By Norm Frauenheim-

PHOENIX – Danny Jacobs is moving up. But not on.

Jacobs will wear his feelings for an absent friend Friday night when he enters the ring for his first fight at a heavier weight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. at Talking Stick Arena. You’ll see them on his robe. You’ll see them on his trunks.

All Day

Patrick Day

Those are the words, inscribed near the top and near  the bottom of a robe that Jacobs had specially made for his first bout since Day died four days after suffering brain trauma during a fight in Chicago on Oct. 12.

“The robe is symbolic of what he meant to me,” Jacobs said when he introduced the robe and trunks he plans to give to Day’s family after the DAZN-streamed bout.

In addition to All Day, Patrick Day, the white robe with blue stitching includes a picture of the middleweight, a Rest in Paradise inscription and the dates, 1992-2019, of a life that ended too early.

For a while, his grief for Day was more than just a symbol. It hurt. It made him wonder.

“Boxing is not the same,’’ Jacobs said when the fight against Chavez Jr. was announced.

Grief lingers. Perhaps, it always will. But Jacobs is also prepared to re-enter the ring and confront the dangers that killed a friend. In part, the robe helps him remember a fighter and friend who did what he loved despite the risk.

“I know he would want me to not be sad, to be an inspiration in the ring,’’ Jacobs said. “That’s who he was. We sparred numerous times in the ring, spent countless hours together.

“He was a beautiful person, and I know he would want me to keep moving forward.”

Moving forward every day, All Day.

Notes: Jacobs (35-3, 29 KOs) and Chavez (51-3-1, 33 KOs) had agreed to a super-middleweight fight. However, the contract was re-negotiated Thursday morning when Chavez realized he couldn’t make the mandated weight. He was nearly five over the 168-limit at 272.7. Jacobs weighed 167.9.

In the re-done deal, they agreed to a catch-weight, a 173-pound fight. But it cost Chavez plenty. According to multiple sources at the morning weigh-in, Chavez agreed to pay Jacobs $1 million.

According to contracts filed with the Arizona Boxing & MMA Commission, Jacobs and Chavez had equal purses, $2 million each. With the redone deal, however, Jacobs will walk away with $3 million and Chavez Jr. $1 million.  

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a fight for the ESPN welterweight title Nebraska’s Terence “Bud” Crawford stopped Lithuania’s Egidijus “Mean Machine” Kavaliauskas in round 9, defending his ESPN-pound-for-pound rating and further burnishing credentials Crawford insists are already hall-of-fame quality. Too, ESPN’s Joe Tessitore called the last minutes of Crawford’s ringwalk “precious”?

Bud Crawford is bored. You are bored. Bud Crawford knows you are bored. (And now, humorously enough, he knows you know he’s bored.) That mutual boredom leads a proud man like Bud to do imprudent things for his own amusement and to a lesser extent your amusement. That’s half the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday but not the bad half. Boredom can be remedied, after all.

The bad part of the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday is that his skills are gradually eroding in the acid rain of average competition.

Boxing is unique among professional sports in its ability to waste a healthy participant’s prime years. By any measure Crawford’s prime is being wasted. That’s boxing’s fault, the system’s fault, much more than any one person’s or organization’s or broadcast network’s.

Boxing does this to many of its participants, but you rarely notice because the case is never obvious as Crawford’s is right now. Generally these things happen to a 29-year-old stuck in a small market and affiliated with the wrong manager, some fighter either too good or too loyal to get the fights a bigger handler might get him. If ever he breaks-through his story becomes an inspirational one of perseverance and seizing one’s chance on the odd chance it is presented and almost never about bad luck and a system that squanders its participants’ primes.

Bud already did his b-side breaking-through years ago. Now his staybusy mandatory defenses illuminate fundamental flaws in our beloved sport’s meritocracy.

Bud’s promoter, Top Rank, knows all this much better than even Bud does, and so it gives him a semiannual pulpit from which to vent on America’s mostwatched sports network. Bud gets the relief of telling ESPN viewers what he opines of PBC’s keepaway game, and the honor of being called boxing’s best prizefighter despite years of middling competition, and Top Rank and ESPN get promotional rights to the world’s best prizefighter. And everybody gets money enough to endure the arrangement another year longer.

But a crossroads approaches for Bud and his promoter, if not his network. Another couple years like 2019 and age and poor competition’ll’ve eroded Bud’s skills to a point Top Rank’s matchmakers’ll know Bud is no longer great enough to justify the risk of putting him in with the world’s best welterweights – not when another two years of revenues can be milked from the ESPN cow, fighting unification matches with Julius Indongo or title defenses with Jeff Horn.

Annual interviews with the perennially aggrieved Dre Ward will feature a tasting menu of early-retirement threats, PBC callouts, legal misunderstandings explained, and commiserating about what untrustworthy media rated both men world’s best, both before and after they deserved it. In between there will be more close calls explained away by Bo Mack – Bud’s charismatic trainer now enjoying his own synergistic relationship with ESPN – and surliness and sadism. At the end of the run there will be 10 impressionable kids saying Crawford is an alltime great for every one of the rest of us lamenting the career Crawford might’ve had were boxing run like football or hockey. Boxing writers’ll selforganize around Bud’s already B-Hop-like autohagiography and bully themselves into putting Bud in Canastota.

There are some risks inherent in Bud’s early retirement threats, though, especially now that he’s spoken them to the aforementioned and early retired Andre Ward: Sometime in the next few years Manny Pacquiao is going to retire, and the very last thing Bud wants is historians placing those two resumes side-by-side.

Again, little to none of this is Crawford’s fault. But again-again, absolutely none of it is our faults as aficionados.

Crawford is neither talented nor lucky as Pacquiao. Were he as talented he’d be fighting Canelo at 168 pounds in May, and were he as lucky he’d have had a trilogy with Yuriorkis Gamboa and a pair of fights with Vasyl Lomachenko and a tetralogy with Errol Spence. Instead he’s stuck reminding viewers Egidijus Kavaliauskas was still undefeated on Saturday afternoon and reviving Money May’s canard about the boxing media not knowing anything about boxing.

We know enough to know Crawford ate righthands Saturday night he’s not proud of this morning. We know that if he tried to race forward willfully against any of PBC’s top four welterweights the way he did against Kavaliauskas he’d have spent more than a flashing moment on the canvas. We know three years comprising John Molina, Felix Diaz, Julius Indongo, Jeff Horn, Jose Benavidez (on one good leg) and Amir Khan is no one’s idea of a path to enlightenment.

And we know Bud knows we know these things, and all of it pisses him off. He’s a great talent and a true fighter, nevertheless. It’s a stain on our sport he’ll unlikely get his chance to be remembered as more than that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Terence Crawford defends the WBO Welterweight Title against mandatory contender Egidijust Kavaliauskas.  The show kicks off at 9 PM ET with Michael Conlan trying to extract revenge on Vladimir Nikitin and Richard Commey defending the IBF Lightweight title against Teofimo Lopez.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED…THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.

Round 1: Jab from Kavaliauskas

Round 2 Right to body from Crawford..Left..Good right from Kavaliauskas..

Round 3 HARD RIGHT BY KAVALIAUSKAS…Crawford went down…Not ruled a knockdown..Jab..Right

Round 4 Jab from Crawford..Right from Kavaliauskas..Right..Left from Crawford..Ripping right to body by Crawford..Big right by Kavaliauskas

Round 5 Right from Kavaliauskas..Good right hook from Crawford…Left..Right from Kavaliauskas..2 punch combo from Crawford..Hard right hook..another..Jab..Good right hook..Left hook from Kavaliauskas

Round 6 Left from Crawford….Right from Kavaliauskas..Uppercut from Crawford..

Round 7 Right from Kavaliauskas..Left and right from Crawford..Right to body from Kavaliauskas..Jab from Crawford..Hard 4 punch combo..Ripping 3 punch combination…right AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…Crawford landing hard power shots….Kavaliauskas fires back at the bell

Round 8 Right from Kavaliauskas..Right..2 more rights..Left hook..Hard right..Left from Kavaliauskas..3 punch combo from Crawford..Hard right..Left on ropes..

Round 9 Hard 3 punch combination from Crawford...Ripping LEFT AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Counter right from Commey..Right..Left from Lopez..Right…Counter right

Round 2 Right Buckles Commey…HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES COMMEY,,,HE IS HURT BAD…HE STUMBLES UP…LOPEZ ALL OVER COMMEY JUST WAILING AWAY AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED!!!

[/su_table]

Round 1: Body shot from Conlan…Left from Nikitin..Left to body from Conlan…

Round 2 Left from Conlan..right/left from Nikitin..Hard left in the corner..Right hook from Conlan..Right from Nikitin

Round 3 Left and right from Conlan..Left to the body..Counter left

Round 4 Left to body from Conlan…right hook..

Round 5 Right Hook from Conlan…Right from Nikitin..Left to body from Conlan..Jab..Right..

Round 6 Right hook from Conlan..

Round 7 Right hook from Conlan…Good toe to toe action with Conlan getting the better

Round 8 Conlan hits Nikitin low…Left and right from Nikitin..Left from Conlan,,Left from Nikitin..Good exchange

Round 9 Left to body from Conlan..Right from Nikitin

Round 10 Left from Conlan..Combination from Nikitin..

98-92, 99-91 and 100-90 for Conlan

By Norm Frauenheim-

The pound-for-pound debate is nothing more than an argument. It has no promoter. It offers no belt. Win it, and you won’t get a dime. Just another argument. Terence Crawford knows that, of course.

He’s been the argument, front and center, for a couple of years now. By now, Crawford (35-0, 26 KOs) has heard it all, or at least enough of it to understand that the only fight he can win is the one within the ropes. He’s been doing that and doing it masterfully throughout his career.

That figures to continue with efficiency as seamless as it is deadly Saturday (ESPN) against Lithuanian Egidijus Kavaliauskas (21-0-1, 17 KOs) at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Crawford will win. The argument will resume. Only the argument won’t be decisive. Bet on it.

The argument against Crawford at No. 1 is fair enough. It falls under a time-tested category: Beat The Best To Be The Best. In a balkanized business, however, that’s problematic. The game’s promotional entities are like rival kingdoms. They are divided by their ties to different networks and ego. Crawford is aligned with Top Rank. Shawn Porter, Keith Thurman, Errol Spence and Manny Pacquiao are with PBC. A virtual no-man’s land seems to separate the two.

A deal is not impossible, of course. Example: The Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury rematch on Feb. 22. Wilder is tied to PBC. Fury signed with Top Rank after their dramatic draw a year ago. Business is possible. Top Rank’s Bob Arum is already thinking about Porter as a Crawford possibility in 2020. It’s still not clear what Spence’s plans are since he was thrown from his Ferrari on Oct. 10 in a scary crash in Dallas.

“Spence had that accident and he’s not, I think, going to be around for a while,’’ Arum told Fight Hub TV this week.

So, Arum is considering Porter, who lost a narrow decision to Spence in late September at Los Angeles’ Staples Center.

“The guys who will tell you if a fight will sell are the bookmakers,’’ Arum said. “If they make a fight 50-50, 6-5, 7-5, then you know you got something.

“Now, I think Porter and Crawford will be in that margin, 8-5 or something like that. So that would be interesting. Danny Garcia with Terence Crawford is about 5-1, so that’s not as interesting to me as a Porter fight.”

Porter, tough and smart, would be interesting and might mute some of the Crawford critics. If Crawford beat Porter – and it says here he would – maybe the critics would stop saying that the Omaha welterweight is from the “wrong side of the street.”

It’s a lousy line.

“Deontay Wilder is about to fight Tyson Fury and you never hear about any ‘sides of the street,’ ‘’ Crawford said this week. “It’s just something people say when it comes to Terence Crawford.

“You don’t hear ‘wrong side of the street’ with any other fighter but Terence Crawford. Why do all these other fights get made, but when it’s Terence Crawford, it’s about the ‘wrong side of the street.”

From this corner, Crawford is No. 1 on any side of the pound-for-pound street. His instincts, timing and overall ring IQ are unequalled in today’s generation.

Enough has already been said about his ability to switch from right-handed to southpaw. But it’s still eye-catching. Switch-hitting is often seen as liability. It’s a sign a fighter has no power in either hand. But Crawford has turned a perceived weakness into a strength. Either hand is potent. For Crawford, there’s no wrong side of the street. No wrong hand either.

Only time can beat him. He’s 32. In an interesting radio interview on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show on ESPN, Crawford was asked about Sergey Kovalev. Kovalev, stopped by Canelo Alvarez in early November, is 36.

“Really, I don’t see myself fighting at 36,’’ Crawford said. “I want to retire from boxing before boxing retires me.’’

No argument there.Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a rematch of a wonderful June
title fight, Anthony “AJ” Joshua decisioned lopsidedly Andy “Destroyer” Ruiz by
scores nobody should care about. 
Whenever more than 500 pounds of flesh engages in gloved combat and no
one gets felled, the decision is an irrelevance because something much less
than combat has happened.

It was fat guy versus nervous one, Saturday, and
it failed all expectations.  Every last
one.  That includes Joshua’s and even his
handlers’.  As AJ worked the kettlebells
and scaffolding in camp, setting new personal bests on his wearables, everyone
must’ve assumed that at some point either he would tire from his running or his
opponent would, and AJ would return to proper prizefighting form and conclude
things violently enough for all his predecessor crossfitting to be recalled
like so much strategy.  The dope-a-rope,
as it were.

