frustrating Inoue by constantly changing the angles and lines of attack. 

Then, in round six, the cumulative effect of Inoue’s shots suddenly took its toll. One right hand landed on the Doheny body in the middle of the ring and from that point Inoue wouldn’t let up, targeting that area now with a ferocity and regularity which almost bordered on cruel. 

Doheny, meanwhile, battled back admirably, but found himself exposed upstairs due to his desperation to avoid taking more of Inoue’s body shots. This meant that Inoue had somewhere else to hit, and hit it he did, following his earlier body assault with three straight rights, as well as one of the roundhouse variety, which he uncoiled when rolling out of a clinch. Of all the shots thrown and landed, that roundhouse seemed to rattle Doheny and it wasn’t long before he was retreating to the ropes and absorbing further punches to the head and body. He took a big breath when afforded some respite, his poker face a thing of the past. He then complained about a pain in his back or hip area moments before walking back to his stool. 

Considered no more than distress signals at the time, it was only when round seven began and Doheny reacted to the first Inoue attack by signaling an inability to protect himself that we realized it was something more. Now, as well as distressed, Doheny was hurt, incapable of continuing. There were just 16 seconds on the clock and Doheny, for the first time in his career, had been stopped. 

As far as Inoue finishes go, this was about as anticlimactic and inconclusive as it could get. Unlikely to appear on any future “Monster” highlight reels, it was unsatisfactory both for Inoue, its architect, and also Doheny, the victim. It robbed Inoue of the chance to finish what he started in round six, a round in which he finally made an impression on Doheny, and it robbed Doheny of the chance to maybe build on a solid first half of the fight and pose Inoue more problems as his confidence increased. 

As for the injury itself, we later learned it had something to do with a muscle above Doheny’s hip, presumably the result of Inoue’s burst of activity in round six. This left Doheny with a dead leg at the round’s end which he was then unable to shake off, or bring back to life, in round seven, hence his reaction 16 seconds in.  

Until then, the Irishman had been doing just fine. He had used his longer arms and wider stance to create distance between himself and Inoue and he seemed capable of taking most of what Inoue threw his way. He also did some excellent work of his own from round three, touching Inoue with his right glove before finding a home for his left. This he did well in the third and fourth and then, by the fifth round, Inoue was the one backing up and beckoning Doheny to come forward, usually a sign of a fighter frustrated with the way a fight is unfolding. 

Still, even if that was the case, that doesn’t mean Doheny was edging towards an upset victory. In fact, Inoue, 27-0 (25), remained in control through the first half of the fight and was making some smart moves of his own. He would, for instance, quickly adjust where he threw his right hand after realizing it was easier to reach the body of Doheny than the head, the switch paying dividends in round six. He also noticeably upped the tempo in round five and this Doheny, a man of 37, did not appreciate. After all, he was now, as a result, having to move a little quicker and exchange punches with Inoue when, ideally, he would rather they were taking a breather and engaging in something closer to a staring contest. The moment this shift happened, there was an air of inevitability about what was to come next. 

Whether Inoue would have stopped Doheny without the injury is unknown, but he was at the very least building towards it by round seven. It wasn’t vintage Inoue, no, yet to even think in those terms says as much about our expectations and the standards he has set as it does his performance against Doheny, whose awkwardness and reluctance to engage gave Inoue a minor headache. 

Doheny, though never likely to win, was tonight clever, he had his game plan figured out, and he executed it well during the time he shared a ring with Inoue. Not just that, with pressure on Inoue to get the stoppage, as always, Doheny, a man never previously stopped, used this expectation to his advantage, often coaxing Inoue to overcommit or get desperate in search of what so many, including Inoue, had anticipated seeing. 

In the end, the Tokyo crowd got the result they expected (TKO 7), just not the image: the scene of devastation. Instead of that, they saw pain on the face of TJ Doheny and frustration on the face of Naoya Inoue, two things rarely seen coalescing during the career of the Japanese star. Usually, the pain on the face of an opponent is accompanied and juxtaposed by a smile of satisfaction on the face of Inoue. Usually, he not only wins a fight but, with the help of his left and right fists, decides both the fate and final position of his opponent as well. 

Tonight, though, the deciding factor was not Inoue but rather TJ Doheny’s 37-year-old body. That gave up long before he did. That recorded and stored the pain of all the punches he had, for six rounds, tried his best to ignore.