Samuel Peter retains WBC title

Congratulations to fellow country man Ete, Samuel Peter who successfully defended his interim WBC heavyweight champion title. By this triumph Ete Peter is confirmed the substantive holder of the WBC title.

Although a difficult fight, Ete Peter emerged victorious; having been knocked down thrice in two rounds by MCcline his opponent.

NEW YORK — Opportunity knocked at Madison Square Garden for Jameel McCline last night. He declined to answer.

Despite dropping WBC interim heavyweight champion Samuel Peter once at the end of the second round and twice in a third round in which Peter tumbled around the ring like he was wearing roller skates, McCline found a way to lose a unanimous decision and his fourth shot at the heavyweight title by an almost impossibly wide margin.

Judge Billy Costello scored the fight 115-110. Judge Steve Weisfeld had it 115-111 and judge Julie Lederman scored the bout 113-112. No one, including McCline, disputed the scores. ESPN’s card had Peter winning as well, 115-111, with Peter sweeping the last nine rounds after twice pulling himself off the canvas in Round 3.

“I let him get away,” McCline said sadly after the decision was announced. “I could have finished him. I should have finished him but I didn’t.

“I thought I had it but he got away. That’s why he’s still the champion.”

That was one reason. The other was McCline’s odd refusal to move his hands after Peter rose with 1:47 to go in Round 3 after a right hand to the chin sent him toppling forward onto his hands and knees.

Peter was wobbling when he got up and McCline patiently measured him before sending him to the floor a second time behind three straight left jabs with right hands right behind them. That final combination jolted the champion and sent him flat on the seat of his powder blue trunks with 57 seconds still to go in what was probably the biggest round of Jameel McCline’s career.

But Peter (29-1, 22 KO) pulled himself back up again and despite still moving as if walking across a sheet of ice on a frozen sidewalk, McCline oddly began to retreat. Perhaps he was punched out.

Perhaps he thought he was being patient. Perhaps he had too often studied Peter’s similarly odd performance in losing to Wladimir Klitschko, when he dropped Klitschko three times and failed to win another minute of the fight, losing the decision and an elimination bout that would have made him the mandatory challenger for the WBO title, and ended up duplicating it.

Whatever McCline was doing, as things developed he was accomplishing one thing. He was blowing the biggest chance of his career.

“When I was knocked down I knew I had to stand up and defend my belt,” said Peter. “I’m a champion.”

The fact that he still is was as much courtesy of McCline’s odd refusal to throw his hands with anything resembling bad intentions for the rest of the fight as anything that Peter managed to do.

The more laconic that McCline became, the more the lumbering Peter grew bolder, using his jab and a harsh body attack that often strayed below boxing’s demilitarized zone and only a few of the sizzling right hands that had knocked out so many of his earlier opponents to control the rest of the fight.

As had happened to him so often in the past, the 6-foot-6, 266-pound McCline clearly began to tire under Peter’s relentless, though often ponderous, attack. His mouth began to hang agape and more and more often he would clinch and then stare over Peter’s shoulder into the eyes of his chief second, Poppa Ray Drayton, as if he was a man looking for some sort of suggestion about what to do next.

Whatever Drayton told him before they left the locker room was clearly right on target, starting at the very end of round 2 when McCline knocked Peter off-balance with his shoulder and then dropped him on his pants with a sweet, compact right hand to the chin.

Drayton had no answers after those knockdowns however, and certainly neither did McCline. Each round he threw his jab and the straight right hand behind it that had been so instrumental in his early success less often. That allowed Peter not only to clear his head and begin to take control of the real estate but also to no longer run the risk of again being strafed by those rights that had hurt him early. The few times McCline did land the right hand after that, it seemed to wobble Peter but no longer with the same kind of concussive intensity of those early moments.

After the decision was announced Peter claimed he had broken his left hand during training camp but hid the fact to the commission because he did not want to follow in the footsteps of the man he was originally supposed to be facing, WBC champion Oleg Maskaev.

Maskaev had pulled out of the fight because of herniated discs in his back.Though Peter’s promoter, Dino Duva, said he had not yet seen any medical reports confirming that injury they had agreed to accept the interim title and push on to keep the card (and Peter’s payday) intact.

After three rounds it didn’t appear that that was the wisest choice but then Jameel McCline mysteriously stopped fighting. When Sam Peter refused to follow suit, the fight, and McCline’s fate were sealed.

“You learn every day in life,” promoter Don King said. “Like a toddler, he learned one thing tonight. He learned to get up.”

Late in the final round McCline’s wife appeared to be a woman who had learned a lesson as well. She learned that her husband was in trouble.

“Please, Jameel!” she screamed at ringside as her husband repeatedly declined to move his hands in anger. As with most of what went on after Round 3, Jameel McCline did not reply.

SOURCE:ESPN

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