jamesmcdonnell wrote:[
Yes, Toney is a worry. His speech pattern sounds disturbingly like a man with serious damage in the pipeline, his voice is all gurgly and slurred.
Toney got tagged an awful lot against Peter last time out, a lot more than expected, and that's not good at his advanced age, with a very long career, and more importantly, thousands and thousands of rounds of sparring. Toney hasn't really been hit that much in his career, but it's well known now that sparring contributes just as much if not more to the cumulative effects on the brain induced by boxing. Toney's been having wars in the gym for nearly 20 years, and these days, as he does very little fitness training, he gets most of his training in the sparring sessions.
I've a nasty feeling we're going to see James get splattered by Peter this time around. If not Peter, then someone at heavyweight is going to give him a real kicking soon. Toney doesn't have the power at heavyweight to keep these guys off him for the whole fight, and someone like Peter will just keep on coming for the full 12 rounds trying to take your head off.
I was watching the brilliant HBO series on DVD this weekend, Legendary Nights - two of the fights were Bowe/Golota and Chavez/Taylor.
It was a real shock to hear Bowe and Taylor talking to camera these days ( and even 5-10 years ago ) just a low mumble and you can't understand a word they're saying - like a mouth full of marbles.
Bowe took a terrible beating against nutcase Golota twice, and Taylor took a horrible beating against Chavez, even though he was up on the cards - seemed those fights did some untold damage.
And both are still fighting...ten years later. They showed some horror show footage of a fat, slow Meldrick Taylor still stumbling around the ring in some god forsaken state somewhere. And this was one of the best and brightest stars boxing had ever seen.
But any boxers sees this sort of thing, they think it'll never happen to me, which is true of most people I guess, whatever the danger.