No one, save perhaps Amir Khan, imagined a
heavyweight of such pedigree as Joshua behaving so pathetically for 36 minutes.  Certainly Ruiz did not.  Had he an inkling it was a roadrace he’d
signed for on the dunes he’d’ve taken his obesity elsewhere for a year or two,
making paychecks as the king in exile rather than playing a jiggly game of whatever
it was he and Joshua did.

Not until the match’s final 10 seconds did Ruiz
give expression to every spectator’s every sentiment, when he dropped his
gloves and pleaded Joshua fight at center ring as a giant of a man should do.  Too late. 
Joshua’s conversion from boxing’s next great champion to Wlad
Klitschko’s soulmate was complete.

AJ: Hello.

WK: Hello, Joshua, it’s me, Wlad.

AJ: I am torn, buddy, do I fight Andy like you
fought Sam Peter the first time, or like you fought Tyson Fury?

WK: I have better template for you, Joshua.

AJ: Do tell.

WK: Sultan Ibragimov.  Some change are needed.  But that is template.

AJ: Aye, mate. 
Thank you.

In 2005 Samuel Peter was a better puncher than
Ruiz is and Wlad had fewer athletic tools at his disposal than AJ, but
otherwise the similarities hold – whatever advice Wlad gave AJ.  Anytime Peter got close enough to Klitschko
to make contact he scared the wits out of Dr. Steelhammer.  Wlad’s chest would heave and his eyes would
bug and he would move like a threelegged gazelle fleeing a lion.  Peter hadn’t conditioning enough to throw the
final punch to rid us of Klitschko once and for all, and 12 years later folks
talked of Wlad like the Babe Ruth of boxing.

Y’all can follow that template with AJ till the
cows come home, but count me the hell out. 
I won’t do it again.  I won’t go
through another decade of what contortions and squinting must be done to see a
musclebound man of 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds fleeing another man as anything but
weakness.  Save the talk of strategy;
jab-cross-hook is the only strategy any man, woman or child should expect from
a person Joshua’s size in a fight.  Foot
feints? sideways movement? impressing judges? Jesus God make it stop!

Trust yourself, dear aficionado, trust your gut on
this one.  Don’t let the highbrow set
pettifog you, expressing their sympathy for your ignorance, as they will: “If
you can’t see the craft and discipline it takes for a man like Joshua to run
away from men half-a-foot smaller, I feel sorry for you.”

They’re being paid to say it, every damn one of
them.  The older generation, the opinion
statesmen, they say and write these things because they believe in the
prizefighting ecosystem, were raised on a philosophy of the heavyweight
division as industry leader, and want boxing to stay popular enough to get them
paid.  The younger generation, the media
upstarts, simply don’t know any better; coming of age as young pundits their
mentors had auctioned themselves to the highest bidder – promoter, publicist, broadcaster
– and so the youngsters don’t know enough to feel bashful about their
affiliations anymore; it’s all in the game to them.

But hold no resentments.  A pundit writing or saying Saturday’s fight
was anything better than woeful does so with the same integrity as a waiter
embellishing the daily specials or a flight attendant thanking you for loyalty
to her airline.  The words are sincere
insomuch as their speakers and writers sincerely wish to make a living.

Saturday was just awful.  Take a deep breath and say it with me:
Saturday was just awful.  See that?  You didn’t hurt anyone.  No alarms went off.  Capitalism itself did not implode.  All you did was give a one-star Yelp review
to a substandard product.  The owner
won’t like it, he’ll post a comment under yours explaining your ignorance to
you and inviting you back for a free order of nachos next time, but you’ll feel
a little less dopey the rest of the week for being honest: I was excited about
Saturday’s fight – looked forward to it for about six months – and it was just
awful, and I feel dumb right now, and it’s boxing’s fault.

For if we don’t allow such moments of honesty, if
we shout them down in what faux intellectualism uses phrases like “sweet
science” or “hit and don’t get hit”, we alienate what few serious fans we have
left.  Boxing will not die in a blaze of
outrage about a hometown decision but in a collective shrug about a nervous
giant running away from a fat one.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action Live as Jermall Charlo defends the WBC Middleweight title against Dennis Hogan.  The action Kicks off at 7 PM ET with three world title bouts as Louisa Hawton & Lorraine Villalobos battle for the WBC Interim Atomweight Title…Marlon Taples and Ryosuke Iwasa fight foe the IBF Jr. Featherweight Title and Chris Eubank Jr. takes on Matt Korobov WBA Interim Middleweight Title.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1 Left hook from Hogan.Chopping right..double left..

Round 2 Hogan jabs to body.Hard Jab from Charlo..Right

Round 3 Left hook by Hogan..Left hook by Charlo..Jab from Hogan..Right to body from Charlo..Jab..head shots

Round 4  HUGE LEFT UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES HOGAN…Big right..left to body.right uppercut..Big right..Chopping right

Round 5 Good left hook from Charlo..Hogan lands a right..left from Charlo..Flush right..Right

Round 6 Right from Hogan..jab to body from Charlo..Right uppercut..Nice right..Sharp Jab..

Round 7…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES HOGAN AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Left from Korobov..Double left

Round 2 KOROBOV HURTS HIS SHOULDER..KOROBOV CANT CONTINUE

Round 2 Jab from Iwasa..Sharp right and nice left from Tapales..Lead left..Sweeping left from Iwasa

Round 3 Both landing power shots…right from Tapales..LEFT AND DOWN GOES TAPALES..Left from Tapales..Jab..Brusing around left eye of Tapales

Round 4 Jab from Iwasa..Straight left..Combination..Combination..1-2..Sweeping right hook

Round 5 Left to body from Tapales..right hook to body..Lead uppercut..straight left..Straight left..left

Round 6 Tapales lands a solid left..1-2 from Iwasa…right hook..left uppercut..

Round 7 Tapales lands a right..Lead left..Left from Iwasa…body..1-2..Short right hook from Tapales..Good left

Round 8 Good right from Tapales..Right hook to body from Iwasa..3 punch combination..Iwasa backing up Tapales..Left hook to the body…Sweeping right hook from Tapales..

Round 9  Sweeping right hook from Iwasa..Chopping right from Tapales..Right uppercut..

Round 10  Right hook from Tapales…Swelling under left eye of Iwasa/.Triple right from Tapales

Round 11 Iwasa lands a left…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES TAPALES..TAPALES STUMBLES AND FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Double Jab from Aleem..Jab
Round 2 Good right by Aleem..Good left from Ellis..Right to Body..Right
Round 3 Right from Ellis..Good right..Right..4 Punch combination
Round 4 Right from Ellis
Round 5 Right from Ellis..Good left hook from Aleem..1-2 from Ellis
Round 6 Ellis Body shot and right hand..left hook..left hook on the inside..Aleem coming back
Round 7 Ellis Jabbing
Round 8 Nice Right from Aleem..Right from Ellis..Right
Round 9 Combination from Ellis
Round 10 Body shot from Aleem..2 Good rights

95-95;  97-93;  98-92 ELLIS

Round 1
Round 2
Round 3 Combination from Villalobos..Left hook to Body from Hawton..Right uppercut..Left hook and right and left hook from Villalobos
Round 4 Left hook from Villalobos..Right..2 rights from Hawton
Round 5 Left hook from Villalobos..Triple left hook to body from Hawton..Left hook and right cross..Big Right from Villalobos
round 6 2 lefts and right from Hawton..Left hook and uppercut..Left from Villalobos..Left hook…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES HAWTON
Round 7 Left hook from Villalobos..Hawton bleeding from the nose..Right from Villalobos
Round 8  Right from Hawton..Left hook..Hawton lands a hard right to the body
Round 9 Body work from Hawton
Round 10 Left hook/Right cross from Villalobos

95-94 on all cards for Hawton

Andy Ruiz defends the IBF/WBA/WBO Heavyweight titles against former champion Anthony Joshua from Saudi Arabia.  The action kicks off at Noon ET / 8 PM in Saudi Arabia and 5 PM in the UK with Heavyweight bouts featuring Alexander Povetkin, Dillian Whyte, and Fillip Hrgovic

THE PAGE WILL REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY.  NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Right from Joshua..Joshua Boxing…Hard right..Ruiz Cut around the left eye

Round 2 2 Jabs from Ruiz..Hard right from Joshua..Hard jab..Quick left hook..Good Jab..Right to head..Joshua cut over his left eye..Hook from Joshua

Round 3 Jab from Joshua..Hook to the body

Round 4 Snapping jab from Joshua..Good jab from Ruiz..Hook from Joshua..Good Jab..Hard left hook..Joshua starting to put more behind his punches..Chopping right from Ruiz

Round 5 Nice Jab from Joshua..Counter right..Long jab..Jab

Round 6 Hard hook from Ruiz..Right from Joshua…Body shot..Quick Jab..Hard hook

Round 7 Hard hook from Joshua..They both miss with big shots..

Round 8 Chopping right by Ruiz..Right to body..Hard Right..Hard left hook

Round 9 Good jab from Joshua..Nice Jab..Good right to the body..Hard uppercut…Right from Joshua..

Round 10 Good right from Ruiz…

Round 11 Nice jab from Joshua..Good jab..Jab….another jab..

Round 12 Hard right hand from Joshua..

118-110 TWICE AND 119-109 FOR ANTHONY JOSHUA

Round 1  Huge flurry by Hunter…Going right after Povetkin..Hard right..Counter hook from Povetkin

Round 2 Hard right drives Povetkin back..Sharp right from Povetkin

Round 3 Good right from Povetkin..Good Body shot on the inside..Body shot..Good Body..Hook..

Round 4  Povetkin pushing action

Round 5  Hunter lands a jab and a right..Hard left hurts Hunter..Hard right

Round 6 Hard left from Hunter..jab..Hook from Povetkin

Round 7 Jab from Hunter…Jab to body..Hard right from Hunter..Body shot wobbles Hunter

Round 8 Left hook from Hunter..Good right from Hunter..

Round 9 

Round 10 Hard right from Povetkin..hard Body shots.Body shots on inside..Nice 1-2..

Round 11 Hard right wobbles Povetkin…Good right..Right drives Povetkin back

Round 12 Good right from Hunter..Nice right from Povetkin..Left to body

115-113 Povetkin…115-113 Hunter…114-114 Draw

Round 1 Hooks to body and head from Whyte..Hard right to body from Wach..Right to body from Whyte..Good right to the head

Round 2 Hard right to body from Whyte..2 Hooks..Body shot from Wach..Uppercut and Hook from Whyte..Hard right from Wach..Combo from Whyte

Round 3  Hooks to body by Whyte..Left…Good right from Wach

Round 4 Hard right from Wach..Good combination from Whyte..Jab

Round 5 Body shot from Whyte..2 Good rights from Wach..Left

Round 6  2 rights from Wach..Combination from Whyte..Good jabs from Wach..Combo from Whyte..another combo on the inside..Hard right from Wach..Body shot from Whyte..Right from Wach…1-2

Round 7  Good jabs from Whyte..Good Hook…Wach has some blood on his nose..Good jab from Whyte

Round 8 Big right from Wach

Round 9 Good body shots from Whyte…Hard right from Wach..Hard combo from Whyte…Right eye of Whyte swelling up…Right from Wach..Uppercut from Whyte..3 punch combo from Wach..jab..Right from Whyte..2 rights…Right from Wach..combo on the ropes at the bell

Round 10 Good right from Whyte…

98-93..97-93 TWICE FOR WHYTE

Round 1 Good straight right from Hrgovic..Right off the break..Right from Molina..BODY SHOT HURTS MOLINA AND THEN HE GOES DOWN…The did not rule a knockdown

Round 2 Chopping Right knocks Molina down again, and yet ruled no knockdown..Straight right from Hrgovic..Body shot..Overhand right from Molina..Right again..Jab..HaRD RIGHT FROM HRGOVIC AND DOWN GOES MOLINA (BODY SHOT)..Right to body…hard body shot and right at the bell

Round 3 Chopping right and hook to body from Hrgovic,,,Hook to body and right hand..RIGHT TO HEAD AND DOW GOES MOLINA…HE DOES NOT BEAT THE COUNT

Round 1 Majidov landing the jab..Right to the body..hooks landing

Round 2 HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES LITTLE..Little trying to fight back..Straight right drives little back..Jab snaps Little’s head back…CombinTION AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

NEW YORK (December 6, 2019)- This Saturday in Saudi Arabia, 18 year-old sensation Diego Pacheco will look for win number eight in just under 12 months when he takes on Selemani Saidi in a super middleweight bout.

Pacheco (7-0, 6 KOs) has kept what most likely is the most ambitious schedule in the sport as he will be fighting just four weeks after his 4th round stoppage over Aaron Casper in Los Angeles.

The bout with Saidi will be part of the much anticipated Andy Ruiz Jr. – Anthony Joshua World Heavyweight title rematch undercard, and will be streamed live on DAZN beginning at 12-Noon Eastern Time.

Pacheco, of Los Angeles has already defeated four undefeated fighters, and with a win over Saidi (20-15-5, 15 KOs), Pacheco will enter 2020 near the top of many top prospect lists.

Pacheco weighed in at 167 lbs. Saidi was 166 lbs.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Anthony Joshua promises not to celebrate. That’s just one of the many promises attached to Joshua.

First and foremost, there’s the promise to win Saturday, avenge the stunning defeat to Andy Ruiz Jr. in June. A failure to fulfill that one and you can toss the rest of Joshua’s advertised promise into the spit bucket.

A lot is at stake for him and promoter Eddie Hearn in a rematch aptly dubbed Clash On The Dunes. Lose it, and Joshua’s career won’t be worth much more than a handful of sand. Win it, and he can hit the re-set button on what had been boldly sold and sculpted as a sure thing.

We’ll see.

