Boxing: Of Crafty Southpaws and Identical Twins

The term “crafty southpaw” has been a part of the baseball lexicon since the first left-handed pitcher served up a slow-moving, well-placed breaking ball that had the poor schnook in the batter’s box flailing like someone trying to catch butterflies while wearing boxing gloves. Prime examples of the genre: Randy Jones, who won a Cy Young Award for the San Diego Padres in 1976 while striking out just 93 hitters in 315.1 innings, and Jamie Moyer, who pitched in the major leagues until he was 49, with stints with eight teams spread over 25 seasons. Moyer’s repertoire consisted of more junk than could be found in Fred Sanford’s back yard.

With 13 knockouts among his 22 victories, it would be at least somewhat inaccurate to describe Cuban expatriate Erislandy Lara as the pugilistic equivalent of a Jones or a Moyer. When the opportunity presents itself, he can sting an opponent, although he has never had, nor will he ever have, the kind of one-punch power that Saul “Canelo” Alvarez recently demonstrated in sending Amir Khan to lullaby land.

The 33-year-old Lara (22-2-2, 13 KOs) ostensibly is in the main event of a Showtime-televised championship tripleheader this Saturday, as he will defend his WBA and IBO super welterweight titles in an intriguing rematch with Vanes Marirosyan (36-2-1, 21 KOs) at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. However, it is possible -- and probably likely -- that whatever he does will be overshadowed by the two co-featured bouts that precede his turn in the ring.

Leading off the show will be the Jermell Charlo (27-0, 12 KOs)-John Jackson (20-2, 15 KOs) matchup for the vacant WBC super welterweight championship. Jermell will be attempting to join his identical twin brother, Jermall Charlo, as a world titlist. If he succeeds, it will make the middle bout of the tripleheader even more compelling. In that one, Jermall (23-0, 18 KOs) defends his junior middleweight belt against former WBA super welterweight champ Austin Trout (30-2, 17 KOs), who also can be reasonably described as a crafty southpaw.

Should both of the handsome and charismatic Charlos win two days after their 26th birthday, they would become the first twins to have won world title bouts in the same weight class on the same night. The historical aspects of the Charlos’ Ripley’s Believe It Or Not careers may well have increased interest in their fights to such an extent that Lara, by consensus the best 154-pound practitioner of the pugilistic arts, will be relegated to a secondary role, even though his bout will close the show.

During a 48-minute teleconference with the media on Thursday, all five of the other fighters in the three featured bouts got a chance to respond to questions. Lara, who was to have been on last, a position befitting his station, was disconnected just moments after he joined the call. He never got the opportunity to offer his thoughts about again mixing it up with Martiroysan. Their first meeting resulted in a technical draw back on Nov. 10, 2012, when the Armenian veteran sustained a bad cut in the ninth round from an unintentional head butt.

Talk about bad karma. Then again, perhaps Lara is used to being overlooked and underappreciated, even though his back story is every bit as interesting as that of the Charlos. The twins, however, have the benefit of not being crafty southpaws, a condition that means Lara is continually fighting something of an uphill battle for acceptance. Simply put, crafty southpaws are not sexy. In baseball, the guys with the 98-mile-per-hour fastballs carry that label; in boxing, it’s the big boppers who mesmerize audiences with pulverizing punching power.

Lara is in several ways a virtual twin of another highly skilled Cuban lefty, Guillermo Rigondeaux, his friend and former teammate on the Cuban national team. Favorites to win gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Lara and Rigondeaux -- he had taken gold at both the 2000 and 2004 Olympics -- defected during the 2007 Pan American Games. A few weeks later, they were caught by Brazilian authorities and returned to Cuba, where they were indefinitely banned from boxing. Their focus thus shifted from the ring to a bid for the kind of freedom they could never find in their communist homeland.

