By Norm Frauenheim-

There’s something singular about Vasiliy Lomachenko. That’s another way of saying there’s nobody else quite like him. His unique skillset is often compared to modern art, a cutting-edge exhibition on canvas that has seen it all.

The portrayal works. At least, it has in promotional terms for the last couple of years. Against Anthony Crolla Friday at Los Angeles Staples Center in an ESPN+ televised bout (8 p.m. PT/11 p.m. ET), the artist will be back at work.

Crolla is just there, another opponent Lomachenko is expected to add to his brilliant body of work. The idea is to watch how Lomachenko does it. The result doesn’t appear to be in doubt. If you believe the odds, Crolla is nothing more than a piece of clay that Lomachenko’s array of many-angled punches will sculpt into another victory.

Crolla is an 18-to-1 underdog. There are reports that a betting site has listed Lomachenko as a 100-to-1 favorite. Art can be massacre, too.

It’s worth a look. Lomachenko always is. But we don’t watch fights because we’re looking for museum masterpieces. We’re seeking drama, often the kind that is painted in blood-red tones.

Lomachenko (12-1, 9 KOs) is facing Crolla (34-6-3, 13 KOs) because of a hand injury suffered by Richard Commey, whose IBF lightweight title represented a chance for the Ukrainian to add a fourth major belt to his collection.

Commey would get a better shot from oddsmakers than Crolla has. But probably not by much. Commey figures to wind up the way Crolla will when and if the IBF champ faces Lomachenko.

Lomachenko, probably the best Olympic boxer since Cuban heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson, wants unification.

Fans want a test.

A potential one has been there for years in Mikey Garcia, still the World Boxing Council’s lightweight champion despite his one-sided welterweight loss to Errol Spence Jr. on March 16. The Garcia-Lomachenko possibility had been No. 1 in the public mind of fights the fans wanted to see. But it cooled, in large part because of Garcia’s divorce from Top Rank and his current relationship with PBC.

Now, there’s also an erosion in the way some see Garcia, who was overmatched in his loss to a much bigger Spence. There’s still some question about what Garcia will do next.

To wit: Will he go back to 135 pounds? Or will he wait and hope for a shot at Manny Pacquiao, perhaps at 140?

Lomachenko still hopes for a showdown with Garcia, but he night have to wait until Garcia wins a couple of bouts that will help put the Spence loss in the rear-view mirror. Guess here: Garcia will still be the threat he was at 135, but he will have to restore credibility lost in the risky venture against Spence.

“I still want that fight, 100 percent, but it is up to Mikey,’’ Lomachenko said in interviews before Friday’s opening bell. “Can he cut the weight? I don’t know. But if he can make 135, I want that fight.’’

Both Lomachenko and Crolla made weight Thursday at a weigh-in moved from Staples Center to the Los Angeles Convention Center because of a memorial service for rapper Nipsey Hussle. Lomachenko was 134.4 pounds; Crolla 134.8.

Top Rank is making alternate plans. It’s no secret that Garcia and the promotional company don’t exactly get along. Emerging sensation Teofimo Lopez has been mentioned as a Lomachenko possibility. So, too, has Miguel Berchelt, if Berchelt beats Francisco Vargas in their May 11 rematch at Tucson’s Community Center in an ESPN-televised card that will also include a Isaac Dogboe-Emanuel Navarrete rematch.

But Lomachenko has always want to fight Garcia. Perhaps, the artist in him foresees a classic. But there’s something else, too. In the end, he understands that his mastery of the ring craft only becomes enduring art if it is challenged, tested by another acknowledged master.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight titlist Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko will successfully defend his title against Britain’s Anthony Crolla on ESPN+ in a match that challenges prefight scriptwriters to excavate some superlative as yet unused on Lomachenko. Hi-Tech will look sublime, spiteful, special and spectacular against Crolla. And for a low monthly rate subscriber aficionados will witness all of it.

When this preview strays from Anthony Crolla, and it surely will, indulge me please, since it won’t be a straying of laziness or complacency but desperate boredom.

If there’s occasion for plumbing the depths of Crolla’s highlight reel such occasion escaped me nimbly as I set out to do so. Bygone years this sort of thing was risky. You figured the late Vernon Forrest was so much better than his next challenger, such a prohibitive favorite, you didn’t bother returning to silly episodes of The Contender to see if Latin Snake was any sort of a boxer, and then the prohibited happened and you looked a fool – and back then readers abounded enough to tell you as much.

These days temptations are very much other; go outlandish and put all eggs in the underdog’s basket because the only way anyone will remember any prediction is the occasion of an unthinkable upset, and nobody has attention span enough to bury himself in the archives and see how many times you picked outlandishly for this one ticketcashing score, has he? This column is too regular, though, to make such irregular efforts as fruitypicking the oneoff for a singular story, which is exactly what a Crolla victory over Lomachenko would prove be for a week at least or until some wiseass remembered Orlando Salido had exactly twice so many losses as Crolla when Salido did the unimaginable and fouled his way to a clear victory over a man we later learned was a generational talent.

One needn’t set out for the gloatful score, then, when sturdier intentions favor beginning with a possibility of the champ’s upset and looking for how it might happen then deciding after an appreciable review, say two or three minutes, it cannot happen. This is when you turn boxing sage and answer one essential question: If there were no more important phrase in the English language than “I told you so”, in a couple years how would posterity read your preview? Satisfy that criterion and build nothing to dam what accolades flood your DMs.

Anthony Crolla is a fine, basic lad who won a world title the right way from a Colombian named Darleys Perez, in his second try, defended the title once then made a pair of losing scraps, one of them close, to the man last seen getting wet-tissued in Madison Square Garden not long after being designer-distressed by Lomachenko, chinny Jorge Linares. There was that moment, though, wasn’t there, when Linares dropped the prodigy and made us hopeful something other than yet another woeful mismatch was in the offing. Of course you’ve forgotten; that happened nearly a year ago, and can you remember what Lomachenko has done since?

Oh, in that case, you’re a better man than I. I recall more about Lomachenko from highlight videos and overwrought profiles, and the requisite ESPN fare (Lomachenko, a man very accomplished at violent acts, turns out to share a complicated relationship with his father – in a twist no one saw coming) than anything he has done in the 11 months since he won his lightweight title from the man who won his lightweight title from Anthony Crolla, the man who lost to the man who lost to the man and is about to lose to the man. If that’s not circular symmetrical it’s because it’s not much any geometrical shape that has symmetry; it’s a linear thing. The wrong sort of linear thing, definitively not a lineal thing, then, but a linear one nonetheless.

It’s not too early to start salivating at the prefight Loma footage, pingpong pops in Spidey spandex, it’s not too . . . oh, enough pretending.

Here’s what happened when I looked for Crolla highlights a while ago: YouTube used years of my viewing activity to recommend yet another Lee Trevino video. This has almost nothing to do with boxing save that Trevino is of Mexican descent the way most of the last generation’s best prizefighters were. But whereas those men came out a prizefighting lineage Trevino came out of nowhere, many years ago, an El Paso club pro raised on a dirt floor by a gravedigger grandfather, a marine and autodidact whose first professional victory was American golf’s greatest prize, a master ballstriker and shotmaker who needed no lessons to torque the clubface in just such a way to visit maximal inertia on the back of a golfball.

If YouTube history can be trusted, no visual spectacle delights me much as Trevino’s swing, and not prime Trevino, either, but the 50-year-old version I saw drive a golfball at the Digital Seniors Classic 29 years ago, in a move unmatchable for power, grace and violence. Not since Juan Manual Marquez snatched Manny Pacquiao’s soul has anything in our beloved sport transferred to me what energy a glimpse of Trevino’s swing does.

There, just above, that’s the way I would like to write about Vasyl Lomachenko but cannot. It’s all too precious and prescripted with Hi-Tech, too white-earbuds, not enough analog. He’ll stream through Crolla on ESPN+ and aficionados will get dangled and promised, the usual maybe-Mikey-Garcia-next canard, and made to feel unappreciative for not thanking hard enough what promotional benefactors give us semiannual glimpses of Lomachenko’s otherworldly talent. Then it’s back to the Trevino videos for me.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It can be scarred. It can be friendly. Scary, too. Sometimes, it’s a booking photo.

It’s the face of the game.

It’s anybody’s guess as to how it started and how it continues to evolve. At one level, it’s as subjective as the pound-for-pound debate. It’s also closely linked to it, yet not defined by it.