Doubts at all that’s been said and sold about Joshua will linger no matter what happens in a sequel (DAZN) in a ring near the Saudi oil fields. Joshua had been called a generational athlete. The media bought it. UK fans bought it. Yet, he was beaten in one of the biggest upsets of his generation. The heavyweight hype is gone, leaving him with only a burden of proof.

Has he shaken the psychological aftermath of his June 1 demise?

Will he have enough agility and speed in his feet and a reportedly leaner upper-body to elude and eventually counter Ruiz’ fast hands?

Answers are hard to find, in part because Ruiz’ upset – a seventh-round TKO – was so one-sided. Ruiz (33-1, 22 KOs), a late replacement for Jarrell Miller, was the stand-in. But Joshua (22-1, 21 KOs) fought like the stand-in, hitting the canvas four times.

Who was this guy?

Who is this guy?

A hint to the second question is forthcoming. For Joshua, the task Saturday is to restore some of the advertised identity he lost in New York. He’s right to say there’s no reason to celebrate.

“I was asked this – will it be a special moment?” Joshua said at a news conference Wednesday.  “I said, ‘no,’ because I know I belong there. So, it’s not special.

“I know I belong there. I know what I’m capable of doing. So, when I regain those belts, I’m probably just going keep cool and stay focused, because it’s not a time to celebrate.’’

He went on to say that he always fought as though he was destined to be great.

“When I came into boxing, I didn’t come to take part,’’ he said. “I came to take over.’’

His words are underlined by an unmistakable resolve. But words don’t win fights. Fast hands do. Ruiz can win the rematch with hands that move with a magician’s agility. What Ruiz is missing this time however, is the surprise factor. From this corner, that’s critical.

Ruiz has forever proven that he was underrated. In some ways, he still is. He’s 2-to-1 underdog despite his one-sided stoppage of Joshua in June. But the guess is that Joshua has no illusions about how good Ruiz is, or about how perilous his own future appears to be. Joshua knows about the fast hands. Knows about Ruiz’ resiliency, too.

It would be no surprise to anyone, including Joshua, if Ruiz is the first to hit the canvas. He was in June in a third-round knockdown. But Joshua let him off the hook. Maybe, Joshua got lazy. Or, perhaps, he was just unprepared. But expect Joshua to be vigilant and prepared for that moment when Ruiz does get back up all over again. For the Mexican-American, that will mark the time when the fight is just beginning.

For Joshua, however, it’s a chance to capitalize with superior strength and overall athleticism. That’s when Joshua can begin to punish Ruiz with his power, which is one element that wasn’t oversold. It’s real.

Prediction: Joshua might not be great heavyweight, but he’s good enough to win the rematch with a late-round TKO in a victory that will put him back in line for a day when he can really celebrate. 

By Bart Barry-

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – Sunday nights at Arena
Coliseo, downtown, are noches familiares (family nights) when the lucha libre
begins at 6:00 PM local time.  The masked
luchadores congregate in the lobby whilst ticketbuyers queue and mask vendors assemble
their displays.  If you spring for $10
ringside seats, in front of the chainlink fence, a selfemployed usher shows you
your spot for a small but assumed gratuity.

What follows is 150 minutes of theatrical, performative
violence done by acrobatic athletes. 
What thousand children gather wear smiles, every one.  It’s combat sans sadism, catharsis without
malice.  Most of all it is fun.  Rarely is our beloved sport fun.  Enough alcohol and friends, and our sport has
funny occasions.  But how often does
anyone review a prizefight and think it was a fun evening?  Now take that number and subtract the folks
who feel guilt shortly thereafter – a man could die in the ring, after all, we
remind ourselves tirelessly – and you’re left without a handful. 

With one blessed exception: Ruiz-Joshua 1 – the
rematch of which happens Saturday on DAZN somewhere far away from wherever
you’re reading this.  Ruiz-Joshua 1 was
boxing’s one night of delivering guiltfree jollity enough to be a beersoaked
family night of lucha libre.

That night a made-man got exposed indecently by what
looked like a bellyjiggling toughman. 
None of us gave Ruiz a shot, not necessarily because we didn’t know who
he was or what talent he had but because everything about Joshua’s ascent was
so preform scripted none of us imagined a happening so absurd might befall him;
any man with better than a 1-in-10 shot of beating Joshua, we assumed, had been
filtered before the Madison Square Garden contract collected its ink.

Yet there Joshua was, the prodigy – Olympic gold
medalist, sculpted giant, undefeated collector of men’s souls, unrivaled seller
of tickets – stankylegging his chiseled bulk about the bluemat and transferring
his disbelief to the rest of us, refusing to toe the line in round 7 after his
fourth knockdown.  Then Ruiz jumping in ecstasy,
his back shimmying everywhere like spilled glitter, and his unmanned foe
commandeered the microphone to call him the better man several times and
several more.  Well.

Here are some things that didn’t matter until
Joshua got stopped but matter in retrospect and preview.  Ruiz and Joshua are the same age, 30, but
Ruiz has been boxing twice as long. 
Joshua won a gold medal at London 2012, but Ruiz had more than twice as
many amateur bouts.  Joshua was 22-0 as a
professional before their June match, but Ruiz was 29-0 three years ago.  Joshua is the darling asset of his country’s
best promoter, but Ruiz spent nearly all his career under boxing’s best
promoter.  And as ace writer and editor
Matthew Swain tweeted last week, Joshua may be an athlete, but Ruiz is a
fighter.

That distinction is the one that mattered in their
first tilt and anticipates their rematch. 
Watch the men’s reactions whenever both land stiff shots.  Joshua admires his work and expects to be
left in a quiet, happy place while he does so. 
Ruiz leaps at his opponent with another combination and keeps punching
till the ref makes him stop.  Ruiz
expects to be struck and hard, and if he didn’t quite expect to be nearly decapitated
by Joshua’s round 3 combination, 6-3, uppercut-hook, boxing’s purest combo
according to Joe Frazier (if you land the 6 then you cannot miss with the 3),
he knew exactly how to behave after it came.

Meanwhile it was amateur (half)hour for Joshua thereafter.  He got inside his opponent’s comparatively
tiny range, got slapped silly by a balance shot, and never recovered at
all.  And when he pleaded with his corner
for a tip, he was told “lefts and rights” – which, as this column goes to
print, exhaust the options in boxing’s lexicon; all that was missing from that
show was a waterfilled latex glove playing enswell.

Today Joshua says all the right things, just like
yesterday and yesteryear – back to basics, trust his intuition, go with what
got him there, a brand new fitness regimen. 
None of these things fixes the technical flaws Ruiz brought to light,
much less the mental weakness Ruiz amplified by contrast, much less the experience
of Joshua’s public emasculation.

What hope does Joshua have in Saturday’s rematch?  He retains a ridiculous size advantage,
excellent power, and every sanctioning body’s and broadcaster’s rooting
interest.  Ruiz went for the money and
conceded most everything else, because why not? 
Ruiz’s former promoter, Bob Arum, in an interview with The Ring mischievously
alluded to Joshua’s preference for host countries with lax testing protocols, too,
and Saudi Arabia’s probably couldn’t be looser.

None of those things, though, makes a Joshua
rematch victory probable.  Joshua cannot
outbox Ruiz and would be foolish to try. 
He cannot throw more fluidly in combination than Ruiz.  A chin is not something one acquires in his 24th
professional fight.  And that’s before
one considers Joshua’s evident conditioning issues.  Well before spazzing hither and yon against
Ruiz, Joshua showed selfdoubt against under-40 athletes; he knew better than to
think carrying so much muscle in the ring makes for finessed, lateround
showings.

Jester or otherwise, Andy Ruiz knows exactly what
he is when he looks in the mirror.  Anthony
Joshua does not any longer, if he ever did. 
He knows his career’s greatest advocates either overestimated him or lied
about it.

If Joshua takes an honest inventory of what
mountains of selfdoubt now enclose him and uses that inventory to create
desperation enough to fuel a savage firstround blitzing of Ruiz, Joshua may
well prevail.  Or he may get stretched
again.  But if he cautiously wades in and
lets Ruiz warm, he’ll enroll himself in a game of keepaway he’s too robotic to
win.

I’ll take Ruiz, KO-6.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

BUENOS AIRES – This is a long way from Vegas where history is always just a bulldozer away. Vegas sells itself for all that is supposed to stay there. That’s the cliche anyway.

It’s not true, of course. Nobody much remembers what they did in Vegas. They lose. They go home. They forget.

But there’s no forgetting in Argentina’s capitol city. It’s full of monuments and surrounded by decaying elegance. Streets are named Eva or Evita. Take a left, take a right and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll wind up in Ciudad Evita.

One of the city’s leading tourist stops is a graveyard, Cementerio de la Recoleta. You can say hello to Eva Peron, there, too. Or at least you can say your last respects.

Her tomb is there, next to others, all done in a dizzy array of architectural styles. It’s a well-manicured piece of monumental real estate, the best in the city. Once there, it’s easy to understand why you might want to stay forever.

Among the many decorated graves of Argentine greats, there’s a boxer, Luis Firpo. Forgive the longwinded tour to the point in this column. Then again, nothing happens very quickly in Argentina. Trust me, I’ve stood in several interminably long lines to show my passport at the airport and to exchange currency. (More on this later.)

Firpo’s place in the cemetery is a symbol of what Buenos Aires has been and some ways still is. It was a great fight town. Firpo, one the great heavyweights in the 1920s, is remembered for a wild bout with Jack Dempsey. He knocked Dempsey out of the ring. But Dempsey won, knocking him down seven times.

I mention Firpo, because I was here, passing through Buenos Aires on my way to Patagonia’s glaciers, lakes and mountains on the same day that Deontay Wilder stopped Luis Ortiz last Saturday in a rematch at the MGM Grand. If not for the long-planned trip, I would’ve been in Vegas.

So, I figured that Wilder-Ortiz had to be a must-see event in a city that reveres Firpo and in a country that still celebrates Marcos Maidana and Sergio Martinez. Another heavyweight, Oscar Bonavena, is an Argentina native. He twice took Joe Frazier to the scorecards, losing both. He lost a 15^th-round TKO to Muhammad Ali.

Then, of course, there is Carlos Monzon. They still talk about the all-time middleweight in Buenos Aires. A local television station is planning a documentary series on the fighter, who died in an auto accident in 1995 on a furlough from prison. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend in 1988. Monzon still fascinates.

So, they had to know Wilder, right? No, no, nada. Then, they had to know Ortiz, right? After all, Ortiz is Cuban.  Che Guevara, a Cuban revolutionary, was born in Argentina. He went to school in Buenos Aires. Maybe there was a link, a reason to cheer for Ortiz? No, no, nada.

On the day of my arrival, I only heard some mild interest while standing in line at customs from three Americans, who were a lot more interested in partying in the endless parade of bars up-and-down so many of Buenos Aires’ streets.

So, I searched, first for a sports bar that might show the telecast. But no, no, nada. If there’s a television not showing soccer in Buenos Aires, it’s probably not on. It’s soccer, soccer and more soccer, all day long and all the time.

It was about then that I thought I would invest the $79.99 for the Fox pay-per-view telecast. At the moment I made that decision, the exchange rate, Argentine pesos-for-dollars, was at 56-to-1. Buster Douglas was given a better chance before his monumental upset of Mike Tyson in Tokyo.

Anyway, I’m not sure what the PPV price tag added up to in pesos. Besides, it doesn’t matter. The exchange rate changes, almost by the hour. As I write this, it’s 60-to-1. Whatever the PPV toll in Argentine currency was, it was in the thousands and I forgot to pack a wheelbarrow to carry them around.

Anyway, I headed back to my hotel room, thinking I’d follow the fight on twitter. First, I turned on the television, flipped my way through a few dozen soccer games and, suddenly, there it was Leo Santa Cruz beating Miguel Flores. Wilder-Ortiz was next. But the Fox telecast was carried by rival ESPN for its South American audience.

I didn’t have to shell out a dollar or a single peso. The fight, itself, played out the way I thought it would. Wilder’s right hand lands and it’s over, this time in the seventh round instead of the 10^th. Different timing, same scenario.

Yet, what struck me more than anything were the background shots at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.  Empty seats were everywhere. A crowd of 10,000-plus for heavyweight title fight was announced. Turns out, Wilder isn’t must-see TV in his own country either.

Pick the reason. Maybe, it was a date too close to the Thanksgiving holiday. Or, maybe, neither Wilder nor Ortiz has much appeal to fans. Or maybe the house was over-priced. Pick one, pick all.

But for one night, at least, Vegas and Buenos Aires weren’t as different as I had thought.  

Follow all the action as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight title against Luis Ortiz in a rematch.  The action gets underway at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with a 3 fight undercard featuring title bouts with Leo Santa Cruz and Brandon Figueroa.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1: Good left from Ortiz,,Ortiz bleeding from forehead

Round 2 Straight left from Ortiz

Round 3 Left from Ortiz..left..Right from Wilder…

Round 4 Left from Ortiz..2 more lefts..

Round 5 Left from Wilder..Solid right from Wilder…

Round 6 Good hook from Wilder..left..

Round 7 Right from Wilder..Right to the body..Straight to body from Ortiz..HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ORTIZ...HE DOESNT BEAT THE COUNT AND ITS OVER

Round 1 Right from Santa Cruz…Counter right

Round 2 Flores lands a right and gets counter with a left

Round 3 Santa Cruz working on the ropes..Straight right..Uppercut from Flores

Round 4 Right to head from Santa Cruz..he is boxing well at distance

Round 5 Body shot from Flores..

