Candy Lee

Man the hits just keep on coming. Two fights like Vasquez/Marquez and Pacquiao/Marquez in the space of two weeks, and now the demise of the Andy Lee juggernaut on Friday Night Fights. I have to say, I get almost more excited by these kinds of bouts than I do the big PPV affairs, these bouts where a young highly-touted prospect gets exposed by some hard-head who doesn't seem to have gotten his copy of the script. If you didn't watch FNF last night, then you missed a corker - Manny Steward's prized charge, the big-punching Irish southpaw Andy Lee, getting stopped by Contender vet Brian Vera in the seventh-round of an all-out slugfest. Lee knocked Vera down in the first round, but even then he didn't seem to me to be in control of the fight, although credit must be given on that score to Vera's chin, because he took a load of clean straight lefts right down the pike and ate them like a man's man. And the chins really proved the difference in the fight, because what emerged early on as a pattern of exchange was Vera taking Lee's left to counter with big roundhouse rights, and in those exchanges it was Vera's and not Lee's punches that took a heavy toll. As early as the fourth I started to feel the upset on the way, as it became more and more clear that the Irish prospect's vaunted power simply wasn't enough to stop the hard-charging Vera from getting inside and roughing him up. On that count, Lee proved virtually incompetent, unable to clinch effectively and clueless as to how to handle himself in close quarters. In the fifth, his legs started to go, and then the fight became an all-out war, Lee's left, Vera's right, lather rinse repeat, and suddenly what was supposed to be a walkover was shaping up as an FOY candidate. With sheer determination, Vera seized the upper hand in the fifth and took it with him into the sixth, when he wobbled Lee with one of his big wide rights and the chase was on. Bleeding badly from an eye-cut and staggering backwards around the ring, Lee was just target practice for Vera in the seventh, and that's when the ref put an end to it, a bit prematurely no doubt (on the punch from Vera that sealed the stoppage Lee was firing back a left-hand counter just as the ref stepped in), but I had some sympathy for the referee in that situation, because for the entire minute beforehand Vera had landed one haymaker after another, almost all of them unanswered. The ref probably was at that point where he was thinking, "all right, one more of those and I'm stepping in," and then that one more comes and that's the one that Lee fires back on. It didn't look good, but hey, if Manny Steward wasn't complaining, you know it wasn't that bad, because if the stoppage really had been unjust Manny would have been going nuts. What a tough night for Steward. He's been talking this kid up so relentlessly this year, talking about him fighting Winky before the year was out, talking about how he could beat Kelly Pavlik right now. Those are some awfully big words to have to eat, and yet you have to feel like he deserves to eat them with relish after having the audacity to flap his gums so hard about a kid so woefully inexperienced and unskilled as Lee proved himself to be last night. Manny has never been one to shy away from talking very big about his fighters, but in this case, it seems like he should have known better. Of course, all credit goes to Brian Vera, the only person in the building last night who hadn't read too many of Andy Lee's press clippings. And besides Manny and Lee himself, there were two other big losers of note - Irish boxing, having to suffer yet another highly touted native fighter getting exposed on a very big American stage (following John Duddy's disaster against Walid Smichet on the Klitschko/Ibragimov undercard) and Bob Arum, who recently signed Lee to a big promotional deal. Right now, it seems like he bought himself a lemon.