Brennan is the unsung hero
If Brennan hadn't fixed the Morales fight, chances are Lights would've suffered the brain damage in that fight, and never would have made it to the big money match with Reynolds.
share1)Fixing a fight by threatening to get a guy's parole revoked (when really, it ought to be) doesn't make you a hero.
2)I tend to agree with Lights' dad--Morales may have said he'd throw the fight, but his pride took over, and he was fighting to win. Lights knocked him out. They just threw that in there to create some doubt about the not very doubtful outcome of the Reynolds fight.
1. Maybe not but he did help Lights get to the big pay day.
2. From the replay Lights watched in his hotel, it looked like Morales wasn't knocked out from his facial expression. He just took the punch and took a NBA-esque flop to the canvas. Either way I thought it was a nice storyline to add into the finale.
1. Maybe not but he did help Lights get to the big pay day.
For his own purposes, and again, I think the finale raises doubt about whether Lights beat Morales fairly only to quell it by showing him knock out a far superior fighter in a few rounds. If he couldn't beat Morales, he couldn't beat Reynolds. Either Morales was going down later in the fight, or he decided not to go down at all. And that's probably what Brennan wanted to tell Lights--that he tried to fix the fight, but it turned out it didn't need fixing.
2. From the replay Lights watched in his hotel, it looked like Morales wasn't knocked out from his facial expression.
You do get that in boxing 'knocked out' doesn't necessarily mean 'unconscious', right? It means unable to continue fighting. You can be knocked out with your eyes wide open--awake, aware that you're lying on the canvas, hearing the ref count, and unable to get up. How are we supposed to believe that Lights (whose punching power wouldn't be increased by his later training--the punch is the last thing to go, remember?) could knock out Reynolds, who is in top condition, but Morales, after spending years in prison, could just take those punches without being incapacitated by them? They wanted to raise doubt, but at the end it was pretty near certain that Morales didn't take a fall--though obviously Brennan did try to scare him, and you could argue that the fear of what would happen if he didn't throw the fight threw him off his game.
And after all, you can't be 100% certain about any fight. People still argue about whether Liston took a fall against Ali. According to some accounts, Ali privately expressed doubts about whether Liston was doing his best. Liston had major mob ties, and may actually have been murdered by the mob. Or he may just have been too old and slow to beat Ali, who rarely had much trouble with the big power punchers. But we'll never know for sure.
He just took the punch and took a NBA-esque flop to the canvas.
He took a lot of punches, flush on the chin. Too many for any fighter to just take without being incapable of fighting.
Either way I thought it was a nice storyline to add into the finale.
It was necessary, to create tension--to make us toy with the idea that maybe this won't end the way it does in the Rocky movies. But of course it did anyway. share
Good stuff, clyons.
To support your point, if a pro is so far gone he's taking bombs with his hands at his sides he's on the edge of total disaster, and nine times out of ten the ref jumps in and stops it at that point. For anybody claiming Morales was diving, the fighter has never lived who would deliberately take a head pounding with his hands down. Like your example of Ali-Liston II, a fighter on the take goes down from a glancing shot that wouldn't ruffle your kitchen curtains.
In other words, Morales was a legit KO.
1. Maybe not but he did help Lights get to the big pay day.
2. From the replay Lights watched in his hotel, it looked like Morales wasn't knocked out from his facial expression. He just took the punch and took a NBA-esque flop to the canvas. Either way I thought it was a nice storyline to add into the finale.