With these two, you see, there was never any danger of us being let down, nor the need for anything “artificial”. In Ball, you had a WBA champion whose nickname “Wrecking Ball” amounts to more than just an obvious pun, while Figueroa, the former champion from Texas, threw over 1,000 punches in his previous bout, a 12-round decision win over Joet Gonzalez. Together, they were only ever likely to produce one kind of fight. It would be a battle – yes, of the gladiatorial sort – but it would also be real, with nothing either forced or fake about it. A “proper fight,” they would call it in the UK, and a proper fight it proved to be. Not only that, after 11 rounds of compelling back-and-forth action, we received a proper finish, too, when Figueroa, the underdog, landed a left hand on Ball which made three judges’ scorecards irrelevant and delivered the Texan his third world title (two full titles, one interim).
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