Gored By A Sagging Bull

Mando Ramos, a star-crossed fighter whose luck over the past few years has been consistently bad, had mixed fortune last Friday night in Los Angeles. He won one version of the lightweight championship of the world—and then got roundly booed by viewers who had been seduced by his opponent's pitty-pat punches.

Ramos walloped Pedro Carrasco of Spain for most of the 15 rounds, yet was given only a split decision when one nearsighted judge scored the fight eight rounds to five for Carrasco, a spidery fighter with a feather punch and unlimited courage. Carrasco kept his left hand in Ramos' face most of the night, but with no more authority than if he had been using a powder puff to prepare Ramos for a TV appearance.

Mando, on the other hand, scored often with long and jarring left jabs and shook Carrasco in several rounds with smart right-hand crosses that slowed the Spaniard but never discouraged him. At the end of the fight Carrasco had a puffy, discolored left eye; Ramos' tender eyes, recently relieved of scar tissue by plastic surgery, were swollen but he never once took a punch that remotely disturbed him.

Unfortunately, Ramos is a natural welterweight. For several days before the Carrasco bout he was struggling to get down to the 135-pound weight limit, and finally he had to take off two pounds on the morning of the fight, a process that left him weak and too tired to eat. Had he been at full strength, there is little doubt that he would have knocked Carrasco out, as he nearly did in Madrid last November.

"My problem is water," he said. "I got to drink lots of water, always. If I don't drink all that water, I can make the weight. I know I had Carrasco in trouble over and over again, but I didn't have the zip to take him out."

Early in the fight Ramos fired a series of left hooks to the belly to bring Carrasco's guard down, then shifted to the head and puffed Carrasco's right ear with the same left hooks. Later on he banged Carrasco with a short, smarting right cross to the head and once, in the 13th round, when Carrasco was beginning to flag, he hit the Spaniard with three fine right hands and a flailing left hook, any one of which might have meant the end had Mando this night been a stronger man. But Carrasco is an amateur bullfighter in Spain and he fought Ramos with all the bravery his avocation implies, despite his modest armament.

After the fight Carrasco emerged from the shower, his midriff still pink from the early body punches, his eye swollen. "The public knows who won the fight," he said in Spanish, "but I would not mind fighting Ramos again. I think I am the better fighter. I won on a bad decision in Madrid. He won a bad one here. Now we fight somewhere else to see who is the better of us."

No doubt the two will fight again, because this was a lovely, ferocious battle between a bull and a matador, and if the bull won this time there is always the chance that in the next outing the matador's skill will prevail.

Carrasco is wonderfully able, a picture fighter in the model of the best of the Europeans, reminiscent of Nino Benvenuti at the top of his clever game. There surely will be only one rematch, however, since Ramos has come along so fast, in size and attitude. If he maintains his new straight-arrow image and continues to train as seriously as he has lately, it is not inconceivable that he can also win the welter and middleweight championships in the years to come. In the years just past—young and irrepressible years for Ramos—he squandered his fine natural talent. He was one of those early maturers physically, and maybe too much was expected of him too soon. Friday, with the crowd booing him, it was obvious that at least he was growing up, a process that may have begun after the first fight in Madrid.

From all accounts, that was a fight. Ramos put Carrasco down either four, five or six times, depending upon who is telling the story, and he did most of that damage after being deprived of his best punch, a left hook to the liver.