21.09.07 – By Ted Sares: When David Tua recently fought Cerrone Fox, many (including me) called it a mismatch. But then, there are worse mismatches, ones that can cross over into the danger zone.
Cristian Nicolae, a Romanian featherweight, recently fought Italian Massimo Morra, 18-3, in Rome. Morra was coming off a win over 0-7 Roman Rafael. Incredibly, Nicolae was 1-36 going into his fight with the Italian and had lost 35 in a row. This was a mismatch.
A far more dangerous one occurred when world class Thai fighter, Sirimongkol Singwancha, 57-2, took on Kaennakorn Bangbuathong in his very first professional fight.
In 2005, Singwancha beat Michael Clark in a WBC Lightweight Title Eliminator in Las Vegas. Prior to that, he lost to the very tough Jesus Chavez in Austin, Texas in a fight for the WBC super featherweight title. His only other defeat came at the hands of Joichiro Tatsuyoshi when he lost his WBC bantamweight title by 7th round KO.
Maybe Bangbuathong had an extensive amature career or maybe he crossed over from Muay Thai boxing, but I could not corraborate either. And so a 57-2 ex-champion fights a guy in his first pro bout. Sometimes, this can have a bad ending.
Something worse
Filipino Angelito “Lito” Sisnorio, twenty-four, was coming off a fourth-round TKO loss to reigning WBC Flyweight Champion Pongsaklek Wonjongkam, 63-2, on January 26, 2007. It was Lito’s third consecutive defeat. Then on March 30, 2007, he fought former WBC Flyweight Champion Chatchai Sasakul, then 58-3 (now 62-3), again in Thailand. Sasakul had won his last six fights, four by stoppage, since losing to Kuniyuki Aizawa in Tokyo. Lito, who was not liscensed to fight in Thailand, had won only five of his eleven fights.
Sasakul is truly one of the great Thai fighters. He battered—yes, battered—Manny Pacquiao for six rounds before Manny caught him with a devastating combination to win the title by a sensational eighth-round knockout in 1998. One of his other losses came against the great Yuri Arbachakov in 1995. He avenged this loss by beating Arbachakov two years later for the WBC flyweight title. It would be Arbachakov’s only career defeat.
Fighting at a catch weight of 116 pounds, the vastly-experienced Sasakul predictably ended the fight via a fourth-round stoppage. He landed a series of vicious right hooks, decking Lito, who had absorbed tremendous punishment. The referee then stopped the contest at the 2:35 mark as a badly-cut Sisnorio came under a sustained barrage and could no longer defend himself. Later, he fell unconscious while reportedly eating dinner and was rushed to Bangkok’s Piyamin Hospital where he underwent emergency brain surgery to remove a blood clot. Sadly, he failed to regain consciousness.
Culpability in Plain Sight
Here’s a kid who finished his career with a total of seventeen fights (or eleven depending how you interpret the stats), but he’s thrown in with monsters like Wonjongkam and Sasakul. He also had been knocked out by tough nd undefeated Oleydong Sithsamerchai. The fatal fight was scheduled even though Sasakul was thirteen years older than Sisnorio, who was an average fighter at best. At the time, Sasakul had sixty-one since turning pro in 1991, while Sisnorio had lost five of his last six bouts.
These kinds of fights don’t come out of the ordinary circumstances surrounding boxing, where all precautions have been taken, where the referees, officials, and ringside physicians are competent, and where the fighter are evenly matched, but still a fatality tragically occurs. Tragic as those unexpected situations can be, I can live with them, for they come with the territory. As Jim Lampley said in a recent article on the Huffington Blog, they come out of the culture of boxing.
But I cannot live with these. Oh no, these involve a flashpoint of culpability that occur in plain sight, and that’s what makes them so reprehensible and unacceptable.
Why?
Why, then, was Sirimongkol Singwancha, 57-2, allowed to fight Kaennakorn Bangbuathong, 0-0, on September 14, 2007? Why?