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Answering bell fraught with risk

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

At first glance, this looks like pretty good going for somebody who hadn’t fought competitively for 18 months, a sign perhaps that the most exciting professional fighter the island of Ireland has ever produced could be building up for one last hurrah. Except for one thing.
Mike Juarez is a professional tomato can, one of those journeymen who are constantly used to pad the records of higher-ranked fighters. His current world ranking of 251 doesn’t do justice to his lack of pedigree. In 10 fights since 1998, he’s won just twice, the last victory coming four years ago. Before climbing through the ropes to meet the former Olympic silver medallist from Belfast, four of his previous five professional contests had culminated in him being knocked clean out.
“I’m very happy with the result,” McCullough said after the fight. “I thought it may have taken me a bit longer because he has been in with some top fighters like Erik Morales and gone the distance. But once I caught him clean, he went over and he was out cold. It’s great to be back and I got a great reception from the crowd. I can now build on this and look ahead to staying active.”
Juarez had once fought Erik Morales, but McCullough was way wrong to suggest he’d ever taken any serious boxer the distance. Four years ago, Morales battered him around the Staples Centre in Los Angeles before knocking him out in the third round. One ringside observer described it as not so much a fight as target practice. An earlier Juarez contest against former IBF and WBC world lightweight champion Jeff Fenech saw him floored five times in the first five minutes before the referee called a halt. His record speaks for itself.
Every boxer in the game fights these guys. It’s considered a legitimate warm-up tactic, a way to build ring sharpness before embarking on greater and more lucrative challenges. The problem with McCullough is the ease with which he can still dispose of fighters of this ilk may well lead him into further danger. Although too many newspapers in Ireland regularly chose to ignore this, there is a school of thought within the sport that believes he has already taken too much punishment and has no business fighting at this stage of his career.
The generally positive reaction to McCullough’s latest comeback indicates that too many people have already forgotten the last time he fought competitively. Following his utter dismantling by Scott Harrison in Glasgow in March of last year, the Pocket Rocket had to spend a couple of days in a Scottish hospital. As is customary, too much was made of how gamely he stayed upright for 12 rounds during which he had been thoroughly hammered, and there wasn’t enough talk of how he’d flirted throughout with being seriously hurt.
“By the end of the eighth round it was so clear that McCullough wasn’t going anywhere, that he had no chance of winning the fight, that I told Cheryl [his wife] to end it,” said Frank Warren of that night. “She just smiled and said, ‘He’s a warrior.’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing that from a woman watching her husband being taken apart.”
That was the performance that conclusively proved that McCullough’s immense courage and incredible determination, once the very hallmarks of his greatness, had become his most glaring weakness. In this arena, not knowing when you are beat can be damaging to your health.
“It was the most cruel, one-sided, systematic beating that I have seen in 50 years of watching boxing,” said Barney Eastwood of the pummeling McCullough received from Harrison. “From the very start it was clear that he was in big trouble, and if I had been at the fight I would have been over at the corner telling them to stop it. He was ready to be pulled out after the sixth round and then in the eighth round he was fighting on instinct.”
For the spectator paying to watch boxing, McCullough is one of those fighters who make every penny spent seem worthwhile. Apart from his own thrilling, all-action style, the fact that superior talents haven’t been able to stop him has justifiably earned him Ring Magazine’s “Best Chin” award. Of course, that’s a dubious honor because it implies he must take an awful lot of punches. He did and he probably still will.
“For me it’s all about staying busy, because when I am that’s when I give my best,” McCullough said after humbling Juarez. “I’m just glad to have this one out of the way. I want to stay active in terms of fights because I have not done that for a long time.”
His record still reads an impressive 27 wins and four defeats (each of those against fellow champions), but a closer scrutiny reveals it’s now been eight years since he actually defeated a fighter of substance. Despite embarking on what appeared to be a highly promising career in TV and other media, he will, of course, keep fighting. He has every right to do so, except that each time he steps in the ring he will look more and more like every other boxer who didn’t know when to quit and suffered greatly for it afterward.
The pity about that is when the story of Irish boxing is written, McCullough’s wresting of the WBC bantamweight title from Yasuei Yakushiji in his hometown of Nagoya in 1995 will deserve a chapter all its own. A far more illustrious achievement than Steve Collins’s overhyped defeats of Eubank and Benn, that performance and his feat in Barcelona will ensure McCullough is always ranked with the best. The sad thing is, everything he does from here on will not only sully his legacy, it could also imperil his health.

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