Undercard

Is This the End For Peter Manfredo Jr.?

2011-11-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

Ron Borges has an extended look at Peter Manfredo Jr. ahead of his fight this Saturday against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., a fight that might be the last one for Manfredo before he retires.

"Manfredo, like Khan-Clary, was once a promising amateur, but that was a dozen years ago, back before his face had taken enough shots to rearrange it and long before he understood why they call boxing the hurt business.

"Now he’s on the other end of it, a fighter with one last opportunity in a career that’s running out of them. As he ages, The Boxer becomes one of two things. He becomes deluded or a realist. Peter Manfredo Jr. is not delusional."

Aging Peter Manfredo goes after Julio Chavez Jr.’s belt / The boxer gets one last title shot (Boston Herald)

A Darn-Good Dozen: Barrera, Marquez, Morales and Pacquiao

2011-11-17T13:53:00.001-08:00

Cliff Rold looks back over the past dozen or so years at the dozen fights that have come between Marco Antonio Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez, Erik Morales and Manny Pacquiao.

"Twelve Years... Twelve Fights: Ranking a Boxing Rivalry" (BoxingScene.com)

Pacquiao-Marquez III: Clash Creates Controversy

2011-11-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

The third bout between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez was the kind of fight that had everyone talking beforehand and everyone talking afterward. Let us get everyone talking, then, with writers supplying a form of oral history:

Joe Maxse, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer: The judges have spoken, but not many in the crowd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Saturday night wanted to hear what they had to say.

Ron Borges, The Sweet Science: After Glenn Trowbridge and Dave Moretti concluded Pacquiao had defeated his arch nemesis, Juan Manuel Marquez, and Robert Hoyle saw it as no better than a second draw in three meetings between them, the sold out crowd of 16,383 began to boo lustily, reaching a crescendo that drowned out Pacquiao’s post-fight words until he finally left the ring with a sad look of embarrassment on on his face.

Kieran Mulvaney, ESPN.com: There were times on Saturday when Pacquiao looked befuddled, as though he had forgotten everything that trainer Freddie Roach taught him. For all the talk that Pacquiao was the much-improved fighter, it looked on occasion as though Marquez was the one who had adapted better.

Santos A. Perez, Miami Herald: Manny Pacquiao may have overwhelmed larger foes during the past three years, but familiar nemesis Juan Manuel Marquez remains the proverbial thorn inside his shoe. Not given favorable odds to win, Marquez was on the verge of finally defeating Pacquiao in Marquez’s third bout against Pacquiao late Saturday in Las Vegas. Marquez adeptly counterpunched and landed crisp lead shots that may have finally been sufficient to defeat Pacquiao after two previous unsuccessful tries.

Bryan Armen Graham, Sports Illustrated: Marquez (53-6-1, 39 KOs), a 7-to-1 underdog who'd appeared vastly out of his depth in his only previous fight above lightweight, looked better than anyone expected from the opening bell, staying away from Pacquiao's power in the early rounds and peppering him with well-timed counterpunches. The Filipino champion had trouble getting inside and landing shots, finding his hyperkinetic flurries thwarted regardless of his tack or pace. Marquez even managed to rock Pacquiao several times, most notably by gigantic right hands in the fourth, fifth and seventh.

During those the middle rounds Pacquiao was as apprehensive as he's looked in years, wary of the counters, as confounded by the Marquez riddle as he was when they met at featherweight in 2004 and super featherweight in '08. (They fought Saturday at a catchweight of 144, or 14 pounds above their most recent fight.) He was doing enough to bank a few rounds and keep the Mexican challenger from running out too far ahead, but it was clear the more disciplined Marquez was in control. After nine rounds, the fight was there for Marquez to take.

And then he took his foot off the gas.

Jake Donovan, BoxingScene.com:Then came the 12th and final round, where Marquez did anything but seal the deal. Of all points in the fight where he could’ve slowed down, he chose to pick the point where the fight was very much on the table on at least two of the three judges’ scorecards. Pacquiao was the much busier of the two, even if not very many punches were scoring. Enough left hands did score, however, for Pacquiao to take the frame on two of the three judges’ scorecards.

Chris Mannix, Sports Illustrated: What Marquez proved is that if you are a brilliant counterpuncher, if you have excellent footwork and if you come into the ring without the slightest trace of fear of Pacquiao, you can beat him. Think about it: Pacquiao and Marquez have fought 36 rounds now and, with the exception of one or two, every one of them has been close. History will officially record that Pacquiao won two of those three fights but many will say that Marquez deserved to win all three of them.

David P. Greisman, BoxingScene.com: It's impossible to settle a score when the scores don't settle anything.

In Memoriam: Smokin' Joe Frazier

2011-11-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

Where there was Smokin' Joe, there were rumbles and thrillas. There were his three Fighter of the Year awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America (1969, 1971 and 1975). There is the name of the "Fight of the Year" award that the BWAA bestows each year, an award named after his legendary heavyweight trilogy with Muhammad Ali.

Ali was the Greatest of All Time, and Frazier was there with him, two greats who made each each other greater, two men who pushed the other to the limit, then pushed themselves even further.

We lost a great one on Monday, Nov. 7. Joe Frazier had been diagnosed barely more than a month ago with liver cancer. He was 67.

His greatness had been known in these decades since, paid tribute to in articles, in books and documentaries. We want to hold onto the great ones for as long as we can. He is gone too soon.

Wally Matthews, writing for ESPN New York:

Smokin' Joe Frazier became a fighter in Philadelphia and a legend in New York.

He did it on one magical night: March 8, 1971, when Frazier turned in what was arguably the greatest athletic performance ever seen under the gaudy ceiling of Madison Square Garden 4.0, and what was among the top five performances ever by a heavyweight champion in the history of our oldest and most demanding sport.

Willis Reed's entrance in Game 6 of the 1970 NBA Finals might have rivaled it for drama, and some might say Michael Jordan's 55-point game against the Knicks in 1995 matched it for skill, but no athlete has ever owned the big room the way Frazier did the night he won that epic first battle with Muhammad Ali, the one that was so big it was billed simply as "The Fight."

He did it with a body too short and arms too stumpy for a heavyweight, with a style that demanded that he eat two shots for every one he landed, and against a man who was really not a fighter but an exquisitely proportioned and coordinated ballet dancer who happened to carry a brick in each fist.

Frazier was unforgettable that night, giving so much of himself that he spent the next month in a hospital, and for a time there were serious concerns that he might die. He was dangerously dehydrated and his kidneys were shutting down. His blood pressure soared. At the time, no one outside his circle knew that for most of his career, Frazier was an insulin-dependent diabetic.

All the world knew was that few men had ever paid a higher price in the single-minded pursuit of victory than Frazier did that night.

"Frazier, both his eyes nearly swollen shut, was not allowed to come out for the final round by trainer Eddie Futch, who told him, 'Son, no one will forget what you did here today.' And no one did - not then, not now, probably not for as long as two determined, courageous men test their wills and their skills in a roped-off swatch of canvas while wearing padded gloves." ~ Bernard Fernandez, Philadelphia Daily News

"In the ring he was the epitome of a warrior. He was simply fearless. He fought every minute of every round in his career, always coming forward, always applying pressure, his left hook ready - and able - to dispatch of anyone in his path." ~ Tom Archdeacon, Dayton Daily News

"They fought three times, twice in the heart of New York City and once in the morning in a steamy arena in the Thrilla in Manila in the Philippines. They went 41 rounds together. Neither gave an inch and both gave it their all. In their last fight in Manila in 1975, they traded punches with a fervor that seemed unimaginable among heavyweights. Frazier gave almost as good as he got for 14 rounds, then had to be held back by trainer Eddie Futch as he tried to go out for the final round, unable to see." ~ Tim Dahlberg, Associated Press

"That neighborhood is in the City of Brotherly Love, his home since he was 15, and a place that he is synonymous with. So if you’re a fighter from Philadelphia, that’s the legacy you need to live up to. You can’t quit, you can’t give an inch, and you can’t back down. You fight until you just can’t fight anymore. That’s a Philly fighter, and that’s Joe Frazier." ~ Thomas Gerbasi, BoxingScene.com

"His final record stands at 32-4-1 with 27 KOs. But wins and losses are besides the point when you ponder Frazier's legacy. His determination, his burning desire to go forward, to leave every ounce of what he had to give in the ring, placed him in the top 1 percent of any boxer, in any era." ~ Michael Woods, ESPN New York

"Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier. And for all the deserved accolades for Muhammad Ali, I’ve always believed that each at his best, Joe Frazier, who died Monday night at age 67, was the better fighter. And the better man." ~ Dave Anderson, The New York Times

Thomas Hauser of TheSweetScience.com recalls a visit Joe Frazier made to press row in 2008.

Kieran Mulvaney of ESPN.com looks back at the Ali-Frazier trilogy.

Who to blame for Mayweather KO4 Ortiz

2011-09-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

Joe Maxse, Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Ortiz and his camp called them 'sucker punches,' but after butting Mayweather on purpose three times, with referee Joe Cortez taking a point away after the third violation, Ortiz should not have reverted to Mr. Nice Guy against a wounded opponent."

Thomas Hauser, The Sweet Science: "Legal or illegal, it was a sucker punch. ... Also, one can argue that, when Ortiz took the fight into the gutter with a flagrant foul, he was inviting an equally unsportsmanlike response. And let’s be honest. If the reverse had happened; if Mayweather had deliberately head-butted Ortiz and Victor responded with a sucker-punch knockout, many people would be saying today that Floyd got what he deserved."

Mike Coppinger, BoxingScene (via RingTV.com): "Victor Ortiz took the fight to the streets, and Floyd Mayweather finished it in the streets. That headbutt was one of the most egregious fouls I've seen in a long time, and Floyd's supposed to be happy about it?"

Michael Woods, The Sweet Science: "If we're parceling out blame, Cortez has to receive the lion's share, because he is there to keep order. When in the fog of war, when emotions boil over during a stressful time, the ref has to be the voice of reason, the person to keep order. Cortez didn't. He was neither firm, nor fair, he was flawed."

Ron Borges, Boston Herald: "The heavily pro-Ortiz crowd booed, but their man had gotten what he asked for and what he deserved. He tried to make it a street fight and when it turned into one it didn’t last for long."

Doug Fischer, RingTV.com: "...both fighters behaved unprofessionally and the manner in which the fight ended was bad for the sport."

Tim Dahlberg, Associated Press: "If Mayweather deserves criticism it’s probably not for the two punches that ended the fight prematurely. He didn’t need to berate HBO’s Larry Merchant in the post-fight interview in the ring, which the 80-year-old responded to by saying he would beat up Mayweather himself if he was 50 years younger. And he didn’t need to press his claim that Pacquiao uses steroids when there is no evidence to indicate Pacquiao does anything other than train well and fight even better."

Tim Smith, New York Daily News: "But the real sucker in this was Ortiz, who should have realized you can't deliberately foul someone and a few seconds later think they're going to bring you a bouquet of roses. Not in boxing."

George Willis, New York Post: "Ortiz went overboard in seeking forgiveness. He first kissed Mayweather on the cheek and then was slow to defend himself after referee Joe Cortez let the two fighters engage after taking the point away."

David Mayo, The Grand Rapids Press: "Maybe Victor Ortiz should’ve played within the rules, because the one thing he said Floyd Mayweather was, in pre-fight build-up, was a dirty fighter. The way Mayweather dealt with Ortiz’s own dirty tactics showed, at least, that he knows how to deal with them."

Bryan Armen Graham, Sports Illustrated: "Always protect yourself. It's the first rule of boxing. And one that Victor Ortiz picked the wrong time to forget Saturday against Floyd Mayweather."

Bill Dwyre, Los Angeles Times: "The fight was over. What Mayweather had done was basically legal. The fight was back on and the niceties were over. Mayweather was the more experienced fighter. He has lived through the wars and knew that when there is an advantage, you take it."

Ryan Maquinana, BoxingScene.com: "Well, let’s get two things straight. The two punches were legal, and Victor Ortiz has only himself to blame for being unprepared for them, regardless of Joe Cortez’s best efforts to ruin another televised fight by turning a blind eye to the action. ... But in the whole grand scheme of things, Mayweather robbed himself of a chance to really silence his detractors on Saturday. Rather than leaving no doubt by dominating Ortiz without controversy, he opened himself up for criticism and debate from the general public about whether or not what he did was ethical."

Khan-Judah: Chin It to Win It?

2011-07-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

Will we see one of these moments unfold in Khan-Judah?

Remembering George Kimball

2011-07-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Image credit: Boston Herald

The most renowned fight scribes earn that status, their staying power a product of dedication to the sport and the written word and the desire and ability to reach readers over the generations.

The boxing world lost one of its more renowned scribes this week. George Kimball passed away from cancer at the age of 67, dying after a battle that dated back to 2005.

"Many people engage in a flurry of activity when they’re in their sixties to make up for time lost when they were young," writes Thomas Hauser, memorializing Kimball for The Sweet Science. "George was determined to make up for time that he knew he would lose at the end.

"Over the next six years, George was living, not dying. He was as content and productive as most people are at any time in their lives.

"He added to his legacy as a writer by authoring Four Kings (the definitive work on the round-robin fights among Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran). That was followed by Manly Art (a collection of George’s own columns about the sweet science). He also edited two anthologies with John Schulian (At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing and The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song)."

Hauser's memorial includes an article he wrote about Kimball in 2004. It can be found here.

Kimball's longtime newspaper, Boston Herald, ran this memorial. Here's an excerpt:

"The Herald meant more to him than he ever let on, especially to his employers and superiors. George was a columnist here from 1980 to 2005, a quarter of a century. Here is where he made the transition from Angry Young to Grand Old. Here is where he got to have the most fun there is, being a big-city tabloid sports columnist. Here is where he found professional true love No. 2: boxing writing.

"He expressed his gratitude by trying to make reading as enjoyable as he found writing. A series of shared misadventures — too long for newspaper space allows me to state — illustrates that one of George’s dominant personality traits was a love of mischief. That’s a very good attribute for sportswriters, and a better one for their readers."

At the Boston Globe, columnist Bob Ryan penned this tribute to Kimball. Among the highlights:

"Long before he began treating Boston readers to his musings, he was a published novelist and contributor to many diverse "literary" publications having nothing to do with sports.

"You can look all this stuff up.

"But the reason why so many of us will miss George Kimball is, shall we say, his off-the-field self. If one were to conduct a poll of local writers, broadcasters, team officials and even players who have worked in Boston during the last 35 years or so, the question being, "Who is the most absolutely memorable personality you have encountered in the writing business?" the runaway winner --- perhaps even the unanimous choice --- would have to be George Kimball.

"That is, unless you know of some other bearded, one-eyed, chain-smoking, beer drinking, pot-bellied (I say this lovingly) vegetarian writer friend of Hunter S. Thompson who never saw a party he didn't like."

Rest in peace, George.

