In his latest column for Boxing Social, boxing’s master of all trades Russ Anber expresses his disgust with last week’s Seniesa Estrada-Miranda Adkins mismatch.
I love boxing. It’s been my life for more than four decades now. I live it, I breathe it every single day of my life.
And because I love boxing so much I have to tell it straight when it gets things badly wrong and, boy, did boxing get things wrong on last weekend’s DAZN show when Seniesa Estrada knocked out Miranda Adkins in just seven seconds.
That fight has been eating away at me ever since I saw it at the weekend. To be honest, I don’t even possess vocabulary adequate enough or strong enough to describe the rage and disgust I feel about that fight.
I say fight. It wasn’t a fight. It was a slaughter, an assault, a travesty.
Seven seconds for goodness sake! I mean you could post the whole thing on Instagram and still have 53 seconds of free time left.
Estrada is an accomplished world champion. She went into the fight 17-0 with 7 KOs. In her previous fight she had beaten Marlen Esperza, an Olympian.
As for Adkins, she was a 42-year-old mother who had assembled a misleading 5-0 record fighting mainly debutants who were probably “soccer moms” who’d never put on a pair of gloves before.
I can’t begin to describe the disgust I felt watching it. It was wrong on so many levels. It was like watching a tame house pet put up against a pit-bull.
To tell you the truth, although some people have criticised what happened, I’m surprised there hasn’t been much more media attention, scrutiny and condemnation.
Photo: Hogan Photos/Golden Boy Promotions.
If someone tests positive for drugs the media are all over it, so why weren’t they all over this to the same extent? To me, allowing this gross mismatch to go ahead was as bad an offence as doping or glove tampering. I found it despicable.
It was clear from the opening bell that Estrada knew Adkins wasn’t in her league. I mean she ran across the ring towards her, which I bet wasn’t the way she started her last fight.
There’s a certain level of tolerance within boxing surrounding matchmaking. Yes, sometimes we go into a fight knowing what’s happening and who is going to win. We accept that one guy isn’t good enough to be in there with the other. We know the score.
But this went so far outside of those parameters of acceptance that we normally have. And let’s be honest those parameters are pretty wide! Yes, she was a last minute replacement, but that’s no excuse. It left me feeling sick. Adkins had no clue what was going on or what to do.
I know that Andy Foster of the California State Athletic Commission has come out and said he regrets sanctioning the fight. Well, okay, but it’s a little late in the day now, isn’t it?
So, yes, we could blame the CSAC. And yes, I know we could blame the matchmaker at Golden Boy.
But what the commission did and what Golden Boy did doesn’t bother me nearly so much as what the people who surround and manage Adkins did, including her husband who is apparently a combat sports promoter out in the Midwest .
A fighter needs to trust those around them, those who train them and those who manage them. They have to trust that they are people who are there for them to make sure they get paid but also to make sure they get protected.
And the people around Adkins failed in that most basic of duties. They betrayed her to a degree that isn’t even imaginable. That’s what really disgusts me above everything else.
I’m not going to pretend this is the first time something like this has happened in boxing. Or a one-off. It isn’t.
But every time a fighter who isn’t capable is put in a fight like that, and a position like that, it disgusts me.
I’d like to think it won’t happen again, but we all know it probably will.
Russ Anber was speaking to Luke G. Williams.
Main image: Seniesa Estrada. Hogan Photos/Golden Boy Promotions.