The day before his April bout in Las Vegas with the junior middleweight contender James Kirkland, Nobuhiro Ishida met with the HBO announcers. Ishida, a slender Japanese boxer, was a considerable underdog and he looked the part.

“He had delicate bones — handsome kid,” the announcer Jim Lampley said. “I said to people in the room, ‘He looks like he would be more comfortable dancing in a revue down the street.’ ”

Ishida scored a first-round technical knockout of Kirkland — Lampley said it was a bigger upset than Buster Douglas’s victory over Mike Tyson in 1990. And yet, after the fight, the analyst Max Kellerman interviewed the vanquished Kirkland first.

“We’re trying to talk to Ishida, the winner, also,” Kellerman said during the postfight coverage. “We’re looking to see if we have a translator. This is such a shocking upset, we didn’t have one on hand.”