In the Arena

2011-07-07T07:06:00.001-07:00

Maybe you never watched Eliot Spitzer's news/talk show on CNN. Maybe that's one reason why it's just been canceled. But Spitzer did leave with a farewell quote from Teddy Roosevelt that I think all of us boxing writers would be smart to keep in mind. Here's a snippet of the sign-off:

SPITZER: That's it for tonight. This is my last program. And I thought the best way to sign off is with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt. It is, in fact, the passage from which we took the title of the program "IN THE ARENA."

Here it is: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood which strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Thanks for watching. Good night from New York.

Klitschko-Haye: The Buzz Before The Big One

2011-07-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

Image from fightnews.com

This is the big one. This is not just a fight between two of the three best heavyweights in the world. This is not just a fight that has been talked about for years.

This is the big one, the biggest fight that can be made that doesn't involve taking some guy named Manny Pacquiao and getting him in the ring with some guy named Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Wladimir Klitschko's fight with David Haye is Saturday afternoon (evening in Germany, where the fight is being held). This is the big one. And with the big-fight feel comes that big-fight buzz. We want to see what's going to happen. We don't know what's going to happen. We say we know what the result will be, and we argue why that will be the case. But we don't know, and that is why we tune in. And we will definitely tune in.

This, after all, is the big one.

This is a fight between a Ukrainian and a Brit, taking place in Germany. This is a Klitschko fight being shown on HBO, once commonplace, now a rarity.

Tim Smith of the New York Daily News looks at the situation:

"He [Klitschko] is already a megastar in Germany and Eastern Europe. His last five fights have been in Germany before sellout crowds and massive TV audiences (13 million people tuned in to see him beat Sam Peter in his last fight). He has endorsement deals with Hugo Boss and Mercedes. His face graces the covers of national magazines. His fight with Haye has been front-page news here for the past week.

"But Klitschko is an invisible man in America. He hasn't fought in the U.S. since a lackluster performance against Sultan Ibragimov at Madison Square Garden in 2008. He wants to return to the U.S. to wipe out the stench of that fight and could do it with a match against Chris Arreola if he can get past Haye Saturday."

Those are the larger stakes for Klitschko. The fight itself is much more immediate. Gabriel Montoya of MaxBoxing.com sets the table, giving the storyline on David Haye's end:

"For two years, David Haye has been talking about taking out a Klitschko, telling everyone and anyone that he can beat both brothers, even signing to fight them before pulling out of the fight (at the time, Haye cited an injury) because his promoter at Setanta Sports was having financial issues. For two years, after printing T-shirts of the brothers – both decapitated - and saying he would rid the boxing world of the boredom that is a Klitschko fight, the moment has finally arrived. Though many will take the 'I’ll believe it when the bell rings' approach, on July 2, David Haye finally will attempt in the ring what he has been trying to do in the press when he squares off against Wladimir Klitschko in the Imtech-Arena, Altona, Hamburg, Germany."

Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated believes a Haye win, which would end Klitschko's long reign, would be a good thing for boxing.

"The Klitschko Era has been impressive, but not always entertaining. Wladimir has tried to endear himself to America. He splits time between Miami and Los Angeles, has dated an American actress (Hayden Panetierre) and isn't averse to enjoying the night life. But his stoic demeanor and consonant-heavy name haven't sold many tickets and don't have casual fans looking for HBO.

"Haye could. He claims he will retire at the end of this year, but the potential embarrassment of riches that await him in the U.S. could change that. Haye could reboot the division and storm through the contenders in the States. Haye-[Chris] Arreola is a good fight. Haye-Tomasz Adamek, the Polish-born ex-cruiserweight champion who fights out of New Jersey, is another. Haye would have the full-throated support of HBO, which would jump at the chance to give another [Floyd] Mayweather-like personality a platform, and of a public starved to anoint someone as [Lennox] Lewis' heir."

For Wladimir Klitschko, a win over David Haye would be the crowning jewel in his heavyweight rain, the pinnacle of his resurrection from ruin.

For David Haye, a win over Klitschko would make all the trash talk and all the waiting worthwhile, all from one stunning win. Any other talk – about whether Haye should retire next or blaze through the heavyweight division instead – is premature.

We have Klitschko-Haye to talk about first. This is the big one.

Profile of BWAA Member Lem Satterfield

2011-06-20T12:38:00.001-07:00

I hadn't known when I'd moved back to my hometown that there was another BWAA member there: Lem Satterfield, a longtime reporter for The Baltimore Sun who'd moved on to become the boxing editor and writer for AOL Fanhouse and is now one of my colleagues at BoxingScene.com.

I took a job last year running a local news website. Lem's story is one worth telling. It is a story that Thomas Hauser put on paper many years ago. And his is a personality that area residents should know about.

Mike Coppinger, a member of the BWAA who is based out of New Jersey, wrote a profile for the Columbia Patch website.

Here's the first paragraph:

In many ways, Lem Satterfield is a fighting man, but not in the manner those words initially suggest. He is a boxing writer who covers the best and biggest prizefighters in the world. He is a longtime journalist who is trying to succeed in the transition from writing for newspapers to writing online. And he does all of this while recovering from cancer.

And here's the link to the rest: http://patch.com/A-hsDm

International Boxing Hall of Fame Induction Weekend

2011-06-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Image credit: boxrec.com

They are three more big names whose careers will be enshrined within the confines of a small-town museum. This weekend, Mike Tyson, Julio Cesar Chavez and Kostya Tszyu will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, located in Upstate New York in Carmen Basilio's hometown of Canastota.

Here's a sampling of what writers are saying of their accomplishments. And for a full list of this year's inductees, please click here.

Let's start with Bernard Fernandez of the Philadelphia Daily News, introducing the legend of Chavez:

"Tales of what Chavez did, or was capable of doing, grew so tall south of the border that they took on a mythical quality, something akin to the legend of towering woodsman Paul Bunyan in the upper Midwest. And the thing is, most of those stories were true, or mostly so."

Graham Houston, writing on ESPN.com, expands on why:

"At his best, Chavez was an almost perfect fighting machine. He was a relentless aggressor who punched hard and fast, and never seemed to tire. If Chavez got caught by hard blows, he could shrug them off, as he showed when withstanding a full-impact right hand from Roger Mayweather -- something of a Thomas Hearns of the lighter weight classes—in a 1985 bout.

"No, Chavez said afterwards, Mayweather hadn't hurt him. "I have too much chin," he said through an interpreter.

"Too much chin, too much everything, for the opponents who faced him."

Dan Rafael, in an entry on ESPN.com, has Mike Tyson reflect on his own career:

"I'm going in with guys like Stanley Ketchel and Jack Johnson, guys who lived colorful lives," Tyson said. "I wanted to be like them even though they were tragic at the end. But what lives they had. They had interesting lives. I wanted to live like them, like Mickey Walker, Harry Greb. Those guys had no boundaries. That's who I wanted to be. I wanted to be heavyweight champion. I wanted to conquer everyone. I looked at boxing different than most people. It was about destruction and pain and 'nobody can ever stop me.'

"Back then, I lived by those comments. I was the best in the world and nobody could beat me. It was a weird journey."

And Greig Johnston of Sportal in Australia said Kostya Tszyu defined himself by what he did after his first pro loss:

"With those around him urging him to quit, Tszyu, at 28, did the hardest thing of all – he changed.

"The second part of his career was even more impressive than the first, as Tszyu reinvented himself as a more intelligent fighter, no longer content with trying to bludgeon his opponents into submission.

"He embarked on a 13-fight unbeaten streak, the high point of which was a second-round knockout of Zab Judah in 2001 to unify the junior-welterweight division, something no man had been able to achieve in over 30 years."

R.I.P. Genaro Hernandez

2011-06-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

It is an unfortunate truth that, for as much as we appreciate our prizefighters while they are in the ring, such appreciation tends to fade in the years that follow, returning only once they are truly and permanently gone.

Genaro Hernandez passed away this week at 45 after an extended battle with cancer, a battle which he fought as valiantly as he did while between those ropes. So many have noted their affection toward him and their appreciation of him—Hernandez the fighter, the commentator, the man—during that battle. And it is in tribute to who and what he was that their affection and appreciation has been written so that those who did not know Genaro Hernandez can, at the very least, know why he was appreciated.

Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports spoke to promoter Bob Arum, who said:

“He was everything you could have wished for in a boxer and an athlete, but he was a wonderful person. He trained hard, he didn’t engage in trash talk. He had respect for his opponents and the sport. He was a great warrior. The way he handled this cancer was amazing. He never gave up and fought as hard as he could, and he handled it with so much class. He was as good as they get. As a fighter, as a commentator and as a man, he was always the perfect gentleman.”

Dan Rafael of ESPN.com spoke with Hernandez's broadcast partner, Rich Marotta:

"I had the good fortune to call many of Genaro's fights, from early in his career when he was appearing in prelims at the Irvine Ballroom to his days as a world champion at the Forum to his biggest fight against Oscar De La Hoya at Caesars," Marotta said. "He was the same guy through all of that, friendly, accessible to all and simply one of the finest athletes I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with. He was still the same guy, with the same accommodating demeanor, in the years following his boxing career as a ringside commentator."

Steve Kim of MaxBoxing.com:

"There was an everyman quality and a certain normalcy to Hernandez and in many ways, he was the embodiment of that. While he had a storied career and made some money, he still had to go out into the real world and make a living for his family as he retired, which was just fine by him. If that involved boxing, even better. What Rudy [Hernandez, Genaro's brother and his trainer] will remember most about his brother is, 'that he never thought he was better than anybody else and that his whole thing was if he could only be treated equally to a guy who was a four-round fighter, then he could be happy with that. It took him a long time to get used to the fact that people called him ’champ’.' "

CompuBox ended its tribute to Hernandez on BoxingScene.com with this fitting conclusion:

"From the time his struggle with cancer became known, he was the focus of countless prayers. But cancer doesn't care who it strikes or how much agony it inflicts. It places no merit on whether its victim has a loving family or a deep and diverse circle of friends. All it wants to do is conquer its host. Once it attacked Genaro Hernandez, however, it met a fierce, fiesty and unyielding foe that never shied away from a challenge. But in the end Hernandez's bravery and strength of character wasn't enough—and that's only because it couldn't have been enough.

"If there is one silver lining in this grim circumstance it is this: The boxing fraternity had ample opportunity to show Hernandez just how loved he was. They came in the form of countless e-mails, events to raise money for his treatment, private and public donations for said treatment as well as the Bill Crawford Award for 'perseverance in overcoming adversity' from the Boxing Writers Association of America in 2008.

"His 13-2 record in title fights spread over seven years and two reigns is one of which to be proud. Perhaps someday he will receive the ultimate honor—induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. But even if he doesn't achieve that status one thing is beyond argument: He was a Hall of Fame human being."

Remembering Bill Gallo

2011-05-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: Enid Alvarez for the New York Daily News

The passing of Bill Gallo is not just the loss of one of the boxing journalist fraternity, but also the loss of one of the forefathers to this modern era of boxing coverage, a writer and artist and International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee whose work dates back decades, transitioning from before and during the times of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell to the days when the Internet allowed any number of us loudmouths to attempt to have a voice in boxing.

Through all this, Gallo's voice was a distinguished and recognizable one, not just in boxing and not just in New York City, but encompassing a number of sports and beyond the five boroughs.

Gallo died May 10 at the age of 88. Here's just a sampling of what people are saying about him. Please feel free to add your own memories below.

Omar Minaya, former general manager of the New York Mets (via ESPN New York): "If you grew up in New York over the past 40 years or so, he was just a part of New York life. You woke up in the morning, opened the Daily News sports page, and at some point in time you would go to Bill Gallo."

Michael Woods, The Sweet Science: "Though his ardor for the sport dimmed somewhat as sanctioning body silliness and promoter's tomfoolery increased in recent decades, Gallo communicated his love of the game and the special athletes who make boxing the sport to which all others aspire to."

William Grimes, The New York Times: "Unlike many cartoonists, he resisted formulas. To recreate the 1971 title match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, he gave readers at least half a dozen key moments in the fight, all within a single cartoon panel. When Thurman Munson, the catcher for the Yankees, died in an airplane crash in 1979, he gave full rein to sentiment, showing two boys despondently leaving a sandlot as the head of Mr. Munson looked down from above."

Yes you were, Bill. Yes you were.

Klitschko vs. Cowboys and Aliens

2011-04-26T07:35:00.001-07:00

Maybe the Summer film you're waiting for is Cowboys and Aliens, or the 55th Harry Potter one. I'm hoping to see Klitschko. It's at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.

Frazier Beats Ali -- March 8, 1971

2011-03-08T00:14:00.000-08:00

"In a classic 15-round battle, Joe Frazier broke the wings of the butterfly and smashed the stinger of the bee tonight in winning a unanimous decision over Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden," Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times.

It was March 8, 1971, 40 years ago today.

"Frazier, with an unrelenting pursuit and a brutal body attack, wore down the dancing, jabbing Ali through 14 rounds, then sent him crashing to the canvas and pounded him at will in the final round to retain his championship with a unanimous decision," the UPI wire story reported. Ali's jaw was hurt and he was taken to a hospital. "I don't think he wants a rematch -- not right away," Frazier said, in the AP stor y.

Frazier won the Fight of The Century that night -- but it's mostly Ali people are remembering today. GQ put him on the cover in February, for the second time in three years, this time as one of the "25 Coolest Athletes of All Time" (in 2007 it was for being one of the "50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years.") Whatever. Inside, GQ runs three quotes about Ali, from Don King, Norman Mailer, and...Garry Shandling.

At The Sweet Science, Bernard Fernandez has a new piece looking at the syndicate of Philly guys who bankrolled Frazier (and later banked profits) as he turned pro and started winning big purses.

The keepers of Life magazine are releasing a gallery of photos from the 1971 fight and its build-up -- photos that, they say, are previously unpublished, though I know I've seen this one (top right) before. The whole pictorial is worth checking out -- it's right here.

Little But Big, B.A.D. But Good (Part Two)

2011-02-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Chris Cozzone

Let us postscript this past Saturday's fight between Nonito Donaire and Fernando Montiel, with our writers' words providing a form of oral history:

Jake Donovan, BoxingScene.com: The talent long ago suggested that Nonito Donaire was destined for greatness. All that he needed was the big wins to match the potential.

Saturday night provided that part of the formula, in a very big way.

Kevin Iole, Yahoo Sports!: Montiel looked stiff when the fight began and paid a price early when Donaire raked him with a straight right in the opening moments. About a minute or so later, Donaire ripped him with a left hook that seemed to bother the champion.

Donaire, who was poised and calm throughout, knew long ago that it would be an early night. He said he told trainer Robert Garcia right before Christmas he would knock Montiel out in the second.

He was true to his word, knocking Montiel down with a vicious left hook and then a right uppercut that was totally unnecessary. Montiel was laying on the mat, with his legs twitching.

“I hit him with a left hook, I looked down and he started twitching,” Donaire said. “I knew the fight was over.”

It should have been, but, incredulously, referee Russell Mora let it continue. Montiel fell on his first attempt to get up and didn’t respond to Mora’s command to walk toward him when he did arise. However, Mora walked to Montiel, wiped his gloves and somehow saw fit to allow the bout to move on. Donaire landed two punches before Mora then jumped in.

