Boxing: Super Six Tournament Starts in Exciting, Controversial Style

The Super Six Boxing tournament, featuring arguably the six best fighters at boxing's best weight class, Super Middleweight, got off to an entertaining start on Saturday night.

The first fight featured the tournament favorite, Arthur Abraham, taking on former Middleweight champ Jermain Taylor in Abraham's adopted home country, Germany.

In his career, Abraham has been the beneficiary of a few controversial decisions in his hometown, including one that gave him a victory over Edison Miranda in which the Armenian-born Abraham suffered a broken jaw and was dominated through the middle portions of the fight.

Saturday's fight showed glimpses of similar controversial behavior. Abraham, who sports a high-hands, peek-a-boo style defense and rather high shorts, complained often whenever Taylor hit anywhere near the belt. It even resulted in Taylor losing a point for a shot that didn't appear to hit that low, if at all.

However, in the end, the point didn't make much of a difference. Taylor faded late in the fight, as is becoming his M.O., and Abraham was able to capitalize. While some of his flurries were wild and ineffective, Abraham pushed the pace at the end and landed a lightening quick right to Taylor's mouth, knocking the former champ out cold.

In truth, Taylor's eyes were closed before he even hit the ground. He had no idea where he was, or what had happened. It was perfect boxing by Abraham, using a left hook to split Taylor's gloves the slightest bitenough for the right hand to slip through and drill Taylor.

After two nights in a local Berlin hospital, Taylor was released and offered a clean bill of health after a severe concussion and will likely remain in the competition for his next fight against Andrew Ward, who has yet to fight in the tournament.

Abraham's next opponent will be the loser of a highly controversial fight between Carl Froch and Andre Dirrell. The American Dirrell travelled to England to take on Froch in front of his hometown fans.

The fight was ugly early with both fighters holding and doing their fair share of dirty boxing. However, Dirrell was able to slip most of Froch's punches and landed some of his own, frustrating the champ enough to have him throw the challenger down Judo-style.

However, it was Dirrell who was deducted a point for holding the back of the head. It came at a horrible time for Dirrell and seemed to be awarded after nothing occurred that was any different than anything either fighter had been doing earlier on.

The deduction seemed to wake up Dirrell who, in my view, handily won the last three rounds, pushing the pace and landing some serious shots to the cement-chinned Froch.

But when the scorecards came out, it was Dirrell who was on the losing end of a split decision, falling 115-112 on the two cards put in by European judges. How anybody was able to give Froch a two-round advantage in the fight is beyond me and the complaints about Dirrell's behavior during the fight seem so unfounded considering it was both fighters who were making the fight ugly and dirty.

Dirrell will get his chance to rebound from his first loss when he takes on Abraham in the United States in the next round of the round robin portion of the tournament. Froch will look to keep his momentum going when he takes on the man pushing Abraham for tournament favorite, Mikkel Kessler.

As the first weekend of fights draws to a close, the tournament seems to be fulfilling its intentions: create solid, even fights and get people talking about boxing again. Perhaps thats why they've instituted the location plan where each fighter will rotate fighting in his hometown. It certainly has gotten conversations going, if for nothing less than seemingly biased judging.

Here's hoping the great fights keep coming and conversations keep getting more regular.

For those who didn't watch the first round of fights, tune in November 21st when the first round finishes with American 2004 Olympic Gold medalist Andre Ward against Kessler.