Latest Boxing News, Results, and Rankings.

Brock hopes to travel same road as Holyfield

Kathy Duva was recalling her frustration in the early 1990s in getting the national media to pay closer attention to Evander Holyfield, then the God-fearing, clean-living heavyweight contender who was being described, if he was being described at all, as the anti-Tyson.

Ban on Panama Lewis meant for a lifetime

If it had involved marginal baseball or football players, the announcement probably would have only made the transactions listings of a newspaper’s agate page, and read something like this:

Brother wants no one to get a piece of The Rock

Perhaps it is selfishness, but members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only NFL team ever to win every game in a season, get together every year to toast themselves whenever the last remaining undefeated team in the league loses.

SAMUEL PETER HOPES TO UNLOCK POTENTIAL

“Potential means you ain’t done it yet,” former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal said of one of his teams that was highly rated heading into the season but had yet to play a game. Or perhaps it was Duffy Daugherty, Bear Bryant or Vince Lombardi who first uttered the now-famous phrase; all of [...]

Forgotten Esneault fell through cracks of boxing history

The International Boxing Hall of Fame’s Class of 2007 won’t be announced until January or inducted until June, but, hey, it never hurts to start banging the drums early for a worthy candidate.

Big money to nothing common tale in boxing

They called it “conspicuous consumption” in the 1980s during the heyday of the Reagan Administration, and it was a term meant to reflect the wealth and prosperity that an increasing number of Americans enjoyed. To wit: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

This Aesop’s Fable a tale of Hill and the hare

There are valuable life lessons to be gleaned from Aesop’s Fables, cloaked though they may be in the guise of children’s stories. Take, for instance, the distance race which pitted Slow and Steady, the tortoise, against the speedy hare. The hare, of course, got off to a blazing start and, overconfident, took a nap somewhere [...]

This Byrd Happy to Fly Lower

Chris Byrd is downsizing.

Leavin’ on a Jet Plane

If I had only known then what I know now.
It was 1965, my senior year at De La Salle High in New Orleans, and I considered myself something of a travel virgin. Oh, my parents had taken me on several vacations with an uncle and his wife, but those were when I was a small [...]

Vargas’ Spirit Still Willing, But Body is Failing Him

It is an intriguing irony that Fernando Vargas was born on Dec. 7, 1977. Pearl Harbor Day seems especially appropriate for a fighter who has initiated so many wars, both verbal and in the ring, to come into the world, no doubt kicking and screaming all the way.

Fans Have Come to Love Gatti’s Lumps and Lacerations

“They Have Kept Him in Stitches,” read the Sports Illustrated headline that accompanied a tight closeup of the sweaty, oft-sutured face of Chuck Wepner, which graced the cover the week of the journeyman heavyweight’s March 24, 1975, challenge of champion Muhammad Ali.

Out With The Old, In With The …?

You’re not too bright, are you? I like that in a man.
Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat”
Just a guess, but I imagine that the manipulative Matty Walker character, in Turner’s 1981 breakthrough role, was a boxing fan. Had to be. Because Matty’s favorable impression of the simplistic male, tunnel-visioned and generally oblivious to outside influences, is [...]

Out With The Old, In With The …?

Some things never change. Roy Jones Jr. scheduled a breakfast press conference with the media this past Saturday morning in Memphis, and he showed up 40 minutes late.

Great Beginning, Better Ending

And when I die,
And when I’m dead and gone,
There’ll be one child born,
And the world to carry on, carry on …
_ “And When I Die,” Blood, Sweat and Tears

Castillo-Corrlaes 3 ; Food For Thought

So now we know: Jose Luis Castillo’s secret role models are Roberto Duran, George Foreman and James Toney.
All right, so that’s a semi-cheap shot at Castillo after the Mexican failed to make weight for the second straight time in his now-infamous series with Diego Corrales. What had started out 13 months earlier, as a rivalry [...]

Carbajal Was a Good Thing In a Small Package

When you are Michael Carbajal’s size, which approximates the dimensions of one of Wladimir Klitschko’s legs, your athletic options are by necessity limited. You can become a jockey and hope to get the mount on the Kentucky Derby winner, or you can take up boxing and try to punch your way into the public consciousness [...]

Jackson: No Stone Left Unturned

The popular consensus is that Oscar De La Hoya is boxing’s Latin lover, the most handsome man to grace the ring, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. In a sport populated primarily by guys with ski-run noses, cauliflower ears and unsightly masses of scar tissue around the eyes, designation as boxing’s No. 1 heartthrob falls [...]

Rocky Could Have Been Ricky

It could have happened this way.

A Real Sweet Scientist

NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry is said to have such a keen shooting eye that he could detect even the slightest variance to the target. Once, upon entering a visiting arena with his San Francisco Warriors, Barry took a look at the basket and said, “It looks a little low.” A tape measure was [...]

ANGELO

A cynic might take it as another indictment of boxing that the James S. Farley Award, presented by the Boxing Writers Association of American for “honest and integrity,” hasn’t been presented to anyone since 1996, when the late, great Eddie Futch was honored, and that only six such awards have been distributed since Harry Markson [...]

Looking for a Lion in the Land of the Hyenas

Once, at the final press conference before the Oscar De La Hoya-Shane Mosley rematch in September 2003, promoter Bob Arum tried to convey the global significance of the confrontation which would take place three days later.

It Wasn’t Yalta, But …

DON KING KONG

I’ve always suspected that, deep down inside, Don King aspired to become Carl Denham.
Now that his new protégé, hirsute giant Nicolay Valuev, has wrapped his massive paws around the WBA heavyweight championship, His Hairness appears to finally have succeeded: He’s now Don King Kong, promoter of the biggest thing to come along since [...]

No stop to the glop

Controversy in boxing is sort of like the congealed glop that passes for melted cheese when you go to a movie and order those overpriced concession-stand nachos. Said glop is not good for your health (neither are the nachos) and you’re virtually certain to spill some on your shirt, but, hey, you already know that [...]