Bart Barry, 15rounds.com: Even serious boxing fans were forgiven their disbelief at Saturday’s spectacle. For most of us, after all, Nonito Donaire was the guy who stretched Vic Darchinyan on Showtime 40 months ago, left promoter Gary Shaw and disappeared into promoter Top Rank’s farm system, making reportedly excellent if alliterative progress on Pinoy Power pay-per-view programs.

By 2010 Donaire was lost to the public. While specialists knew of his technical acumen, most everyone else assumed Top Rank already had its Filipino superstar in Manny Pacquiao – and one was enough. Rabid as boxing’s supporters in the Philippines were, there was only so much money to be squeezed from the world’s number 46 economy.

How well Top Rank has handled Donaire’s career is debatable. How well Top Rank has developed Donaire as a prizefighter, though, is not.

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com: A star is born. Donaire, with a massive knockout against a top-notch opponent in a much-anticipated fight, took his career to a new level and stamped himself among the handful of the best fighters in the world. Montiel, 31, of Mexico, a three-division titleholder, had not lost since 2006 and had established himself as the No. 1 bantamweight in the world by virtue of his impressive knockout of Hozumi Hasegawa last year to unify a pair of alphabet belts. Yet Donaire -- "The Filipino Flash" -- erased him in violent fashion to claim his 118-pound belts.

Little guys usually don't score such huge knockouts. Donaire, 28, a longtime flyweight titlist who also briefly held an interim belt at junior bantamweight before moving up in weight again in December, is not just any little guy. He's special.

Little But Big, B.A.D. But Good (Part One)

2011-02-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

Let us preview tonight's fight between Nonito Donaire and Fernando Montiel, with our writers' words providing a form of oral history:

Robert Morales, Long Beach Press-Telegram: Fernando Montiel and Nonito Donaire are both promoted by Bob Arum, which made it easy for them to become fairly good friends.

But they say that won't matter tonight when they square off for Montiel's two bantamweight world titles at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas (on HBO).

Thomas Gerbasi, BoxingScene.com: The anticipation leading up to this bout is reminiscent of the lead-up to the bouts between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez, and stylistically, it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to suggest that Montiel and Donaire can deliver the same kind of intense action. Of course, given the disappointment of last month’s highly-anticipated Superfight between Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander, containing your excitement level has become a necessary requirement of being a boxing fan these days. Montiel says not to worry, because he’s bringing it, and he’s willing to take all the risks necessary to beat his foe.

Jake Donovan, BoxingScene.com: HBO takes a rare peek into the bantamweight division.

Even if it’s not the norm, a matchup pitting a pair of bona fide pound-for-pound entrants is way too tempting for anyone to pass up.

“The Montiel-Donaire showdown features two of the most accomplished little men in the sport,” states Kery Davis, Senior Vice President of Programming for HBO Sports. “It’s as good as any match-up you will see in the smaller weight classes.”

It’s also as good as any Boxing After Dark fight that has been shown in recent – and perhaps even distant – memory, as none of the B.A.D. entrants from 2010 certainly measured up.

Michael Rosenthal, RingTV.com: Ask an expert who he believes will win the Fernando Montiel-Nonito Donaire fight on Saturday and he or she will probably sigh before serving up an answer with minimal conviction. Donaire is a 3-1 betting favorite but most believe it’s a pick-‘em fight.

We'll return after the fight for part two.

Pacquiao-palooza

2011-02-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

This TMZ/Entertainment Tonight/Us Weekly 24-hour-news-cycle generation has served to make cult figures of celebrities. Manny Pacquiao was already a national hero in the Philippines and a superstar in the boxing world.

Now?

Now you half expect there to be people on street corners handing out pamphlets letting you know all there is to know about Pacquiao.

Did you know that Manny Pacquiao's haircut is not modeled after Justin Bieber but rather is in tribute to Bruce Lee?

Did you know that Manny Pacquiao has a sizable lump near his right wrist that comes from something called Gideon's Disease?

Did you know that Manny Pacquiao's name is ubiquitous?

Bob Arum and Floyd Mayweather Jr. were seen sitting together at the Super Bowl. What does this mean for a possible fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather?

Who in history would Saul Alvarez most want to fight? Manny Pacquiao.

"[T]here are web sites where writers go out of their way to force a certain popular Filipino fighter’s name into every single article to drive search-engine traffic their way," writes Eric Raskin in a guest post on the stellar Queensberry Rules blog. "How pathetic. I would never do something like that."

Raskin's sums up the madness with his next thought in the piece:

"Manny Pacquiao is good at boxing."

Heck. Manny Pacquiao is great at boxing. And he's great for boxing. Can we start talking about Manny Pacquiao AND boxing again?

Thank You(Tube)

2011-02-09T07:03:00.001-08:00

It was hidden away on the non-televised portion of the undercard to Timothy Bradley vs. Devon Alexander, but that doesn't mean it was hidden away to all. There's such a thing as the international feed, and there's such a thing as YouTube.

Some are touting Kendall Holt's first-round knockout of Lenin Arroyo as an early candidate for knockout of the year (praise not just the person who loaded this video, but also from Steve Kim of MaxBoxing.com).

I'm not as high on it. I don't think the camera angle helped, and I don't believe the blow was "stand up from your seats" good. Still, here it is:

Bradley-Alexander: Coming Up Short

2011-01-31T10:19:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Carlos Baeza/Thompson Boxing Promotions

Writers don't have venom tongues so much as they venomous ink – if they are disappointed or angry or unhappy, they will let you know by letting the venom ink flow.

So when Timothy Bradley vs. Devon Alexander – a fight with great expectations – turned out to be a woeful clash of styles, writers dug into it with pleasure. Or with displeasure.

Dan Rafael of ESPN.com:

"Talk about a disappointment. Bradley-Alexander, the first unification fight between two undefeated American titleholders in 24 years and only the third ever, was supposed to launch the winner, and maybe even the loser, to stardom, if it had been a great fight. Instead, it was a giant dud.

"The fight, fought before a crowd of 6,247 at the Silverdome, was competitive all the way with several very close, hard-to-score rounds. But the fight was not pleasing to watch. It was messy and never found a flow, and it ended in ugly fashion after yet another head-butt badly rattled Alexander."

Jake Donovan of BoxingScene.com led off with this in his post-fight recap:

"Dead atmosphere. Disappointing action. A major fight that ends on a butt and not a punch.

"Not exactly the ideal return to the big time for a sport desperately in need of a shot in the arm."

Bart Barry of 15rounds.com framed part of his story around his encounter with Bradley at the airport:

"Bradley was exhausted, busted up and bandaged, his left eye swelled shut from accidental collisions with Devon Alexander’s head. He was also the world’s best 140-pound prizefighter – if anyone cared.

"It appeared no one did. And that was fitting a footnote as any to the weekend’s depressed and depressing event, a spectacle billed as “The Super Fight” that filled little more than five percent of Silverdome’s available seats in Pontiac, Mich."

Ouch.

All of these words sting nearly as bad as Alexander's eye must've after that final head butt.

The Big Stage, The Big Screen, The Big Challenge, Two Big Guys

2011-01-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

The Big Stage

Inside a large domed football arena this Saturday will be Devon Alexander and Timothy Bradley. So many other writers have weighed in on the economic side of things. But here's a Michigan man, David Mayo of The Grand Rapids Press, discussing what this fight could mean to the state.

Lem Satterfield of AOL Fanhouse, while not from Michigan, says Detroit needs this fight.

The Big Screen

Kieran Mulvaney of ESPN.com looks at a fascinating documentary on modern bare-knuckle boxing.

Murray Greig of the Edmonton Sun has his top 10 boxing movies.

The Big Challenge

Mixed martial artist Nick Diaz wants to try out boxing, says Franklin McNeil of ESPN.com.

Two Big Guys

George Kimball of The Sweet Science kept a secret for a long time – Why did Butterbean get knocked out by Mitchell Rose way back in 1995? Here's the answer...

And Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated takes a look at Chris Arreola and his new, supposed dedication to training.

What's The World Coming To?

2011-01-25T10:49:00.001-08:00

Don't call us nattering nabobs of negativism. There's plenty of good news out there – for just one example, there's Thomas Gerbasi's feature on Kevin Cunningham, trainer to Devon Alexander, on BoxingScene.com.

But blog posts are better made when they're not just roundups, but when there's an overriding theme. And so there's these:

Thomas Hauser of SecondsOut.com has the behind-the-scenes stuff on how the flagship boxing network, HBO, lost the top boxing star, Manny Pacquiao, to Showtime.

John Whisler of the San Antonio Express-News has the story of drama involving a South Texas amateur boxing organization.

Tom Archdeacon of the Dayton Daily News looks into the dangers of Toughman contests, which returned to his city last week.

And Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times says the newly launched World Series of Boxing is already in major financial trouble.

No need to pile on with the poor ticket sales for this Saturday's fight between Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander...

That's What Sheed Said

2011-01-21T14:07:00.000-08:00

There was a report on NPR this week saying that writer Wilfrid Sheed has died, and it took me a second to connect the name to the first boxing book I ever bought. I got Muhammad Ali: A Portrait in Words and Photographs probably a year or so after it came out in 1975, because I remember I used to stretch my teenage budget by shopping for big, glossy books about movies and sports at the discount table, where a lot of good ones eventually landed.

Of course I was drawn to the book by the awesome Neil Leifer photos. Ali looked great. He was cool. So were Frazier and Foreman and Liston. I tore out some of the 9-by-11 photo pages for my wall. I can't say I read the book cover-to-cover. I always figured Sheed was a grizzled sportswriter along with all the other guys I was reading then -- Dick Schaap, Stan Fischler, Ray Fitzgerald at the Boston Globe, Pat Putnam in Sports Ilustrated. The obits say Sheed was a satirical British essayist and novelist. His two biography subjects were Ali and Claire Boothe Luce. But looking back -- I still have my tattered copy of the book -- this is good stuff:

The face has been flattened ever so slightly by the hammers of Mars, and there is some reluctant scar tissue around the eyes. Yet he looks the better for it. Narcissus probably had a dull face without all those ripples on it -- a few rounds with Frazier would have helped him too. Ali's eyes themselves are deadly weapons, black as carbon and jabbing in every direction, from impassive surroundings.

Oh, Holy... Field.

2011-01-18T14:21:00.000-08:00

Evander Holyfield loves boxing. And boxing fans loved Evander Holyfield. But there's a reason why the 48-year-old heavyweight – who will enter the Hall of Fame five years after he finally retires, if and when he finally retires – is fighting in a lesser venue against a lesser opponent and would be getting less attention of his fight wasn't coming on an otherwise empty weekend.

Tim Dahlberg of the Associated Press:

The problem is Holyfield hasn't had a good fight in years, unless you count his win over equally ancient Francois Botha last April a good fight. It wasn't, and there's no body of evidence in boxing that the older fighters get, the better they get.

It's the exact opposite, of course, as it is in all sports. But other sports don't involve getting hit repeatedly in the head.

The fighter who helped make the '90s a good time for the heavyweight division might be emboldened in his quest by the knowledge that the cupboard is painfully bare among boxing's big guys. Take away the Klitschko brothers and Britain's David Haye, and there's not a whole lot left in the division.

But Holyfield is never going to get a fight with the Klitschkos or Haye, much less beat them. He's stuck fighting guys like Williams and Brian Nielsen, who is coming out of a nine-year retirement to fight Holyfield in Denmark in March.

Still, he soldiers on, fighting for paydays a fraction of the $35 million he made to fight Tyson the second time around. He's had recent money issues and a payday is a payday, but listen to Holyfield talk and you get the feeling he really does think he can be heavyweight champion again.

To listen to the above promo is like listening to a commercial for a Monster Truck rally. All noise. Little substance. SATURDAY! SATURDAY! SATURDAY!

Santos A. Perez in The Miami Herald:

Holyfield, who turned 48 in October, refuses to join his former rivals in retirement. As much as strict state commissions deny Holyfield fights, there always is a willing location, opponent and promoter.

Now, instead of fight Meccas such as Madison Square Garden and Las Vegas, Holyfield settles for venues overseas or in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., site of his bout against Sherman Williams on Saturday night. Fight organizers, still trying to bank on Holyfield's name recognition, somehow gave this bout a pay-per-view tag.

But does Evander Holyfield truly need to retire?

If you'll pardon me linking to myself on very, very, very rare occasions, I asked that question this week:

Holyfield could not be that ageless wonder in the past decade. He will not be that ageless wonder now.

But he has not been damaged despite fighting on against opponents the caliber of Bates or Maddalone or Savarese or Botha. He should not be in any danger against Williams or Nielsen.

Holyfield is a fraction of what he once was. As is Roy Jones Jr. As are numerous other faded former stars. And commissions must take that into account should these faded stars want to face those who have replaced them at the top.

There is a tremendous difference between how Jones looked against Jeff Lacy and how Jones looked against Danny Green and Bernard Hopkins. There is a tremendous difference between Holyfield standing across from the men he has beaten – and even the titleholders, Ibragimov and Valuev, he has lost to – and him being in the ring with Haye or the Klitschkos.

If athletic commissions will still allow the men Holyfield has beaten to fight, then the same commissions must allow Holyfield to fight as well.

We can say this now. But time, unlike nearly every fighter to enter the sport, remains undefeated.

The Talk

2011-01-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

Not everything is flowery prose and dramatic storytelling and witty turns of phrases. Sometimes the best thing to do is just to get out of the way of the subjects and let them speak. And sometimes writers don't need to write at all, but rather will report, ask questions and let the answers speak for themselves. The above segment with Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander carried much more power to it than any other minute-long production HBO could've put together.

The beauty of the Internet is that should a writer choose to publish an interview on its own, rather than turning it into an article, it is welcomed because doing so is suited to the short attention span that often comes with reading online. And much like Muhammad Ali saw that television would give him a channel to use his mouth to amplify his stardom, boxers have taken to the Internet to sell their fights.

Writers, of course, are willing to oblige.

Kieran Mulvaney, writing for ESPN.com, talked to Emanuel Steward, trainer to Wladimir Klitschko, about the dangers that Klitschko's next foe, Dereck Chisora, presents.

Jake Donovan of BoxingScene.com gives voice to a junior welterweight many boxing fans have never seen, much less heard from – Kaizer Mabuza, who is to face Zab Judah in a title fight.

Lyle Fitzsimmons, also of BoxingScene.com, has Evander Holyfield making a case for himself continuing to fight.

Robert Morales of the Long Beach Press-Telegram did some interviews that hyped a potential fight between Devon Alexander and Amir Khan even while Alexander still has an upcoming tough unification bout with Timothy Bradley.

Lem Satterfield, meanwhile, has this interview with Bradley on AOL Fanhouse.

And while it was brief, Richard Cloutier, writing for BoxingScene.com, talked to Lucian Bute in a reminder that there is a top super middleweight who is waiting in the wings for Showtime's tournament to come to an end.

What fights and fighters are you talking about?

In With The New...

