The Fight Network

Here's what you don't do. You don't travel 5,400 miles into hostile territory to risk your undefeated record against an opponent who gave you a grotesquely mangled broken jaw (and against whom you needed the active assistance of a referee, three judges, a ringside physician, and the timekeeper in order to win a decision) unless you are very, very sure that you're going to win.

And you probably don't travel 5,400 miles into hostile territory for less than a sure thing if your opponent has, since your first meeting, been beaten from pillar to post in front of a large viewing audience, thus shattering his image as an indestructible assassin.

Because beating Edison Miranda doesn't mean as much as it would have unless you beat him even more impressively than the WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik did. And losing to him would be a disaster.

All this made me ask myself: What does Arthur Abraham know coming into this fight, shown tonight on Showtime, that I don't know?

As it turns out, he knew exactly how to beat Edison Miranda. And he knew how to do it in a way that would have the boxing public clamoring for a unification showdown between him (Abraham holds the IBF middleweight title, not on the line tonight) and boxing's newest superstar Pavlik.

Looking extraordinarily strong at 166 pounds, Abraham seemed unfazed by any pressure caused by fighting in the US for the first time (all but one of his previous bouts had been held in Germany .) He smiled implacably at the crowd as they booed him. I got a sense that he knew exactly what he had to do.

This, as it turned out, was to wait patiently behind a solid defense and let the fired up Miranda unload his arsenal. Giving away the first two rounds, Abraham voluntarily spent time against the ropes, calmly covering up as Miranda tried to pierce his defense, having occasional luck with an uppercut thrown from slightly too far out.

Abraham incurred the wrath of the crowd in the second round when he insisted on being given time to recover from a low blow. There seemed to be a general consensus that he was faking, but the video replay showed him to have been hit squarely below the belt. He's not a fighter who'll suffer from needless macho display. If he's hurt by a low blow, he'll demand time to recover. It's the smart thing to do.

About halfway through the third round, Abraham seemed to intuit a flagging of energy on Miranda's part. He'd let the Colombian fire all his bullets. Late in the round, he wobbled Edison with a good overhand right. Just before the bell, he followed it up with a good combination that clearly troubled his opponent and won him the round.

It was the only edge Abraham needed. He stormed out in the fourth, determined to end the fight then and there. A decent right was followed by a hard left hook that dropped Miranda. A second left hook-harder than the first-put him down, and in terrible trouble, again. At the one minute mark, Abraham repeated the hook a third time, Miranda fell with his back against the ropes, and referee Telis Assimenios rushed to his aid, stopping the fight at 1:13.

It was an impressive performance by a smart, strong professional. It also accomplished what it set out to do. If a Kelly Pavlik-Joe Calzaghe super middleweight fight doesn't get made, Pavlik-Abraham would be a very desirable fight at middleweight. They could hold it in Berlin, Las Vegas, or Atlantic City ; it'd draw sellout crowds wherever they put it, and it'd do good PPV numbers too. Showtime announced that an estimated audience of three million was staying up late in Germany to watch the fight.

Earlier in the evening, veteran Raul Marquez put himself back into some kind of middleweight title picture with a canny, psychologically adept dissection of prospect Giovanni Lorenzo, taking the younger fighter to school in the process of winning a unanimous decision (114-113 on all cards). Lorenzo is big and moves well, but must develop a more extensive repertoire if he intends to succeed at the upper levels of the sport. Hopefully this defeat (his first) will be a valuable part of his education.