One such criterion for Fight of the Year is surprise, because the year’s best fight should be an event we do not expect. Whether it is an upset like Carlos Monzon emerging from Argentina to wrench the middleweight crown from Nino Benvenuti, or Sugar Ray Leonard coming back to knockout Thomas Hearns late in their first fight, it is something the fight needs to make it stand out. This importance of surprise makes engineering a Fight of the Year difficult. The 2012 brawl between Brandon Rios and Mike Alvarado was pushed as a Fight of the Year candidate, but it lost some of its claim because it was so predictable.
In a Fight of the Year, the performance of the fighters should be nearly equal, as in the back and forth trilogy between Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera. If one fighter dominates the contest then the attraction immediately decreases.
The final and most crucial ingredient of all is violence. This can be stretched over twelve horrific rounds, as it was when Timothy Bradley faced Ruslan Provodnikov last year, or squeezed into three rounds of breathtaking punishment like Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns. Alone these attributes create interesting fights, but they cannot get the title of Fight of the Year. When these attributes are all present however, we get boxing at its best.
According to the Fight of the Year criteria above, Guerrero-Kamegai does not quite live up to the hype. It was heavily seasoned with violence, but neither fighter had the power to keep it unpredictable, and their impressive volume of punches is not enough to replace the dramatic risk of a knockout. The action was consistent, but you knew who was winning the whole time. The fight between Vasyl Lomachenko and Gary Russell, Jr. that preceded Guerrero-Kamegai, for example, was far more interesting despite drawing less attention.
So far this year, my pick for Fight of the Year is Lucas Matthysse-John Molina, Jr. This fight was supposed to showcase Lucas Matthysse's power against an opponent that is not hard to hit. And eventually this is what the fight became. But John Molina never read the script. Instead he sent "La Maquina" to the canvas twice, something no opponent had done before. This was not the end though, and the rounds that followed were nothing less than absolute carnage. Matthysse and Molina wore each others' blood and sweat, each man relentlessly hammered away at a person that could have been his reflection. Both had chins of granite, both had dynamite in their gloves; but the quality that tied Matthysse and Molina together was their heart. Ultimately the better fighter won, with Matthysse stopping Molina in the 11th round, but in these types of fights there is no loser. These fights are what keep us addicted to the sport; they are what makes this sport different from the rest, because what Lucas Matthysse and John Molina gave us that night cannot be replicated on a court, or pitch, or diamond, or anywhere but a ring.