Forrest looks to get it right the second time around The Glassjaw Chronicles by Thomas Gerbasi (Sept 10, 2008) Photo © German Villasenor Send this page to friend Give us your feedback It was one of those nights that could make a non-betting man lay down a sizeable wager, so sure of victory that he would think it almost criminal for Vegas to be allowing the fight to stay on the boards. There was simply no way Vernon Forrest, two division world champion and one of the best fighters of this era, was going to lose to the unbeaten but unproven ‘Contender’, Sergio Mora on June 7th of this year. Forrest was just as confident, and with good reason. He had come back from four surgeries and reinvented himself in 2007, winning a junior middleweight title against Carlos Baldomir and defending it with a stoppage of Michele Piccirillo. He was even looking so sharp that anyone resembling a big name avoided him like the plague. So Mora would have to do. He had a decent following based on his stint on the first season of ‘The Contender, reality series, and he seemed harmless enough for a keep busy bout. Then the bell rang at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, and as the rounds progressed, it was clear that an upset was brewing. Forrest knew it almost immediately. “I was flat, my rhythm wasn’t there, my legs weren’t there, and things weren’t operating the way they were supposed to,” Forrest told MaxBoxing. “I could see how (welterweight titlist) Paul Williams felt the night he fought (Carlos) Quintana (the first time). It was just one of them nights.” Admitting that he was done physically after the fourth round, Forrest nonetheless hung in there and fought on, with his veteran savvy keeping him in the fight. But he was unable to pull the trigger enough to pull ahead. “Of all the nights,” he mused, “not that night and not that situation. It’s almost like saying ‘I don’t want to die like that.’ If I’m gonna have a bad night, I wish I would have had the option of picking which night it was gonna be, but it don’t work that way.” By the end of 12 rounds, the scores were close, but there was little question that Mora had eked out the win and took the Atlanta resident’s title via majority decision. “I knew he was gonna be aggressive and when you have the chance of a lifetime to fight for a world championship, you leave everything in the ring, and I expected that out of him,” said Forrest of Mora. “I just didn’t expect to do as bad as I did, as well as him doing as well as he did.” And unlike pitchers who can take the mound again in five days or quarterbacks who can go back on the field in a week to redeem losses, Forrest had to wait for his shot at redemption. Luckily, it wasn’t going to be that long – three months to be exact – but that was more than long enough for ‘The Viper’. “If I could have gloved back up on that Sunday and done it again, I would have welcomed it,” said Forrest. “But you’ve got to sit on it and wait for three months, and in some cases, longer than that. I’m fortunate enough that I had a rematch clause in there and that we were able to exercise it immediately and get back in the ring real soon and pretty much erase what happened. But to sit on it and let it marinate, it can be frustrating.” What may have hurt even more were the whispers that at 37, Father Time had already started knocking on his door. The 1992 US Olympian and 16 year pro scoffs at such talk. “The talk about me went from the medical report to my age – ‘okay, Vernon grew old overnight,’” he said. “Well, how could I grow old overnight when I had two spectacular fights back to back? And mind you, the fight against Mora was pretty much the worst fight I ever had. If you look at the first (Ricardo) Mayorga fight, that was a shootout – first guy who lands wins, and he hit me before I hit him. I don’t consider that a bad fight, but the Mora fight was the worst fight I had. But what was positive about that fight is that people still talk about what I didn’t do, as opposed to what he did.” There was also a lot of talk about what Forrest did before the fight against Mora, when he verbally lit up his opponent on a pre-fight media teleconference. It was an outburst that shocked many, especially since Forrest, one of the game’s undisputed good guys, was never a big trash-talker. But there was a method to his madness. “At the time we were going against Kelly Pavlik on HBO on the same night, and I wanted to make sure people tuned into our fight as opposed to their fight,” said Forrest, who fought Mora on Showtime. “And I could have said a bunch of nice, pleasant things about him and he could have said the same things about me, but then no one would have wanted to watch the fight. So somebody had to play the bad guy role, and I decided to do it. I don’t regret it at all, and if I had to do it all over again, I would, because that’s the business side of it.” And as he explains, what he did before the Mora fight was simply show the side of his personality that he usually reserves for the time when the bell rings. “Because of the things I do outside of the ring, people have labeled me as a nice guy, but I’m a very fierce competitor and people sometimes confuse the two,” said Forrest. “But anybody who’s been in the ring with me will tell you that I’m a fierce guy. The only thing I was doing was expressing how I am inside of the ring, outside of it. And people weren’t used to it.” More troubling though was that people weren’t used to seeing Forrest one step behind a fighter most believed he would beat easily. But as he admitted to this scribe before the first bout with ‘The Latin Snake’, Forrest was in camp for three months, leaving him overtrained and flat come fight night. Add in the fact that he saw no way he could lose to Mora, and disaster was just around the corner. “At times I would have said ‘this guy couldn’t beat me on my worst day,’ but he actually did beat me on my worst day,” he laughs, noting that losing to a former reality show participant made the defeat even worse. “Truth be told, nobody wanted to lose to one of those ‘Contender’ people. And that was pretty much an inside thing with the fighters – ‘whatever you do, do not lose to one of those Contender guys.’ (Laughs) And me, of all the people, I lost to one of them and made him a world champion. So I feel like I let the boxing community down, so I have to make up for my mistake.” This Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena (HBOPPV 9pm ET / 6pm PT), Forrest gets his chance at redemption. So how do you prepare for the possibility that the bell will ring and everything will go wrong again, besides hoping for the best? “For me, it’s being comfortable and focused, and maintaining that focus throughout the camp,” he said. “In camp, you have your flat days and your good days, but because training becomes such a routine, you know when you’re going to have certain days, so you try to make sure that Saturday of the fight is a fresh day, no matter what, and then you hope for the best.” Forrest laughs, cool and confident that he will take his title back on Saturday and then get back to the business of looking for a big fight with a big name – it’s actually a job that may get easier since he showed some vulnerability against Mora, and with a fight coming up between two of his nemeses, Shane Mosley and Ricardo Mayorga, Forrest would like nothing more than a crack at the winner. “I think after this fight I would like to get the winner of Mosley-Mayorga, preferably Mayorga, but if Shane wins and he wants to fight, then that’s fine too.” There’s business to be taken care of first though, and Forrest is not about to get caught off guard a second time. “He did just enough to win the championship, and he’s fighting the best he could possibly fight, and I’m fighting the worst I could possibly fight, so I know when I’m fresh, it’s gonna be a piece of cake.” Now available, Thomas Gerbasi’s latest boxing compilation: Fightin’ to Writin’ – More Ring Ramblings. For more information, click here http://www.amazon.com/Fightin-Writin-More-Ring-Ramblings/dp/0595486665/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF 8&s=books&qid=1202272469&sr=8-12 Discuss this Topic - Go to the forums E-Mail Thomas Gerbasi at tgerbasi@mindspring.com or visit www.myspace.com/gerbasi