If first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Lara attempted another defection in 2008, this time by speedboat; he made it to Mexico, going on to Hamburg, Germany, where he joined former Cuban Olympic champions Odlanier Solis, Yuriorkis Gamboa and Yan Barthelemy before resettling in Houston. Rigondeaux made his break in 2009, eventually finding his way to Miami, where he began his professional career.

Yet the book on the crafty Cuban southpaws, which is still adding chapters, has not been without its darker moments since Lara and Rigondeaux made their respective arrivals in the United States. Despite his superb technical skills, Rigondeaux, 35, was disinclined to make adjustments to the amateur style which he had mastered as few ever do, preferring to use his mobility and ring generalship to flummox opponents instead of trying to blast them out in a more fan-friendly manner. Even after handily outboxing Nonito Donaire, the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2012 “Fighter of the Year,” on April 13, 2013, Rigondeaux (16-0, 10 KOs) was criticized for being “boring,” an assessment that came not only from outsiders but by his then-promoter, Bob Arum.

“I fight my own way, my own style. I do what I need to do to win,” Rigondeaux said a couple of days before he made Joseph Agbeko, another challenger to his WBA and WBO super bantamweight championships, look foolish and inept in registering a one-sided unanimous decision on Dec. 7, 2013. After “El Chacal” schooled Donaire, a more marketable member of the Top Rank stable, Arum did not bother concealing his distaste for Rigondeaux’s defense-savvy approach, saying, “every time I mention him [to HBO Sports executives], they throw up.”

Although there are always variations, the stock-in-trade of crafty southpaws is not so much to look good themselves but to make the other fellow look bad. Two-time former heavyweight champion Chris Byrd, himself a card-carrying member of the club, called it “being clowned.”

“I pride myself on making guys miss and kind of making them look foolish, especially heavyweights because they’re so slow,” Byrd said in 2002. “It’s a God-given ability to see punches coming and take them off the shoulder. Nobody wants to get clowned. They’d rather get knocked out than get embarrassed and frustrated.”

Supremely confident in his abilities, Lara has never ducked anyone. He went crafty southpaw-versus-crafty southpaw when he squared off against Trout on Dec. 7, 2013 and came away with a unanimous decision victory. Against the power-punching Alvarez on July 12, 2014, he not only made it to the final bell but did well enough in dropping a close split decision that Lara’s trainer, Ronnie Shields, believes his guy was wronged by judges predisposed to favor the Mexican superstar.

“I had it eight rounds to four for Lara,” Shields said. “It was pretty obvious ‘Canelo’ couldn’t hit him.”

Lara now calls himself “The American Dream,” which is what former WBA super welterweight champion David Reid went by. However, Reid was the only U.S. gold medalist at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; Lara’s more tenuous claim to the sobriquet is rooted in his thankfulness that he was finally able to ply his trade in his adopted country. It is a good-paying way to make a living, no doubt, but probably would be even more so if he ever decided to what his old buddy Rigondeaux will not as a matter of principle: stand and trade to appease crowds that are not always appreciative of master-level craftiness.

Should he take care of business against Martirosyan -- hardly a cinch outcome -- Lara wants to fully unify the 154-pound championship, which might mean future dates with either or both of the Charlos, a potentially interesting development as Jermall is also trained by Shields. Yet Lara is aware that his particular skill set is such that no prospective opponent wants to run the risk of coming off as Emmett Kelly or Bozo.

“I believe the division is one of the strongest in all of boxing,” Lara said. “I’m leading the pack and my goal is to unify all the belts. I’m going to take it one step at a time with the mindset to clean out the division.”

If the other 154-pound titlists choose to steer clear of him, Lara has a Plan B. He said he is available to move up to middleweight for a second crack at Alvarez or a shot at unified champ Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, who is widely recognized as the most fearsome puncher in boxing, pound-for-pound. Even the greatest home run hitters of their eras frequently came up empty swinging for the fences against the likes of Jones and Moyer. It is both the curse and the blessing of crafty left-handers, whose gift is killing them softly.

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.