Before anything else, I think this fight gets a little lost in history because people only remember it as the night Adrien Broner finally got what was coming to him. And yeah, that’s absolutely part of the appeal. But underneath all that is a genuinely fantastic fight. Marcos Maidana might honestly be one of my favorite fighters to watch. From the opening bell he tears across the ring, forcing Adrien Broner onto the back foot before he’s even had a chance to settle. A good gameplan from Maidana too considering Broner had a history of being a slow starter. Because of this there’s no feeling-out process. Maidana just gets straight to work.

The story of the fight is Broner’s aura being stripped away brick by brick. For years he’d built himself up as boxing’s next superstar, all swagger and confidence. Here, every round chips away at that image, and in return Broner spends the rest of the fight doing everything he can to hold onto whatever’s left. Legal or not. Mostly not. But to be fair the fight is dirty from both men. Clinching, forearms, headbutts, low blows, punches after the bell. It constantly feels on the verge of boiling over. And from this dirtiness we get the fight’s most memorable moment. The infamous doggy style taunt in the first round. Here Broner gets one last chance to be a douche before spending the next eleven rounds receiving his long overdue comeuppance. The dying breaths of a prick, if you will. This moment comes full circle in round eleven however, as Maidana throws the taunt right back at him. It’s one of the best bits of payoff you’ll ever see in a fight.

This fight is the magnum opus for Maidana’s awkward punching. It’s easy to see why he gave Floyd Mayweather so many problems. His left hook in particular is bizarre. It almost starts like a jab to the body before he twists his whole frame into a lead hook, and somehow he lands it over and over again. He uses this lead hook to punish Broner’s inactivity throughout the fight, never letting him admire his work or wait for perfect openings. In the end what we get is a mostly dominant display by an underrated banger in Maidana humbling an overhyped problem child in Broner. But this fight deserves to be remembered for more than just that. It’s violent, messy, funny, dramatic, and incredibly entertaining from start to finish. The final image of Broner running out of the arena as fans hurl garbage at him is about as graceful of an ending as he had earned and it’s the cherry on top for one of the most pro wrestling boxing fights in the history of the sport.

There’s probably another world where Broner bounces back from this and remains a fringe pound-for-pound guy. This just isn’t that world. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.