Disappearing Acts
By M. Abduh

He ducked so low under the punch, he was looking up at his opponent from ringside.

In the mid to late eighties, I was what one would call a pure fight fan and something of an amateur boxer. I had recorded and studied hundreds of fights on VHS tapes stacked all over my room. Many of them featured fighters from the 1984 U.S. Olympic Boxing team: Mark Breland, Evander Holyfield, Meldrick Taylor, Tyrell Biggs, and Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker. Pernell Whitaker, especially. I watched as he won a gold medal in the lightweight division, beating Luis Ortiz of Puerto Rico. (One of nine gold medals the team would bring home. Holyfield had to settle for a bronze medal, after being robbed by the referee).

As a pro, Whitaker would go on to win titles in four different divisions: lightweight, light welterweight, welterweight, and light middleweight and defended the undisputed lightweight crown more times than anyone in history, with six title defenses. A master boxer, his defense was aptly described as a “disappearing act.” Even in his loss to Oscar De La Hoya, I can remember Pernell dropping his guard as De La Hoya’s swung at the air around Sweet Pea’s head and shoulders. After missing widely and repeatedly in the second round, De La Hoya had to stop and smile. My father, who had seen all the Sugars—Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Seales, Sugar Ray Leonard—jumped up from his seat like he was at a Sunday morning revival and said, “Goddamn he’s sweet!”

“If you talked to real boxing heads [and asked], ‘Who would have beaten Floyd Mayweather?’ Well, if they were both in their primes, Pernell Whitaker.”

There will always be an argument about the pound for pound best fighters in history: the Ali’s, the Robinson’s, the Louis’s, the Mayweather’s; but the Whitaker’s must also be included in this debate. As boxing historian Max Kellerman said, Whitaker was “one of the three greatest pure boxers who ever lived,” and that “If you talked to real boxing heads [and asked], ‘Who would have beaten Floyd Mayweather?’ Well, if they were both in their primes, Pernell Whitaker.”

Whitaker was the perfect combination of speed, defense, bravado, ferocity, and heart. He was, as former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson said of him today, “a flawless fighter.”