Top 10 "Boxing in the Media" Events of 2007

Man, it was a slugfest of a year for boxing media in 2007. The sport's top magazine got a new owner. The sweet science had a gigantic year on pay-per-view TV -- despite the threat from Mixed Martial Arts -- and even the mainstream press paid attention to boxing's biggest event. Still, newspapers continued to shed boxing beat writers, and the Internet picked up some of the slack. Here are my top ten boxing media events of 2007:

1. De La Hoya Buys The Ring
After more than a year of back-office talks, De La Hoya pulled the trigger on a Rupert Murdoch-like takeover. He set up subsidiary Sports Entertainment Publications to buy The Ring and a few other fight books from Kappa Publishing, whose real forte was word-search puzzle magazines. The influx of money and boxing appreciation from the new bosses could be very good for the magazine. Oscar pledged to improve the mag's production quality, timeliness and Web presence and keep his promotional company's hands off the editorial and the rankings. But some observers (especially rival promoters) still fret about how Oscar's control will influence the Bible of Boxing. As long as ODLH doesn't pull an Oprah - renaming the mag O and putting himself on the cover every week - that'll be a good start.

2. The Vanishing Newspaper Boxing Beat Writer
Ron Borges left the Boston Globe to do TV and other projects. Michael Hirsley retired from the Chicago Tribune after winning two first-place Barney awards (but continues to freelance). Kevin Iole left the Las Vegas Review-Journal for Yahoo. Tim Graham left the Buffalo News to cover an NFL team that allegedly plays in Miami. The Philadelphia Inquirer's staff purge snared fledgling boxing writer Don Steinberg (uh, that's me, and it still hurts, but I continue to freelance for them).

3. Boxing in Non-Boxing Places
Mostly they played up it as "the fight to save boxing." But, still, it was encouraging to see boxing making the covers of top sports magazines and receiving legitimate coverage elsewhere. Sports Illustrated gave a cover to the Mayweather-De La Hoya fight. So did ESPN The Magazine -- its first boxing cover ever. ESPN "Sports Guy" Bill Simmons, who had called the sport dying, actually attended a fight (Mayweather-Hatton) and decided boxing is really exciting. Even Time gave Oscar-versus-Floyd a little quality time. HBO, meanwhile, launched its 24/7 series, a well-produced infomercial that, airing many nights after The Sopranos or Entourage, brought boxing added mainstream attention.

4. Merchant-izing
HBO seemed ready to say goodbye to Larry Merchant in the Spring, then it came to its senses and took him back, at least part-time. Boxing and its fans are better off for as long as Larry stays behind that red-ball microphone. Merchant, now 76, isn't just an announcer. He's a journalist, bringing decades of experience to ringside, willing to question every fight and fighter that deserves to be questioned. Here's a great story on the machinations at HBO.

5. Pay Per View Seems to Be Catching On
The good news is that HBO had its best year ever for pay-per-view boxing. The bad news is that HBO had its best year ever for pay-per-view boxing. HBO said it got 4.8 million buys and $255 million in PPV revenue from its eight events in in 2007. That's great for the future of big-money mega-fights. It's not so great for fans or the future of big fights on regular premium cable, basic cable, or free network TV. A football fan can buy a package to watch every NFL game for $250. By my calculation, it was $400 just for HBO's eight pay-per-views in 2007: Barrera-Marquez ($45), De La Hoya-Mayweather ($55), Cotto-Judah ($50), Hopkins-Wright ($50), Morales-Diaz ($45), Pacquiao-Barrera II ($50), Cotto-Mosley ($50) and Mayweather-Hatton ($55). I'm not even counting Showtime PPVs. Throw in monthly fees for regular HBO and Showtime, plus the occasional off-the-grid Evander Holyfield PPV, and it starts adding up like real money.

By the way, do you know that an anagram for Bernard Hopkins is "HBO Inks Pardner"?

6. The Rise of ESPN.com
Call ‘em the worldwide leader, the four-letter word, whatever you'd like. It's nice to see ESPN.com giving boxing and boxing writers a growing venue. The site this year hired a boxing editor, Darius Ortiz, who has supplemented torch-bearer columnist Dan Rafael with veteran contributors like Tom Hauser and Bert Sugar, making ESPN.com's boxing page a daily read and one of the top boxing sites on the Web. (Disclosure: I'm a contributor too, so maybe I'm biased.)

7. Online Video Proliferates
Yes, Viacom (Showtime) and Time Warner (HBO) took action to get illicit videos of their their boxing matches removed from YouTube. But anyone who knows how to operate Google knows that there's more boxing video online than ever, and it's a great research tool. Even HBO's are fights still online for free (in better quality than YouTube) -- at the officially sanctioned AOL Video.

8. Passing the Mic
Beyond the Merchant saga, the TV networks shuffled blow-by-blow talent, and it all seemed to work out nicely. The veteran Bob Papa moved to HBO Boxing After Dark to replace Fran Charles. Nick Charles has been stellar on Versus with Wally Matthews. Max Kellerman stepped up to play wing on HBO's scoring line, and even Lennox Lewis is getting the hang of things behind the green-ball microphone. And is that Vinny Paz providing his unique analysis on tape-delayed Comcast boxing-casts?