2011-01-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

It's easy to get caught in nostalgia, to look back at the great fighters and the great fights of decades past. Nostalgia means name value, which is why we still see Hector Camacho and Evander Holyfield and an assortment of long past-their-prime fighters still step in the ring (or why we see Buster Douglas in what might be the worst amateur commercial contest entry ever).

That, and they need money.

We will never be completely out with the old. But we are in with the new.

Thomas Gerbasi of BoxingScene.com talks to prospect Demetrius Andrade and the disappointing 2010 he had just two years after turning pro out of the Olympics:

Still unbeaten as a pro, still on most pundits’ Top Prospects lists, Andrade nonetheless only fought three times last year against pedestrian opposition and ate some backlash from fans and those in the media, including ESPN commentator Teddy Atlas.

Yet the 22-year old from Providence, Rhode Island took everything in stride.

“I just basically keep it moving, keep focused, and I try not to pay too much attention to it,” said Andrade, who chuckled when asked if this is what he signed up for when he became a professional boxer.

“Not at all. I didn’t expect a lot of things outside of boxing to happen. It’s crazy.”

For a taste, just look at Andrade’s social media output. Usually used just as a marketing tool, his webpage and Twitter account provided a glimpse into what he was going through.

Twitter - May 24 - My fight was cancelled last week due to my opponents arrest. My next fight is scheduled for June 18 at Northern Quest Casino in Spokane, WA.

Twitter - June 21 - My June 18 fight at Northern Quest Casino was cancelled, due to my opponents medical condition. Check my tweets for info on my next fight!

Webpage – September 23 - “I want to say to my family, friends, and fans that I've been reading things online regarding my father and myself. I'd like to set the record straight by saying, he's still my dad and he will always be in my corner. It is to my father’s credit that I am, where I am, today. My father is still a key person in my life and will always be.”

Add in a new baby, and it’s kind of amazing that Andrade was able to fight at all, but he did, he kept his “0” and now it’s on to what he hopes will be a better 2011.

There is a new television series centered around boxing called "Lights Out." Michael Woods, writing for ESPN.com, sets the premise of the show:

The pilot was screened on Wednesday night at the Hudson Theater on West 44th St., and 13 episodes are in the can. The FX production crew rounded up a slice of the boxing Hall of Fame to drum up hype for the series, which stars Holt McCallany, who some might remember played Teddy Atlas in the 1995 TV movie "Tyson." He looks plausible playing ex-heavyweight champ Patrick "Lights" Leary, who takes a fierce pounding in his final bout and is convinced by his wife to exit the savage milieu. Money woes compel him to go against his better judgement, and take a collection gig offered by a gangster.

Threatened with a doctor's warning that he might show effects from brain damage soon, the New Jersey resident Leary also contemplates a return to the ring, with a purse of $10 million dangled in front of him, as his wife Theresa (Catherine McCormack) and three daughters pray he doesn't lace 'em up again. Stacy Keach also seems at ease in this swirl of violence, tenderness and crises of identity, understandable considering one of his signature roles was that of descending pug Tully in the 1972 film "Fat City."

And there is a new slate of fights to look forward to. Here's a great schedule of the opening months of 2011, put together by Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.

Some Goodbyes...

2010-12-31T14:46:00.000-08:00

Cyberboxingzone.com – Image Credit

The end of the year is meant to be cathartic, a symbolic purging of the negatives of the last 12 months, a filing away of everything positive as we look toward what is to come and what must be done.

That requires saying some goodbyes. This last week brought the death of respected Philadelphia middleweight Bennie Briscoe. How respected was he? Let us turn to the Philadelphia Daily News, which this week re-ran an article by Elmer Smith from 1983 following a tribute that year to the retired fighter.

They rang the final bell on Bennie Briscoe's career last night in one of Philadelphia boxing's most decent and dignified hours.

Undisputed world middleweight champion Marvin Hagler, boxing Hall of Fame inductee and five-time world champion Emile Griffith, former light-heavyweight champion Eddie Mustafa Muhammad and a dozen other local and nationally known figures took turns at Palumbo's microphone to recall the wars they fought with Bad Bennie and to wish him the best.

They talked about how hard they had to train to get ready for a night with Bennie during the years when Philadelphia was still a "must" stop on the route to the top of the middleweight rankings and how they tried to build their reputations on Bennie's bald head.

And they told about how a fight with Bennie Briscoe told them more about themselves than it did about him.

The article includes several quotes from Briscoe's opponents. It's worth reading, even 27 years later.

Meanwhile, Murray Greig of the Edmonton Sun takes a look back at someone lost long, long ago: former heavyweight champion Tommy Burns, the man whom Jack Johnson would defeat to gain that crown. Greig's timing is apt, for it was 102 years ago that Greig faced Johnson:

The Little Giant. Hercules of Hanover. The Canadian Crusher.

None of the colourful nicknames Tommy Burns earned in the ring appear on the nondescript bronze plaque that marks his grave at Ocean View Cemetery in Burnaby, B.C.

There’s just a single line proclaiming him, “Heavyweight boxing champion of the world, 1906-1908.”

When I recently visited the cemetery office to ask directions to the champ’s final resting place, the matronly woman behind the desk seemed genuinely impressed.

While checking an oversized diagram of more than 1,000 numbered gravesites in Section B of the sprawling property, she wanted to hear the request again. “A boxing champion? A real world champion is buried here? I had no idea ...”

The past is easily forgotten. After all, each year we purge the negatives of the last 12 months, file away the positives and direct our attention to what is to come.

But history must always be written.

Boxing: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

2010-12-28T16:19:00.001-08:00

There are down times in boxing, periods when there are no big fights for several week, periods such as the time between Dec. 18 (when Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins fought to a draw) and Jan. 29 (when Devon Alexander and Timothy Bradley meet in a battle for junior-welterweight supremacy).

There is no offseason, however, no need to force the news with talk of hot stove leagues or draft picks or scouting combines. There is always a recent run of fights to review. There is always an upcoming fight to preview. There are fighters to feature, issues to discuss.

Tim Smith of the New York Daily News was one of many taking aim at the May 2011 fight between Manny Pacquiao and Shane Mosley:

[T]he news of Mosley being the next Pacquiao opponent isn't surprising or disappointing. Actually it makes perfect business sense - low risk, big reward.

It is merely par for the course with how Arum promotes Pacquiao, but if you want to blame someone for Pacquiao fighting Mosley, blame Pacquiao because ultimately he's the one who decides who he wants to fight. All Arum does is outline the financial particulars and negotiates the contracts with the various parties involved with staging the fight.

Thomas Gerbasi of BoxingScene.com had a feature on Wladimir Klitschko's rise to heavyweight prominence and his continued heavyweight dominance:

In the ring, Klitschko has matured into a machine that doesn’t have to worry about his supposed glass jaw because no one has even gotten close enough to touch it. He has developed a predictable “jab, jab, right hand, occasional left hook” gameplan into boxing’s version of the old Green Bay Packers sweep – you know it’s coming but you still can’t stop it. And for a fighter with a glass jaw, he hasn’t hit the deck since Peter put him down three times in their first bout (still won by Klitschko via decision) in 2005. That’s 83 rounds worth of heavyweight fighting without suffering a knockdown. Few can claim that these days.

And few in today’s heavyweight division can claim to have a legitimate shot at dethroning him.

Carlo Rotella, meanwhile, wrote for The Washington Post in memoriam about another big man: Manute Bol, the former basketball player and humanitarian who also had a connection to the sweet science, fighting on Celebrity Boxing in a fight, against William "The Refrigerator" Perry, that was neither sweet nor overly scientific.

The crowd grew restless because it wasn't seeing the flailing that makes incompetent fighters fun to watch, and the referee warned both men that neither would get paid unless they fought harder. Bol, who had agreed to appear on the show only if the name and address of one of his Sudan-aiding charities appeared on the screen, threw a few more punches and took an easy victory by decision.

Perry's feeble blows had not touched Bol, and, somehow, neither had the awfulness of the show. Just by carrying himself as he always had, holding some part of himself aloof from the lucrative childishness and triviality around him, he had managed to pass through "Celebrity Boxing" without humiliation. Another problem solved by standing tall.

Sometimes Truth is Stronger Than Fiction: Micky Ward and "The Fighter"

2010-12-24T09:12:00.000-08:00

Sylvester Stallone has fame and fortune. He has an Oscar, millions upon millions of dollars, and even a plaque in the International Boxing Hall of Fame, which has inducted him as an observer, and deservingly so, for his role as the writer and star of the "Rocky" movies.

Micky Ward toiled for 18 years and 51 fights, respected by those that knew of him, revered for what they saw of him. Rare was he in the headlines or under the spotlights, and even when he was, the amount of attention he received (and the amount of fame and fortune that comes from that) was less than what his real-life story deserved.

Ward's been retired for more than seven years now. He went out on top – even with two straight losses – with his trilogy of wars with the late Arturo Gatti. At last, Ward is receiving attention beyond the niche audience of boxing fans. He will never have the fame or fortune of a Sylvester Stallone – and he will never have a plaque in the International Hall of Fame (though when I visited he was referenced within the museum in Canastota).

But people will know who he was.

Sometimes truth is stronger than fiction. And while movie makers must take some liberties with his biography, there is "The Fighter."

Lem Satterfield of AOL Fanhouse has an interview with Ward about the movie.

So, too, did Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated.

Don Steinberg talked to Mark Wahlberg, who played Ward, in an article for The Wall Street Journal.

And the Sports Illustrated website had an interview with Christian Bale, who played Dickie Eklund:

We have reviews of the film from Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times, from John Whisler of the San Antonio Express-News, from Keith Idec on BoxingScene.com, and from Michael Rosenthal of RingTV.com.

Bernard Hopkins Does Everything But Make History

2010-12-20T06:53:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Tom Casino, Showtime.

He rose from two knockdowns. He won more rounds. He turned back time and the tide and the fight put forth by a champion nearly 18 years his junior.

He did everything but make history.

Bernard Hopkins' draw amazed in what the nearly 46-year-old was able to do, and so many of the writers who watched the fight gave him recognition that the judges didn't. Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins fought to a draw, a result that this scribe felt was fair but an ending that others felt robbed Hopkins – not just of what they saw as a rightful victory, but of a record as the oldest man to win a lineal championship.

Dan Rafael of ESPN.com:

"Hopkins turns 46 on Jan. 15 and deserved the decision, but didn't get it. Was it highway robbery? No. But he did more than enough to overcome flash knockdowns in the first and third rounds to dominate virtually the entire rest of the fight, a stunning performance against a [28-year-old] champion in his prime."

Bernard Fernandez of the Philadelphia Daily News:

"Hopkins has yelped about being on the wrong end of controversial decisions before, but maybe never one so obviously incorrect as the majority draw he was obliged to accept in Saturday night’s matchup with 28-year-old WBC light-heavyweight champion Jean Pascal in the Pepsi Coliseum."

This seemed to be the dominant theme among writers, though this scribe had it a draw, and Bart Barry of 15rounds.com actually found the fight 115-113 for Pascal:

"After the final bell sounded, Hopkins began to campaign for his victory. He protested a bit too much – almost like Marvin Hagler dancing after his final round with Sugar Ray Leonard. It was for the judges, you figure. The cards they returned, really, were fine. Hopkins’ reaction was the usual. But he’d have made a more sympathetic figure of himself if he had tried harder for a knockout in the sixth, seventh and eighth rounds."

Lee Groves of BoxingScene.com analyzed the stats compiled through his role with CompuBox:

The CompuBox numbers certainly were in "The Executioner's" favor. He threw and landed more total punches (153 of 502, 30 percent to 86 of 350, 25 percent), attempted and connected on more jabs (24 of 191, 13 percent to 19 of 148, 13 percent) and governed the power punches (129 of 311, 41 percent to 67 of 202, 33 percent). The round-by-round breakdowns showed that Hopkins landed more total punches in 11 of the 12 rounds, with only a 9-9 tie in the fifth preventing a clean sweep in that category. In fact, of the 36 total categories, Hopkins held a commanding 27-2-7 advantage as Pascal's only edges were in connected jabs in rounds nine (3-1) and 10 (3-1).

All the numbers were in his favor, indeed, except for the two scorecards that made the result a majority draw. And one number not in his favor is his age. When – well, if – Hopkins gets another shot, he will be 46, another fight deeper into his career, more months of aging to defy.

Could Hopkins do it again? Hasn't he taught us to stop doubting him by now?

Don't Call Him Old News: Bernard Hopkins Takes on Jean Pascal

2010-12-17T08:38:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Luc Grenier

Let us let Bernard Fernandez of the Philadelphia Daily News set not only the scene for Saturday's fight between Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins, but also the theme for today's post.

The boxing ring, like the jungle, can be a savage place. Old fighters are like old lions; at some point a younger, stronger lion is certain to challenge the aging king for leadership of the pride. More often than not, youth must be served. It is called survival of the fittest, and it is nature's way.

Hopkins, of course, is the old lion in Saturday's fight. But he is a cagey and capable one, which gives him a shot at breaking the record set 16 years ago, when George Foreman, 45, knocked out Michael Moorer to become the oldest-ever world champion. On fight night, Hopkins will be 38 days older than Foreman was then.

Here's Don Steinberg, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Other fortysomethings have tried unsuccessfully to win crowns. Roberto Duran was 47 when he lost a bid to regain a middleweight belt in 1998. Evander Holyfield came up short in a challenge for the heavyweight title at age 46—and he's still active at 48. Saoul Mamby, a former junior welterweight champ, pulled a Minnie Minoso and came back for one fight at age 60—the oldest in a modern, sanctioned fight, though it wasn't a title bout.

These thoughts are not to give short shrift to the man facing Hopkins, the legitimate light heavyweight champion, Pascal. But Hopkins' quest for the championship is also a quest for history. Here's Jake Donovan of BoxingScene.com taking a look at the other side:

In that regard, Pascal’s involvement in such a historic event would be as the answer to a trivia question. Not surprisingly, Pascal’s view of this weekend comes from a much different perspective.

“It's going to be a good start for me to beat a legend to become a legend one day. Hopkins was the big name and that's why I chose to fight him… I want to fight the best to prove that I'm the best.”

Such proof should have come of his most recent performance, becoming the first to hang a loss on the career of rising young star Chad Dawson in their vacant lineal championship bout this past August.

Pascal tells Donovan that he actually welcomes the way the coverage has gone:

“For the first time, he has the pressure because if you read the magazines, if you read the newspaper, a lot of people in the States think that Bernard is going to defeat me,” Pascal points out. “Bernard has to back up his legacy. He's going out there with all the pressure.

“Even if I'm the champion, it doesn't matter because he's the legend. He's got the legacy. He has to back it up, his history. So, he has a lot of pressure over his shoulder and me, I'm going out there like the young lion with no pressure. I'm going to do my best to win this fight against a living legend, because I'm not supposed to beat a living legend.”

Ah, there's that phrase: the young lion.

By that law of the jungle mentioned by Fernandez at the top, the young lion needs to be able to take the old lion's place as ruler. It is not always just being younger (or the opponent being older) that leads to such a change. And so we leave with Adam Berlin's inside look at one young lion who delayed his challenge of an old lion. Berlin, writing for TheSweetScience.com, goes inside Alexander Povetkin's camp with a great look at the work trainer Teddy Atlas feels was so necessary that they declined a mandatory shot at heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko.