Round 6 Santa Cruz pressuring…

Round 7 Santa Cruz working…Flores not landing anything significant

Round 8 FLORES DEDUCTED A POINT FOR HOLDING…Lead right from Santa Cruz..2 right hands..

Round 9 Good right from Santa Cruz..Hard counter right rocks Flores at the bell

Round 10 Santa Cruz cut around the left eye..

Round 11 Solid right from Santa Cruz

Round 12  Body shot from Santa Cruz..

115-112; 117-110 TWICE FOR LEO SANTA CRUZ

Round 2 Hard right from Figueroa…Right from Ceja…Right from Figueroa..

Round 3 Good combination on the inside from Ceja…Body shot from Figueroa..and another…left hook..4 lefts in a row

Round 4 6 lefts in a row from Figueroa….
Round 5 Both guys trading in the middle of the ring..Uppercut from Ceja..
Round 6 hard right and left from Ceja..Left to body from Figueroa..Good hook…Right from Ceja…
Round 7 Ceja landing body…Good hook from Figueroa..2 lefts from Figueroa..
Round 8 Good right from Figueroa..
Round 9 Ceja landed a body shot..Body shot from Figueroa.3 body shots from Ceja…
Round 10 Left from Ceja…body work..body/head combination…

Round 11 Short right from Ceja…Ceja lands a right on the inside
Round 12  Figueroa lands a combination…They are throwing lots of punches down the stretch

Figueroa landed 411-1338    Ceja Landed 373-1473

115-113 for Figueroa…116-112 for Ceja…114-114 a draw

Round 1 Combination from Ramirez..Nice right hook
Round 2 Right hook from Ramirez..
Round 3 Jab from Barthelemy…Straight left..2 lefts from Ramirez..hard right hook..
Round 4 2 lefts from Ramirez..Right hook..Hard left over the top..Hard left…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES BARTHELEMY…FIGHT STOPPED

Round 1: Hard hook and BODY SHOT..DOWN GOES SHACKS..Hard body shot..Hook..left to body…CombinATION AND UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES SHACKS…Good right from Shacks..
Round 2 Combination from Juarez
Round 3
Round 4 Right from Juarez
Round 5 Right and combination
Round 6 RIGHT AND DOWN GOES SHACKS…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Hook to the body from Bailey..Soldi right from Mielnicki…Jab

Round 2 uppercut from Bailey..Body shot from Mielnicki..Hard right hurts Bailey..LefT HOOK ROCKS BAILEY AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1: Right from Wilder..
Round 2 Lead right from Long
Round 3 Good right from Wilder..Jab and right hand
Round 4 HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES WILDER…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Slavinskyi lands a jab…right hand

Round 2 Jab from Slavinskyi…Good left..Hook..left..Counter
Round 3 Hermosillo lands a left
Round 4 Right hook and left over the top from Slavinskyi..Good jab from Hermosillo…Good jab from Slavinskyi..Hlavinskyi was cut over his right eye due to an accidental hedbutt
Round 5  Good left from Hermosillo
Round 6 Sharp left from Slavinskyi…Body shot from Hermsillo

58-56; 59-55; 60-54 for SLAVINSKYI

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder’s power, potentially a double-edged weapon, has yet to strike back at him. The theory, perhaps expectation, has long been that it will undo him and his heavyweight reign.

Yet, his right hand, a weapon that is singular in every way, has always been there, a force of nature almost reliable as an incoming tide.

Nobody has ever been able to avoid it, not even Tyson Fury. Fury got up from it in a controversial draw. But not even the clever Fury could elude it.

Now, the many-skilled Luis Ortiz has a second chance Saturday night at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand in a Fox pay-per-view bout.

Ortiz, who learned the trade in Cuba’s exacting amateur ranks, vows to not let it happen again. Ortiz envisions a rematch without a repeat. He foresees only a reversal.

Perhaps, he figures he can exert his own power and finish what was left undone on March 3, 2018 when he had Wilder in big trouble in the seventh round before losing a 10^th-stoppage. Perhaps, he will re-assert a younger version of himself with some old tricks he learned in Cuba.

It’s hard not to like Ortiz. He has a compelling story that includes his flight in 2005 from Cuba in a desperate battle to help a daughter born with a skin condition.

He’s a quiet man in front of the media.

He’s a dangerous man in front of an opponent.

He also believes now — perhaps more so than ever – that his chances at a heavyweight title have never been better. It’s evident he’s done the work throughout training in Las Vegas, a long way from his home in Miami. If conditioning is any factor, there’s good reason for his confidence.

Physically, he has never looked better. For now, forget the jokes about his age. Forty or 50, he looked as if he were ready to fight a few weeks ago.

But appearances are misleading, if not an outright illusion. Ortiz’ good look doesn’t mean he has found any way to elude Wilder’s wild right hand. Who has?

In all of the attention on that one massive punch, however, Wilder’s durable chin is often overlooked. He can do more than throw a punch. He can take one, too.

That durability allows Wilder to take a fight into later rounds. It’s a factor that multiplies chances that his right hand will land, especially in moments when energy and focus begin to fade. He’s been durable enough to successfully defend his title nine times. Now, it’s time for No. 10 with no real reason to think anything has changed.

Prediction: In a repeat and rematch, Wilder wins another 10^th-round stoppage.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder likes to talk about differences, what he believes separates him from Luis Ortiz, Tyson Fury and just about everybody else.

He’s different, no doubt, from the kid, who won a bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Even then, however, there was a singular difference, one that separated him from every other boxer on the U.S. team. He was the only American in Beijing to medal.

Since then, he’s grown older and louder by multiple decibels. Still, there are questions about how much better he is within the ropes. His right hand is the one thing that continues to make a powerful difference. It is a singular strike, scoring 40 knockouts in 42 fights. He throws it with Tommy Hearns-like leverage.

Fury got up from it in their celebrated draw nearly a year ago. But that was more about Fury and his inexhaustible resilience than Wilder. Yet, there’s a sense – even a fear among promoters planning on a Fury-Wilder rematch in February – that Ortiz has the wherewithal to beat him on Nov. 23 (Fox pay-per-view) in their sequel at Las Vegas MGM Grand.

“He can screw this whole thing up,’’ said promoter Leonard Ellerbe, who didn’t exactly say screw, but you get the idea. “He can screw it up.’’

He can, mostly because of a versatile skill set that makes him more capable of adjusting than Wilder. Longtime boxing observers and bettors have always believed a good boxer beats a power puncher. But Wilder has knocked out that formula while knocking out just about everybody he has faced.

Giving a good boxer a second chance, however, might enhance chances of an Ortiz upset, which also would put all of those plans for Wider-Fury II on hold.

At a media workout a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, Ortiz looked as though he was in good enough shape to make lots of adjustments throughout 12 rounds. He blamed fatigue for the loss in their first fight, which ended in a Wilder stoppage in the 10^th.

Ortiz’ confidence matched his well-conditioned appearance. He assured reporters that, yes, he was 40-years-old and not a day older.

Then in a conference call this week, he said the Wilder fight was not his last chance at a heavyweight title.

“No, absolutely not,’’ Ortiz said. “I’m going to win the title, so no need for another opportunity. I will be the champion.’

Wilder scoffed at that, of course.

“This might be his last at 40 years old,’’ Wilder said. “Coming in, we all know when you fight Deontay Wilder, I take something from you. I take years from your life. ‘’

An over the-top confidence has become a noisy trademark for Wilder, who is poised for a 10^th defense of a belt he won in his only decision over Bermane Stiverne on Jan. 17, 2015, also at the MGM Grand.

“I’m a totally different king,’’ Wilder said. “I’m a totally different beast. I’m the best in the world and I prove it each and every time I go in the ring. I’m not worried about going in and making any mistakes and stuff. And if I do make any mistake in the ring, rest assured, I will correct it as the fight goes on.

“I see this fight going one way, and that’s Deontay Wilder knocking out Luis Ortiz, point blank and period.

“You know it.

“He knows it.

“I know it.’’

By Bart Barry-

Thursday at Super Arena not far from Tokyo, Japan’s
Naoya “The Monster” Inoue decisioned “The Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire to win
WBSS’ bantamweight tournament in a fight that saw the loser dropped by a liver
shot and the winner later treated for a cracked face.

It was splendid, gorgeous, a Thanksgiving-month reminder
to be grateful.  One can leave
of-the-year superlatives to others and say this 2019 match is the one any
aficionado should rewatch first.  This
was the match to show kids who wonder if boxing retains qualities they’ve heard
grandfathers conspire about.

It had class, courage, class, drama, class,
suspense, class, blood, class, concussion, class, bonebreaking, class, violence,
class, violence and class.  It didn’t
make its predecessors or successors worth their suffering because it was an
island, a tribute unto itself of what prizefighting looks like at its very
best.  Notice: It wasn’t horrorflick gory
or WWE paced or Boardwalk Hall thunderstriking – it was proper prizefighting in
a way as recognizable to Benny Leonard as Floyd Mayweather.

Inoue sought and encountered his foil in a way
none of his peers has done.  We now know
he could’ve signed with Top Rank and fought ESPN prelims till 2021 but
self-entered a single-elimination tourney instead to test himself three
weightclasses higher than his debut scaling. 
That’s what a pursuit of greatness looks like.  No cherrypicking, no ask-my-managering, no thank-God-and-Al-Haymoning;
rather, I will fight whosoever draws me and I will annihilate him.

And at tourney start Nonito did not look that part,
as the bracket configuration appeared prohibitive to Filipino Flash.  Three rounds into WBSS’ first round Donaire
looked outclassed enough by Irishman Ryan Burnett to be involuntarily retired before
three, 120-108 scores got read in Scotland. 
Then Burnett suffered a freak back injury Donaire had nothing to do
with, and Nonito was on to the semifinals where he blasted an anonymous
shortnotice sub.  All the while Inoue
stomped to the finals in a series of exertions better captured by punches-needed
than minutes or rounds.

I was ringside for Inoue’s only American tilt, two
years ago, and I did not see anything to make me anticipate the ease with which
Inoue’d go through Juan Carlos Payano and Emmanuel Rodriguez.  This year I went from admiring Inoue’s
character for signing with WBSS to quietly ranking him above Bud, Hi-Tech and
Canelo.  I expected him to blitz Donaire
and bring a mercy stoppage early, definitely before the fight’s mid rounds.  Too fast, too strong, too technically sound
for a 37-year-old returned in 2018 to a division he outgrew in 2011.

But did I remember July 7, 2007, in my
assessment?  Damn right I did.

That extraordinary lefthook against an onrushing
and sadistic savant, Vic Darchinyan, who’d humiliated Nonito’s older brother, Glenn,
then put Victor Burgos in a coma in the two fights that preceded his intended
wasting of Nonito.  Darchinyan’s
signature charge embraced contemptuous entitlement more than strategy, fists not
just waistlow but cocked, when Nonito clipped him and changed both their careers.

True an eraser as exists in our beloved sport,
that Donaire lefthook.  It erased
everything we predicted on Thursday, no? 
It flew in round 1 but got outsped by Inoue’s own eraser, the same way
everything Donaire did most of the fight got outsped by what Inoue did, but in
round 2 it did something wicked.  It
gifted The Monster with a monstrous gash, concussion and facial fracture. 

We hadn’t before Thursday an inkling how Inoue
might react to such trauma and hadn’t much more of an inkling immediately after
it happened; Inoue’s composure revealed that his brow had been sliced, not that
his cheek had been cracked.  In
retrospect and upon review, what is most beautiful about the rounds that
followed is how close the men stood to one another without wasted motion.  No twitching, no hotfooting; Donaire and
Inoue stood inside their arms’ lengths and threw punches at one another.

Donaire knew how good Inoue was, and Donaire gave
him everything he had left.  Inoue did
not know how good Donaire’s chin was, none of us did, frankly, and went after
him imprudently on several occasions but none so predatorily as after blackmatting
Donaire with a precise buttonshot 90 seconds in the championship rounds.  Donaire circled desperately as any man with a
vital organ under direct attack.  Inoue
hunted him with punches fundamentally flawless and a defense that was not.

After 30 seconds of being a prey Donaire let sail
a lefthook that braked Inoue’s engine for their fight’s final four minutes.  If Inoue knew a man is never more dangerous
than when hurt he didn’t feel it till 1:54 of round 11 of the WBSS Final – a
punch he will not forget.  Done were
Inoue’s leads; nearly every punch he threw after that Donaire lefthook got
preceded by a jab, the way you learn your first week in a boxing gym.  If the match’s final round was anticlimactic
it was because the match climaxed four minutes before its closing bell when
both men realized they’d given enough of themselves and enough to one another.

I watched Thursday’s WBSS Final on short rest and 12
hours after an
unsettling adventure with stroboscopic LEDs, so I may be an unreliable narrator,
but Inoue-Donaire was complete a prizefight as I’ve seen in many years.  Bless them both.

*

Editor’s note: This column will return in December.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It was a defining fight for Naoya Inoue. It was also a reason for caution.

In watching Inoue’s courageous brilliance in a unanimous decision over Nonito Donaire early Thursday morning, it was hard not to be reminded that there is huge drama packed into boxing’s smallest weight classes.

From Ricardo Lopez to Michael Carbajal to Roman Gonzalez and now Inoue, there has always been this singular mastery of tactical skill, footwork, instinct and guts. All of those elements make them look bigger. But they’re not.

Inoue, a champion in all three flyweight classes, tested himself against an aging, yet bigger Donaire in a bantamweight bout. For 10-rounds, he fought with blood from a long, deep cut below his right eyebrow dripping into his eye and down his cheek like tears.

He said he suffered from double vision. Yet, he never lost sight of what he wanted. And wants.

