WRONG, JUST WRONG
Elliot Worsell on how Luis Nery broke the rules yet again and got away with it
LAST Thursday (March 1), Shinsuke Yamanaka’s retirement party was ruined by gatecrashers who turned up, broke all the rules, embarrassed him in front of his friends, and then left with his belongings.
The man chiefly responsible for Yamanaka’s misery was Mexico’s Luis Nery, who floored the Japanese star four times en route to a second-round stoppage win. But Yamanaka’s demise is so much more complex than that; far sadder than if he’d just been beaten fair and square by a better man.
In truth, since hanging out with the bad boys of the bantamweight division (namely Luis Nery), the Tokyo native has had a tough time of it. Unbeaten until August 2017, Yamanaka was once a WBC world bantamweight champion with 12 successful defences and wins over the likes of Anselmo Moreno, Liborio Solis and Vic Darchinyan to his name. But then, roughly six months ago, he met Luis Nery.
Controversial Nery, a 23-year-old southpaw, is known as “Pantera”. He also occasionally goes by another name: drug cheat. It’s not a title the boxer will ever use, yet details of a failed drug test in 2017 are just as noteworthy as the 26 wins and 23 knockouts on his stellar professional boxing record.
Based on what we know, Nery, shortly after halting Yamanaka in four rounds to win the WBC bantamweight title, was informed by VADA (Voluntary Anti-
Doping Agency) that he had an adverse pre-fight test for the banned substance zilpaterol, something typically used to increase the size of cattle. The substance helped him prepare for the fight. It then helped him win the fight.
Alas, this is boxing, so nothing much happened. The result stood, Nery kept his ill-gotten gains and Yamanaka was left to lick his wounds and somehow remain philosophical about the fact he’d lost his unbeaten record to a drug cheat.
The hope, of course, was that karma would somehow do the work of the boxing authorities and Yamanaka would get his shot at revenge and regain what was rightfully his. It was heading that way, too. The rematch was made, it was given a date of March 1, 2018, and it would again take place in Japan, Yamanaka’s home country.
Yet, despite these positive signs, and the want for this to amount to some great morality tale, Nery had other ideas. Not content with cheating first time around, the mean Mexican then realised he wasn’t able to make the 118-pound bantamweight limit for the rematch and registered a weight five pounds over. This meant the WBC title was now vacant – only Yamanaka could win it – and it also meant Nery, someone accustomed to having an edge, would enjoy a hefty and crucial size advantage by the time the two shared a ring in Kokugikan.
Poor Yamanaka. His much larger opponent, oblivious to what is right and wrong, mercilessly beat him up, dropped him, stopped him, and showed not a shred of guilt, much less remorse. Apparently now clean, he was eager to prove the first fight was no fluke. And, inevitably, he got the result he wanted.
But what does any of it mean if boxing, this most dangerous of sports, allows incidents like this to happen and results like this to stand? Perhaps Yamanaka, 27-2-2 (19), should take some of the blame. Not for the first fight, but certainly for fight number two. His opponent, after all, wasn’t even close to making weight and therefore it was patently obvious he’d be much heavier than the former champion on fight night. Yet Yamanaka went ahead with it and paid the price.
Whatever his reason for doing so, it was the wrong move. It was the wrong move for a 35-year-old who has since announced his retirement, and it was the wrong move for a sport that needs to get its house in order, remove its many grey areas, and start punishing those who take drugs, miss weight and bend the very rules that help protect them and the opponents they intend to damage.
On a brighter note, Daniel Roman, the WBA super-bantamweight champion, managed to travel to Japan, make weight, not rely on performance-enhancing drugs and dominate Ryo Matsumoto over 12 rounds to retain his title on Wednesday February 28. The scores at the end of the fight were 119-109 twice and 118-110, and the victory at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall was Roman’s second in Japan, following an impressive ninthround stoppage of Shun
Kubo in September.