Timothy Bradley to Retire: Goodbye and Good Riddance?

Word has it that two-division former world champ Timothy Bradley is about to announce his retirement from the sport after about thirteen years as a pro.

Bradley has a résumé that may earn him Hall of Fame consideration and he’s definitely paid his dues in the sport. By all accounts, he’s also one of the really good guys in the business.

All of this is wonderful and certainly worthy of heaping amounts of respect, so is it too cruel to say that Bradley’s farewell is probably less of a sad goodbye than a “that’s alright, see you later?”

With the exception of his Fight of the Year brawl with Ruslan Provodnikov in 2013 (in which he might have been fighting in a concussed haze from the first round forward) and a couple of other brief moments here and there, Bradley has never really made for compelling TV.

Sorry, it’s true.

Regardless of the opponent and the circumstance, Timothy Bradley fights usually amount to little more than awkward, muddled action where bodies are moving, but nothing is really happening. And we’ve seen this way too many times to blame the other guy at this point. Even when “boxing” and taking a stab at being a stylist, the ring work is just so much nothingness. Pure athleticism propping up, again, nothingness.

At the risk of taking a sharp shot at a good guy, this is all on “Desert Storm” and his execution of a fighting style that is often so confused and lacking in real form that it’s barely a style at all.

There used to be a time when many in the media pounced on Bradley for producing extremely unsatisfying bouts, but that was before he signed with Top Rank and earned the free pass from the Top Rank apologists in the media. But, the media was right to criticize him back when Bradley was with promoter Gary Shaw and not much has changed since then. Even with trainer Teddy Atlas in his corner for a good chunk of time, Bradley is still Bradley.

The nothingness that Bradley tends to produce in the ring is not the same as the sublime negative powers of a fighter like Guillermo Rigondeaux. Bradley’s void is less like a supreme robot coldly shutting down foes and more like a dump truck dumping a ton of gear-breaking tools into a wood chipper.

With excessive, frenetic movement that leads to nothing, an awkward, mauling inside game, and a lack of precision-punching on the outside, Bradley creates situations where the fighting space is so confused and awkward that neither fighter can really do much. Bradley has even been able to drag two of this generation’s most exciting fighters—Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez—into the void.

To his credit, Bradley has managed to get to the very highest levels of the sport to become a two-division world champ. Through tremendous physical conditioning and a will to win second to none in boxing, Bradley has earned the right to be regarded as a legitimate world-class fighter. But he’s also a complete and total buzzkill of a ring presence in every sense of the word. With only thirteen knockouts in thirty-six professional bouts (two in his last eighteen) and a style that nullifies an opponent’s ability to land anything clean, fans can’t even hope for the occasional early end, either.

Yes, there is room for the so-called “boring” defense-minded fighter and it’s a shame that more people can’t appreciate those masters of the fine art of boxing. But Bradley isn’t one of those masters. Bradley’s negativity is a product, in many ways, of his inability. It’s a flaw he shares with many young fighters today, raised to rely on athleticism over traditional boxing skill and craft. Real connoisseurs of boxing skill and craft have to be pulling at their hair in angst over some of the stuff that passes as good technical boxing these days. Bradley is just one of the best of this current lot.

It’s hard to make a case against Bradley in any way because he is what he is as a product of an era that is also just what it is. But that doesn’t make him any more palatable as a performer.

If Bradley is indeed retiring and has a good financial plan in place to see him through the rest of his life, then Timothy wins at the game of life. He has already claimed to be suffering from some neurological issues from his war with Provodnikov and his time in the ring, so retiring from the sport just days before his thirty-fourth birthday is the smartest thing he could do.

Timothy Bradley, the man, deserves applause and acclaim—and his character and class have been big parts of his career in the ring. But Timothy Bradley, the nuts and bolts fighter? He was a mess and, with just a very few exceptions, never made for a satisfying night at the fights.

So, yeah, have a nice life, Tim. See ya behind the mic and at your new restaurant.