“I’m not the greatest of all time, yet,’’ he said while standing in the middle of the ring in Saitama, Japan. “I think I have to go over the fight and get stronger. Next year and on, I’ll keeping fighting. I’ll be victorious.

“I want to be the strongest of all time.’’

Therein lurks the danger.

All-time, at least in this era, means moving up the scale. That’s what Canelo Alvarez was doing just a few days ago in his self-proclaimed pursuit of history in taking a fourth division title, light-heavyweight, in an 11^th-round stoppage of Sergey Kovalev.

For the smallest fighters in the business, moving up in weight is an even bigger hazard. Their smaller frames mean every single pound is a little bit bigger. Against Donaire, there were moments when that small difference in pounds was evident in multiples. Donaire, who has fought at featherweight, rocked him. Cut him.

Inoue fought through all of it, yet it was impossible not to think of an old line, as true now as ever.

To wit:

There are weight classes for a reason.

Now, the 26-year-old Inoue has a Top Rank contract and is expected to continue his career in the United States. Already, there’ s speculation of a fight with Mexican junior-featherweight Emanuel Navarrete, an emerging star after successive victories over Isaac Dogboe.

At 5-foot-7, the Top Rank-promoted Navarrete, 24, is more than two inches taller than Inoue, who is 5-5 ½. Navarrete’s reach is listed at 72 inches, five more than Inoue’s 67. He is rapidly growing into a full-fledged featherweight.

Would he fight Inoue? Of course. Inoue is really a flyweight, whose emerging stardom on different sides of the world is expected to generate heavyweight money.

Inoue might find himself in the same situation as Vasiliy Lomachenko, also a Top Rank fighter. Both are ranked among the top four pound-for-pound contenders in virtually every rating.

In the chase for bigger money and wider fame, Lomachenko has also been moving up the scale. He’s a featherweight campaigning at lightweight. He’s winning, but not without injuries that began with stoppage of Jorge Linares in May 2018. Lomachenko underweight shoulder surgery after that one.

Now, there’s talk that he wants to go back to his natural weight, 126 pounds.

“He wants to go down, because he’s getting touched up,’’ Gervonta Davis said last week while talking about his own move up to lightweight against Yuriorkis Gamboa on Dec. 28 in Atlanta.

Perhaps, that’s for any little guy in any era a lesson for any era. Inoue, the reigning Lord Of The Flies, doesn’t have to go anywhere, at least not in terms of weight.

Follow all the action as Naoya Inoue and Nonito Donaire meet for the IBF and WBA Bantamweight title.  The action begins at 5:15 am ET / 7:15 PM in Tokyo

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Round 1:  Good exchange..Stiff jab from Inoue..Right to the body…

Round 2 Right to body from Donaire…Hard left from Inoue..Left staggerd Donaire…1-2 from Donaire..Jab from Inoue…Hard left from Donaire..Inoue cut around the right eye..Replays show it was from a punch

Round 3 Left hook from Donaire..Counter right from Inoue..Left hook to the body..Left hook from Inoue…Left hook from Donaire

Round 4 Left from Inoue..Sneaky right..Right from Donaire…Counter right..Jab to the body

Round 5 Counter left hook staggers Donaire..Good right..Jab..Right from Donaire..Counter right..Counter right staggers Donaire..Hard right..2 more rights

Round 6 Left hook from Donaire..Straight right from Inoue..Counter right..Right..Check left hook

Round 7 Exchange of jabs..Left hook to body from Inoue..Right from Donaire..

Round 8 Good right from Donaire..anther right..Inoue lands a body shot..Hard body shot..right from Donaire..Uppercut and left hook..Right..

Round 9 Good right from Donaire…Check left hook from Inoue..Hard jab from Donaire…big right and Inoue is hurt..Hard right

Round 10 Left from Inoue..1-2…Body shot from Donaire..Combination on inside from Inoue..Good right from Donaire…Hard combination hurts Donaire

Round 11  hard 1-2 from Inoue…head and body shots..BIG LEFT TO BODY AND DOWN GOES DONAIRE…Huge Barrage from Inoue…Big left from Donaire..4 more hard shots from Inoue..

Round 12 Inoue lands a left to the body..Right to the head..right and then a left to the body

116-111, 117-109, 114-113 FOR INOUE

Round 1 Left to body from Oubaali..Left and right from Inoue..Jab

Round 2 Left from Inoue..Uppercut to body..

Round 3 Counter right from Inoue..Good right hook from Oubaali..Left wobbles Inoue..Left from Inoe..Pot shots with right..Good right..

Round 4  Right to body from Inoue..Short right,,little check left hook..Jab..Good counter right…HUGE COUNTER LEFT AND DOWN GOES INOUE..Left to body…Oubaali up 40-35, 39-36 and 38-37

Round 5  Good right from Inoue..Good work from Oubaali on the ropes..Good left..Combination from Inoue..Mouse under the right eye of Inoue

Round 6 Right from Inoue..Nice Jab..

Round 7 Left from Oubaali

Round 8 Good left from Oubaali..Left from Inoue..Oubaali counters back..79-72, 80-71 and 77-75 for Oubaali on judges cards

Round 9 Left to body from Inoue…Body work

Round 10 Left uppercut on inside from Inoue..Good right..Right..

Round 11 Straight left from Oubaali..

Round 12 Straight left from Oubaali..Check right hook..Inoue lands a right that drives Oubaali into the ropes..Left hook..

120-107, 117-110, 115-112 FOR OUBAALI

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at MGM Grand in a light heavyweight title fight
broadcasted by DAZN, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez discombobulated Russian
Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev in the 11th round of a dull match staged sometime Sunday
morning.  It was an exclamation mark on
the end of a sentence banal as this!

Something artificial pervaded the spectacle
entire.  Nothing untoward, quite.  Nothing worth burning digital bridges
about.  But a weird sensation those who
made the Vegas trip deserved much more than they got for being much more
authentic than what they witnessed. 

Krusher, the psychopath-cum-kitten, fought like a
man worried he might offend his host, his benefactor, his employer.  That would be Canelo.  And Canelo put up with oh so much more from
his new employer, DAZN, than our beloved sport’s flagship man should.

Since when does the a-side glove-up an hour before
he walks?  Canelo ate it in a way Money
May would not have, and that is no compliment. 
To see Canelo’s face as a monitor showed him Krusher enjoying a prefight
siesta about 10 minutes after their opening bell should have sounded was to see
a professional processing how many promises his promoter made to get his
promoter paid so much for delivering him as a fighter.  What the hell else did that flake pledge in
my name?  Time will tell, Cinnamon, for
only time knows.

The match hewed suspicious close to its script.  But allay those suspicions.  No one had to be anything at all other than
exactly himself to end the match exactly when it did exactly as it did.  Referee Russell Mora’s spastic no-count was a
smidgen less than hoped, perhaps, but everyone else played his part perfectly,
right down to a wonderful scorekeeper so nervous his maths might fail him at the
decisive point he gave Canelo the first two rounds at the prefight buffet,
figuring Kovalev’s struggles with weight would bring a slow start and since
nothing much happens in the opening six minutes anyway if he launched his card at
20-18 he could score the rest straight and safely submit a tidy tally.

How about that spot in the middle rounds when
Krusher got himself tangled in a Canelo headlock and began tapping his
employer’s back pleadingly?  It was so
sweet and gentle and tender.  Near an
antonym for the word “fight” as anyone’s done with 10-ounce gloves in many a
moon.  An historic touch on an historic
night.

Not since Julio Cesar Chavez has a Mexican won a
title at 175 pounds, apparently, or else I misinterpreted some of DAZN’s 90
minutes of nonsequitur-filled filler, though not the part where B-Hop talked
nonsensically about himself.  I recall
thinking it odd they’d put one of the promoters beside the broadcasters so
close to the ringwalk.

Hah! 
Yup.  I’m an idiot.  It wasn’t till after the Metta World Peace
interview I realized some programming something was so wrong there was no
choice but to fold: I clicked the Roku to Amazon Prime, started a new episode
of “Jack Ryan” and fell gently asleep about the same moment Canelo reclined
into his own prefight torpor, symmetrically enough.

Here’s what happened when I awoke seven hours
later (and I impart this for your future reference, friends, as goodfolk who might
utilize DAZN’s replay): No sooner did I find the main-event selection on DAZN
than I began some maths of my own, noticing the opening bell was fewer than 48
minutes from the video’s end, instantly rendering all of the match’s scoring
drama an irrelevance.  Which made me
impatient.

Imagine, then, enduring those first two rounds en
route to a knockout.  Imagine listening
to witling chatter about Kovalev’s establishing his pittypat jab while knowing
someone would be stopped by real punches sometime before the closing bell.  Imagine listening to that tedious crew argue
with itself about the definition of a close round.  Imagine watching Kovalev’s fears about his
conditioning mount in the middle rounds while knowing he needn’t go all
12. 

By the end of round 7 here was my greatest
suspense as a DAZN subscriber: Should I continue to skip forward 30 seconds at
a time, at the risk of being bored unto longterm acrimony towards the eventual
winner, or should I pointer-skip ahead full minutes, at the risk of ruining the
grand finale? 

I fearlessly skipped forward and landed between
rounds 10 and 11.  Romance favors the
bold. 

Here’s where I should write a white lie about regretting
my course, something like: Great as the ending was, how much better would it
have been had I let the drama build properly through those 40 minutes!  Nah. 
The ending redeemed the match regardless of one’s investment in it; I
felt my 17 minutes well-spent the same way others felt their 117 minutes
well-spent. 

What I like best about Canelo is his treating this
era as it deserves.  After getting
stripped naked by a 150-pound Floyd Mayweather in 2013, four years later Canelo
knew after 12 rounds with GGG, world’s most-feared fighter, there was nothing
historic about today’s middleweight division. 
So he fought 36 rounds with its two best men, went 2-0-1, signed an
obscene contract, then decided to cherrypick from an equally weak light
heavyweight division.

Canelo can fight any man he wishes at any catchweight
he wishes, and no one will say no to him for the next few years because DAZN is
an infinity-plus-one financier.  Too, if
he fights the cruiserweight winner of WBSS next year, none of us is going to
doubt he could beat Callum Smith at super middleweight – even if he probably
couldn’t.

In flashfreezing Kovalev to win a light
heavyweight belt Canelo made history the way Manny Pacquiao did against Antonio
Margarito.  Canelo could be the next
Pacquiao, in fact, if only he’d had a Barrera, a Morales and a Marquez.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Canelo Alvarez tries to win a world title in his 4th weight division when he takes on WBO Light Heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev from the MGM in Las Vegas. The action kicks off at 6:30 PM and the undercard will feature Ryan Garcia

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Round 1 Kovalev jabbing..Continuing to jab,

Round 2 Jab from Kovalev…Good Jab.. Alvarez..Good combination..Counter right to the body….  16-129 for Kovalev….15-41 for Alvarez through 2 rounds

Round 3 Counter right from Alvarez..Jab….Good left..

Round 4 Left hook from Alvarez..Left to body from Kovalev..Body shot from Alvarez

Round 5 Jab from Alvarez…Hard body shot..Left hook..Good body shot from Kovalev..Jab to the head..Body shot

Round 6 Hook to head from Alvarez..right to body  64-56 punches landed for Canelo through round 6

Round 7 Jab from Kovalev

Round 8 Hard jab from Kovalev..Body shot..Hook from Alvarez.

Round 9 Good jab. from Kovalev..Straight right..Hook fro Canelo…Jab from Kovalev..Hard body shot from Alvarez..Double jab from Kovalev..

Round 10 Alvarez lands a right in the corner..left to the body..uppercut..Canelo up 113-111 in punches landed

Round 11 Canelo lands a right..Hook from Kovalev..Body shot from Alvarez…Good right..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KOVALEV…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Hook from Garcia..Hard right shakes Duno…HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES DUNO…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Good hook from Estrada..Body shot..Left hook..Thudding right from Esparza..Good jab..Right to body..Estrada lands a counter hook and body shot

Round 2 Estrada lands a straight right..Check hook from Esparza..Check hook from Estrada..Straight right from Esparza..Body shot from Estrada..

Round 3  Good right from Esparza..Estrada lands a left and right..Left hook from Esparza..Jab from Estrada

Round 4 Hard left from Estrada snaps Esparza’s head back

Round 5 Right from Esparza..Body shot..Body shot from Estrada…Straight right from Esparza…Esparza is cut bad on her forehead..The cut is deep..Bad Headbutt

Round 6 Big left hook from Estrada..Body shot..Hard right

Round 7 Left from Esparza..

Round 8 Hard right by Esparza..

Round 9 Estrada continuing to land…Esparaza lookes tired….ESPARZA SAYS SHE CAN’T SEE ANYMORE AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Left from Ortiz..Straight left..Left..LEFT HAND AND COBBS GLOVE HOTS THE CANVAS

Round 2 Combination from Cobbs…Power jab from Ortiz..Left from Cobbs..Jab..

Round 3  Jab from Cobbs..Counter left..Body shot

Round 4 Jab from Cobbs…Body shot from Ortiz..Body shot from Cobbs

Round 5 Good left from Cobbs..Combination to the body

Round 6 BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES ORTIZ..Good left…Let to top of head..Body from Ortiz..Blood from nose of Cobbs..Hard hook from Cobbs..FIGHT IS STOPPED IN THE CORNER..ORTIZ SAYS HIS RIBS ARE HURT

Round 1  HOLYFIELD COMES OUT STRONG AND DROPS WINSTEAD…FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Good right from Murtaaliev..Right from Fortea

Round 2  Right from Fortea..Big left hook..left to body..Body..Sharp counter combo from Murtazaliev

Round 3 Good body shot from Fortea

Round 4 Swelling and a cut around the left eye of Murtazaliev..Good counter from Fortea

Round 5 Combination from Murtazaliev..Right from Fortea

Round 6  Left from Murtazaliev..Good body shot..Nice right from Fortea..Body shot and overhand right from Fortea..Good right from Murtazaliev..