9. A Movie About Writing About Boxing
Resurrecting the Champ came and went quickly to mixed reviews, but how often do you get to see a newsroom movie and a boxing movie in the same movie? Okay, the press does seem to have a role in most boxing movies (The Harder They Fall, The Great White Hope, and The Great White Hype come to mind). But usually it's a grotesque, one-dimensional caricature. The press in this one is much more realistically grotesque. Resurrecting will be an April DVD. Scheduled to hit theaters in 2008 are a boxing comedy (The Hammer starring Adam Carolla) and a documentary (Diego Luna's Chavez).

10. The Contender Hangs in There
Alfonso Gomez's win over Arturo Gatti gave The Contender new legitimacy - wow, somebody from a TV reality show beat someone in real life! It was like Kelly Clarkson winning a Grammy. The latest season, numero three, focused more on boxing than on goofball contests and family melodrama, and it delivered some real-deal fighters, plus a bang-up, live finale between Sakio Bika and Jaidon Codrington. Most important, it kept boxing in weeknight prime-time, on basic cable.

FightJudge.com Looks for a Bigger Score

I always thought that if you had a great idea, brought personal passion to developing it, and executed it flawlessly, all the rewards of success would follow.

Build it and they they will come. The world will beat a path to your door. Blah blah blah.

About a year ago, Corey Shelton, an amateur boxing judge in Atlanta and former IBM computer guy, worked with two partners to launch FightJudge.com. It's a free web site that allows everyone who is watching a boxing match to score the rounds and text-chat live with one another other as the punches fly. I've covered and been involved with online ventures for about as long as online ventures have existed (since the 1980s), and apart from Amazon.com and Google, I have rarely seen a site that did what it set out to do so well.

The site's design is elegant and enticing. The interactive scoring system is fast and works without a glitch. A few seconds after a round ends, you get a pull-down menu that lets you assign a score for the round to each boxer. Then it automatically tabulates your running overall score for the fight and ultimately determines a consensus score for all the fan-judges. Official judging should be done this way. And FightJudge keeps adding features that make it more functional and easier to use. One can imagine Jim Lampley, after complaining about a questionable decision, emphasizing his point by saying, “And here's what the fans watching the fight on HBO thought...” (FightJudge users gave Jose Santa Cruz a 118-109 victory over Joel Casamayor last month, while official judges awarded Casamayor a controversial split decision.)

“That's really our ultimate goal, to align ourselves with a network,” says Shelton. “From from a technology and accuracy standpoint, we could do it. From a sheer volume standpoint, no. I would love to go out and say 'FightJudge scored De La Hoya-Mayweather a draw.' Because we did. But the reality is that it was less than 20 people [on FightJudge] who scored that fight.”

Twenty people, out of more than two million pay per view buys for that fight. It makes no sense! (Of course, if the announcers were to mention the service on the air, it would get a lot more than 20 people.) Why aren't more people as fascinated by FightJudge as I am?

Yeah, you need to be in front of your computer to score a fight while you're watching it on TV. It's a bit of a hassle, though a wireless laptop can work just fine when you're sitting on the couch. Boxing writers could easily fire up the site from ringside (a new feature creates a custom graphic of a user's score -- see above -- that a writer can keep and publish). There's even a stripped-down version of the site for use on mobile phones. Shelton dreams of crowds at big fights scoringkeeping en masse between rounds.


I was stuck at home for the Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley bout. I went online to score the fight and landed in the FightJudge chat room, where about 20 guys were firing off wisecracks about the action. It was almost like having friends at home to watch with.

But the site, which launched at the start of 2007, hasn't been able to get much traction.

"I don't know how to interpret the reaction by boxing fans," he says. "If you look at boxing on the web, it's pretty pervasive. There is a fan base online."

The Versus network has its own live fan scorecard online that the TV commentators on its Fight Night telecasts refer to. It averages the fan scores and shows results with decimal points -- someone might win a round 9.7 to 9.2. It looks like the scores a girl named Shannon would get in gymnastics. Still, it's a step forward as an interactive, sorta Web 2.0 tool for of boxing. HBO has tried interactive scoring at least once: in 2000 it offered fan scoring of the Bernard Hopkins-Antwun Echols fight through the slow AOLTV and WebTV services, which were used about as much as Ricardo Mayorga's defense. The experiment has not been repeated.

Shelton -- who at IBM led development of sports sites like Wimbledon.org and Masters.org and now works at a healthcare company -- has campaigned to enlist boxing web sites as parners. Secondsout.com recently came on and offers a customized version of the FightJudge scorecard on its site. Still, the big break hasn't come yet.

“It's been disappointing, but not to the point where it's discouraging us from continuing," Shelton says. "We know we have a good product. Some folks say we are way ahead of our time. I don't think it's true. We're right on time. It's just a matter of adoption."

