Abraham’s Confidence Lacking as Showdown With Ward Looms:
With the Super Six tournament‘s semi-finals scheduled for faraway May, the innovative tournament sponsored by Showtime has slipped off the radar. Yet that does not mean all is quiet for the Super Six’s four participants. Arthur Abraham, the Armenian banger coming to us by way of Germany, is scheduled for a tune-up bout against a journeyman named Stjepan Bozic this weekend. Andre Ward, Glen Johnson and Carl Froch do not feel the need to undertake a preliminary fight, so why does Abraham?
Abraham started the Super Six with a bang, knocking Jermain Taylor out of the fight and into retirement. Since then, Abraham hasn’t looked so good. Andre Dirrell out-boxed Abraham so thoroughly that Abraham looked like a plodder with no answers, and in fact the Armenian had no answers until frustration led him to clock Dirrell when that fighter was on one knee after slipping. Dirrell put Abraham on the canvas in the 4th, cut him, and was leading on the scorecards by a decisive margin prior to the completely just disqualification. In his next Super Six fight, Abraham proved unable to apply his formidable punching power against Carl Froch, who surprised many observers (including this one) by out-boxing “King Arthur.”
So things haven’t gone well for Abraham, and in that perspective a tune-up fight looks more like a confidence-builder. When Abraham meets Andre Ward on May 14, he will not have fought since November, and that is a long time. Yet all the other Super Six fighters are enjoying the same seven-month lay-off, and none of them thinks a tune-up is necessary. From a strictly physical point of view, it is hard to see what fighting a no-hoper like Bozic (who was knocked out by the unspectacular Dmitri Sartison) will accomplish. The whole thing smacks of ebbing confidence on the part of Abraham.
Regular readers of my work on Proboxing-Fans.com might recognize that I place a big emphasis on the psychological aspects of boxing. Like any one-on-one sport, if a boxer’s head isn’t screwed on properly, that boxer can have all the talent in the world and still lose badly. Abraham isn’t used to losing and plainly isn’t dealing very well with his two back-to-back losses in fights where he simply was not competitive. In his next bout, Abraham is taking on the #1 super middleweight in the world, and the smart money has Andre Ward handing out an ever more lop-sided beating to Abraham, who seems to know that.
I have a hard time thinking of Arthur Abraham, who duked it out with Edison Miranda with a sickeningly broken jaw, as suffering from a crisis of confidence. However, the evidence suggests Abraham might very well be quite badly shaken, and if so, he has beaten himself before he ever gets in the ring with Ward. Hopefully, Abraham will get whatever it is he thinks he needs from fighting Bozic and show up on May 14 game and ready to go.