Round 7 Good right to the body from Murtazaliev..Nice left..left..Good right to the chest

Round 8 Counter right from Murtazaliev

Round 9 Chopping right from Murtazaliev..Right

Round 10 Good right from Fortea..Left hook from Murtazaliev

Round 11 Counter right from Murtazaliev..Hard jab and right hand..

Round 12 Good right to body from Fortea..Check left hook

120-108..119-109..118-110…Murtazaliev

Round 2 Kalkreuth lands a hard left and right

Round 3 Good shots from Smith..Right from Kalkreuth..Big right from Smith..

Round 4  Counter from Kalkreuth..Good right..Straight right from Smith

40-36 TWICE AND 39-37 FOR KALKREUTH

Round 1 Left from Nursultanov
Round 2 Combination from Nursultanov..Double jab to the body
Round 3 Good body shot from Olivas..Good counter left from Nursaltanov…Right and left from Olivas..Straight left from Nursaltanov..Body shot and straight right
Round 4 Quick right from Nursaltanov
Round 5 Body shot hurts Olivas..
Round 6  Right from Nursaltanov
Round 7   Body shot from Olivas..Another body shot
Round 8  Body shot from Nursaltanov
Round 9 Nursaltanov driving Olivas back
Round 10 Nice body shot backs Olivas up..Good right hand

100-90 on all cards for Nursaltanov

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS — The road team does win sometimes. Proof of that happened Wednesday night when the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros, winning a World Series in which only the road team won.

In more than a century of baseball, that’s never happened. In the 116^{th-version of the modern Series, it finally did. It was hard — make that impossible — not to} wonder whether Sergey Kovalev has any kind of chance against Canelo Alvarez Saturday night (DAZN) at the MGM Grand.

If anybody ever represented a road team, it’s Kovalev, who is the underdog in a bid to stop Canelo from making his own kind of history.

He’s moving up the scale, from middleweight to light-heavyweight, in his pursuit of a fourth division. A victory over Kovalev would put Canelo among the elite in Mexico storied boxing history.

It’s no coincidence that a chance at Mexican history would be played out in front of a Mexican crowd. It’s Canelo’s town. It’ll be his crowd, too. It’s hard to find an oddsmaker, or a fan, or a pundit who doesn’t think it’s his fight, too.

By now, there are familiar theories as to why.

Theory #1: Kovalev is vulnerable to body punches, Canelo’s best punch.

Theory #2: Canelo, 29, is younger and continue to improve. Age has begun to erode the 36-year-old Kovalev’s skill set.

Theory #3: Kovalev has never been the same since Andre Ward stopped him with succession of body punches in their 2017 rematch. Kovalev says the punches were low blows. Maybe, they were. But the damage to the Russian’s career looks to be irreversible.

Apply one theory or all three, and it looks as though  it’s not a matter of if, just when, Canelo adds a fourth division belt to the other three he already has in his personal history.

Throughout this week in Vegas, however, there were subtle signs that it might not be Canelo in blowout. There’s evident personal chemistry between Kovalev and his new trainer, Buddy McGirt, who has scaled back Kovalev’s training. There’s less sparring and more of an emphasis on restoring fundamental technique, especially the jab, Kovalev’s signature punch.

“I’ve told Sergey: ‘You’re an older person now which means you have to be a smarter person,’ ‘’ McGirt said.

Best guess is that smarts, the so-called ring IQ, will prove to be the decisive factor. Canelo appears to have an edge, but it’s to say how much smarter he will be throughout the scheduled 12 rounds. His intelligence, however, has been evident over the last few years. At each opening bell, he adds a new element to his skill set.

There more, a lot more, to what he can do, his trainer Eddy Reynoso says.

“People haven’t seen it all,’’ Reynoso said.

Much of his intelligence is rooted in reasonable caution. Don’t expect him to race at a bigger man with a bigger punch.

“It will be complicated, especially in the early rounds,’’ Canelo said.

It also might be complicated in the later rounds, especially if Kovalev hasn’t left the best of himself in the gym.

From this corner, Kovalev-Canelo figures to go to the scorecards. It’ll be close, but it looks as if Canelo is just a little bit smarter and has more in his ever-evolving skillset.

In this week, the real history belongs to the Nationals and Astros.

Pick: Canelo wins a close, yet unanimous decision. 

By Norm Frauenheim-

They called him Little Hands of Stone. The impact on Arizona was huge and now forever indelible.

Michael Carbajal, the best fighter in the state’s history and one of the best in the history of lightest divisions in long and colorful sport, will be inducted to the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame Friday at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort.

Carbajal, a former junior-flyweight champion, grew up in downtown Phoenix. He earned to box in a makeshift ring in his backyard. Old hoses were used as ropes. There was dirt instead of canvas. Mostly, there’s was Carbajal’s passion and skill for craft sometimes call The Sweet Science. He still lives in the house that is front of that modest training ground.

It produced an Olympic silver medalist at the 1988 Seoul Games.

It produced the first little guy, a 108-pound fighter, to win a $1 million purse for fight in 1994. From the World Boxing Council to the International Boxing Federation, he won multiple titles in pro career that spanned a decade, 1989-1999, and included 53 fights – 49 victories, 33 by knockouts and four losses.

Along the way, there were chances to move on. At times, there were reasons to move on. There was adversity. But Carbajal always said no. He said he would never leave his community, his home town or home state.  As a fighter, he would always say: “Never quit.” Lots of fighters say that. But they never lived up to the promise. Carbajal lived up to it on both sides of the ropes.

He never quit in the ring or on his vow to stay at home.

Now 52 and already a longtime member of several Hals of Fame, including the international Hall in Canastota, N.Y., Carbajal finally joins the Hall that defines who he is:

An Arizonan.

Carbajal is joined in the 2019 class by late University of Arizona football coach Dick Tomey, former Suns forward Tom Chambers, Olympic swimming medalist Amy Van Dyken-Rouen, Diamondbacks President Derrick Hall and former Northern Arizona University trainer Michael Nesbitt.

By Bart Barry-

ATLANTA – Traffic shapes your view of everything
here, and you’re not ready for it. 
You’re a medium-city guy who hails from one and likes others from them,
and you know infrastructure in medium cities is sometimes wanting, especially
in the South, spiritually unprepared as it is for immigration of all kinds, and
yet you’re not prepared for the perilous and timebending nature of this city’s
traffic.

This has something to do with Saturday’s match but
not too much, even if one of its combatants is from the American South.  Scotsman Josh Taylor had something that bent New
Orleans’ Regis Prograis in a way for which he was unprepared, howsoever
well-prepared he thought he was.  And
since I happen to be in Peach State for reasons entirely unrelated to our
beloved sport, why . . .

Class told early Saturday while ruggedness told
later, and that’s not oftenly how it goes. 
Taylor won WBSS’ third Muhammad Ali Trophy by majority-decisioning Prograis
in an excellent fight broadcast by the aficionado’s network, DAZN, from an O2
Arena near enough Taylor’s native Scotland to make it a homegame for the Tartan
Tornado (and since Taylor prevailed, he remains British).

In so doing Taylor joined Callum Smith and Oleksandr
Usyk on a shockingly short list of prizefighters since 2017 who’ve allowed
themselves be matched in single-elimination tournaments against the best
available men in their divisions and prevailed. 
While an argument might be made that Top Rank and PBC assets shouldn’t
be excluded from conversations about the world’s best 168- and 200-pound
fighters in 2018 and best 140-, 130- and 200-pound fighters in 2019, the ranks
of those capable of persuasively making such arguments ain’t exactly swelling.

There was much chatter, for instance, about Top
Rank junior welterweight champ Jose Ramirez, Sunday morning, with Taylor’s
establishing himself as the division’s best. 
Ramirez moves the gate for Top Rank, and the promoter’ll be in no hurry
to risk such prowess against a man who might beat him.  Which brings a very interesting question: Who
of Saturday’s combatants do Top Rank’s matchmakers, boxing’s best for a few
decades at least, think is less likely to beat Ramirez in a way that cancels
future sales?  That question, much more
than belts or rankings, will determine the next direction for the junior
welterweight division.

The aforementioned Smith and Usyk cases are instructive
here.  Both men did everything they might
to scour their divisions, and neither got rewarded with meaningful followup
challenges.  Middleweight champion Canelo
Alvarez decided a match with a 175-pound titlist was more attractive than a
match with Smith, and former middleweight titlist Gennady Golovkin, well, his handlers
now search Twitter profiles for a proximate opponent, #superwelter.  Usyk’s case is slightly different – there was
nobody left when he was done at 200 pounds – but he’s now at heavyweight, where
no champion is matched to lose unless by accident.

The Muhammad Ali Trophy is gorgeous but not magnetized.

Still, what Taylor and Prograis did in its pursuit
merits more words than granted thus far. 
Taylor unmanned Prograis for 2/3 of Saturday’s match by smothering him,
in a twist few anticipated.  Taylor’s
largest liability, going in, was his tendency to defend in the exact manner from
which Prograis’ attack would draw encouragement.

Then Taylor did nearly its opposite.  He introduced Prograis to a degree of
physicality Rougarou did not prepare for. 
What happened eventually, Taylor’s unemployable right eye, was exactly
what Prograis would’ve predicted had anyone told him Taylor’d be brazen enough
to get physical during minutes 4-35, but herein lay the problem for Prograis:
Taylor predicted the same in camp.

Nobody who watched the 12th round of Saturday’s
fight thinks Taylor could’ve prevailed were the match unexpectedly extended to
15 rounds – Prograis won the final round more clearly than either man won any
of its predecessors – but Taylor had a better plan and executed it more
precisely.  Fortune, they say, favors the
bold, and it did Saturday when a nasty gash opened over an eye Taylor wasn’t
using anyway; the southpaw Taylor’d long since replaced his lead eye with tactile
tactics and didn’t bother dabbing at his bepurpled right eyelid while there was
still a chance to counter the southpaw Prograis.

Saturday’s was not a great fight but an excellent
one.  Taylor would not have prevailed in
a great fight, one in which each man was felled or worse; had the match been
any more excellent than it was, in other words, Taylor would’ve been the one
giving a gracious postfight speech rather than Prograis.

A word or two about that, too.  How refreshing was Prograis’ comportment for
an American after losing a decision narrow enough to be attributable to
geography?  He promised no excuses and
made none.  He called his opponent – badly
faded, beatup and blinded – the better man more than once.  Prograis wasn’t chastened in defeat but
noble.  He’d gotten a fight more honest
than expected and talked like it.

That spoke, also, to what Taylor’d done.  When a man skitterskips his way from you,
husbanding his most violent acts for a finalbell chest slap, it’s impossible
not to feel cheated.  But when a man puts
his weight on you, shoulders you and forearms you, gets your sweat cleaned off his
gumshield after a round of knocking it from your head in halos, when he makes
it filthy intimate, that’s another thing entirely.  It’s easier to be gracious after such an
experience – and such things must be experienced to be believed.

Congratulations, then, Josh and Regis, we wish
there were more men like you!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Star power is behind him. Star potential is within him. What looks so close, however, could suddenly become a star-too-far for Regis Prograis, who is a cutting-edge face to boxing’s emerging generation.

Much, if not all, depends on how Prograis tests his evident charisma and versatile skill-set against Josh Taylor Saturday in a bout (DAZN) loaded with career-defining elements.

Prograis, whose management team incudes Mark Wahlberg and filmmaker Peter Berg, has a back story to tell and he knows how to tell it.

He fled New Orleans and the devastation left by Katrina in 2005. Where there weren’t wrecked homes, there was personal chaos. Prograis survived, then thrived. Out of the storm, came the fighter.

The story introduces him. He’s done the rest, scoring 20 stoppages in 24 victories and winning a junior-welterweight belt. No matter the rating, he’s ranked among the top three at 140-pounds alongside Taylor and Jose Ramirez.

Now, he’s on the road in London, where he puts it all at risk against Taylor (15-0 12KOs), a fighter from Scotland’s Edinburgh who is a slight betting underdog yet figures to be a huge crowd favorite at the O2 Arena in southeast London.

Both left-handers, Taylor has advantages in size. At 5-feet-9, Taylor is an inch taller than the 5-8 Prograis. He has a 2 ½-inch edge in reach. In terms of volume, he figures to have all of the decibels from the crowd cheering in his favor.

It’s hard to pick against him.

“I’m quite a bit better than him in every department,’’ Taylor said Thursday at the final news conference.

No argument there. If a pre-fight news conference is the equivalent of a political debate, however, score this one for Prograis.

“He should be able to land a solid, flush punch on me and when that happens, nothing will happen,’’ said Prograis, who is as comfortable in front of the cameras as he is telling stories. “When that happens, things will change. He will realize that I am an iron-man with an iron jaw.

“Once he lands his hardest shot and I look at him with a face of disdain, he will think: ‘Damn, I’m in trouble.’ “

Damn, he might be right.

Taylor argues that Prograis’ unbeaten record is padded with a lot of nobodies and wannbes. He has yet to encounter Taylor’s kind of power, the Scotsman says.

Yet, it’s also evident that Prograis has almost a quick-silver way of adjusting. His mastery of different looks can confuse even a prepared opponent. In so many words, Prograis says Taylor doesn’t know, can’t see, what’s coming.

Prediction: Prograis wins a decision, unanimous, yet close on every scorecard.