Norman Mailer: 1923-2007

Some words from around the world about Norman Mailer, boxing writer and novelist, who died Saturday at age 84:

An appreciation, by Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald (Scotland) http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1824217.0.norman_mailer_1923_2007.php

Original book review: The Fight (1975), by Norman Mailer, in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/ali-mailer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

"American literary giant," by Philip Marchand, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/275456

"Writer Who Never Put Down His Fists," by Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-mailer_kellernov11,1,2721898.column

Norman Mailer: "The Writer as Writer," by Hillel Italie, Associated Press

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gCaNMJjmpdFjE3n9__UcnEc8padQD8SRELDO0

Obituary, BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/231694.stm

In case you missed it: The World has a New Cruiserweight Champ (Briefly)

While everyone was thinking about the big welterweight fight in New York -- in Paris, Englishman David Haye knocked out Frenchman Jean-Marc Mormeck to become global cruiserweight champ. Then he said he'll move up to heavyweight.

Only in America!

What's Not to Like About Cotto vs. Mosley?

Some clips by BWAA members about the Miguel Cotto - Shane Mosley fight and its undercard, coming Saturday night at Madison Square Garden:

Tim Smith, New York Daily News: "Antonio Margarito Wants Another Title Shot" http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2007/11/09/2007-11-09_antonio_margarito_wants_another_title_sh.html

Bill Gallo, New York Daily News: "Boxing Showing Signs of Life"

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2007/11/09/2007-11-09_boxing_shows_some_signs_of_life-2.html

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com
Video Breakdown
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?videoId=3100144&categoryId=2491554
Cotto still trying to shake comparisons to Trinidad
http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/notebook?page=notebook/boxingnov9

George Willis, New York Post: "Margarito's Focused"

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11092007/sports/margaritos_focused_798650.htm

Bernard Fernandez, Philadelphia Daily News, "Fighting Words Pack a Punch"
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/sports/columnists/20071106_Bernard_Fernandez___Fightin_words_pack_a_punch.html

Wally Matthews, Newsday: "Mosley: I Will Win Dramatically"

http://www.newsday.com/sports/columnists/ny-spwally095453026nov09,0,3426466.column

Keith Idec, Herald News: "Mosley Knows Low Blows May Be Coming"

http://northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk1OTYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcyMTkzNTkmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2

Robert Morales, San Gabriel Valley Tribune: "Mosley Prepares for Clean Fight"

http://www.sgvtribune.com/sports/ci_7411373

Kieran Mulvaney, ESPN.com: "Small Town Kid Hoping for Big Things to Come"

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=3093534

Patrick Kehoe, BoxingScene.com: "Is The Sugar Still Sweet For Shane Mosley"

http://www.boxingscene.com/?m=show&id=11117

Keith Idec, Herald News: "Cheaper Cotto-Mosley Tickets Available"

http://northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk1OTYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcyMTkwMDEmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2

Don Steinberg, ESPN.com, "Cotto-Mosley: Haven't We Seen This Before?"
http://proxy.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=3094554

George Kimball, Boxingtalk.com: "Cotto-Mosley: Who is Fast and Who is Furious?"

http://boxingtalk.com/pag/article14045.html

The Two Jack Mosleys

Don't know about you, but for me it's hard to hear anything about Shane Mosley's dad, Jack Mosley, without hearing in my head the name spoken in Mos Def's awesome voice, in the movie 16 Blocks, in which Bruce Willis plays a cop named Jack Mosley.

Boxing Gloves as a Political Prop, # 82

Sometimes When We Touch

I'm just going to put a thought out there and let the chips fall where they may.

In those pre-fight "stare-down" photos that newspapers love to run, it often doesn't seem entirely clear whether the two guys are getting ready to fight each other -- or to kiss each other.

There, I've said it.

I know we're all supposed to get stoked up in the days of hype before a big fight, especially at the press conferences where the two guys come out and tell everyone how deeply they desire to kill each other and what a talentless punk the other guy is. After emptying out both barrels of trash-talk, they then are forced by promoters to move really close together and pose with their faces an inch or so apart. They have to snarl and look mad to let us know it will be an awesome promotion, er, fight.

The thing is, when we write advance newspaper stories about a forthcoming fight, photo editors almost always seem to choose shots from the staged stare-down rather than running action shots of the fighters, which actually depict the sport. I think I know why photo editors choose stare-down photos. They are from an event that happened yesterday, so they are "news," while a fight that happened months ago isn't.

Also, not all newspapers can freely tap into the AP or Corbis photo archive to get great action shots or portraits of boxers; they can get yesterday's posed stare-down pictures for free off the wire they subscribe to.

So we get two guys staring into each other's eyes.

Sometimes they have a hard time pulling off the hate. Anyone who's seen Joe Calzaghe and Mikkel Kessler knows they look like they belong in GQ magazine anyway, and they seem like they really are nice guys. Still, I just can't get over the shots from their stare-down.

"Their noses touched and they started laughing," says Ed Mulholland, the award-winning boxing photographer who took the shots of that stare-down shown here.

Up from a Long Count

Time to play catch-up and post a bunch of stories by BWAA members. Here we go:

St. Clair Murraine in the Tallahassee Democrat reports from Friday's controversial 15-second stoppage in the heavyweight fight between Travis Walker and T.J. Wilson. Michael Woods at thesweetscience.com says Joe Calzaghe's hands are 100 percent going into the title unification bout with Mikkel Kessler. Robert Morales in the L.A. Daily News has a talk with Calzaghe.