I have watched Teddy Atlas train Alexander Povetkin before and when I watch him I always think he is a teacher first. Working with Sasha in the ring, shouting out instructions as Sasha spars, stopping and starting the video session after each sparring session to go over the strengths and weaknesses of his fighter, pointing out openings, reinforcing lessons, revising the work, polishing it, Teddy Atlas does what the best teachers do. He teaches by repetition. He builds upon fundamentals. He molds and perfects, slowly, patiently, carefully. Atlas is literally hands-on...his hands are constantly on his fighter, demonstrating, guiding, maneuvering, relaxing.

Later:

Atlas puts his hand on Sasha’s shoulder and talks about the rounds, the translator earning his keep. “If you go by physical things that was your worst round. But it wasn’t. You were seeing, planning. Let’s not open the door and just look. Get to where you want to get to. Then do it. Do it with your feet. Do it with your upper body. Anticipate the next move. Anticipate the next position. Anticipate the next opportunity.” This advice is tailor-made for Povetkin, a tutorial based on the student’s strengths and weaknesses. Atlas’ analogies to make things vivid for his fighter, to create pictures that will clarify his boxing lessons, metaphors that will define the un-definable, open the door for more metaphors. Atlas as teacher, revising his student’s work. Atlas as sculptor, molding the clay, chiseling the rock.

Boxing is an exercise in seeing which sculpted figure will be made to shatter. Atlas is training Povetkin to fight in a way he feel will make Klitschko fall apart, whereas Klitschko has been chipping away at his opponents' wills for years now.

Saturday's fight between Pascal and Hopkins might not be a work of art. But we will either see a young artist or an old master taking control of the canvas.

Books: Ali Memories and Carver Boyd

2010-12-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

Occasionally in this space we'll showcase the writing in new boxing books by BWAA members. Today is a two-fer. First, Tom Hauser and Bart Barry have teamed up to create an exclusive title for Barnes & Noble, The Legend of Muhammad Ali, a coffee table book that contains some fine writing and removable reproductions of Ali memorabilia. Here's a little teaser from Chapter 8:

In one understated elegant gesture, Futch turned toward the referee and unfurled the fingers of his left hand. He would not allow the fight to continue.

Across the ring, Ali realized that the carnage was over. He stood up, lowered his head, and lifted his right glove in the air, more in relief than triumph. Then he allowed his body to slowly ooze to the canvas. Later, Muhammad would say that the fight had been 'the closest thing to death I know of.'

Hauser also has published a new boxing novel, Waiting for Carver Boyd, which Jerry Izenberg at Secondsout.com calls "better than anything he has written before, no matter how well he wrote it." Here's an appetizer:

That’s when I saw a woman about my age on the sidewalk walking toward me.

She saw me the same moment that I saw her.

She was as beautiful as any woman who ever walked on the face of the earth. Tall with long auburn hair and a body that I won’t try to describe because words wouldn’t do it justice.

Her face was as dreamlike as the rest of her.

The distance between us narrowed and there was a flash of recognition in her eyes.

“You’re the fighter,” she said.

Writer Roundup: Khan Survives Maidana; Agbeko, Mares Advance in Bantamweight Tournament

2010-12-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

Some storylines are natural, others artificial. Either will produce interest, at least so long as entertainment is promised.

The storyline to Amir Khan's fight with Marcos Maidana was natural: fighter perceived as having flaws facing fighter perceived as being able to expose those flaws.

The anticipated moment in the story of Khan-Maidana would come in Round 10. Michael Rosenthal of RingTV.com:

The problem was that Khan couldn't hurt the tough-as-they-come Argentine even though he landed 190 (of 360) power shots, the only exception being an excruciating body shot that put him down in first round.

That allowed Maidana (29-2, 27 KOs) to attack with abandon and land his own telling punches. He was able to score inside, many times with uppercuts, but he also landed some wild shots from a distance. That included the punch that instantly turned Khan’s legs into wet noodles.

Khan did more than save the victory however, Rosenthal writes:

It might be an exaggeration to say that Khan saved his career by surviving the knockdown and the final two rounds but that’s not far off the mark.

Had he lost, he would have suffered two brutal knockouts in a span of two years and been saddled forever with the reputation of having a weak chin. He probably never would’ve reached the heights he and many others have imagined.

With the victory, big things lie ahead. Richard Schaefer of Golden Boy Promotions, his promoter, said Khan probably will fight in April in England. He said Victor Ortiz, who drew with Lamont Peterson on the undercard Saturday, and Zab Judah are possible opponents.

After that, Schaefer said, he would pursue a showdown sometime during the summer with the winner of the Jan. 29 fight between Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander for supremacy of the deep 140-pound division.

Meanwhile on Saturday, there was the artificial storyline created by making a tournament between four of the top fighters in the bantamweight division. Beyond top fighters facing each other, there would now be the question of who would win and go on for a chance to install himself as the man at 118.

The pairing of Yonnhy Perez and Joseph Agbeko was actually a rematch of what had been a thriller, one which Perez had won. This rematch would not be a repeat, however, both in how the action fared and how it ended. Here's Doug Fischer, also of RingTV.com:

For nine minutes the two bantamweight rivals rekindled the energy they produced in their first bout by exchanging furious combinations in close quarters. However, Agbeko returned to his punch-and-move strategy at the behest of his corner, headed up by chief second Adama Addy, and controlled rounds eight through 12 to the degree that a discouraged Perez abandoned his trademark stalking and tried to box with the talented Ghanaian from a distance in the final three rounds of the bout.

The result was disappointingly one-sided in favor of Agbeko.

Abner Mares would take a split decision over Vic Darchinyan. Fischer, once more:

Mares (21-0-1, 13 KOs) suffered a nasty cut along his hairline in the first round that bled directly into his left eye during much of the fight. He was dropped in the second round, and docked a point from referee Bobby Howard for low blows in the fourth. The Southern California-based Mexican contender couldn’t have had a more difficult start to the most significant fight of his 5½-year career.

However, his rock-solid chin, dogged determination and concentrated body attack kept him in the fight long enough for his constant pressure and punches to Darchinyan’s midsection to pay dividends.

Although Mares continued to walk directly into the flush power shots of Darchinyan over the second half of the fight, he scored with sweeping left hooks -- one of which produced an off-balance knockdown in the seventh round -- until the older fighter was forced to retreat to the ropes and hold for dear life in the late rounds.

The storylines continue.

Khan moves on toward shots at the 140-pound throne, having proclaimed his viability in a division run by Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander. Agbeko and Mares will face each other in the bantamweight tournament's finals, while Darchinyan and Perez will meet for the consolation prize and a chance to regain some momentum.

No matter the origin of the the storylines, natural or artificial, these next chapters could be page turners.

Grab Your Popcorn – It's a Double Feature Weekend

2010-12-10T07:22:00.001-08:00

If only we had the late Don LaFontaine, the famed deep voice that boomed over all those movie trailers.

In a world... where Saturday night will be spent watching four of the best 118-pound fighters in the sweet science, Showtime is there to broadcast the action. Vic Darchinyan is The Raging Bull. Abner Mares is his challenger. Joseph Agbeko is King Kong. And Yonnhy Perez is there to attempt to shoot him down.

They star in the latest Star Wars extravaganza: The Bantamweight Menace.

And in a world... where Saturday night will also be spent watching HBO, particularly for its main event. Amir was a young man with fast hands but a questionable chin. Marcos Maidana was a man who waited all year to test that speed and that chin.

They star in the latest Star Trek extravaganza: The Wrath of Amir Khan.

Alas, we do not have LaFontaine, but we do have these previews of this weekend's action:

In actuality, Doug Fischer of RingTV.com, who's traveled from SoCal to Tacoma, Wash., to cover the Showtime card, sets the table for Agbeko-Perez as well as LaFontaine could have.

Yonnhy Perez and Joseph Agbeko fought a Fight of the Year candidate last October, and the bantamweight standouts will likely repeat their scintillating performance when they meet again in a rematch on Saturday on Showtime.

Perez-Agbeko II, one of the semifinal bouts of Showtime’s four-man bantamweight tournament, is a fight hardcore fans should be talking about but the buzz on the rematch is disappointingly low.

How can this be? The first fight, a title bout that Perez won by unanimous decision, was as good as boxing gets. Agbeko attacked with abandon in every round but Perez withstood the defending beltholder’s relentless volleys and fired back with controlled, accurate combinations. The unheralded Colombian eventually drew Agbeko into a furious inside battle, where he outworked the proud Ghanaian down the stretch of a thoroughly satisfying fight.

Fischer provides much, much more. Here's his article.

Tom Gerbasi of BoxingScene.com puts the spotlight on Vic Darchinyan:

“I’ve fought in 14 world title fights, he’s fought in one,” said the native of Vanadzor, Armenia. “I’m going to out-school him badly and prove to the whole world that I’m too good for him and anyone in this division. This fight is a mismatch. I am just too good for him.”

Mean. It has to be one of the first words that pop into your head when you look at Darchinyan’s eyes in the ring, at weigh-ins, press conferences, well, just about anywhere. For him, this is not a sporting event; it’s a sanctioned street fight, a brawl with rules, a way to settle a score that only he has in his head.

And that’s a gift, especially these days. Throughout boxing history, there have been numerous examples of the power of a mean streak. Stanley Ketchel, Harry Greb, Roberto Duran, Jake LaMotta, the young George Foreman, Sonny Liston, and Marvin Hagler, just to name a few. Sure, they fought to make a living, but you got the distinct impression that they would have done it for free just as ferociously.

We return to the aforementioned Fischer for his profile of Darchinyan's opponent, Abner Mares, and the story of why Mares trained at home instead of going to training camp.

As for the HBO card, Dan Rafael of ESPN.com talks to Amir Khan and his trainer, Freddie Roach, about how Khan has been able to rebuild his career since his stunning first-round knockout loss in 2008 to Breidis Prescott. Khan wilted under the pressure and power of Prescott. Why won't he do the same against Maidana? Here's Roach, via Rafael:

"He knows how to set things up now," Roach said. "He just doesn't go in there and look for a one-punch knockout. He knows how to break a person down, and he knows how to work behind his jab. He's just become a completely different fighter. We haven't lost a round since we've been together. I mean, we haven't lost one round."

But Maidana doesn't need to win rounds, according to Norm Frauenheim of 15rounds.com. He just needs to land the same punches that derailed Victor Ortiz, Frauenheim writes.

If this was a horse race, Maidana’s advertised chances Saturday night at Las Vegas Mandalay Bay would be about as good as a Clydesdale pulling a keg-filled wagon in six furlongs against Secretariat. It’s not. It is 12 rounds, thirty-six scheduled minutes and every second a chance for Maidana to unload a kick that damaged one prospect’s career with doubts that have yet to be eliminated.

Overlooked in this weekend's action is the HBO undercard featuring Victor Ortiz against Lamont Peterson.

Lem Satterfield of AOL Fanhouse describes Ortiz-Peterson as a fight for two prospects who still need to rebuild following losses to other top 140-pounders. Both Ortiz and Peterson chime in.

Please turn off your cell phones. Your feature presentations are set to begin.

Waiting for "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali"

2010-12-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

DC Comics published Superman vs. Muhammad Ali as a one-shot comic book in 1978, and until recently the only place to get a taste of what it contained was to win a rare copy in an eBay auction or scout around for homages on the Web. Now, the company has made it easier for everyone who digs a good intergalactic brawl by reproducing the classic in two new editions. There's a "Facsimile" that's a hardcover reproduction of the oversized (13.6 x 10.2-inch) original, and a less expensive "Deluxe" edition that's regular comic-book size and adds unpublished artwork goodies.

Ali in those days was pretty invincible. A 1975 pop-reggae song had labeled him the "Black Superman," and it did seem like he could lick anybody. In 1978 he lost to Leon Spinks and then beat Spinks, in the Superdome in New Orleans, to regain the title.

Fighting Superman himself would be a different story, and even more contrived than losing the title to a kid with 8 pro fights and winning it back. I won't spoil things, but basically, one day Clark Kent and his usual colleagues are visiting the inner city to see Ali train -- yes, they are boxing writers for the day -- and an alien materializes from a planet called Bodace. And he's not Ali's promoter. The guy says his race, the Scrubb, considers itself to be the most super-savage and warlike in the galaxy and wants to put its toughest guy up against Earth's toughest guy. Stop me if you've heard this before. Ali and Superman have to duke it out in a sort of eliminator bout to see who gets to fight against a heavyweight humanoid called Hun'ya who was molded by alien scientists to be the perfect warrior. And you thought the WBA was messed up.

You probably need to be a deep die-hard fanboy to hang on all the plot twists, but the book itself is an awfully cool collectible. As the comic explains, "intelligent beings from a thousand worlds" attended the Ali-Superman fight, and the book's front and back covers are like a "Where's Waldo" of 1978 celebrities sitting in the crowd: Johnny Carson, the Jackson 5, Donnie and Marie, Raquel Welch, Wayne Rogers. Hey, that's Sonny Bono between Batman and Jimmy Carter up front at ringside!

In Case You Missed 'Em (And Many Probably Did...)

2010-12-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

Photo Credit: TopRank.com

A fight-of-the-year candidate between two lightweight warriors in the main event. A top bantamweight showing off his talent on the undercard. All on an independent pay-per-view that likely received far less attention once its original main event attraction, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., dropped off the card.

And on the same night, a popular but relatively untested welterweight/junior middleweight prospect performed under his own spotlight. Except that spotlight was limited to HBO Latino – not quite the same as "World Championship Boxing" or "Boxing After Dark."

And so the battle between Humberto Soto and Urbano Antillon likely went unseen by the many who did not order Top Rank's pay-per-view this past Saturday. The same could be said for Nonito Donaire's beatdown of Wladimir Sidorenko.

Ditto Saul Alvarez's unanimous decision win over Lovemore N'Dou, which aired after midnight on HBO Latino.

Here are the writers on those fighters.

Dan Rafael of ESPN.com recapped Soto-Antillon:

It took all the way until virtually the last notable fight of the year, but it looks as though we have an honest-to-goodness leader in the fight of the year sweepstakes. Soto and Antillon turned in a brutal, back-and-forth slugfest that was a raging, competitive battle from the first bell to the last.

And...

Antillon's best chance to win was to make it an all-out brawl against Soto, a quicker and better boxer. Soto can mix it up, so when Antillon did drag him into a toe-to-toe battle, he had answers. By the third round, the fight had blown up into a true slugfest, as both men scored repeatedly.

And...

There were numerous heated exchanges in which both fighters landed hard shots, but neither backed down. In the end, it was a great fight with Soto getting the tight but deserved decision based on the point deduction. It was the fitting finale to what turned out to be a highly-entertaining Top Rank pay-per-view card from top to bottom.

Doug Fischer of RingTV.com had this on Donaire-Sidorenko:

Simply put, Donaire was too fast, too big, too strong and too powerful for the game but over-matched Ukrainian fighter.