By Bart Barry-

Sometime last week or the one before, the ballot
arrived for this year’s International Boxing Hall of Fame election.  It had too many great fighters to choose only
five, but rules are rules.  I don’t
recall the other four I chose.  They
weren’t necessarily four who will get in but borderline candidates I hope to
help.  My fifth vote went without
hesitation to a man whose name appeared alphabetically towards the bottom: Israel
“El Magnifico” Vazquez.

This won’t be a persuasive piece, necessarily, so
much as a light exposition, an examination, a chance to write once more about
my favorite prizefighter.

I didn’t vote for Vazquez to be in the IBHOF
because I believe you should, or should agree that I did.  I won’t list the most-prominent fighter on
this year’s ballot for whom I did not vote because I know his misanthropic fans
and haven’t a desire or reason in the world to hear from them again – and he’s
getting in anyway.  I don’t have
reductionist criteria to which I cling for making decisions about who belongs
in a hall of fame or deserves of-the-year awards because I feel no compulsion
whatever to justify these decisions.  I
watch prizefighting often enough to write a weekly column and trust the rest to
intuition.  I don’t argue about these
things, either; this column is an asymmetrical medium.

There is no one I have covered in this, our
beloved sport whom I admire more than El Magnifico.  Nobody I can think of who gave more of the
best part of himself to our sport, either, making naught but world championship
fights in his prime and losing his career and right eye to the quality of
opposition he faced.  And in a sport of
counterintuitively decent men, too, he’s the most decent I’ve met.

My first Las Vegas card I covered for this site
was Marco Antonio Barrera’s 2006 tutoring of Rocky Juarez, and that night’s
co-comain featured the best fight any American aficionado saw live, much less
in person, that year.  Vazquez came off
the canvas twice and ground Jhonny Gonzalez to dust seven years before Gonzalez
put a stamp on Abner Mares.

Man, could Vazquez grind!  He had innate a sense as any of another man’s
accumulating weakness; he saw with a jeweler’s loupe the first fissures in an
opponent’s will.  Once he saw the
fissures he pressured them unto cracks and pieces and pieces of those pieces,
regardless what counterpunches hit him en route.

He had many plans, too, not just a plan A, which
means he was nothing like the kamikaze some wrongly credited him with being.  He stayed on his stool, after all, in the
first of his three fights with Rafael Marquez. 
He wasn’t able to breathe and said he wouldn’t fight on.  If that keeps him off someone’s defunct Gatti
List, so be it.

What it proves is Vazquez’s volition; it proves
that every time he marched through his era’s best super bantamweights he did so
voluntarily, capable as he was of calling-off the match if the contest became
futile.  Oscar Larios (63-7-1, 39 KOs),
Jhonny Gonzalez (68-11, 55 KOs) and Rafael Marquez (41-9, 37 KOs): Vazquez
fought these men a collective eight times and went 5-3 (4 KOs).  He knocked-out two of them in rematches after
they’d stopped him, and in the case of the third, “Jhonny” Jhonny, he
knocked-out Gonzalez after being dropped by him a twotime.

El Magnifico’s legacy is, of course, his trilogy
with Rafael Marquez.  As aficionados
bemoan the recesses and tuneups granted men like Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury
and Saul Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin, they’re reminded Vazquez and Marquez
fought one another consecutively in three matches that spanned less than a
year.  Marquez stopped Vazquez in March,
Vazquez stopped Marquez in August, and they made the 2007 fight of the year seven
months later.

It’s the best fight in the best trilogy I’ll ever
cover.

You can confirm all that on YouTube.  What you can’t confirm is how ruined, broken
even, Vazquez was in the postfight pressconference after his victory.  There he was, his face like a powdered
Halloween mask – allwhite but for lipstick circles where his eyes and mouth
should’ve been.  He humbly mumbled his
praise of Marquez through torn, swollen lips and graciously ceded the
microphone to Marquez’s jackass promoter and assistant manager and their braying
about protesting some detail nobody remembers. 
Eleven years later, and that scene still boils.

Sixteen months after Vazquez won 2007’s fight of
the year, good fortune put me at a dinner table with him in New York City,
where the BWAA honored him and my mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim.  Who knows how many surgeries Vazquez’s right
eye had undergone by then.

El Magnifico was there with his wife’s brother,
and before dessert Vazquez’s cuñado loped over to take pictures with what
bedizened models accompanied the evening’s presenters.  Vazquez and I exchanged incredulous glances,
and I told El Magnifico his brother-in-law was gaming every woman with a line
about knowing Israel Vazquez.

“Pero, yo soy Vazquez,” he said, and he motioned
to himself and started laughing.  “I’m
Vazquez!” 

I don’t care if empiricism says there are fighters
more deserving of IBHOF induction.  I
don’t care if someone knows so little about prizefighting that he looks at the 27
losses listed above, or the 5 losses (4 KOs) on Vazquez’s résumé, and scoffs at
someone being dumb enough to vote for Vazquez and admit it in a column.  Frankly, I don’t care if this is the last of
my columns you ever read.

Israel Vazquez epitomizes for me everything that
makes prizefighting worth its writing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Artur Beterbiev and Oleksandr Gvozdyk meet in a Light Heavyweight Unification bout.  the action kicks off at 10 PM ET with Luis Collazo battling Kudratillo Abdukakhorov

THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.  NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED 

Round 1: Jab from Gvozdyk..3 punch combo..Right to body..Right from beterbiev..LEFT..GVOZDYK FALLS..RULED A KNOCKDOWN..Changed to no Knockdown

Round 2 Right from Gvozdyk…Right to body..Hard uppercut from Beterbiev..Counter right from Gvozdyk

Round 3 Good right from Beterbiev…Flush counter right from Gvozdyk..Counter left from Beterbiev..

Round 4 Good combo on ropes from Gvozdyk..Jab..right to body..Right to body..Right from Beterbiev..Jab from Gvozdyk..Right..Hard left from Beterbiev

Round 5 Counter right from Beterbiev..Right..2 rights..Right..Right to body..3 quick punches from Gvozdyk

Round 6 Counter right from Gvozdyk..Uppercut and left from Beterbiev..Counter right from Gvozdyk..2 hard rights

Round 7 Left from Gvozdyk..Hard jab from Beterbiev..Left..left hook

Round 8 Left from Betterbiev..Right to body from Gvozdyk..Good right..Right..Hard right

Round 9 Body shot from Beterbiev..Counter right from Gvozdyk..Hard uppercut rocks Gvozdyk

Round 10 Hard left from Beterbiev…BIG COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES GVOZDYK..HARD LEFT DRIVES GVOZDY BACK,,,RIGHT AND DOWN HE GOES AGAIN…RIGHT HAND AND DOWN GOES GVOZDYK…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Left from Collazo..hard left from KA..Right..Right ..Collazo slips

Round 2 left from KA..Counter left from Collazo..right from KA…Body punch from Collazo..Hard right from KA..Right hook from Collazo…2 hard shots from KA at the end of the round

Round 3  Right from KA..Good left from Collazo..Left from KA

Round 4 Right from KA

Round 5 Collazo boxing

Round 6

Round 7 Straight left from Collazo..Right hook to the body..

Round 8 Right from KA..Uppercut..3 punch combo from Collazo..Collazo bleeding from left eye

Round 9 Right from KA..Good 2 punch combo…

Round 10 Good uppercut from KA..Collazo hurts his leg and his right eye is bleeding badly.

By Norm Frauenheim-

It’s a conflicted sport. That borders on redundancy. Boxing wouldn’t be what it is without conflict. Yet, Patrick Day’s death exposes all of the jagged fault lines that have always been there. Drama and death. What thrills, kills.

It’s all there, hard to explain and now hard to understand. The conflicting emotions from Day’s death four days after suffering traumatic brain injuries in a knockout loss to Charles Conwell figure to haunt the game for a while.

The business moves on. There’s a great fight Friday, Artur Beterbiev-Oleksandr Gvozdyk in Philadelphia. Promoters are calling the light-heavyweight bout (ESPN) a possible Fight of the Year. They’re right. It promises drama. It promises thrills.

Yet, it’s hard to look forward to the looming clash without some trepidation, some anxiety, even some anguish. Cheers will come with concern. Day’s death hangs over the game, leaving troubling questions and a search for answers that might not be there. Yet, the search must happen. Lou DiBella said it best in his statement in the wake of Day’s death Wednesday.

“It becomes very difficult to explain away or justify the dangers of boxing at a time like this,” DiBella said. “This is not a time where edicts or pronouncements are appropriate, or the answers are readily available. It is, however, a time for a call to action. While we don’t have the answers, we certainly know many of the questions, have the means to answer them, and have the opportunity to respond responsibly and accordingly and make boxing safer for all who participate.’’

DiBella, in effect, was making a heartfelt plea. Don’t let Day die in vain. Don’t let Maxim Dadashev and Hugo Santillan die in vain. Both died within days of each other in July. Don’t let Boris Stanchov die in vain. He died of an apparent heart attack during a Sept. 21 fight. 

There are some signs that regulators are trying to make the sport safer for those willing to take the risk, The California State Athletic Commission voted earlier this week to cancel a fight if a fighter is 15 percent above the contracted weight on the day of the bout. It’s believed that wild swings in weight, from the day before to the day of the bout, endanger fighters. Buddy McGirt, Dadashev’s trainer, told www.boxingjunkie.com that weigh-ins should be moved to the day of.

“They should have the weigh-ins the day of the fight,” McGirt said. “Listen, guys don’t fight at their normal weight because they know they have 24 hours to put weight on. Make the weigh-ins the day of the fight. Then you would know that you can’t really dry out and then have an IV and fight five, six hours later.

“I think you’d have less injuries. Say you’re trying to make 140 when you should realistically be at 147. You weigh, say, 143 and think, ‘I can get down to 140.’ But you have to dehydrate yourself, and that’s not good for your body or your brain. I’m not a doctor, but I’m not an idiot either.”

There are other possible safeguards. Day had been knocked down in the fourth and eighth rounds before the fatal blows landed in the 10^th. On this scorecard, he was trailing 89-80. He couldn’t win on points. Given, the prior knockdowns, it was safe – emphasis on safe – to assume he wouldn’t be able to win by a late KO. Why not just stop it after the eighth?

It’s just one question, one of many. In Day’s name and for the sake of a conflicted game, answers are imperative.

BROOKLYN (October 17, 2019) – Undefeated WBC Middleweight World Champion Jermall Charlo will defend his title against highly-ranked contender Dennis Hogan Saturday, December 7 live on SHOWTIME from Barclays Center, the home of BROOKLYN BOXING™, in an event presented by Premier Boxing Champions.

SHOWTIME CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING® begins at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT and is headlined by unbeaten middleweight star Charlo making the second defense of his 160-pound title against Hogan, a tough former world title challenger who has campaigned from super welterweight through light heavyweight.

Tickets for the live event, which is promoted by Lions Only Promotions and TGB Promotions, are on-sale now and can be purchased at ticketmaster.comand barclayscenter.com. Tickets also can be purchased at the American Express Box Office at Barclays Center. Group discounts are available by calling 844-BKLYN-GP.

“Jermall Charlo is a can’t miss attraction and one of the brightest stars in boxing,” said Tom Brown, President of TGB Promotions. “He’ll look to make the second defense of his WBC Middleweight Championship in his fourth appearance at Barclays Center on December 7. He’ll have his hands full with the hard-charging Dennis Hogan, who many believe should be a 154-pound champion and should have earned the decision over junior middleweight champion Jaime Mungia. That performance has put him right back in a position to fight for a title and there’s no doubt that him and Jermall are going to leave it all in the ring and give fans a great fight live on SHOWTIME.”

“Jermall Charlo is one of those rare athletes who creates a spectacle every time he steps in the ring, and December 7 will be no different,” said Stephen Espinoza, President, Sports & Event Programming, Showtime Networks Inc. “Jermall is the complete package – speed, power, athleticism and elite talent – so it is no surprise that he is one of the most avoided boxers in his division. Dennis Hogan deserves credit for stepping up to a challenge which many other middleweights wouldn’t. Hogan is a tough, aggressive fighter who many believe should already be a world champion. This is an intriguing clash of styles and personalities.”

“We’re looking forward to hosting another great night of Brooklyn Boxing and to welcoming Jermall Charlo back into our ring for the fourth time,” said Keith Sheldon, EVP of Programming and Development for BSE Global. “December’s matchup against Dennis Hogan exemplifies our ongoing commitment to bringing world class fights to Barclays Center featuring the sport’s most exciting stars.”

The undefeated Charlo (29-0, 21 KOs) is one of the most exciting young champions in the sport. He and his twin brother, Jermell, were super welterweight champions simultaneously between 2015-17 before Jermall decided to move up to middleweight. Charlo won the IBF Junior Middleweight title with a thrilling TKO victory over Cornelius Bundrage in 2015. He made three successful defenses, including a victory over current unified champion Julian Williams, before moving up to middleweight.

The 29-year-old has proven to be just as dominant at 160 pounds as he was at 154, with three convincing performances since moving up in weight. Charlo will be making his second defense of the WBC middleweight title and fighting for the fourth time at Barclays Center. In a homecoming defense in June on SHOWTIME, he successfully defended the title against Brandon Adams with a unanimous decision in his first bout since being elevated to full champion. In his last fight at Barclays Center he shared the card with his twin brother, Jermell, and came away with a hard-fought unanimous decision over tough veteran Matt Korobov last December.

“Nobody knows Dennis Hogan like I know Dennis Hogan,” said Charlo. “He likes to come straight forward with that ‘Mexican’ style. I’m going to exploit that. He’s a tough fighter and he deserves a shot at the world championship because he competed well at the championship level already.

