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.