85th BWAA Dinner Photos

photos by Ray Bailey

Manny Pacquiao with his Fighter of the Decade award

Pacquiao with Bob Arum, BWAA President Jack Hirsch and Freddie Roach

Tomasz Adamek with Ed Keenan and crew

Erin Boyd accepts the A.J. Liebling Award for her father F.X. Toole from Bernard Fernandez.

Photo award winners Chris Farina and Will Hart with Barney winner Tom Hauser

HBO's Max Kellerman with Terrance and Tommy Lane, sons of Mills Lane.

Wallace Matthews with Manny Pacquiao and Joe Frazier

Jack Hirsch and Bernard Fernandez with a special award for events coordinator Gina Andriolo

Photo award winner Rafael Soto with Sean Sullivan

Bill Gallo, Harold Lederman, Don Steinberg

George Chuvalo with his award for courage.

Punching Stamps

So Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, as of today, are together on an official Ukrainian postage stamp. Finally, someone will be able to lick them (ugh, sorry). The stamps are for 1.5 Ukraine Hryvnia -- about 19 cents according to this conversion site.

Sending mail inside paper envelopes is a dying art in the age of Twitter, but in Europe, at least, boxing isn't. Over there they put current boxing heroes on stamps. In the Philippines too: in 2008 they came out with a Manny Pacquiao postage series, honoring several of his hairstyles.

In the USA, snail mail and boxing both have that strong aroma of nostalgia, so we choose to put old-school champs on our official postage. There have been four pro boxing champs on U.S. postage stamps, starting with Joe Louis in 1993, then Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey in 1999 and Sugar Ray Robinson in 2006. Palau, Micronesia and other countries (not all of them exotic locales for the Survivor series) have placed Muhammad Ali on postage. So far no James Toney, though. And Floyd Mayweather Jr. is probably holding out for getting his face on money. Also, there are websites now where you are allowed to put your own image of almost anything on a legal U.S. postage stamp.