Much of the press on Calzaghe-Kessler is from Europe. It's rare these days when a U.S. newspaper does any kind of infographic for a boxing match, but here's an idea to pass along to editors and art directors. The graphic here (above right), which is on the website of English promoter Frank Warren, shows both fighters' complete pro records and how long every fight has lasted.

T.K. Stewart's awesome boxing blog has an item on the angling of promoters to set up a middleweight title fight between champion Kely Pavlik and the well-hyped, still-Irish John Duddy. George Willis at the New York Post catches up with Ohio hero Pavlik in the aftermath of his big win over Jermain Taylor. ESPN.com's package on Joe Frazier includes video plus stories about the old days by Ron Borges and Don Steinberg. Speaking of Philadelphia, Bernard Fernandez (Phila. Daily News) and Steinberg (Inquirer) give the details from the weekend's boxing card at the Spectrum. I wasn't thrilled with the headline the paper put on my story. I wrote that none of the fighters was exactly Joe Frazier; the hed called the whole card "less than smokin'." Which isn't the same thing. It was a fine card with exciting moments and boxers who worked hard. I should have made that clearer to the copy desk.

ESPN.com, meanwhile, has made a lot of moves lately in coverage, notably bringing in regular pieces by Tom Hauser. Dan Rafael's weekend notebook extends a hope that Calzaghe will stay off the list of recently injured boxers whose mishaps have forced big-fight postponements. Rafael also has the details on Floyd Mayweather's dismissal from Dancing with the Stars. As for another former contestant on that show, William Dettloff's Ring Update at thering-online.com defends Evander Holyfield's right to keep punching. It also adds bonus remarks such as: "This unfortunate news just in for the handlers of John Ruiz and Sergei Liakhovich, who spent the week arguing over who is afraid to fight whom: No one cares."

Manny Being Manny

Sorry -- this is just a novelty entry to buy time until I have a chance for a real update.

The toughest person ever named Kelly

Kelly Pavlik now is officially the toughest person ever named Kelly, and that includes Leroy Kelly, Pat Kelly, Jim Kelly, R. Kelly and Kelly Swanson. Here's some coverage by BWAA journalists of an amazing night in Atlantic City:

Joe Maxse, Cleveland Plain-Dealer: "Power-puncher Pavlik prevails"

Tim Smith, New York Daily News: "Kelly Pavlik KOs Jermain Taylor in seventh"

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com: "Pavlik gets off floor,knocks out Taylor, wins middleweight title"

Dave Weinberg, The Press of Atlantic City: "Pavlik shocks Taylor with 7th-round KO"

Tim Struby, ESPN The Magazine: "Pavlik-Taylor just the beginning of exciting autumn"

Don Steinberg, Philadelphia Inquirer: "Pavlik, down but not out, scores KO"

Lem Satterfield, Los Angeles Times: "Pavlik stops Taylor to win middleweight titles"

Tom Gerbasi, Maxboxing.com: "A star is crowned as Pavlik stops Taylor in seven"

George Kimball, Boxingtalk.com: "Pavlik pummels Taylor for middleweight crown"

Keith Idec, Herald News: "One-handed, Sheika scores TKO victory" and "Paterson's Pierson gets fifth-round win"

Jermain and Kelly's Class Reunion

Quick, get slugger Kelly Pavlik in the ring with Jermain Taylor. We need a guy who won't run away from Taylor, clinch Taylor, be smaller than Taylor, cover up too much, or otherwise make Taylor look bad and make a world middleweight title fight seem like a good time to change the channel.

Dan Rafael at ESPN.com dredges up fading memories of the only previous time Pavlik met Taylor, in the opening round of trials for the 2000 Olympics. Taylor was 22. Pavlik was 17. Taylor won. Neither boxer remembers anything about it. Manager Cameron Dunkin, who was looking at Pavlik at the time and seems to remember it best, tells Rafael: "I had seen Jermain knocking guys out with the right hand in the amateurs, beating guys up and bullying a lot of guys. He didn't do that with Kelly."

John Cotey in the St. Petersburg Times does a great piece comparing Taylor's recent ring action to a college football season (with a funny line about recent opponents being division I-AA). In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Joe Maxse takes readers inside Team Pavlik with a nice little main story about Pavlik's ring skills and a big box of fun facts (hobbies: darts and golf). In Taylor's hometown paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Chris Givens has a report on Jermain from his training camp in the Poconos. Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News reports from the Poconos too. The Philadelphia Inquirer with its fancy-pants new web site has a piece (by me) about Taylor's recent lack of flash.

A New Book from Tom Hauser

It's a treat whenever Secondsout.com posts a new column about boxing by Tom Hauser. Once every year or so, when those columns are compiled into book, it's a treasure.

The Greatest Sport of All: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing (University of Arkansas Press paperback, $19.95) anthologizes everything Hauser wrote about boxing in 2006, including two pieces that won BWAA Barney awards (“Pay-Per-View Piracy And The Internet,” and “The Opponent.") Most of this stuff is available online, but having it in book form is so much more convenient and far cooler to display on your shelf.

