WHILE the May 2, 2015 showdown between eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao and unbeaten pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. may have been a disappointment to fight fans, who expected a classic encounter, it was still named “Event of the Year” by the World Boxing Council in a fight the American won by a unanimous 12-round decision.
Mayweather was also to be bestowed with the “Lifetime Achievement Award” for his undefeated record of 49-0, which equaled the mark set by heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano.
The award was announced by WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman, who had earlier released the process to choose the best of 2015 in different categories.
The amazing comeback of Francisco Vargas, who knocked out champion Takashi Miura of Japan in the ninth-round of an action-packed bout that swung one way and then the other was chosen as “Fight of the Year.”
Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports wrote: “Back and forth, Miura and Vargas pounded each other in a compelling war filled with clean power punches that tested each man’s will to the fullest extent and culminated in one of the great comebacks in boxing history.
“Vargas’ ninth-round knockout of Miura to win a junior lightweight world title was perhaps the most dramatic comeback since the late Diego Corrales used a legendary 10th-round rally to stop Jose Luis Castillo and unify lightweight titles in 2005.”
Middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Interim champion Gennady Golovkin shared honors as “Champions of the Year,” while Alvarez’s spectacular third-round KO of veteran James Kirkland was named “Knockout of the Year.”
It was described as “an all-out war in the Lone Star State in which Canelo stopped Kirkland with a picture-perfect kayo in front of over 30,000 fans at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas.”
The end came at 2:19 of the third round, courtesy of a dead-on right hand from El Canelo that spun Kirkland like a top and dropped him into an immobilized clump. Kirkland had previously been down twice in the fight, once in the first round and once in the third, before the final KO.