Although technically what happened in Wembley Stadium on Saturday night is a TKO because the referee stopped the fight without making a count, in all other ways Carl Froch delivered a devastating one-punch kayo to George Groves. Groves wasn’t just stopped; he was hit by a right cross that turned him around like a music box ballerina and deposited him on his ass, leaving him splayed senseless on the canvas. Froch vs. Groves II was no mere technical knockout, but Knockout of the Year material.
As such, boxing circles must wonder if George Groves has not suffered a permanent dent in his career. Crushing knockouts like what Groves suffered are hard to come back from, both physically and mentally. On the physical side, brutal knockouts sometimes leave what could be described as neurological scars, permanently diminishing a fighter’s ability to take a punch. It’s almost as if having had the fuze blown and the lights turned out once, the fuze box becomes more prone to blow outs in the future. While a knockout like this changes nothing in terms of bone and muscle, sometimes it changes something in the brain in a physical rather than a psychological sense.
Yet knockouts like this can leave psychological scars as well. The sport is replete with cases of boxers who lost confidence in the wake of such a knockout, becoming perceptibly gun shy in a way that limits their performance in the ring. In a sport that is nine-tenths psychology, a boxer can operate at the world level with a sense of caution, but caution is not the same thing as hesitancy, and hesitancy means not operating to one’s full potential.
I worry about George Groves more than others because he seemed to wilt in the middle rounds of the fight. On our official scorecard, Groves lost Rounds 5 and 6, and nearly lost Round 7 as well. The period saw “Saint George” backed up onto the ropes, put a lot of his energy into defensive tactics, and most of his punching limited to snapping the jab. Watching the ebb and flow of the fight, I wonder if Groves didn’t realize he was facing a very different customer than before, if even on a sub-conscious level.
Groves was flying pretty high on a disputed loss after his first go at Froch, and that proved an even shakier foundation than many expected. Consequently, he has fallen far and hard, so the blow to his confidence might prove weightier than the blow to his noggin. For now its all just educated speculation, but clearly boxing observers will be watching Groves’s comeback with great interest.