Hauser's pieces are called columns, but that's selling them short. In today's sports media, it often seems like getting to the top requires a journalist to have an opinion first and the facts second. With a few exceptions, Hauser's columns aren't about his opinions. They aren't filled with self-references, cagey prose and hilarious jokes. They're actually features and investigative stories, disguised as columns.

Hauser gets the details. In “Manny Pacquiao: Where's the Money Going?” he meticulously breaks down how the numbers added up (and subtracted down) after a so-called $2 million purse netted Pacquiao $313,446. Hauser's looks at pay-per-view piracy and a night in the life of a professional opponent similarly go deep behind the scenes. His profile of Richard Schaefer gets past the Golden Boy executive's mannered front to show the personality that took him from banking to boxing. “Don King at 75,” a compilation of comments by and about King, could serve as a eulogy.

Yes, Hauser enjoys working conditions that any newspaper reporter would envy. His deadlines are loose compared to the daily grind, and editors don't measure the quality of his stories by how far under 25 inches he can keep them. Still, he makes the most of his medium. This year's book is especially interesting to boxing writers because it contains profiles of boxing media people: Tim Smith, Dan Rafael, Steve Farhood, and Steve Albert. The other pieces just serve as lessons to writers. In some instances, the reporting makes it hard to read them to their completion -- halfway through, you get inspired to go out and try reporting a story of your own so thoroughly.

News links: Joe Maxse in the Cleveland Plain Dealer tees up an advance of the Jermain Taylor - Kelly Pavlik fight. In the San Antonio Express, John Whisler laments the absence of top notch boxing promotion in that city. A story in the Boston Herald explaisn that "Channel 5 sports dude Bob Halloran has signed on as a technical consultant for the Mark Wahlberg-Brad Pitt flick The Fighter, now that his book about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward is just about to hit bookstores."

Ali on GQ cover and other news highlights

To me, any excuse is fine to put a young Muhammad Ali on a magazine cover. It's a no-lose situation. For its October issue, celebrating its 50th anniversary, GQ has made Ali one of 10 different collectible cover subjects. Each cover features one of the "50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years." They include -- stop me when you see a name that doesn't seem to belong -- Ali, JFK, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Tom Brady. I'm not sure how Brady snuck in there. Let's assume it's because he's impregnated Bridget Moynahan.

The issue is a gigantic 472 pages -- the masthead doesn't even appear until page 100 --and it's hard to find whatever they wrote about Ali. Fashionwise, the image of Ali that comes to my mind has him in a 1970s print shirt with a big pointy collar, made of some fabric that isn't cotton. But the inside Ali photo, accompanied by a very short essay on him -- ah, here it is on page 971,312 -- has him looking sharp in a 1960s black suit, with a white shirt and skinny black tie.

Moving on: Oscar De La Hoya has responded to some weird photos that emerged on the Internet this week showing his head on a body posing in fishnet stockings. He says the pictures are fake.

In real boxing news, Tim Smith did a nice report in the New York Daily News about a new book about early black boxers. Bernie Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News has Bernard Hopkins riffing on fighting overseas. At ESPN.com, Dan Rafael's weekend notebook offers his usual tasty tidbits, on Taylor-Pavlik, Calzaghe-Kessler, The Contender, Zab Judah and more. Also at ESPN.com I have a piece about a boxing statistic I invented called the Tyson Index, which measures the percentage of scheduled rounds that a boxer fights as a crude way to measure the excitement of his fights.

De La Hoya Plays Rupert Murdoch, Buys The Ring

Shocker! Everyone seems happy that The Ring has a new chance to thrive -- and scared about what new owner Oscar De La Hoya will do with it. A promoter owning The Bible of Boxing? Still, despite concerns, no one doubts that editors Nigel Collins and Joe Santoliquito and publisher Stu Saks are stand-up guys who will print whatever makes sense to print in the magazine.

"The Ring, led by Collins, has worked feverishly to gain acceptance of its rankings and championship belts. If even a hint of impropriety was suspected, the entire program would go out the window," points out Michael Swann at 15rounds.com.

In my story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ran in the business section today (it was a busy Philly sports night in which the Phillies scored 13 times and the sad Eagles scored just 12), the strongest statement of the problem came from rival promoter Lou DiBella, who seemed to sum up the unspoken feelings of the other promoters:

"There's conflict of interest all over the place. It takes what's been called 'The Bible of Boxing' and puts it under the ownership of a player who's trying to dominate the business. If you're a rival company to Golden Boy, would you want [Ring's] ratings being used by television networks to determine what they buy? There's too much inherent conflict. And if I owned Ring magazine, and I'm a promoter, I certainly would go to a fighter and say, 'Look, I own Ring magazine.' "

Oscar told me, as he has said to everyone, that Golden Boy won't exert any kind of influence over the editorial choices in the magazine. He said he just wants the magazine to be more mainstream, more like Golf Digest. I warned him just don't make it like Oprah and put himself on the cover every week. The O is taken already anyway.

Here's the press release from Golden Boy.

