Ranking the top 10 fights of the 2010s
Decade produced several all-time classic battles
A few days ago there was some good conversation on my Twitter timeline about what the fight of the decade was for the 2000s and the 2010s.
The 2000s, for me, is a no-brainer because it’s not just the fight of the decade but it’s also in the conversation for best fight of all time, and that is a fight I was lucky enough to cover at ringside at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas on May 7, 2005 — the Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo lightweight unification bout. It was as wildly violent and dramatic as anything I’ve ever seen and ended with perhaps the greatest comeback in sports history — not just boxing — as Corrales got off the deck from two “the fight is over” knockdowns in the 10th round to stop Castillo moments later. It was just an amazing fight and it still crosses my mind regularly.
There were some other all-time great fights in the 2000s: Micky Ward-Arturo Gatti I and III, Erik Morales-Marco Antonio Barrera I and III, Israel Vazquez-Rafael Marquez I-III and Somsak Sithchatchawal-Mahyar Monshipour, to name a few. They’re all great. Corrales-Castillo I was on another level.
As far as the 2010s, there were great candidates but it’s not as clear. So, I have taken each fight of the year from 2010 to 2019 and ranked them for the top 10 fights of the decade. Here they are from No. 10 to No. 1.
10. Humberto Soto W12 Urbano Antillon
Year: 2010 (Dec. 4).
Site: Honda Center, Anaheim, California.
Stakes: Soto was making his third WBC lightweight title defense; Antillon was fighting for a title for the first time.
Was I ringside? No.
The fight: It headlined a Top Rank PPV card because Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. came down with the flu and dropped out, but Soto and Antillon more than made up for it with a brutal slugfest Soto eked out 115-112, 114-113, 114-113.
As the action flowed, commentator Rich Marotta said, “Somewhere up there Diego Corrales is looking down on this fight and smiling.” It was his kind of fight.
Referee Ray Corona, who had little to do other than watch them pulverized each other, did get into the act in the fifth round when he docked Antillon a critical point for a borderline low blow. There was also blood as an accidental head butt opened a cut over Antillon’s right eye in the sixth round. There were so many heated exchanges it looked like a video game at times.