The Boxing Audience Socks It to Nunn

They call boxing the sweet science, but it’s an inexact science at best.

Nobody criticized the Kansas City Royals for winning the final game of the World Series, 11-0, without much of a display of power.

Nobody criticizes the Chicago Bears for going 10-0, thanks largely to a tough defense.

Just win, baby.

But in boxing, middleweight Michael Nunn boosts his record to 10-0 and he hears boos.

It’s just not enough, baby.

Many boxing fans don’t pay to see wins and losses. They pay for blood. And there was none of that to be seen in Nunn’s last fight.

The North Hollywood middleweight heard the boos Wednesday night in Las Vegas while winning a unanimous decision over Jorge Amparo, a man who earned a 1984 draw with James Kinchen, then ranked No. 2 by the World Boxing Council. Seeing he wasn’t going to knock Amparo out, Nunn fought a defensive fight, using his superior boxing talent to stay out of the reach of the hard-punching Amparo. But he seemed to coast the last few rounds, playing it safe with his big lead.

Good strategy. Bad theater.

“It’s been very frustrating,” says Dan Goossen, Nunn’s manager. “When he was starting out, people were telling me he was fighting a bunch of bums. ‘When is he going to fight someone?’ they asked me. ‘He’s not fighting anybody.’

“Now that he is fighting people like Amparo, who is not a bum, people want to know why he ran. ‘If he is so good,’ they asked, ‘why didn’t he go toe to toe with Amparo and knock him out?’

“I thought he showed he is a beautiful technician who doesn’t get hit too often. You use different strategies for different fighters. When you meet a strong, capable fighter like Amparo who always puts on the pressure, to meet him toe to toe would be the wrong strategy.”

Nobody questioned Nunn’s strategy much in an amateur career that included 168 wins in 176 fights and a berth as an alternate on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. Nunn fought his first professional fight last December. He knocked out his first eight opponents, before decisioning Charles Campbell in September.

As the spotlight grows brighter with each fight, so does the pressure.

How good is Nunn?

Years ago, a fighter might fight 20, 30, even 40 times before he had to prove whether or not he was championship material. Current middleweight champ Marvin Hagler fought in obscurity for years before he got the opportunity to fight for a title belt. When he did, he was ready.

Now, with the insatiable demands of the cable networks to produce fighters for a national audience and with the rise of so-called yuppie boxing in supper clubs around the country, it’s different.

You want a championship fight, kid? Great, we’ve got a card to fill. How about a week from Tuesday?

Goossen has tried to shield Nunn from such pressures. He would be the first to admit that Nunn needs experience. There’s no need to rush to the top. The guy is only 22.

“He’s learning every fight,” Goossen says. “Wednesday’s fight was a great one for him to learn from. He got a year’s worth of gym work in one night. It’s better for him to have met a fighter like this when he is 9-0, rather than 20-0. When he’s 20-0, he’ll be better able to handle a fight like this.”

Goossen also has been criticized for pushing Nunn too fast. His Dec. 10 match against Billy Robertson at the Forum will be his 10th of 1985. It also will be his first scheduled 10-rounder, another test.

“People tell me I’m moving him too fast,” Goossen says. “But they forget that most of his fights, he had early knockouts. In several of them, a glove wasn’t laid on him.”

One man who seems convinced of Nunn’s potential is Akbar Muhammad, a vice president of Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc., one of the top promoting organizations in boxing. Muhammad says his group is negotiating to tie Nunn up to an exclusive two- to three-year contract. As the opposition keeps getting better, Top Rank would like to have him fight about six times a year, with several on the East Coast to give him some national exposure.

“We feel he can fight for the title in a year to a year and a half,” Muhammad says. “We would like to see him have 20 or 21 fights before he fights for the title.

“We think he’s on a very good schedule now. We don’t think he’s been fighting too much. He doesn’t live bad. The fights he has had have not produced a lot of wear and tear on his body. And his weight doesn’t balloon up and down.”

Still, there are questions.

Can he withstand a knockout punch from a quality fighter competing in his prime? Can he score on a knockout punch thrown at such a fighter?

Time is on Nunn’s side. He ought to go slow and keep it there. If he’s a champion, his time will come.