7 feet tall? Good for wrestling...

...but not so good for boxing. Just got finished watching last Saturday's "championship" fight between 6'3" Monte Barrett and the 7-foot tall Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev. It was... well, it was something. Not quite a boxing match, not quite the massacre I expected either, though.

Barrett was clearly outmatched, but did his damnedest to try and chop the bigger man down. He escaped the first round after getting knocked down but not counted, as the ref did not see his gloves hit the canvas. Through the middle rounds, Barrett tried to alternately chop away at Valuev and then jump in and grab him to avoid the bigger man's clubbing blows. But as the fight wore on, Valuev just kept thudding away at Barrett. Barrett went down in the eighth, though it was almost more of a slip than a knockdown, but by the eleventh, Barrett was reeling. After three knockdowns in the round and Valuev's landing shots at will, Barrett's trainer jumped in and ended the match.

Unfortunately, Valuev seems like a very intelligent, sensitive guy, but he's probably never going to be anything more than a freak, especially since Don King has wormed his way into Valuev's management team. HBO showed some footage of Valuev in New York looking very uncomfortable doing PR with King, holding a mockup of the Empire State Building while King crowed about "my Russian Giant!". I can't imagine him going very far, but BoxRec has him ranked #2 in the world right now in the awful, awful heavyweight division behind fellow Russian Wladimir Klitschko. Maybe he'd be better off calling Vince McMahon.