The Book on Boxing Cards. Plus: Our Changing Profession

Adam Warshaw started collecting boxing cards as a kid when, at a card show, he saw some cool 1948 Leaf cards of Barney Ross and Benny Leonard and learned from reading the backs that the great fighters were Jewish. There weren't many Jewish players on the baseball cards he'd collected. But, as he would learn when he showed the boxing cards to his father, there had been plenty of Jewish fighters. One was a distant old cousin of his named Ray Miller, a lightweight of the 1920s and 1930s who'd fought Ross.

Now Warshaw is a construction and real estate attorney in Burbank, Calif., and one of the country's leading authorities on boxing cards. The fourth edition of his guide, America's Great Boxing Cards, is out and available for $40 through his website, americasgreatboxingcards.com.

As a collector, Warshaw discovered lost treasures. There were as many boxing cards in the early years (the first part of the 20th century and earlier) as there were baseball cards, he says. He discovered boxing cards dating back to an 1862 John C. Heenan. But he found very few checklists for card sets or other resources. “I thought, “My God, here's a field that has no information out there,'” he says.

So he became the resource.

“I'm still working on some checklists," he says. "The 1948 Leaf is done. Ringside [a 1951 Topps set] is done. I just finished the La Salle Hats checklist [a small set from the 1930s depicting lightweights]." In 2008, Warshaw plans to expand his website to include checklists and images of many cards.

Boxing cards aren't produced much these days. The sport has lost kids as fans, and card collecting begins with kids, he says. Of course, the high values of some collectibles are fueled by kids who never really grew up. The rare 1948 Leaf Rocky Graziano, which was pulled from the market and never distributed, is worth as much as $20,000. As best as Warshaw can tell, four are confirmed to exist.

"It's the [Honus] Wagner card of boxing," he says. “One of my friends has one.”

Our changing profession: Two stories, both just out, examine the strange and evolving business of boxing journalism. Tom Hauser, at SecondsOut.com, explores the glories and agonies of the free food that promoters lay out for journalists at press conferences and fights. Steve Kim, at MaxBoxing.com, points out how newspaper coverage of boxing has declined. Nobody can dispute that sad trend, though I would suggest his report of the death of boxing coverage at the Philadelphia Inquirer is greatly exaggerated.

Boxing Versus Tennis

Rafael Nadal has an 8-5 record versus Roger Federer. Every time they play -- and they may meet again at the end of the current U.S. Open -- it's still exciting. It's good TV. Can you imagine two boxers fighting each other 13 times? Who would watch?

Sugar Ray Robinson fought Jake LaMotta six times. By today's standards that would he unheard of, mostly because of the brutality of boxing. Ward-Gatti XIII? It would be sickening.

But there's something else. Losses count so much these days in boxing. In tennis, losses are just history. Somehow, watching tennis, we are better able to appreciate that at the highest levels of competition, it is all about which guy brings more on that particular night. We get it that one match is just one match, and it doesn't need to settle for all time which athlete is superior. That ought to be the case in boxing too. In boxing, what a guy brings into the ring on a particular night, mentally as much as physically, is as important as training and skill. But, no matter, we weigh losses so heavily. If one guy beats another twice, we consider the matter settled.

Rod Laver went 75-66 in matches over Ken Rosewall, according a pre-Open story on tennis rivalries in the New York Times. Winning was all about who came with his best game. This isn't a suggestion that boxing should push its most fierce rivalries beyond fighting trilogies, to pentilogies and dodecadilogies. It's just a reminder to myself that often a loss in the ring can be merely an off night from a good fighter.

Hey, I'm not the first boxing guy to compare the sport to tennis. In Larry Merchant's 1976 book Ringside Seat at the Circus, a compilation of his mid-Seventies columns from the New York Post, Merchant writes: "Tennis has supplanted boxing as our main one-on-one game." Both have faded since then. Maybe one-on-one isn't enough enymore. Now an individual athlete -- Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, the NASCAR driver of the week -- has to beat the world for his sport to be popular.

Let's hit the links: At BoxingScene.com, Cliff Rold says he's tired of pound-for-pound rankings, in part because they are meaningless. A couple of looks at the tough Paterson, N.J., background of junior welterweight Kendall Holt, who fights Saturday night: Michael Woods at ESPN.com. Tim Smith in the New York Daily News. Keith Idec in the Herald News writes that Henry Crawford, an undefeated prospect also from Paterson, is out of luck this week. He'd been on the card to fight this Friday night in Atlantic City, then been switched to the undercard of Vargas-Mayorga. When that bout was postponed, Crawford couldn't get back into the ESPN2 show at Boardwalk Hall.

Floyd on "Dancing with the Stars" & Vargas' Bad Blood

ABC announced today that Floyd Mayweather Jr. will compete in the next season of Dancing with the Stars, which begins September 24. Based on a thorough analysis of Mayweather's stance and style -- a study performed by viewing video of his actions in every pro fight he's had -- I predict his dance on the show will look like this:





In other news: I don't mean to be cruel here. But the postponement of the Fernando Vargas - Ricardo Mayorga fight, because Vargas reportedly is suffering from anemia, reminded me that his fight with Oscar De La Hoya was called "Bad Blood." Yuck. I hope Fernando is feeling better soon.

