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Raymond Ford didn’t know how essential his dramatic stoppage of Otabek Kholmatov had become.
The 24 year old recently transformed his career with the victory over the Uzbek, with seven seconds to go of the 12th and final round, to win the WBA featherweight title.
He had been on course for defeat. Ford was sufficiently behind on two of the three judges’ scorecards that only stopping Kholmatov was enough to rescue him, but for all of the admiration for the nature of his victory, the finish wasn’t something he had planned.
“I didn’t know I was behind, but my corner didn’t say I was behind either,” he told ProBox TV. “They were saying it was a close fight, and they wanted me to pick it up because we were fighting on a Top Rank card against their fighter as well as being the ‘B-side’ fighter.
“They wanted me to pick it up a little bit more and dominate a little bit more.
“It was crazy – just crazy. The fight and the whole build-up were just crazy. You just saw the raw emotion after I got the job done. It was a very surreal moment for me.
“We were both trying to figure each other out and get our range down, and we were both trying to box a little bit in the third round, but he started to land a few more solid shots on me. I feel that he caught me with his best shots in the third round, and I took them, but I knew I had to change things up at the end of the third and give him a different look.
“He was expecting me to be just a boxer, but I decided to change it up and see how he liked being pushed back because we had never seen him pushed back before when we had studied [him] on video and tape.
“If I took the fight to him, I knew I had a better inside game than him. He is kind of strong, but a lot of the shots he throws are wide. I had a good defence, and I was able to catch and shoot, and I was fast enough to get my own shots off.
“I started to see a change in his attitude and body language [during the second half of the fight] when I began pushing him back. I was touching his body and he really didn’t like it. He started to use his legs a lot more.
“He started to box more than we had expected compared to what we had seen of him on film. Once I saw the change in him, I knew I was doing the right thing. I just had to stick to it.
“I knew I was going to get to him eventually. I was breaking him down, and my corner told me this is what happens, so I should stick to what I was doing.
“I knew I was going to catch up with him, and I knew he was going to get tired and break down. I still had to be very careful, as he was still throwing a lot of punches, but his shots did not have any snap by the end and were missing me.”
Ford dropped Kholmatov, 25, in the 12th round, but the referee Charlie Fitch didn’t rule it a knockdown, and Kholmatov therefore didn’t have a chance to recover before ultimately being stopped.
“I have thought about that a lot after the fight,” said Ford, from Camden, New Jersey. “The referee did me a favour. It just goes to show there was a little bit of favouritism going on towards him, though, especially when the knockdown came.
“I felt it was a real knockdown, but it backfired on them. However, everything happens for a reason. It was meant to happen like that, so I had to go in there and take the fight.
“I have been getting a lot of those comments lately, people saying it was something out of a Rocky movie.
“In the moment, it was just one of those situations where I did not know how much time I had left in the fight. The crowd was going so crazy that I could not even hear the 10-second clapper.”
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