The Beltline: What is your worst-ever fight prediction?

While bad fight predictions are as common as bad decisions in boxing, rarely do you get the opportunity, as either a fan or journalist, to enter the confessional and confess your sins. Typically, in fact, a bad fight prediction is something you hope to quickly erase, either from your memory, your social media feed, or the website for which you write. It is considerably easier, too, with so many other wrong opinions available online, to achieve this – to become traceless – than it was when your fight preview congealed in a magazine or newspaper for days, if not weeks, after the fight was over. 

In those days it was important to get the prediction right, or at least not humiliate yourself completely. In those days, a time when predictions were no more than things mumbled in offices or pubs, there were fewer outside influences. In other words, you did your research, you took advice from people deemed knowledgeable, and then you nailed your colours to the mast. You weren’t, unlike today, inundated with conflicting viewpoints, or scores of people telling you what to think and why, in thinking the way you choose to think, you are perhaps not qualified to do the job to which you have been assigned. 

That is all part and parcel of the job itself, of course. As is making a call in the first place and then standing by it even when in the presence of the two boxers; one of whom, per the rules of the game, you will have picked against. Most of the time the boxers appreciate the demands of the job, just as you do. They are therefore understanding, or at least unlikely to abuse you, should you predict that they will lose their upcoming fight. Some will remember it and maybe remind you of the call, if wrong, at a later date, but most will simply forget you even made a call in the first place. 

It is not the sort of thing you bring to a fighter’s attention, that’s for sure. You don’t, for example, reveal your pick to them before the fight – regardless of whether you lean their way or not – and you certainly don’t reveal your hand after the fight, when to do so would be considered either cruel or showing off. Instead, you simply make a mental note of the good ones and you disregard, like a bad date, the ones that went awry. 

Occasionally, you may get the opportunity to speak with a fighter you once picked to lose and feel so bad about going against them that you succumb to guilt. This happened to me on Monday (September 9). That was the day I interviewed the 62-year-old former world cruiserweight champion Carl Thompson and confessed to him that I had, like so many, backed David Haye to beat him ahead of their fight at Wembley Arena in 2004. Yes, 2004; meaning 20 years ago. It was in the passing of time – the distance between the event and confession – that I found comfort, confidence, I suppose. It also helped that Thompson himself had brought the subject up. “Everybody picked against me in that fight,” he said, “and that is why the win ranks right up there for me. Nobody thought I would win. Nobody.”

If just to confirm this, I offered my own incorrect prediction to Thompson and waited for the mood to change. Only, to my relief, it didn’t. Rather, Thompson was all of a sudden even more enthused to talk about the Haye win, knowing that on the other end of the phone he had not only someone interested in the details, but someone who had also been stupid enough to go against him. It was, for him, another victory of sorts; a victory just to speak to me – this dissenter, this contrarian, this fool. 

It got me thinking, our conversation, about other predictions I had got wrong. I wondered in the process why some had stuck with me and yet others had disappeared from my mind entirely, like the faces of school classmates whose names you can no longer recall. 

Picking Haye to beat Thompson was no stretch, I’ll admit, nor embarrassing to get wrong. As Thompson said himself, everyone back then was doing it. Moreover, as part of Haye’s team, it was inevitable I would pick him to win that particular fight, likewise subsequent ones. Indeed, only later did I understand how closeness – a lack of distance, separation – is the worst possible thing when it comes to objectively calling a fight between two boxers. 

Still, as a fan, I have made similar errors with other fights. One that immediately springs to mind is the middleweight fight between Bernard Hopkins and William Joppy, prior to which I became convinced Joppy would win. It made no sense then and it makes even less sense now, yet it is true all the same. Seemingly, though he had won just two fights since being crushed by Felix Trinidad in five rounds, I was impressed enough by Joppy narrowly beating Howard Eastman, another favourite of mine, to side with him in a fight against Hopkins, arguably the finest middleweight of the modern era. 

Scorecards of 109-119, 109-118, and 108-119 would highlight how wrong I was that night in 2003, but it certainly wasn’t the last time I exposed myself in this way. It may have been the last time I tried to be a smart-aleck or contrarian but, rest assured, making wrong picks has long been a feature, a humbling one, of my obsession with this sport. 

Frankly, I am now at the stage where picking a fight with any degree of certainty seems, to me, a demonstration of either ignorance or, in some cases, arrogance. After all, who are we, mere observers, to analyse with conviction what is to happen when two men or women enter a ring and trade punches? Who are we to think we possess the power to predict how one style will mesh with another when much of what makes boxing so special is its unpredictability? 

Thankfully, in recent times I have fared better. I picked Terence Crawford to stop Errol Spence last July, for instance, and then picked Oleksandr Usyk to beat Tyson Fury in May. I am also mature enough to know that neither of those picks can undo the damage already done, nor give me fresh confidence ahead of a fight like Artur Beterbiev vs. Dmitry Bivol next month. But that’s okay. Usually, when you approach a fight feeling as though you suddenly know nothing about the sport, the sport is doing something right.