On Resurrecting the Champ

There's the old line that, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As sports journalists we look at the world, and we bang it into stories. Stories, 20 or 30 or 40 inches of gray text on the page, are our way of packaging life, in a format constrained by the medium, trying to make it burst back into color for readers. Stories are the containers we fill up after we walk around and make calls gathering up the things we learn. But always there's a risk of confusing journalism's most prized form -- the perfect story -- with its real purpose, which is getting at the truth.

Resurrecting the Champ, which opens on Friday starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett (trailer above), is a boxing movie and a newspaper movie, and it draws a melodramatic connection between the two professions: "A writer, like a boxer, must stand alone. The truth is revealed, and there's nowhere to hide."

In the film, a newspaper writer (Hartnett) desperate to impress his editors finally finds the story that will give him his big break. He encounters a homeless man (Jackson) who claims to have been a former championship contender. He writes his guts out. In the movie, the story is published and hailed as brilliant, and then, well, the truth comes out. The movie is based on a 1997 Los Angeles Times Magazine article by J.R. Moehringer, whose article about his own experiences told the whole story.

I haven't seen the film yet. It looks like a terrific newsroom movie, the second of the year after Zodiac. More to come.

some links:
Official movie site
Interview with Alan Alda, who plays the editor
Interview with Hartnett

Trials and Tribulations

The U.S. Olympic boxing trials start on Monday, and advance press on the tournament to qualify for the 2008 Olympic team has been out there, if you know where to find it. This piece at EastsideBoxing.com previews the competition in each weight class. And papers around the country are featuring local boxers who are traveling to Houston hoping to make the team. To sum up: for most of the boxers, the opportunity is the culmination of a lifelong dream, and they are going into the trials confidently, having seen a lot of the other guys in competition before.

The Mining Journal, of Michigan, features five fighters from the United States Olympic Education Center in Marquette who will be competing in Houston: 119-pound David Clark, 178-pound DeRae Crane, 201-plus-pound Nate James, 106-pound Keola McKee and 112-pound Bruno Escalante.

The San Bernadino County Sun tells readers about 106-pounder Malcolm Franklin. The Army News looks at Colorado-based 119-pounder Alexis Ramos. Robert Rodriguez took a circuitous route to the 125-pound trials, as the Rocky Mountain News explains. Bernard Fernandez made the cover of the Philadelphia Daily News this week with a feature on 141-pounder Danny Garcia, while Garcia's 141-pound rival Dan O'Connor of Massachusetts gets a write up in the Metrowest Daily News. The Las Cruces Sun-News gives the details on 178-pounder Siju Shabazz. Also in the 178-pound division is Montana's Nick Swan, as detailed in the Great Falls Tribune.

Also in the news: Over at ESPN.com, Michael Woods takes an interesting look at Russian/Australian knockout artist Victor Oganov. At the same site, I have done up a chart at looking at Evander Holyfield, Oliver McCall, Riddick Bowe, the many boxers aged 40-something who are still punching, hoping for another shot. And Don Stewart cooks up popularity makeovers for underappreciated boxers including Mikkel Kessler, Chris John and Ivan Calderon.

Oscar in Esquire + Riddick's Manicure

I've been thinking for a couple of days about the piece in the September Esquire, the one where Chris Jones calls Oscar De La Hoya "the last boxer." I'm not sure exactly what that means. I guess it's about De La Hoya being the last big star in boxing, and about the idea that his fight with Floyd Mayweather was more promotion than action -- and thereby symbolic of the fading sport. That's sort of a story we've seen before, in the regular boxing press and some mainstream media, even amid all the "Can this bout save boxing?" stupidness.

Jones says boxing has lost its luster because it isn't brutal enough anymore. "Boxing was doomed," he writes, "because it now lacked all of the things that it had once offered in abundance: first and foremost, the chance that someone might get killed." In a sidebar, he suggests the sport could get back its thrill by making championship fights 15 rounds again. But he trumpets the popularity of mixed martial arts, which is known for quick stoppages; the Chuck Lidell - Quinton Jackson UFC match that, he says, fight fans left boxing behind for, lasted less than two minutes and basically ended on one punch.

Boxing is a mess. But no one who watched the recent wins by Michael Katsidis and Israel Vazquez can honestly (or even metaphorically) say that De La Hoya is the last boxer, or that those bouts needed 15 rounds to be completely brutal.

Chronicle of Riddick: Yes, Riddick Bowe is contempalting coming back, again, having just turned 40. His planned fight against the very unsuccessful boxer Paul "Rocky" Phillips may or may not happen. This story in the Dayton Daily News focuses instead on a trip by Bowe and Phillips to get manicures and pedicures together. Talk about brutal. One thing is certain: the nail salon is a safer place for either of them than in the ring.

Also in the news: Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News looks at the forthcoming season of The Contender, which will feature guys in the 170-pound neighborhood. He focuses on Camden/Philly light heavyweight Max Alexander. Other notables in the cast include David Banks, Sakio Bika, Jaidon Codrington, and Sam Soliman.

