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Shane Mosley Masquerading as an Ordinary Fighter, or is This All That’s Left?
As I sat watching David Estrada evidence exactly no fear of Shane Mosley from the safety of my barstool in Montreal, I asked the guy next to me, an esteemed news editor of a major boxing website, what he thought. The reply was not that Estrada was up there in the pound-for-pound rankings and Mosley was meeting the best welterweight since Oscar de la Hoya moved up. Far from it. In all fairness to David Estrada, he fought exactly the way he needed to in order to keep things close with the magnificently skilled Mosley. Except the magnificently skilled Mosley never showed up. That Shane Mosley, “Sugar” if you will, was the one who had bombed other hard-nosed welterweights like Antonio Diaz and Adrian Stone out when they tried to press the action. In fact, “Sugar” jumped up from lightweight to outclass one of the modern era’s best in any division, the exceptional Oscar de la Hoya.
So what happened? Was it just a bad night for Shane? Was Estrada that good or did going back to welterweight (well, almost both fighters weighed in at 148-pounds) sap the specialness out of Mosley? It’s anybody guess but the fact is that the Californian was unable to back up the prediction that he was returning to his former stomping grounds in order to dominate the welterweight division.
Shane did display flashes of his old glory at times, especially when he landed a few breath stealing left hooks that had Estrada looking for a place to hide. Hats off to the Chicagoan that he not only did not go down, but he was able to regroup and finish the fight strongly. But why exactly did Mosley let him survive? There was no concerted effort to continue the attack on Estrada’s liver or anything more than isolated and ineffective attempts at the stray shot here or there which were blocked as they weren’t part of an all out assault.
I’ve had a theory for a while now that Mosley has never quite psychologically recovered from his first loss to Vernon Forrest. The numbers tend to back it up as including that bout; Shane is 1-4-1 with only a highly debatable win over Oscar de la Hoya in their rematch to show for his efforts. True, Mosley’s experience includes a high level of competition and he was probably in over his head weight-wise when fighting light middleweights, but there seems to be something missing from “Sugar” since Forrest put that first loss on Mosley’s resume.
Shane is one of the good guys in the boxing world and does possess remarkable skills. Hopefully, this latest outing against Estrada is not the forecast of things to come but rather a misstep on the return of Shane Mosley to the rarified heights of pound-for-pound glory.
Richard Eberline can be reached at richardeberline@fastmail.fm
