For six rounds Saturday, it looked like middleweight Felix Sturm hadn’t heard of a punch outside the jab. By my estimate, in his bout with Ron Hearns, he once went almost six minutes throwing nothing but jabs. And hey, it wins fights for him. But it’s annoying. It bores anyone who doesn’t live in Germany. Germany has an unfathomable appreciation for jab-a-thons.
And then outta nowhere, in the 7th, Sturm landed a doozy of a right hand that put Hearns to sleep. So, OK. That’s a good way to end a fight. But it doesn’t make up for a couple things:
1. Sturm has talked a big game about fighting the big names, and while his career resume isn’t as bad as some make it out to be, he’s not faced a world-class fighter since 2004 despite being at or near the top of the division for years. He’s fought some top 10 and even top 5 contenders, and while the paucity of world-class fighters at 160 has something to do with that, and while his contract with Universum also had something to do with that, he’s now free of the contract and he’s fighting… Ron Hearns. Hearns, who didn’t really show the requisite urgency in the biggest fight of his life save for a couple moments in a couple rounds, and just isn’t that good.
2. Sturm is 99.9 percent boring. Lord is he boring, save for the ending to the Hearns fight and maybe one or two other bouts in his career. Dang, man, I don’t even know if I want him to face a world-class fighter. It would probably involve HBO shelling out cash for what would ultimately be a boring boring boring boring boring fight. There are better things for HBO to spend money on, really.
Thanks, ESPN3, for giving us the option to watch this fight. But from now on, as far as I’m concerned, Germany can have him.