Jose Torres Wedding Crashers

I just noticed it, but last week's issue of The New Yorker had a cool "Talk of the Town" piece about a mysterious old wedding film that somebody found in the garbage in New York. A boxing poster in the background of one shot in the 16mm film provides a lead for solving the mystery, and soon it's discovered that it is a home movie of Jose Torres' wedding in the early 1960s. A good read.

Boxing's All-Time Records

If Hank Aaron's all-time home run record can fall, are boxing's most cherished all-time records vulnerable too? It's an interesting question. Then you realize: hey, does boxing have any most cherished all-time records? Are there any historical numbers that make sense, compared to today's? Are the old stats really reliable? Does the proliferation of world titles, and therefore of title defenses, render any historic comparison of that feat kind of useless?

Let's see what we have. Boxing all-time records aren't easy to find. I hate to go to just some random page, but this one looks informative. It says the most all-time knockouts in boxing is 145, by Archie Moore. Moore sounds right. But Boxrec.com has Moore with 131 KOs. So who knows. Is most knockouts boxing's most prestigious all-time record?

Most consecutive knockouts: 45 by Lamar Clark from 1958 through 1960. I'm counting 44 straight on Boxrec, but it's impressive either way. I've also heard occasionally about Edwin Valero's record of 18 straight first round knockouts to begin a career, a milestone that Philly junior middleweight Tyrone Brunson just tied this summer and seems likely to break, the way he's tearing through fighters with losing records in New Zealand lately (does that even count?).

There was much talk a couple of years ago about Bernard Hopkins' breaking of Carlos Monzon's all-time record of 19 middleweight title defenses. But the first 12 of Hopkins defenses defended only the IBF title, at a time when other middleweight champs were simultaneously working on their own defense streaks. Does that mean anything?

I like this one: Most "title fight rounds"

1. Emile Griffith - 339

2. Abe Attel - 337

3. Hilario Zapata - 303

4. Julio Cesar Chavez 301

5. Sugar Ray Robinson - 288.

But possibly the most unassailable record in professional boxing appears to be held by Reggie Strickland, who chalked up 276 losses.

Of course, maybe the attraction of boxing is the immediacy of The Event, and the inherent chaos surrounding it. Each fight is its own thing. It happens, and then we're on to the next one. There are no season schedules or games behind or magic numbers. It's just: who's next? We don't have reams of stats sheets to analyze before and during a fight, in part because they don't matter (and when we do get them, they're usually partly incorrect). The murky history, the absence of squeaky clean recordkeeping and rotisserie-ready data, is all part of the charm.

In the news: Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News takes a nice look at the career of Bronco McKart, who fights in Philly this Friday night. William Dettloff in his Ring Update looks at the legacy of Erik Morales. Norm Frauenheim in the Arizona Republic and Michael Hirsley in the Chicago Tribune give their own postfight takes on Morales-Diaz. Dan Rafael wraps up recent action at ESPN.com.

Ms. Understanding

Well, apparently, to some magazines, boxing is little more than a metaphor for poltical battles, and boxing gloves are merely objects, pieces of hide, to be exploited on magazine covers. I guess we're all used to this kind of treatment in the media by now, although you'd think that by 2007 things might finally be different.

Morales Clause

Has there been a title fight in recent memory where pundits seemed so concerned about the health and welfare of one of the fighters, before it started?

Leading up to tonight's David Diaz - Erik Morales lightweight title bout in Chicago, a lot of ink and pixels have been consumed wondering if Morales (only 30 years old but 48-5 in a 14-year pro career) really should be doing this. Writers have been looking at El Terrible's recent record (four losses in his last five fights) and the way he lost his last fight (battered by Manny Pacquiao in their rubber match, and wisely quitting on the canvas) and thinking twice about what to think as Morales goes for his fourth title.

"It was a sad sight to see when the once iron-chinned Morales crumpled under a hail of punches and sat on his backside, arms wrapped around his legs, shaking his head 'no' as he took the full count from the referee," Dan Rafael at ESPN.com writes.

At BoxingScene.com, Cliff Rold writes: "We all know that Morales, as a man, has always been willing to suffer great punishment. That’s what should worry anyone who cares." Patrick Kehoe, also at Boxingscene.com, wonders if it's Morales' internal fire as much as his skills that has dimmed: "When a fighter cannot find reasons to care about battling on, no matter his possible fate, he succumbs, he’s pulled downward, gravity affixing the tonnage of violating doom, collapsing everything that makes winning possible." Violating doom cannot be good thing.

In other news: The buzz is already building for Kelly Pavlik's challenge to middleweight champ Jermain Taylor, Sept. 29 in Atlantic City. Keith Idec in the Herald News says Taylor-Pavlik will lead off an exciting Fall for championship boxing. Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News wonders if the fearless Pavlik could become a sort of Arturo Gatti-replacement for fans in Atlantic City. In his Update column at The Ring's website, William Dettloff suggests that competition for fans from mixed martial arts has prodded boxing promoters into making better matches, like Taylor-Pavlik and tonight's Rafael Marquez-Israel Vazquez rematch.