He repeatedly rocked Sidorenko with left hooks and lead right hands in the opening round before putting the tough former beltholder down with a left uppercut-right cross combination just before the bell.

And...

It was arguably Donaire’s best performance since he scored THE RING’s KO and Upset of the Year by knocking then-undefeated Vic Darchinyan cold in 2007. The 28-year-old boxer-puncher says the Sidorenko fight is definitely his best showing.

“The Darchinyan fight was one punch,” he said. “This was by far my best performance.”

Meanwhile, Bart Barry of 15rounds.com wasn't quite effusive in crowning Saul Alvarez as the next big thing:

That old saw about nothing attracting a crowd like a crowd perfectly captures the reflexivity that feeds the hype machine and so, too, aptly captures Alvarez’s celebrity. Fight aficionados, of course, want an organic star, someone who learns his craft in obscurity before emerging properly seasoned, preferably in an upset – someone like Michael Medina, Dmitry Pirog or Sergio Martinez. Promoters, and the casual fans they hope to feed, want something else entirely.

They want someone who’s equipped for immediate stardom if not pugilistic excellence. Someone like, say, Alvarez.

And...

Alvarez showed characteristics of a young fighter accustomed to blowing through overmatched opponents. He threw lead hooks and paused after they landed, expecting N’dou to be felled instantly.

Perhaps Alvarez will become Mexico’s next legend. Right now, though, his celebrity feels wholly manufactured.

We now move on from a weekend in which much went unseen to a weekend where there might be too much to see. Saturday offers Wladimir Klitschko defending his heavyweight championship against Dereck Chisora on ESPN3.com, the bantamweight tournament doubleheader on Showtime, and Amir Khan facing 140-pound challenger Marcos Maidana on HBO.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

2010-12-03T10:24:00.001-08:00

Photo Credit: Tom Casino/Showtime

In this in-between week, there is the before and there is the after.

There are the odes to a November in which the fight came in high quantity and the stories they produced were high quality.

Thomas Hauser of SecondsOut.com recently put forth extended examinations of Manny Pacquiao's one-sided win over Antonio Margarito and Sergio Martinez's one-punch knockout of Paul Williams, which, as they often do, provide new details on these fights and these nights.

The post-fight claims of Martinez's trainer reading instructions to his charge before the fight on how and when the fight would end? Those take form through Hauser's access and observation:

At 10:30, Martinez put on his trunks, moved to the center of the room, and began shadow-boxing in earnest. Sarmiento took a 4-by-6-inch notepad from his pocket and moved to Sergio’s side. The trainer had scripted his instructions for the fight, breaking them down into five points.

“The mistakes of the last fight will not be repeated,” Sarmiento began. “Trabajo de amague y golpe con la mano adelantada haciendo pasos laterales hacia nuestra derecha sin entrar lejos de su distancia o fuera de ella.”

Springs Toledo of The Sweet Science, meanwhile, waxes poetic on Martinez-Williams 2:

Replace the chattering HBO commentators with classical music and the Martinez-Williams replay becomes rather like a ballet, a pas de deux. One pursues, the other is coy. The controlled aggression of Williams complements Martinez’s dazzling virtuosos. The virtuoso disrupts the movement by sliding back and then in at angles, accompanied by hooks that cut the air and passados thrusting high and low.

Those were but two of the standout events of the past month. And while there are no bouts on HBO (not including an HBO Latino bout) or Showtime or a major pay-per-view this weekend, the writing continues no matter what the fighting does.

Doug Fischer of RingTV.com talks to Nonito Donaire about the stature he's had since beating Vic Darchinyan a few years ago and the lack of follow-up on that big win. Cliff Rold of BoxingScene.com looks at Montiel's opponent for the Dec. 4 bout, Wladimir Sidorenko.

Fischer's colleague Michael Rosenthal has a feature on Saul Alvarez, also fighting this weekend.

And here are Bernard Fernandez of the Philadelphia Daily News and Don Steinberg (writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer) on Bernard Hopkins' preparation for his Dec. 18 challenge of light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal.

Hopkins, of course, is never one to shy away from talking. Here's Bernard (Fernandez) capturing the quintessential Bernard (Hopkins):

Unlike narcissistic Baby Boomers hoping to cheat, or delay, the aging process with cosmetic surgery and white lies about their actual year of birth, Hopkins exults in the fact he is his sport's last dinosaur, a die-hard long marked for extinction by those who insist someone that old isn't supposed to still be this good.

"Father Time did come by and knock on my door a couple of times," said Hopkins, a raconteur who is always apt to give an entertaining, half-hour answer to a 10-second question. "He was yelling, 'Hey, Bernard! I know you're in there!' Well, yes, I am. But I'm not opening the door just yet."

The door's not quite shut on boxing in 2010.

Book Excerpt: Tales from the Vault

2010-12-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Occasionally in this space we'll showcase the writing in new boxing books by BWAA members. Lee Groves recently published Tales from the Vault (CreateSpace, 2010), a collection of his reports from Maxboxing.com's Closet Classics series. The book is available online from booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Here's a teaser from the book, from Lee's piece on the 1982 battle between Ray Mancini and Arturo Frias:

...Mancini-Frias matched two physically strong brawlers whose styles guaranteed fistic fireworks. For Frias to win, he had to exploit Mancini’s easily penetrated defense and the scar tissue above his eyes. Mancini, by far the physically stronger man, wanted to use his superior work rate and punching power to overwhelm the champion. Also, Mancini had to like his chances to win because this time he didn’t have a legend standing in the other corner.

As the opening bell rang, Frias quickly kneeled in his corner and crossed himself while Mancini advanced to ring center behind a bob-and-weave defense. Both men exchanged jabs, with Mancini’s heavier and more accurate. The feeling-out phase lasted less than 20 seconds as Mancini ripped a right to the body and a double hook to the body and head and Frias connected with a one-two. Encouraged, Frias jumped in with another one-two and followed it with a scorching hook that exploded off Mancini’s cheek. "Boom Boom" staggered toward the ropes with Frias pursuing him, but Mancini managed to grab Frias and turn him toward the ropes.

Frias landed a right to the body and a right to the jaw while Mancini countered with a hook to the face. Mancini ducked under a Frias right and connected with another hook. Frias whaled away with rights under and over while Mancini worked the left overtime. Frias nailed Mancini with two jabs and an inside right to the jaw and a second right deflected off Mancini’s upraised arms.

The fight might as well have been scheduled for three rounds instead of 15 because both men fought with no regard for anything beyond that. Mancini and Frias were engaged in a high-speed firefight that could only end in an early knockout. The only questions now were "who" and "when."

Writer Roundup: Pros and Their Prose on a Packed Fight Weekend

2010-11-29T06:51:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Tom Casino/Showtime

This was not necessarily the weekend to be a brawler. Michael Katsidis served himself up on a proverbial platter to master technician Juan Manuel Marquez. Sakio Bika found himself out-dirtied against Andre Ward. And, on a more positive note for one brawler, Carl Froch put aside the bruiser and became a boxer for a night, taking an easy decision over Arthur Abraham.

Those were but three of the five fights on HBO and Showtime on a big fight weekend. And as always, BWAA members were on press rows or in front of their screens to capture the action.

The most noteworthy fight on paper turned out to be the most noteworthy fight in the ring. Among the many capturing Marquez-Katsidis on deadline were Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times, Jake Donovan of BoxingScene.com and Gabriel Montoya of MaxBoxing.com.

"Katsidis was well on the verge of falling into a deep hole before scoring with a monster left hook to floor Marquez and leave him buzzed even upon beating the count," Donovan wrote of the dramatic third round. "Ever the warrior, Marquez not only avoided disaster and survived the storm, but punched himself right back into the fight by rounds end."

Inevitably, talk post-Marquez-Katsidis turned to whether a third bout between Marquez and Manny Pacquiao will ever happen. The actual question, of course, is not who will be next for Marquez, but who will be next for Pacquiao.

Tackling that topic were Lem Satterfield of AOL Fanhouse, Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports, Dave Skretta of the Associated Press, and Bill Dettloff of RingTV.com.

"You remember how it was when Oscar De La Hoya was at the top of the food chain," wrote Dettloff before handicapping the candidates. "Every half-ass pug within 70 pounds of him either way was willing to lop off a leg or swallow his weight in cheese puffs for a chance to get into a ring with him, and it didn’t matter if he had a chance in hell of winning."

Marquez made a case for himself, both with his performance on Saturday and with his attire afterward.

"Marquez attended the post-fight news conference wearing a T-shirt that said on the front, 'Juan Manuel Marquez beat Pacquiao twice,' " noted Iole. "On the back, the shirt read, 'Pacquiao, your next.'

"Alright, he’s not a great grammarian, but he’s one hell of a fighter"

We'll leave the fighting up to Marquez and his peers, and he can leave the grammar up to the BWAA members.

85th BWAA Dinner Photos

2010-06-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Boxing in the Comics

2008-12-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

You gotta love how much comic books use boxing. These dudes have superpowers and every futuristic gadget at their disposal, but they keep coming back to the primitive match-up: two guys (or mutated beasts) with gloves, going mana-a-mano in the ring. The Thing is a very good American heavyweight, but could he beat Arreola? This site rounds up some great comic-book boxing covers.

Calzaghe Has Epic (Final?) Career Win at The Garden

2008-11-09T22:30:00.001-08:00

After all the hype, the fight went as the betting lines expected. Joe Calzaghe dominated, embarrassed, bloodied and outclassed an aging Roy Jones Jr. in New York's Madison Square Garden.

Fight Recaps

MaxBoxing.com
BoxingScene.com
NY Post
Yahoo Sports
Sporting Life

Povetkin Injured, Bute-Andrade Causes a Stir

2008-10-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

A few notes and links from the weekend. Alexander Povetkin injured himself during a run and withdrew from the Dec. 13 date with WBO/IBF heavyweight champ Wladimir Klitschko.

Some Links of Note with Information

Setanta Sports
BoxingScene.com
ESPN

The ending to Lucian Bute's recent defense of the IBF super middleweight title has caused quite a stir among the boxing fans, and media.

Some Links of Note with Information

ESPN
MaxBoxing.com

Pour Some Sugar on Me

2008-03-05T18:31:00.001-08:00

Sugar Ray Leonard launched his first official web site today at http://www.sugarrayleonard.net/. You might say: what's the rush? Well, he wanted to get online before Thomas Hearns.

The site is finely constructed, with things that move and make noise. There's a bio of Leonard and plenty of promotion for "The Contender" and something called POWER. The video section, with highlights from Sugar Ray's top amateur and pro fights, is worth checking out (with Howard Cosell yelling "the Cuban is hurt!"). So far, I can't find anyplace where the site lists Leonard's career fighting record. And, as is the case on many boxers sites, the merchandise area is "coming soon." We want to see a blog.

Hit Parade of Yesteryear

2008-03-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

I just figured out how to hook up my stereo and turntable to my computer and make MP3s out of my vintage 45s, LPs and 8-track tapes. I thought I'd take the opportunity to present two vinyl classics inspired by boxers, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. Click on the records to play the music:

Trilogy of Terror

2008-02-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

Ali-Frazier. Gatti-Ward. Bowe-Holyfield. Addams Family Reunion. Poison Ivy: The New Seduction.

There are classic trilogies, and there are not so classic ones. All signs point to Israel Vazquez - Rafael Marquez 3, this Saturday night in Los Angeles (and on Showtime), being a worthy threepeat. Their first two fights were mind-numbingly action packed. The ferocity of the last match-up didn't have an easy to follow movie plotline of a Pavlik-Taylor I (a man is decked, then returns for vengeance!). Until Vazquez finally prevailed, it was a back-and-forth war all night -- with Showtime's Steve Albert screaming each Mexican's name altertatively, like Faye Dunaway in the L.A. classic Chinatown: slap! "Vazquez!" slap! "Marquez!" slap! "Vazquez!" slap! "Marquez!"

ESPN.com has it covered from multiple angles. Graham Houston ranks the all-time great fight trilogies. William Dettloff complements that with a look at the top Mexican boxing rivalries. Dan Rafael leads off his weekend notebook with a preview of the fight.

In print, Keith Idec in the Herald News (check out the new web site!) proposes Vazquez-Marquez 3 as a palate cleanser for fans, after the sour tasting Klitschko-Ibragimov fight last weekend. David Avila in the Press Entrerprise sees the bout as continuing in the fine tradition of great Mexican boxing in Los Angeles.

Also on Showtime: Jason Litzau challenges for Robert Guerrero's IBF featherweight title tonight on SHO. The San Jose Mercury News reminds us: "Gilroy boxer Robert Guerrero inspired by wife's bout with cancer." The Montreal Gazette says don't forget that Lucian Bute is fighting this weekend , too, defening his super-middleweight title against William Joppy at the Bell Centre. Meanwhile, Rick Reeno at Boxingscene.com reports that Allan Green may have puleld out of his scheduled bout tonight on ESPN2.

John Duddy update: Maybe his last name is accurate after all.

What a Fool Believes

2008-02-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Ok.
Seconds out.
Segundos fuera.
Man your battlestations.

After a too-long hiatus, it's time once again to bite on the mouthpiece, get up off the stool, and start blogging about boxing in the media. At least for three more minutes.

Sometimes I think that boxing -- to people outside of our boxing bubble -- is getting to be one of those things that's more popular as a metaphor for something else than as what it really is. (You know, like Rodney Dangerfield for anything that lacks respect, or the dodo bird for anything becoming obsolete, or a brick shithouse). So former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald has this new song "Love T.K.O." It's about about how love has beaten him down. "I tried to take control of love / Love took control of me." That kind of thing. I wish Jay Nady would just stop the song. Too much abuse. Check it out on MM's official MySpace page.

And, it's old news now, but Hillary Clinton pandered to a crowd in Youngstown by holding up a pair of boxing gloves and tried to steal some of the crowd's support for Kelly Pavlik, saying she had a tough fight ahead of her. I can't locate a photo, but here is a dumb page of fake pictures of politicians in boxing scenes.

Back in the real boxing world, Bernard Fernandez takes a long look at the fate of PAL boxing gyms this week in the Philadelphia Daily News. It's a nice complement to a piece Tim Smith has at ESPN.com about amateur boxing in New York. The esteemed Furman Bisher in the Atlanta Journal Constitution writes a eulogy for boxing writer W.C. Heinz, who died Wednesday at age 93. Heinz won the A.J. Liebling Award in 1995, covered boxing for years, and wrote the novel The Professional, among other things. "There wasn’t a subject he couldn’t move into with grace," Bisher writes.

I got a kick (as I usually do) out of an entry at the fine boxing-heavy blog "No Mas." Its post-mortem on Klitschko-Ibragimov is worth a read. That heavyweight unification fight got nasty reviews all over the planet. A columnist in the weekly Moscow News writes the fight "kinda sucked." Score one for glasnost!

Lamar Clark has put his glossy boxing magazine Round1 online, with lots of cool art images and regular blog entries. Definitely worth bookmarking for repeat visits. The mini-documentary video about Peter "Kid Chocolate" Quillin is chocolatey good.

