Fight of what year?

So much for fight of the year. Arturo Gatti made short work of Leonard Dorin, though it didn't start out that way. Gatti looked solid in the first, keeping Dorin off his game and winning the round. In the second, Dorin started out well, neutralizing Gatti's jab and seemingly hurting Gatti's hand with a punch, stalking Gatti and whacking away at him, and then just like that, bam, Gatti hits one big body shot, and it's KO city for Dorin. You have to wonder if there's something else up there, or if Gatti just managed to find the off button on Dorin's Energizers. The bloodfest promised by the HBO hype (and general expectations) never materialized. Maybe we need Gatti/Ward 4.

In the opener, Jesse James Leija outworked his 17-year younger opponent Francisco Bojado to take a split decision. Back in May, I wrote this about Bojado:

Overall, Bojado will probably be up with Cotto in a year or two, but he needs to fight a higher level of opponent.

Of course, I didn't expect that it would be Leija, and further, I didn't expect that Bojado would become Jekyll and Hyde in the ring. After a fairly even first two rounds, Bojado knocked Leija down in the third once, and nearly had a second one which was ruled a slip. But afterwards, Bojado seemed to retreat into a shell, allowing the far more experienced Leija to take over the fight for the next 5 rounds before making a late attempt to salvage the fight. In the end, I saw the match as a draw, Harold Lederman had Bojado winning by a point, but the judges saw it 94-95, 96-93, 95-94 for Leija. So now Bojado has to go back to the drawing board and Leija finds himself back in the midst of the very deep welterweight picture.

The only thing that I can say in Bojado's defense is that he's had a bit of upheaval in the last few months trainer-wise, losing Floyd Mayweather Sr. to the Golden Boy. So as a result, he is now with Buddy McGirt, but he's only had two fights with McGirt, neither of which have been overly impressive. But at 21, Bojado is still a potential star. He just may need some stability in his training first.

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Fun in the video store today. Our server decided last night that it didn't need to see the database anymore and then ate itself. So we ran on paper for the entire day. That was fun. (Much like dental surgery with no anesthetic.) It makes you appreciate the very pile of microchips that you're cursing when it works.