AMERICA AT LARGE:ALEX KARRAS, a Detroit athlete of an earlier generation, once voiced to the late George Plimpton his theory that sporting careers could be foretold by a man's given name. A name like "Larry Csonka," noted Karras, could constitute "a blow to the gut".
Dick Butkus? “Look at the collection of consonants,” he said. “That’s why he’s a great linebacker. If his name was Robin Jenkins, he couldn’t have made it in the Ivy League.”
Karras believed the converse also obtained, and cited the example of one-time Lions’ quarterback Milt Plum: “However gifted he was with natural ability, he was destroyed by his name. His parents probably wanted him to play the cello and take them for picnics up on the hill when they were 80 years old.”
Suffice it to say when Cornelius Bundrage’s parents had him christened, they probably didn’t envision their son becoming a professional boxer. Most ring nicknames exist only for the benefit of fight posters and Michael Buffer introductions. You don’t ever hear anyone begin a conversation with Mike Tyson “Say, Iron”, and Tommy Hearns’ kids don’t call him “Hit Man”.
But from the day he first laced on boxing gloves, Cornelius Bundrage has been K-9, as in “canine”. His trainer calls him K-9. His friends call him K-9. His wife even calls him K-9, possibly because Shawana Bundrage is also her husband’s manager.
It was well into last Sunday morning’s wee hours by the time I finished and filed my dispatch on Don King’s “Gateway to Greatness” title fight triple-header, and I was on my way out the door of my St Louis hotel
to join friends at a late-night bistro when Emanuel Steward rang me. He was phoning from the bar of the steakhouse next door, where the small entourage of his latest world champion was quietly celebrating Bundrage’s victory over Cory Spinks.
As it turned out, Spinks hadn’t been the only one caught unprepared Saturday night.
HBO, for one, had thought so little of the IBF light-middleweight title fight they hadn’t even taped it to show on that evening’s telecast, and, more or less as a consequence, Steward belatedly realised he didn’t even have a photograph of Bundrage in his moment of triumph. Did I know if anyone had gotten a picture of K-9’s rite of passage?
As a matter of fact, I did.
K-9 was in his 23rd pro fight by the time I first saw him fight live. Five summers ago at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut Lou DiBella staged a fairly daring club fight in which the three principal bouts each matched undefeated young fighters on the way up – though at 32, K-9 was fairly long in the tooth as apprentices go. We’d hardly have anticipated it then, but the dramatis personae included three future world champions.
Andre Berto, in his fifth professional bout, scored a first-round knockout of Tim Himes. Yuri Foreman won a points decision to hand Kevin Cagle his first loss.
Seconds into the main event, Bundrage and Sechew Powell threw simultaneous right hands, both of which connected. As the two boxers lay on the canvas, referee Johnny Callas couldn’t decide which one to start counting over. It looked for all the world as though it was going to be a double knockout, but eventually Powell got up and K-9 didn’t.
It was the first of several hiccups K-9 would encounter. A year later he found himself in the cast of The Contender, where he lost a decision to the eventual season two winner, Steve Forbes. In 2007, he became one of a host of supposedly better boxers to be upset by Colombian spoiler Joel (Love Child) Julio, and in '08, he lost a split decision to Grady Brewer on a card matching several incarnations of Contenderalumni in Providence.
With four losses on his record, the direction of Bundrage’s career seemed determined, and back in Detroit he seemed to spend most of his time working as a sparring partner for Andy Lee, but, boxing politics being what they are, last summer he was matched against Yuri Foreman in an eliminator for the IBF light middleweight title. When a collision of heads left Foreman bloodied and unable to continue, that fight was abandoned after three rounds and declared ‘no contest’. When Foreman went on to fight for, and win, the WBA version of the championship, K-9 became, by default, Spinks’ mandatory challenger.
Though he could claim a boxing pedigree through his father, Leon, and his uncle, Michael, Cory’s welcome in The Lou was wearing thin. Twice in the past King had orchestrated title defences in St Louis that were supposed to be triumphant homecomings, and on both occasions Spinks had lost – to Zab Judah in 2006, and to 39-year-old Verno Phillips in ’08.
Moreover, Spinks had further alienated his constituency by dumping his career-long trainer Kevin Cunningham, a former St Louis narcotics squad detective – though Cunningham had quickly rebounded, securing another championship last year when Devon Alexander won the first of his light-welterweight belts.
King quickly learned Spinks-Bundrage was going to be a tough sell. Rescheduled several times, the bout had been “postponed” largely due to lack of interest from the ticket-buying public. In the end, it was belatedly added to Saturday’s “Gateway to Greatness” card, one that showcased Alexander versus Ukrainian challenger Andriy Kotelnik and Tavoris Cloud’s IBF light-heavyweight defence against another former champion, the useful, but ageing, Jamaican Glen Johnson.
With K-9 challenging a pesky left-handed champion, a bit of role reversal was in order, and Steward had Bundrage prepare by sparring extensively with his friend from Limerick. (“Trust me,” Steward’s nephew and deputy, Javon Hill, confided a few days before the bout, “fighting Spinks is going to be child’s play after what he’s been through with Andy Lee in the gym”.)
Which turned out to be a fairly accurate prognosis. Spinks can frustrate the best of opponents with his infuriatingly elusive style, as had been the case when he fought then-Stewart trained Jermain Taylor three years earlier, but on Saturday night, as K-9 pointed out afterward, “I was hitting him before he could even start running”.
Bundrage had won three of the first four rounds on two scorecards and all four on the other. In the fifth, Spinks nearly went sprawling out of the ring after one exchange, and while referee Mark Nelson ruled that to have been a push, it was plain the champion was on shaky legs. K-9 leapt in to stun him with a hard combination that drove him to the ropes. Spinks tried to cover up, but Bundrage blasted away, landing two huge right hands, the second of which knocked Spinks sideways and to the floor. He tried to get up, but was visibly staggering, and Nelson took him into protective custody.
Although Steward has been in the corner of more than two dozen world champions, in recent years he has been more or less a hired gun, taking over as trainer of established veterans like Wladimir Klitschko and Miguel Cotto. He had found himself wistfully recalling the days when he had taken the likes of Hearns and Milton McCrory from their first amateur fights all the way to the top.
Although he had longed to do that again, Steward reckoned the instrument of that success would be Lee. Who could have supposed his next world champion would turn out to be 37-year-old Cornelius Bundrage?
Sorry. K-9, we meant to say.
