Boxing: Jesse Hart’s Close Call

Teddy Atlas, the noted trainer and TV color commentator, has referred to the boxing ring as “a chamber of truth,” where any number of difficult questions are asked and answered in the most unforgiving sport’s crucible of competition.

Questions were indeed asked during the 10-round super middleweight bout between rising contender Jesse Hart and journeyman Dashon Johnson on Friday, but the truthfulness of the answers remains a matter of interpretation. Had Hart -- the Philadelphia native who scored a unanimous decision before a packed, supportive hometown crowd of 1,322 at the 2300 Arena -- displayed the grit and mettle of a future world champion despite being knocked down once and possibly twice? Or had he been exposed as a still-inexperienced neophyte by a second-tier opponent who had come in having lost 16 of his previous 24 bouts?

More to the point: Will -- or should -- Hart (20-0, 16 KOs) now move on to a WBO title fight against the winner of the April 9 battle between champion Arthur Abraham (44-4, 29 KOs) and Gilberto Ramirez (33-0, 24 KOs)? Or would the son of 1970s middleweight contender Eugene “Cyclone” Hart be better served by waiting another year, maybe longer, while he gains additional seasoning? Even before his son stepped inside the ropes against Johnson, the elder Hart had suggested that maybe the wiser course of action would be for the 26-year-old to put off any bid for a world title until he logged another “six or seven” fights against a variety of fighters who would help him fill in whatever blank spaces in his repertoire that needed to be filled.

J Russell Peltz, the longtime Philly promoter who co-promotes Hart with Top Rank saw the experience against Johnson as beneficial.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to this kid,” Peltz said. “Now he knows what a real fight is. He hasn’t been in a real fight until now. He needs more fights [before bidding for a world title]. I don’t know if it’s six or seven, but he needs more fights.”

Hart, who was knocked down hard just before or just after the bell ending the sixth round and again with 15 seconds remaining in the 10th, said the main thing anyone should take away from what had happened is that he had demonstrated the kind of gumption that true champions must have and always exhibit when put to the test. Hart confirmed he still intended to fight the Abraham-Ramirez winner at the earliest possible date.

“Yes. Yes. I still do,” he said. “Look, that kid was a tough journeyman. I got knocked down, but I got back up like a true champion. C’mon, man. Everybody wanted to know how I would handle adversity. I showed ’em. Now nobody can say, ‘He can’t handle adversity. He been fighting easy guys. He never been through a tough fight.’ Look, that guy is a veteran, a road warrior. Everybody fought him. Who didn’t he fight? But I beat him every round. I got hit after the bell [in the sixth round], but I kept rumbling; and when I got careless and was knocked down in the last round, I got back up, faced adversity, took my eight-count on one knee like a veteran. I didn’t just jump back up. That’s what veterans do.”

Hart, however, did allow that he would listen to his closest advisers on the matter of proceeding directly to a title fight against the Abraham-Ramirez winner.

“I’ll go along with whatever my team -- my dad, [cornerman] Fred Jenkins [and] my management team [of co-managers Doc Nowicki and Dave Price] -- says after everybody goes back and assesses this fight,” he said, “but the fact of the matter is, when I get in there [in a title fight], I’m gonna be ready. Fights like this make you ready for title fights.”

It remains uncertain what the pro-Hart audience expected beforehand or what it made of the way things played out. Some of the 1,300 or so spectators might have come to cheer another blowout victory for Hart, who turned down a slot on the Terence Crawford-Hank Lundy undercard on Feb. 27 in New York to headline his own show in the city of his birth. Others no doubt were exhilarated to have witnessed an old-fashioned war, the kind Philly has been lacking since the Blue Horizon was shuttered in June 2010.

“That was a Blue Horizon special,” Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission Executive Director Greg Sirb said. “If that fight had been scheduled for 12 rounds, it might have had a different outcome.”

Hart was right; he did win a majority of the rounds, utilizing his height -- he stands 6-foot-2 to Johnson’s 5-foot-9 -- and reach advantages to control the pace while scoring with fast-handed combinations. However, the prohibitive favorite seemed to tire toward the end, and Johnson, sensing an opportunity to register the biggest upset of his career, began loading up and scoring with stinging shots designed to toss cold water on Hart’s homecoming. The official scorecards submitted by David Braslow (98-91), Julie Lederman (97-92) and Lindsey Page (95-94) all favored Hart, who retained his NABO and USBA 168-pound belts.

Johnson (19-19-4, 6 KOs) understood that he had been brought in as a sacrificial lamb, hardly a new development for someone who often is obliged to enter the lion’s den and claims to be self-trained and self-managed. However, the Escondido, California, resident was emboldened when he landed a huge right hand that sent Hart flying backward onto the seat of his trunks a split second after the bell ending the sixth round. Referee Ernie Sharif did not rule it a knockdown.

“It was right before the bell,” Johnson said. “Absolutely. You can see it on the replay. I know it was a legitimate knockdown. [Hart] knows it. It [not being registered as one] was a hometown thing, but I sent a message.”

The message was this: Despite his relatively low knockout percentage, Johnson was going to swing for the fences like a home-run hitter in baseball who knows that, in the late innings and trailing the home team, only a long ball will do. He did go deep, just too late in the final frame to make it stick.

“When we first got the call for this fight, I asked for 12 [rounds],” Johnson said. “I knew it was going to be a grind up to then. I came to his backyard, and I knew I had to knock him out, had to do something spectacular. I knocked him down twice, I don’t care what anybody else says; and in the last round, after he got up and I was trying to continue, the ref pushed me back twice, but that’s all right. I showed I’m not a journeyman. I’m not here to play, and I’m not running. Anyone I fight from here on knows they’re going to have to go through hell to beat me.”

It probably would be of scant satisfaction to Johnson, but if Hart and his handlers do opt for a quick title shot at the Abraham-Ramirez winner and seize the championship, it might be reasoned that the hard lessons Hart learned against the guy to whom nobody gave a chance prepared him better than another by-the-numbers rout ever could.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.