Three Morons Interview Wladimir Klitschko

2008-01-03T11:34:00.000-08:00

He's trying to explain his charity effort but the three Fox News cretins won't let him. Video here:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/heavyweight-magic/2557958271

Top 10 "Boxing in the Media" Events of 2007

2007-12-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-11-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-09T08:22:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes When We Touch

2007-10-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T06:26:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-19T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-30T13:38:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-29T18:15:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-06T18:37:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

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.

The Legality of Boxing

2007-07-31T18:30:00.001-07:00

I finally got my hands on a book that challenges our entire world, The Legality of Boxing: A Punch Drunk Love?, by Jack Anderson. It was published in England this year and retails for $130, so it's not the kind of thing you pick up at the airport on the way to Tacoma. But if it were cheaper and easier to find, I'd put it on the required reading list for boxing journalists.

I had just started reading TLOB when I sat through the lovely evening of brutaliffic bouts in Atlantic City on July 14, headlined by Alfonso Gomez's gruesome destruction of Arturo Gatti, with backup from Kermit Cintron's scary Round 2 plastering of Walter Matthysse. Those fights were preceeded by four other early stoppages in painful mismatches. A week later, fights on the undercard of the Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright match sent both Czar Amonsot and Oscar Larios to the hospital with bleeding on the brain, after they both took severe beatings that may end their careers.

So I was kind of warmed up to read Anderson's dissertation on how the profession of beating people up for sport came to be legal (despite all other laws of civilized society) and whether it still makes sense to keep it legal.

The book, unsurprisingly, recounts the saddest tales from boxing, including boxers who were killed in fights -- Davey Moore, Benny Paret, Duk-Koo Kim, Leavander Johnson -- and many more whose lives suffered after their best days in the ring were done (Muhammad Ali, Riddick Bowe, and what more do you need to say?). But the book isn't a biased screed supporting boxing's abolition. It's a measured account of facts and history.

"I am a fan of boxing," Anderson writes in the introduction (this Jack Anderson is a law professor in Belfast). "I like its characters, its courage and its mimimalism. Nonetheless, my love of the sport is uncomfortable and frequently unfaithful. Many aspects of the professional code unsettle me, and it is that sense of unease that this personal study seeks to confront."

The book at times feels like a well-researched term paper. I'm not kidding: there are 686 footnotes and a 14-page bibliography. But it reads briskly and is a terrific narrative of the sport's evolution. I never knew Bob Fitzsimmons killed an opponent in the ring, or that in 1881 John L. Sullivan, to avoid the law, fought John Flood by candlelight on a barge on the Hudson River, "in front of a select audience of professional gamblers and a sympathetic press."

The laws on public fighting, Anderson explains, have always been sketchy but have almost always made an exception for consensual combat sport. Anderson looks back to Ancient Greece to show how, even then, enlightened lawmakers made sports an exception to normal prohibitions against violence. Accidental killing in sport was, hey, something that might just happen.

Anderson's basic premise is that every time public fighting has seemed to become more trouble than it's worth (in Sullivan's bareknuckle days, for example), supporters have stepped up with regulations to make the sport safer and more palatable. The Queensbury rules were written in 1865 by John Graham Chambers, a sportsman and journalist, who got Sholto Douglas, the eight Marquis of Queensbury, to endorse them. Those rules, which took decades to catch on, set up the ten second knockdown count, three minute rounds, and gloves. Later came state boxing commissions, and, despite the occasional death or backroom scandal, it pretty much became no problem for two consenting fighters to go at each other in regulated sporting events.

But Anderson makes a case that boxing's self-regulation has often failed its athletes, allowing promoters to sign fighters to restrictive contracts that might be viewed as coercive and have made the question of "consent" less than clear-cut. Boxers banned in one state for health or other reasons can often still go to another to fight, as Sullivan did. A national boxing commission would have helped boxers in and out of the ring, but it was shot down in the House of Representatives in 2005, partly by lawmakers' "states' rights" argument.

In the end Anderson realizes the abolition of boxing isn't realistic but he holds out hope that reforms, including better regulation, medical research and fighter education, are possible.

And he hardly lets boxing journalists and fans off the hook. The book opens with a cutting quote from James Ellroy: "Writers approach boxing as idolators, inquisitors, wannabes and manques. They see boxing as an enclosed society and a groovy, blood-and-guts lifestyle....The fighters themselves chase an always fleeting glory through the sustained cultivation and infliction of pain."

Toward the end, Anderson quotes British journalist Kevin Mitchell, in a piece about the sad, endless career of the once-great Thomas Hearns. "There is a lot to love about boxing. It teaches kids discipline and respect. It can be spellbinding and heroic. But there's a lot to loathe -- like the romanticism often attached to what is a deadly enterprise, the wallowing in other people's bravery and the exploitation of notoriety."

The Thrilla in Tacoma

2007-07-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sure, you thought Tacoma was just a AAA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, or a Toyota pick-up truck. But hang on. They're getting boxing fever this week in The City of Destiny (Tacoma's official nickname). On Saturday night Tacoma hosts the Vernon Forrest - Carlos Baldomir fight, which is for the WBC light middleweight belt that neither Floyd Mayweather nor Oscar De La Hoya has anymore. The Tacoma Weekly suggests it might be the biggest boxing match in Washington State history -- but that's what you get when you quote the promoter (in the headline!).

A bit more even keeled is the Tacoma News Tribune, which asks whether boxing in Tacoma can return to its heyday. Tacoma, after all, was hometown to champions Leo Randolph, Johnny Bumphus (pictured), Rocky Lockridge and Freddie "The Tacoma Assassin" Steele. The state's last title fight was in 1988 at the Tacoma Dome. Greg Haugen beat Miguel Santana to keep the IBF lightweight belt. The guess here is that neither Tacoma nor any other U.S. city is likely to return to its boxing heyday.

Outside of Tacoma, people are just wondering if Forrest or Baldomir will return to any kind of heyday. Well, Tim Smith in the New York Daily News is.

In other news: Catching up on some missed stuff...my colleague Frank Fitzpatrick did a nice piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the painter Thomas Eakins' work depicting circa-1900 boxing in the city. Dan Rafael at ESPN.com says a Miguel Cotto - Shane Mosley match is in the works for November. Kieran Mulvaney writes for Reuters that De La Hoya is looking to fight Ricky Hatton, though Hatton also is eyeing Mayweather.

On the Web: Among the online scorekeepers at FightJudge.com, 63 percent had Bernard Hopkins beating Winky Wright, 13 percent had Winky winning, and 25 percent scored it a draw. Boxrec.com has a clean and modern new look and a new (or maybe I just noticed it) way to list chronoligically the fights for any specific title, by sanctioning organization and weight class.

Web site of pick the day: lsavarese.com. Everything you need to know about Lou Savarese, whom I bumped into at Portobello's Pizza in New York on Thursday. He said he isn't sure when his horror movie, Knock Knock, is coming out (it may go straight to DVD) but that he was proud of his acting roles in episodes of The Bronx is Burning, The Sopranos and Rescue Me. He said he's pretty sure he's done boxing, but didn't seem surprised that Evander Holyfield may earn himself another title shot. "With Evander you never know," Big Lou said.

Ejected

2007-07-20T05:19:00.000-07:00

The relationship between reporters and athletes is different in Japan, as a lot of things are. Hiroki Homma, covering the Yankees in the U.S. for the Fuji Evening News, asked Roger Clemens for an autograph. The Baseball Writers' Association of America -- they're the BBWAA -- found out and revoked his membership.

Truth in Boxing

2007-07-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

One reason that mainstream sports fans have lost enthusiasm for following boxing is that what you see too often isn't what you get. Judges' scores sometimes seem to be outrageous. Title fights frequently are made, and belts taken away, for murky reasons that have nothing to do with athletes' skills. With all the sanctioning organizations, it's impossible to tell who's really a deserving champion. Unlike in other sports, it's hard to know what any given ring performance counts for in the big picture.

Last year, a promotion that lasted for a couple of months was built around Bernard Hopkins' farewell fight. The retirement was so elaborately planned, Merrill Lynch would be jealous, starting with Hopkins' tour around the country telling fans it would be his finale, all the way through Michael Buffer's announcement in the ring that it was Hopkins' final fight and a postfight press conference when Hopkins said he had nothing left to prove. It's hard to say how much that theme helped sell the fight. Maybe it didn't matter to anyone. Boxers retire and come back all the time.

But, once again, in a way more highly orchestrated than most instances, viewers were led to believe something about the consequences of a fight that turned out not to be true at all. It wasn't a "Fight to the Finish." It was "never mind." It left boxing once again saying to sports fans: sorry, but what you thought you just saw, that wasn't really what it was.

On Saturday, Hopkins is fighting Winky Wright. The slogan for for the new bout is "Coming to Fight." Anybody ready to believe this one?

Gatti Gatti Gatti (and other bouts)

2007-07-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

Some press on HBO's tripleheader tonight:

It's still his town by David Weinberg, Press of Atlantic City.

A happier Gatti re-enters the ring by Keith Idec, Herald News.

Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward: Brothers In Arms by T.K. Stewart, BoxingScene.com.

Gatti's roller coaster career won't keep him out of the ring by Dan Rafael, ESPN.com.

Gatti fighting to show he can fight and School Bully Gets His Shot (on Paul Williams) by Tim Smith, N.Y. Daily News.

Big test for Gatti by George Willis, N.Y. Post.

Ward trains Gatti for 'Apollo' mission by Bernard Fernandez, Philadelphia Daily News.

Gatti keeps getting pounded - and keeps persevering by Don Steinberg, Philadelphia Inquirer.

Williams works his way up by Steve Springer, Los Angeles Daily News.

The Ring's Hot List

2007-07-10T19:45:00.001-07:00

The cover story of the excellent new issue of Ring (futuristically dated September 2007) brings back a neat idea tried twice before and now officially in the magazine every two years: handing out report cards that grade the star power of boxing's current leading men. Each of 20 selected boxers, from heavyweight to junior feather, is given a separate letter grade on five dimensions: talent, achievement, marketability, support system, and growth potential.

The write-ups are thorough, but it's a lot of grading. Before long you start getting that alphabet-soup feeling and wondering how it all adds up. A single, unified grade for each guy would have made it easier to compare the guys.

Probably more interesting than the individual grades (they're all high) is seeing which 20 boxers have made Ring's 2007 A-list (and who's left off). If you can guess 20 out of 20 without looking, give yourself an A.

They are (approximately by size): Wladimir Klitschko, Sam Peter, Ruslan Chagaev, Bernard Hopkins,Joe Calzaghe, Mikkel Kessler, Jermain Taylor, Kelly Pavlik, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather, Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto, Ricky Hatton, Juan Diaz, Amir Khan, Manny Pacquiao, Edwin Valero, Juan Manuel Marquez, Chris John, and Manuel Marquez. Twelve fighters from 2005 didn't make it this time, a churn rate that seems about right. Six of the 20 are U.S. natives, a national shortfall "reflecting the decline of free television and newspaper interest," the magazine says.

In the news: Bernard Fernandez looks at the fighting Tiberi family of Delaware , and other topics, in the Philly Daily News. Dan Rafael sums up Klitschko-Brewster, Simms-Alcine and all the other weekend action at ESPN.com. Norm Frauenheim writes in the Arizona Republic that the Klitschko-Brewster dud is symbolic of the heavyweight division: "Brewster simply did what the heavyweights did years ago: Quit."

The Oldest Boxing Writers

2007-07-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

I picked up a great old boxing book last week on the Internet through a site called TomFolio.com, where independent used-book sellers list offerings. Boxing in Art and Literature, edited by William D. Cox, was published in 1935. Even back then, pre-Liebling, there was no shortage of classic boxing writing, starting with the most classic classics, The Iliad and The Osyssey. Excerpts from both are in here.

Homer has a scene in The Iliad describing a bout between Epeios and Euryalos, written up around the 7th century B.C.:

"Two boxers being girt went into the midst of the ring, and both lifting up their stalwart hands fell to, and their hands joined battle grievously. Then there was a terrible grinding of teeth, and sweat flowed from all their limbs. And noble Epeios came on, and as the other spied for an opening, smote him on the cheek, nor could he much more stand, for his fair limbs failed him straightaway under him."

Homer also has Odysseus delivering trash talk before a fight in The Odyssey that would work at any Thursday afternoon press conference:

"Do not challenge me too far with show of fist, or you may rouse my rage; and old as I am, I still might stain your breast and lips with blood."

Then it's on to Plato, and The Aeneid ("binding on hand and arm these well-seasoned thongs of bull hide...seven folds of the hides of bulls so enormous...insewn with lead and with iron") and more modern writing. There's a terrific report by Robert H. Davis, who had inside access to the Bob Fitzsimmons camp during Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight week in March, 1897. The two fighters crossed paths while running one morning, in a meeting possibly engineered by a San Francisco newspaper editor. When Fitzsimmons put out his hand to shake, Corbett pulled his hand back and said "I'll shake after I've licked you." Of course, Fitz goes away steamed and a few days later beats Corbett in the ring with the famous "solar plexus" punch:

"Such was the speed and violence of the blow that Fitzsimmons' left arm seemed to disappear into Corbett's midst almost to the elbow."

I won't say they don't write 'em like that anymore. Sometimes we do. The book is a wonderful compilation in any case (I didn't mention the art, black and white reproductions of ancient pottery, newer sculptures, and Thomas Eakins paintings). Here's a review of the book from Time, in 1935. It's not $5 anymore but still available for a reasonable price online.

Wladimir in the Afternoon

2007-07-06T10:12:00.001-07:00

Ah, isn't live boxing at 5 p.m. on Saturday cool? A throwback to the carefree days before the pay-per-view menace, when Wide World of Sports always had a great Bobby Chacon or Boom Boom Mancini fight on TV on those hot Summer afternoons.

This will be the second straight live-at-five for Wladimir Klitschko. Last time it was a farce against Ray Austin in Mannheim, Germany, where it was nighttime at the time. This weekend it's a much better bout, a rematch against Lamon Brewster in Koln, Germany (can Blogger do umlauts?). Last time they fought, Brewster caught Klitschko in the 5th (see above), and it was all over.

Some press on the return bout:

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com: Klitschko, Brewster look forward to a clean rematch
Keith Idec, BoxingScene.com: Klitschko-Brewster: Redemption For One
T.K. Stewart, BoxingScene.com Lamon Brewster, It’s Up To You!

Oldies Night

2007-06-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

Major League Baseball on Wednesday had a night where seven pitchers age 40 or older were scheduled to start: Roger Clemens, Kenny Rogers, John Smoltz, Jaime Moyer, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Woody Williams. Only because Rogers, 42, was rained out did the sport not break its previous record for most oldness in pitchers in one night.

Tonight in El Paso, Evander Holyfield, 44, continues his comeback against Lou Savarese, 41. I've been checking the records to find out when was the last time two guys over 40 fought each other. It's certainly happened many times. But maybe not before on pay-per-view.

Savarese has fought older gentlemen before. But when he fought a 48-year-old George Foreman, Savarese was just 31. And when he fought a 45-year-old Tim Witherspoon, he was 37. Holyfield was still a youngster in his twenties when he battled a plucky Foreman, who was 42 at the time.