“I’m going on two consecutive 12-rounders and I don’t feel good about that. I’m ready to get back to my thing, which is knocking them out and getting them out of there. This is a big fight for me because it’s my 30th fight and I’m about to turn 30.”

Hogan (28-2-1, 7 KOs) is coming off a razor-thin majority decision loss to Jaime Munguia in a super welterweight world championship match on April 13 in which many thought Hogan did enough to pull off the victory. The 34-year-old, who was born in Ireland and now lives in Queensland, Australia, is looking for a clear-cut victory over Charlo in his first U.S. fight since 2016. Hogan put together a six fight winning streak before the title fight against Munguia.

“I am excited for the opportunity to challenge for the most prestigious belt in boxing, the WBC Middleweight world title against Jermall Charlo at Barclays Center,” said Hogan. “It doesn’t get any bigger than fighting in Brooklyn on SHOWTIME against the undefeated middleweight champion. After the disappointment I faced in April in Mexico, having been cheated out of the WBO Junior Middleweight world title that I strongly feel I earned, I am extremely grateful to have another opportunity to become a world champion.

“As an Irishman, I feel right at home in New York and have no issue traveling abroad once again to achieve my dream. I have successfully competed at light heavyweight and middleweight as a professional and I will feel stronger with the extra six pounds on December 7. I’m thankful to Jermall and his team for working with my team to provide this opportunity. I will be prepared and ready to shine.”

For more information visit www.SHO.com/sports, www.PremierBoxingChampions.com, follow on Twitter @ShowtimeBoxing, @PremierBoxing, @BrooklynBoxing, @TGBPromotions and @Swanson_Comm or become a fan on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/SHOBoxing

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Chicago, 2018’s best fighter, Ukrainian
Oleksandr Usyk, made his first-yet heavyweight prizefight against former
American contender Chazz Witherspoon on DAZN, the aficionado’s network.  After a yearlong injury layoff Usyk made
Witherspoon quit after seven rounds in a turn unsurprising as it was
undramatic.

We have seen the best of Usyk.  Years from now, after Usyk is at least a
partially unified heavyweight champion of the world and myriad casuals know him
for it, we can look back at the World Boxing Super Series of 2018 and know we
saw the best version of him, the same way aficionados look at 2006 Manny
Pacquiao and know, whatever his achievements in the 13 years that followed (or
23; hell, he may regularly undress PBC welterweights till he’s 50), Pacquiao never
was better than the 130-pounder who stopped Erik Morales a twotime before decisioning
Juan Manuel Marquez and redecisioning Marco Antonio Barrera.  As Pacquiao scaled heavier, questions arose
about his power and durability and agility but no one ever doubted he was a
better boxer than his new foes at lightweight, junior welterweight,
welterweight and junior middleweight (mind the ‘new’ there; never did Pacquiao
outbox Marquez at any weight).

No one, either, will doubt Usyk is a better boxer
than everyone he faces the rest of his career. 
But can his stamina suffer much harder punches from much larger men? can
Usyk suffer their blows while making them suffer enough to suffer him no more?  Those be exactly the questions Saturday tried
to ask.

Witherspoon, a shortnotice opponent in every sense
of the term, was apt an initial interrogator as boxing’s flagship division had
on offer.  Since power is the last thing
to go, at age 38 Witherspoon, who reliably looks like an A-level guy against
C-level competition and loses just as reliably to every B-level man he faces, needed
to put a few good punches on Usyk, which he did, and absorb a few good punches
from Usyk, which he did, and tell us if Usyk’s move to the weightlimitless
division was foolhardy.

It wasn’t. 
Usyk took punches enough from Witherspoon to prove he can take
heavyweight fire.  And he stopped Witherspoon
faster than 2009 Tony Thompson if slower than 2012 Seth Mitchell. 

Saturday answered every question of power, yes,
but asked a brandnew question of geometry we mightn’t have imagined
otherwise.  The cruiserweights Usyk made
his career undoing were physically narrower, as were the heavyweights Usyk beat
to become an Olympic gold medalist.

It became apparent very quickly Saturday the
precise spinning of Usyk’s signature attack was disrupted by nothing so much as
Witherspoon’s simple girth.  The geometry
was wrong; there was now a need to take a wider step round the opponent, which
meant there was no longer the same space between ring center and ropes or corner.  This made Usyk fight in wider circles,
requiring more skipping than stepping; Usyk was no longer transitioning
balletically from spinning trap to spinning counter to spinning departure so
much as moving defensively sideways or moving offensively straight forward.

And moving straight at a 240-pound man who knows
how to punch is a different thing altogether from moving straight at a
199-pound man.  When a cruiserweight
punching up at you hits your gloves, you expense it to the cost of doing
business at the championship level; when a heavyweight punching level to you or
downwards hits your gloves, it hurts your face and jars your spine.

Usyk is fast and athletic but not so fast and
athletic that a nearing-40 Chazz Witherspoon couldn’t countertouch him with
righthands.  Is that a detail ruinous to
Usyk’s prospects at heavyweight?

No, and the reason why came at the end of
Saturday’s match.  The tale was told in
Witherspoon’s stature and aerobics, not his bleeding mouth.  How open that mouth was and how wilted his
posture, both, indicated what made Usyk unique among cruisers and’ll make him superunique
among heavies.  Usyk is an attrition
hunter who runs his prey to unconsciousness. 
An attrition hunter needn’t fell a beast with a single hurl of the spear
– he need only pain his prey enough to make it flee.  Once it runs, he has it.

Witherspoon sagged on his stool after round 7 like
a sealevel mammoth marched up Mount Everest. 
Thirty seconds into its postround rest Witherspoon’s body had yet to
contemplate recovery, certain as it was about drowning.

What does that say about Usyk’s prospects against
AJ?  Everything.  Men with a third Usyk’s talent and craft collaborate
with Joshua’s massive pecs, delts, traps and bis to fatigue him by midfight.  And Joshua’s June (and December) conqueror,
Andy Ruiz, is nothing so much as a fat cruiserweight loosed on giants who are
basic.

Which brings us to the one genuinely compelling
challenge for Usyk: Deontay Wilder.  Nobody
at cruiserweight hits fractionally so hard as Wilder, but no one at heavyweight
is near so physically narrow as Wilder. 
The geometry of Wilder’s width is all right for Usyk, while the geometry
of Wilder’s height is not.  Neither is
Wilder’s conditioning, which absolutely rivals Usyk’s.  A Wilder-Usyk unification match in 2021 will make
the most-athletic heavyweight prizefight in 25 years.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It is as unforgiving a business as any. Boxing moves on, always moves on from tragedy. But the game stopped early Thursday morning in Dallas, on a road during the lonely hours after midnight and in the twisted wreckage of what was once a beautiful car.

A beautiful fighter survived just a few weeks after he looked immortal.

Pray for Errol Spence Jr.

He had emerged as a face of a resilient game and it looks as if he might need every bit of that trademark resiliency now. He is coming off the biggest fight of his career into what looks to be the biggest fight of his life. We cheered for him against Shawn Porter throughout 12 rounds of welterweight drama on Sept. 28.

We pray for him now in a collective cry of tweets and thoughts. Porter prays for him. Terence Crawford prays for him.

The news is hopeful. Premier Boxing Champions released a statement, an updated report on his condition fewer than 24 hours after he was rushed to Methodist Dallas Medical Center.

“Spence is awake and responding and his condition is listed as stable,” the PBC statement said. “He did not sustain any broken bones or fractures but has some facial lacerations. He is expected to make a full recovery.

“He is currently resting with his family by his side. They want to thank everyone for their prayers and well wishes and are extremely grateful to the Dallas first responders who rushed to the scene to attend to Errol after the accident and the doctors who are taking care of him at the hospital.”

Exactly what happened is still being pieced together. According to a Dallas police report, Spence, of nearby Desoto, Tex., was driving his white Ferrari at a high speed when the vehicle hit the median and flipped wildly at about 3 a.m, Central Standard Time.

Spence, who reportedly was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the car. He was not a boxer then. He was everyman, caught in the cross hairs of time and place, simple physics and scary consequences.

It could’ve been you. Could’ve been me. His fight, our fight, is just starting. Pray that he wins this one.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a prizefight
broadcast on the aficionado’s network, DAZN, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (no new ‘i’
needed; we go with birth names, round here) narrowly decisioned Ukrainian Sergiy
“The Technician” Derevyanchenko to retain his HBO Middleweight Championship and
collect an assortment of other belts Canelo Alvarez doesn’t care for.  The match was bloody, rough and suspenseful.

And when it was over and the scorecards were read the
selfstyled Mecca of Boxing booed Golovkin loudly enough to elicit a “c’mon
guys” from boxing’s once-charming malaprop machine.  Then the postfight interview devolved into
the same scattering of the same Google Translate phrases into which every
Golovkin interview devolves, though it wasn’t nearly so amusing this time, was
it, guys?

For this time Golovkin had faced a man his own
size and looked it.  This time Golovkin,
who somehow became The People’s Champion by being unable to stop in 24 rounds a
smaller man who is between 10 and 15 times more popular than he, countered
interesting and relevant questions with his usual dumb phrases, and nobody was enchanted
as before.  All this and more, in a turn
ironic as it was predictable, oversparkled a Golovkin performance that was more
compelling and confirming than its predecessors.

All the booing and dissent served to make and
subvert what was the first underrated performance in Golovkin’s canon. 

From the third round to the closing bell Saturday the
look on Golovkin’s face was exhausted betrayal. 
One doubts Golovkin’s American assimilation comprises cultural awareness
enough to ring an internal alarm like: By jettisoning the handlers who
hoodwinked late-HBO programmers, Comrade Pyotr et al., I put myself in an
unprotected status with a network interested in feeding me to Canelo Alvarez
the way my previous network’s braintrust wanted Canelo fed to me.

Why, that’s madness, you’re now thinking, what
sort of braintrust would wish to see boxing’s one ticketseller from boxing’s one
reliable ticketbuying public mauled by a man from Kazakhstan?

You had to be there.  GGG was a mania.  In 15 years of doing this, the craziest
things I ever heard said by the sanest boxing minds were things uttered about
Golovkin’s prowess.

In this sense, what happened Saturday, what has
happened in four of Golovkin’s last six fights, was a betrayal of sorts to
those men who invested so ferally in the Golovkin legend.  Because each time Golovkin has confronted a
fellow titlist or a proper middleweight recently – notice the ‘or’ there –
Golovkin has looked like much, much less than the most-feared man on the
planet.

Daniel Jacobs, middleweight permacontender, rose
from the canvas 2 1/2 years ago and showed Golovkin’s hypemen how poorly
chopping down a welterweight prepared the middleweight champion for a defense
with an actual middleweight.  Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG.  Then, as DAZN’s otherwise annoying broadcast
crew reminded us Saturday, Golovkin first got offered a match with Derevyanchenko
but turned it down for a chance to poleax yet another career super welter.  Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG.  Someone named Steve Rolls got excavated to launch
GGG’s new-network debut.  And then
Saturday happened.  Another career
middleweight. 

There was a particularly disingenuous game GGG fanatics
used to play with the rest of us – a game they learned from The Money
Team.  When you mentioned the HBOGGG tagline
about Golovkin’s readiness, willingness and ability to make war with any
champion between 154 pounds and 168, at those weights, and mentioned your own
annoyance with Golovkin’s only making war on 147- and 154-pound men forcefed to
160 pounds, GGG Nation would start listing titlists at 160 and 168 pounds and
ask you if you didn’t think he could beat them.

Your hypothetical assumption of a hypothetical
Golovkin triumph in a hypothetical fight was proof Golovkin had already beaten
these men, shouldn’t be required to fight them and – this is the richest part –
frightened all these larger men such that Golovkin should only don gloves for
those smaller men brave enough to face him. 
You would try to argue it didn’t matter, really, Golovkin’s ultimate
record against men his own size; you just wanted to see him fight men his own
size before you partook in any GGG Nation naturalization ceremony.

Which is a torturous way of writing this: Golovkin
is not today diminished.  What is
happening to him now is what always would have happened to him.

He hits quite hard but certainly not that much
harder than any other middleweight champion and not nearly hard as the best
super middleweights.  His footwork is
plodding, his punches are often telegraphed, his defense is porous, and his
ring IQ ain’t that high either.  His
vaunted ability to cut-off the ring never was a product of more than his
ability to walk through smaller men’s punches (you should see me cut-off the
ring on my 110-pound wife!).

Saturday Golovkin cut-off Derevyanchenko’s escape
routes often and just as often learned they were traps Derevyanchenko set for
him.  Imagine that.  A prizefighter with a 30-percent lower
knockout ratio than GGG’s, a prizefighter felled in round 1, a prizefighter
bleeding constantly into his right eye, opined so little of GGG’s power he made
strategic retreats to walk Golovkin into counters.  He made Golovkin miss quite a bit too and
bent The People’s Champion in two, too, with a midrounds left hook to the
button.

And Golovkin responded with true heart and
chin.  Two things soft matchmaking and
hard overpromoting deprived us of seeing during Golovkin’s reign of terror as
HBO Middleweight Champion.  That’s the
good news for GGG Nation.

Here’s the bad: Y’all are out of your collective
gourd if you think Canelo “A Side” Alvarez is going to come down from 175
pounds to 160 to redeem Golovkin’s legacy. 
Canelo may well give GGG his badly needed rubber match, but it won’t be
at middleweight.  Eight years and 20
lucrative prizefights later Canelo is going to run a check on that “fight any man
from 154 to 168” credit and see what’s actually in the account.  It says here: Canelo KO-10 is what.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry