Cotto Vs. Foreman: The Towel Fiasco, Arthur Mercante Jr., And a Throwback to the Yankee Stadium of Old

In the first fight at the new Yankee Stadium, Miguel Cotto applied effective pressure and used his superior strength and power to wear down Yuri Foreman, eventually earning a ninth round TKO victory and a title belt in his third weight division. However, in an extremely odd sequence of events, a towel was thrown into the ring during the eighth round of the contest but the fight was not stopped. Apparently for referee Arthur Mercante Jr., the phrase "throwing in the towel" doesn't equate to surrender or acknowledgment of defeat, but instead means "I get to do whatever I want!"

Yuri Foreman entered the ring for the bout wearing a knee brace, something you rarely see in the world of boxing and a sure sign that he was nursing an injury. This became more apparent as the fight went on and his typically rapid movement was notably less effective than normal. By the seventh round of the fight his legs buckled and Foreman was reduced to basically limping around the ring.

He was already increasingly getting battered by thudding Cotto hooks, but was now a sitting target. This is when the powers that be in boxing - the cornermen, the referee and the ringside doctors - are all supposed to use their better judgment and prevent a fighter from suffering an unnecessary beating.

Apparently giving their charge one last round to go out and get something done, Foreman's cornermen did just that. In the eighth round, with Foreman's movement reduced to a crawl and his face and body taking shot after shot, a towel flew into the ring from Foreman's corner. Phew, finally, this could have been stopped a round ago!

Except it wasn't over. Mercante tells Foreman, "I don't want to see you go out like that," and after several minutes with both fighters believing they were done competing, even hugging each other in congratulations and acknowledgement, he then starts up the round right where it left off. Mercante later explained that it was an entertaining fight and he basically wanted to see more. Excuse me, but since when does your perceived entertainment value overrule the wishes of a corner to stop a fight?

If a referee sees a towel come into the ring but does not know where it came from, he's taught to not immediately stop the bout on reflex alone. After all, perhaps it wasn't the corner that threw in the towel. Indeed, after the bout Mercante alluded to not knowing where the towel came from initially.

That's all fine and good, but it's not what happened. Before the towel flew into the ring Mercante can be seen waving off Foreman's corner. It's as if they were thinking about throwing in the towel and Mercante was trying to prevent it before it could happen. Shortly thereafter, the towel does fly into the ring, right from the area of Foreman's corner, making it excruciatingly clear that Mercante should have, and perhaps did, know exactly what was transpiring.

The eighth round ends, and Foreman goes back to his corner, limping. Mercante comes to the corner and asks, who threw the towel? The head cornerman nods and says "I did"... but the fight still continues.

The ninth round begins, Foreman couldn't get out of the way of a wiffle ball let alone a Miguel Cotto punch, and he's sent down to the canvas with a well placed left hook to the body. Mercante immediately jumps in and waves off the contest, not even offering Foreman a count.

So Mercante "didn't want to see" Foreman go out in the eighth round, when the men he pays to guard his career threw in the towel, and instead wanted to see him go down in the ninth after suffering more punishment, without even having a chance to beat the count and continue. Was this a better way to go out? Is this what you wanted to see, Arthur Mercante?

Also notably odd in this entire fiasco from the Cotto vs. Foreman fight was that the HBO crew seemed entirely oblivious to the proceedings, going as far as to praise Mercante for his actions. Even watching from a television and not from the ringside apron, the entire sequence of events seemed all too clear. How did everyone miss what happened?

Was the first fight at the new Yankee Stadium a throwback to some of the fights from the Yankee Stadium of old? You know... the kind where nefarious, unnamed individuals provide large sums of money to sway the results of a boxing contest? It certainly was common in the 1930s or 1940s to find that some money was paid to ensure that a boxer took a dive, or that a judge ruled in favor of one man or another, or that a referee used his influence to alter the outcome.

It's more than a bit odd that Mercante essentially wrote his own rules to see the fight not stopped in the eighth, but then jumped in immediately once the ninth round started. What changed, besides the starting of the next round? I'm not saying that anybody was paid off, but the circumstances of the entire affair and Mercante's actions are that mysterious.