Erik Morales has heard questions loaded with suggestions that he is damaged and in danger of permanent disability or worse when Marcos Maidana’s power figures to land with probability dictated by a record that includes 10 first-round knockouts and stoppages in 87.1 percent of his 31 fights.
Fear not, Morales says.
“I feel good,’’ Morales said this week at the end of a conference call 11 days before his April 9 date with Maidana at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. “I feel calm.’’
The questions, he says, are coming from his former promoter, Fernando Beltran.
“It is a matter of revenge, because I am not with him anymore,’’ Morales said through an interpreter, Golden Boy Promotions matchmaker Eric Gomez. “I know Fernando Beltran is causing these problems.’’
At 33, Morales is still at an age when many are at the end of their prime, which means they are still capable in mind and body. Like so many Mexican fighters, however, it’s not the age so much as the record. They are kids, teenagers, when they begin a trade so often mastered in a perilous exchange built on the ability to set up a punch by enduring two, three and four. Morales was 16 when he answered his first pro bell, one of 57.
“I know I have been in some wars,’’ Morales said in a matter-of-fact tone with a comment that also is a matter-of-record, yet cuts both ways.
For him, the experience represents well-practiced skill, the knowhow to avoid power long enough to counter it and transform it into an advantage. But those wars aren’t video games. They come with a physical price, each tagged with the same question: How much is left? I have no doubt that Beltran is asking, again and again.
He wouldn’t be the first former promoter to do so and he won’t be the last. Maybe, he is motivated by reasons other than concern. Maybe not. But Beltran also is asking only what so many others have. Morales’ four fights, all defeats, before he left the sport after losing to David Diaz in 2008 were full of troubling signs. Two of them were to the undisputed best, Manny Pacquiao.
It was the second loss to Pacquiao in 2006 that left a moment impossible to forget. Morales was down in the third and final round. He looked up at his father and trainer, who urged him to get up and continue. Morales waved him off with a gloved right hand. It was as if he was saying good bye. No, no more. For one of the toughest fighters of his generation, it was a concession that his best days were over.
Perhaps, a flicker of what he once was will be there for what would be a significant upset of Maidana.
“I’m not old,’’ said Morales, who won three comeback fights in Mexico last year. “I just decided, at 30 years old, to take a little break.’’
In Maidana, Morales sees a flawed fighter. At 28, Morales would have beat him, no doubt. Five years later, however, there are doubts about whether the toll he paid in speed and reflexes against Pacquiao and Marco Antonio Barrera left him with enough to match the knowhow, especially when Madaina’s shotgun style of power is unleashed. It’s one thing to know how to get out of the way. Doing it, however, is something altogether different.
According to Gomez, Morales passed a battery of medical tests in Mexico, including one administered in Mexico City by the same neurosurgeon who reportedly put a plate in Barrera’s skull in 1997 to correct a congenital condition, one not related to boxing.
What’s more, Morales believes he is stronger perhaps healthier than ever, in part because he doesn’t have to break himself down to make junior-welterweight, 140 pounds. At his featherweight prime, Morales often would step onto the scale at the official weigh-in looking as if he had starved himself. He was always as gaunt as a refugee. If you saw him a couple of months and several meals later, he was hard to recognize.
Maybe, the fears have been overstated. I can’t help but think of Evander Holyfield in 1996 before his first fight with Mike Tyson. From promoter to bookie to fan, the prevailing talk was that Holyfield was damaged. Few thought he could win. The better chance was that he would suffer serious injury.
Holyfield won.
Maybe, Morales will too.
In the meantime, however, I can’t help but wonder about the questions and worry about the result.