In boxing, when you hear about two guys over 40 fighting each other, your first thought isn't: "Wow, it's remarkable how they can keep going after all these years." Your first thought is: someone help these guys hang up the gloves. If boxing didn't involve a risk of permanent damage for athletes with long careers, it would be amazing. It's hard enough to last a few rounds in your twenties. But 44? As much as we want these guys to retire, they remain extraordinary athletes.

Some press on tonight's senior league matchup: Vic Ziegel's headline writer in the New York Daily News calls the fight one for the ages (which recalls the promotional nickname of Holyfield-Foreman, "Battle of the Ages"). Patrick Kehoe of BoxingScene.com and FOXSports.com says Holyfield isn't the real deal anymore. A lot of papers have run the AP's take on the bout.

Happy Birthday, Chuck Wepner

2007-06-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, Chuck Wepner's birthday actually is February 26. Why, it's not even Chuck Bodak's birthday today.

But it's a slow news week.

We're in a lull between the big fights of June and the big fights of July. The Gatti-Gomez and Hopkins-Wright fights are coming soon. Promoters are putting together Mayweather-Hatton --- and could the pre-fight trash talk to whip up fan demand for the battle be any more obvious?

The Washington Post has a story today about the Emmanuel Nwodo - Darnell Wilson fight in Staten Island, N.Y., that will headline ESPN2's Friday Night Fights. Joe Tessitore has a piece about Wilson on ESPN.com. Tim Smith in the New York Daily News mentions that part of the proceeds from tonight's show in announcer Teddy Atlas' hood will go to Atlas' excellent charitable foundation.

Comebacks on Wall Street

2007-06-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight's ESPN2 Wednesday Night Fights card is happening in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero, and it features a couple of rebuilding efforts.

Michael Grant is coming back from a two-year layoff, and Tim Smith asked why in a recent piece in the New York Daily News. Headliner Yusaf Mack (pictured) is trying to find new momentum after taking his first loss more than a year ago, on an ESPN2 card, in somewhat humiliating fashion. My very own story today in the Philadelphia Inquirer looks at Mack's regrouping.

Spinks is feeling gypped: From England comes the oddball-but-true report of a British baby girl named after 25 heavyweight champions: Autumn Sullivan Corbett Fitzsimmons Jeffries Hart Burns Johnson Willard Dempsey Tunney Schmeling Sharkey Carnera Baer Braddock Louis Charles Walcott Marciano Patterson Johansson Liston Clay Frazier Foreman Brown. As Don King might say: only in America.

Rocky Hatton

2007-06-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

For such a spectactular performance, it was a kind of anticlimatic fight. Hatton belted Castillo really hard once on Saturday night, and that was it. What is this, the UFC?

The crowd sure seemed like it was. I adore inebriated Englishmen as much as anyone, but that "Hatton Wonderland" song was too much. Enough to make you nostalgic for "Eye of the Tiger." What's next? It Came Upon a Midnight Hatton? I'm Dreaming of a White Hatton?

There's been no shortage of post-fight press on whatever will happen next. Here's a taste (thanks, Fred):

Tim Smith, New York Daily News: "Hatton Taunts Work on Floyd"
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2007/06/25/2007-06-25_hatton_taunts_work_on_floyd.html

Tim Dahlberg, Associated Press: "Hatton Looks to Mayweather and Future"
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/boxing/2007/jun/24/062408055.html

Chuck Johnson, USA Today: "Hatton Hopes for Boost in USA After Castillo Knockout"
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2007-06-24-hatton-castillo_N.htm

Norm Frauenheim, Arizona Republic: "Hatton Ready for Bigger Opponents"
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/sports/articles/0625boxinginsider0625.html

Bernard Fernandez, Philadelphia Daily News: "Hatton's a Conquering Hero"
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/sports/8161417.html

Steve Kim, Maxboxing.com: "It's a Hatton Wonderland"
http://maxboxing.com/Kim/Kim062507.asp

Steve Springer, Los Angeles Times: "Hatton's Body of Work Wins It"
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-boxing24jun24,1,3022712.story?coll=la-headlines-sports&ctrack=1&cset=true

Carlos Arias, Orange County Register: "Hatton Wastes Little Time in Wasting Castillo"
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/sports/other/boxing/article_1742739.php

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com: "Hatton Retains Crown with Knockout of Castillo"
http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=2914713

Michael Swann, 15rounds.com: "Hatton Stops Castillo in Four"
http://15rounds.com/boxing/News/2007/06/results-062307.php

Chris Cozzone, Fightnews.com: "Hats Off to Hatton"
http://www.fightnewsextra.com/cc/FIGHTS2007/06-postfight-hatton.htm

Boxing 2.0

2007-06-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

I was planning to examine the cool website FightJudge.com in depth a little bit later -- and I still plan to. But Corey Shelton, who runs the site, wants to let boxing writers know about a new feature in time for tonight's Ricky Hatton - Jose Luis Castillo fight. Fight Judge lets any fan log in and score a boxing match live. The software makes it easy to do, and it's free; you enter your scoring after every round while watching TV. Writers can do it from ringside with a laptop computer. The site does the math to compute your score. And then it shows what everyone who scored the fight thought. The new postfight feature: you can get a graphic of your scorecard (as above) to keep and use for publication, if you so desire.

More on Fight Judge later.

Not paying per view

2007-06-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

Lawsuits have been launched over videos on YouTube that aren't supposed to be there. It's true that a sizable portion of the Internet economy has been built artificially, by taking somebody else's valuable content and giving it away for free. Nice way to draw an audience! No wonder "old media" is having a hard time.

For fans getting excited about the Ricky Hatton - Jose Luis Castillo fight Saturday night, there are a lot of videos on YouTube. Some are clips from TV fights, like this video of Round 10 of Castillo - Diego Corrales I. Other videos are homebrewed mixes of highlights, backed by cool music, which let's guess is also being used without permission, like this Ricky Hatton tribute.

Should this stuff be on YouTube? Copyrights are protected by law, and big media companies have a right to have unauthorized material taken down. Those of us who produce content should hope that the media giants go out and use their muscle to defend the concept of copyright. I decided not to embed the above YouTube videos right into this page, though it can be done. Linking to them and watching on YouTube isn't illegal, though. It's just free -- a word that can give anyone mixed feelings.

In the news: Steve Springer of the Los Angeles Times recounts Castillo's tough year, as does Dan Rafael at ESPN.com. Jeff Haney gives a five-point primer on the Vegas fight in the Las Vegas Sun. Tim Smith looks at all the recent action in the welterweight and junior welterweight divisions, in the New York Daily News.

Judge Foreman

2007-06-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

The latest season of House ended this spring with Foreman quitting the hospital. Nobody knows if he'll be back. But another Foreman has become a regular character on TV this Summer. George Foreman is a new judge on American Inventor, along with Pat Croce, that not-Simon-Cowell British guy, and a lady. Tonight, Big George was the deciding vote after a guy demonstrated a custom-made drag racing track for die-cast race cars. It looked like something Hot Wheels came out with in 1972, only bigger and cooler. The guy said he and his brothers had spent $300,000 on its development.

The British guy voted against it. Without George's vote, the inventor wouldn't advance to the Chicago finals. "Don't feel bad about about that investment," George told him. "I once invested $300,000 in a tired old boxer, and that investment paid back more than quadruple." The boxer, of course, was George Foreman. He voted yes.

The Hatton - Castillo Bandwagon is Now Leaving the Station

2007-06-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

The ink is flowing in anticpiation of Saturday night's Ricky Hatton - Jose Luis Castillo matchup in Las Vegas. It could be the biggest England-versus-Mexico matchup since the 1966 World Cup. Ok, well, maybe since Barrera - Hamed.

In the Arizona Republic, Norm Frauenheim writes that "as good as Cotto-Judah was, Hatton-Castillo can be better." At the San Antonio Express News, John Whisler is grateful that this HBO bout isn't a pay-per-view, and his excited headline writer predicts the bout will offer "in your face action." At Ring magazine's web site, William Detloff identifies Jose Luis Castillo's Secret Weapon. It's the rule against excessive holding. Michael Woods says "it's put up or shut up time" for Hatton, over at thesweetscience.com. And at Maxboxing.com, Steve Kim wonders whether Castillo "has lost a bit off his fastball."

Over in the UK, where the BWAA doesn't have a chapter, the great Times of London scribe Ron Lewis writes that Hatton is still eyeing Floyd Mayweather. And to be fair, here's a report on Castillo by Roberto Garcia Ley in La Voz de La Frontera of Mexicali, Mexico, which rightfully calls the Castillo-Hatton fight "uno de las mas esperadas en el mundo del boxeo." In the world of pre-fight buzz, it's a small mundo after all.

A Playbill for Punching

2007-06-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Lamar Clark knows that the audience for a new boxing magazine isn't gigantic. It's tiny by major-media standards. That hasn't stopped him from launching Round1, which recently hit the streets with its second quarterly issue, in a run of 7,500 copies.

Round1 is a little magazine that's taking a different approach than The Ring and the few other remaining boxing periodicals in the U.S. For starters, it literally is little: the size of a folded 8.5-by-11 page, about 24 pages per issue. Clark solves the problem of attracting a boxing audience by giving it away for free, at New York boxing events like Broadway Boxing and Gotham Boxing shows. He thinks of it as a sort of Playbill for boxing. It doesn't cover results or big fights.

"It's more of a lifestyle magazine for the boxing fan," Clark says. His first issue looked at great New York fighters, and the second was a memorabilia issue. Future theme issues will look at fitness, and boxing in the world of entertainment.

Once you look inside Round1 another distinction is apparent. It looks great. By day, Clark is art director at a New York-based magazine, and it shows. The typography and design really pop. He licenses photography from Getty Images and Corbis (the last issue also had artwork from Leroy Neiman). He has an arrangement with the NYC-based roundcardgirlz.com, so the mag has no shortage of New York cheesecake. And it's all printed on luxuriously heavy, glossy paper stock. The writing ain't bad either, though there's not a lot of it. Steve Farhood is a contributing writer, and in the current issue his is the only real article, surrounded by quick hits, lists and visuals.

Clark hopes to expand beyond New York to Philadelphia and the casinos. That will depend on how well he can attract advertising. Current ads are for local gyms or promoters, though he says DirecTV is coming on as an advertiser. He thinks there are enough boxing fans to attract sponsors. But beyond allowing brand-name signage around the edges of rings, boxing hasn't always given advertisers the best forum.

"The numbers are there. I just think the outlet hasn't been presented the right way," he says. "They started advertising on guys' backs. It got that bad."

Clark's planned web site, www.round1mag.com, isn't up and running yet. He can be reached at round1@nyc.rr.com.

Saying no to Scrabble, Paulie Wins & Laila and Her Dad

2007-06-17T07:25:00.001-07:00

It was a big weekend for ignoring the sanctioning bodies that give out belts and rank boxers.

On ESPN's Friday Night Fights, Joe Tessitore said that opponents Lucian Bute and Sakio Bika were rated 6th and 10th in the world at super middleweight -- by Ring magazine. He didn't mention the three-letter organizations. On Saturday night, Bob Papa began HBO's main event by saying Lovemore N'Dou held the 140-pound title of "one of the sanctioning bodies." He never said which one. On-screen graphics during the N'Dou-Paulie Malignaggi fight simply billed it as "140-POUND CHAMPIONSHIP." Could this be an attempt to unify the opposition to the Scrabble-tile sanctioning cartels?

In the news: Malignaggi beat N'Dou, as Tim Smith and Keith Idec report from ringside.

Father's Day: Tonight watch or tape Daddy's Girl (TV One, 8 p.m.). It's a look at Laila Ali and her well-known dad. Here's a People magazine item about it.

The weirdest shopping mall: boxer websites

2007-06-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Just say, for laughs, that you decided to see what kind of weird and cool stuff you can buy on boxers' official web sites. Most of the top fighters these days have their own sites, and many of those have a menu item labeled "store" or "merchandise." Yeah, about half of these link to pages that say "coming soon!" But, hey, it's a lot easier to wish you had decent merchandise and a reliable online commerce operation than to actually have those things. And then there are sites like Robert Guerrero's, which has a lot of merchandise, but all of it is sold out.

Let's start with clothing. Samuel Peter's home page prominently advertises his line of P.O.W.E.R U apparel. But it looks to be just a bunch of different color t-shirts with his stylized P logo on them. By the way, according to the site, P.O.W.E.R. stands for Punishing Opposition Will Earn Respect. And "the U stands for YOU."

Arturo Gatti's site links to a line of clothing called ATG that seems to have nothing to do with Gatti or boxing. It's baby clothes and things. I love the shirt Yuri Foreman sells that features his lion-in-a-Jewish-star logo, with Brooklyn written in Russian. But probably the most sophisticated t-shirt at a boxer web site is over at klitschko.com, where you can design your own shirt (top left). Each design detail adds to the price. I got up my cost up to $47.

Fernando Vargas links his web site to a separate site for his clothing line, nawshisclothing.com. "Why Naswshis? Because it's sick!" Even better than being sick -- and available at Vargas' online shop -- is a bobblehead of Fernando (above right) for just $15.

But a Fernando Vargas bobblehead that doesn't look a lot like Vargas is hardly the weirdest thing available at a boxer web site. The golf towel they sell for $10.70 at Oscar De la Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions site isn't either. We're getting closer, though!

I thought I'd found the #1 oddity when I came across the Markus Beyer mousepad at his fancy German website. It seems like a pretty good deal for 8 euros. But there was more exploring to do. Over at German Arthur Abraham's tri-lingual web site, through a series of clicks you can get to a page where he is selling framed prints of a strange cartoon depicting him in the ring -- for just 199 euros! What's that, like $300?
It seemed implausible that any item available at a boxer web site could top this work of art.

But I was wrong. And suddenly, I had to look no further. At Ricky Hatton's site, among the posters and shirts, selling for just 3 British pounds, there it was: a car air freshener in the shape of Hatton's boxing pants. I'm sorry to say that at this late date it's probably too late to purchase one for Father's Day. But there's always next year.

In the news: Chuck Johnson at USA Today previews the Paulie Malignaggi -- Lovemore N'Dou lovefest slated for Saturday night on HBO. Tim Smith takes a look too, in the N.Y. Daily News. Michael Hirsley salutes Chicagoan lightweight champion David Diaz in the Chicago Tribune. David Mayo of the Grand Rapids Pioneer Press compares Floyd Mayweather and Tony Soprano. "They took their starring roles about the same time, Mayweather as a world champion in late 1998, Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in 1999," he writes, and now both have left the big stage without giving fans closure.

Nice debut: Philly guys Dean Rubenstein, Jeff Izes and Mike Cassell did a terrific job in their TV boxing broadcasting debut Thursday night, bringing three bouts (from earlier in the month at the Blue Horizon) to viewers on Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. CSN will air the show on SportsNets in other regions -- check your local listings. The first of several planned telecasts from the Blue was done live to tape, but Big Dean says they may go live eventually.