Think Roberto Duran and then Roy Jones Jr. At some point in their careers, they were a solid choice for the pound-for-pound No. 1. Yet, neither was ever really seen as the game’s face, not during respective eras when bigger crowds and television ratings were generated by Sugar Ray Leonard and then Oscar De La Hoya.

Think Mike Tyson. For many years, he was that face, even when he was losing. Evander Holyfield would beat him, yet Tyson’s lifestyle was the imminent accident that crowds and pay-per-view customers could not resist.

In a notoriously jagged business, it’s safe to say that the pieces don’t always fit. Yet, the search goes on – and on — for the right face to fill what now appears to be an empty frame, left vacant by Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s retirement.

A fight to fill that frame is underway, starting three weeks ago with Errol Spence Jr.’s one-sided decision over Mikey Garcia and continuing April 12 with lightweight champion Vasiliy Lomachenko’s title defense against Anthony Crolla on April 12 at Los Angeles Staples Center.

Then, there’s welterweight champion Terence Crawford on April 20 against Amir Khan at New York’s Madison Square Garden followed by middleweight champ Canelo Alvarez on May 4 against Danny Jacobs and finally UK heavyweight Anthony Joshua’s American debut against Jarrell Miller on June 1, also at Madison Square Garden.

It’s an intriguing spring. But it’s hard to tell whether it will produce a clear successor to Mayweather’s rich reign as the face.

Spence has been trying it on, almost like a crown prince rehearsing a role he believes he will soon have to himself. The numbers for his decision over Garcia – more than 47,000 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex., and between 300,000 and 400,000 pay-per-view customers – add up to a face that has the potential fill the frame

But he won’t win the role against Keith Thurman or Shawn Porter. To repeat what’s already been said here and elsewhere, the PBC welterweight can only win it in a showdown down with Top Rank’s Crawford, who first has to beat Khan. Negotiations for that one figure to be problematic at best

Then, there’s Lomachenko. He’s up next, meaning he’ll have the bully pulpit to amplify his claim for the next couple of weeks, or at least until Crawford gets back in the pulpit against Khan. A shoulder injury and getting knocked down by Jorge Linares has left some lingering questions about Lomachenko, but the Ukrainian’s unique skillset speaks for itself and figures to so with its usual dynamic edge against Crolla. Question is, can he draw?

The same question has been asked of Crawford, although less so since scoring a big rating for ESPN in a twelfth-round stoppage of Jose Benavidez Jr. last October. The bigger current question is about who he has beaten. It’s one Khan has parroted in the build-up for their April 20 opening bell. Khan has been quoted as saying Crawford’s fights have been “walks in the park.’’ Guess here: It’ll be a walk that Khan will regret he took. Nevertheless, Crawford has the same chance Spence does at being the next face. To wit: They have to face each other.

For now, the best chance is with Canelo. It’s no coincidence that most of the money is with him, too. DAZN bet $365 million over five years that he already is the new face. PPV proof is on Canelo’s resume. Each of his two victories over Gennady Golovkin did over one million buys – 1.3 in 2017 and 1.1 in 2018. But the results leave questions. The first one was a split draw. The rematch went to Canelo in a majority decision. Canelo needs a convincing victory in a rivalry that begs to be a trilogy. DAZN is gambling that he will.

Then, there’s Joshua, who for now is the face of another British Invasion. At stake is whether he can become the face of the American side of the pond. U.S. fans were captivated by his dramatic stoppage of Wladimir Klitschko. He got up from a sixth-round knockdown before Wembley crowd of 90,000 UK fans for a stoppage of Klitschko two years ago.

Since, however, he has appeared cautious, promoting questions about whether the Klitschko battle tempered his aggressiveness. Against a Miller with nothing to lose, an answer looks likely. Beating Miller would presumably set up a long-awaited bout against American Deontay Wilder.

An empty frame is waiting.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in the mainevent of a Golden Boy-promoted and DAZN-broadcasted card from Indio, Calif., undefeated American lightweight Ryan “KingRy” Garcia (2.3m followers, Instagram) whacked-out hopeless Puerto Rican Jose Lopez in two rounds. If Garcia’s punches occasionally wanted for precision they lacked no malice, and their thrower no cocksuredness, and that recommends young KingRy because few are the prizefighters who start an uppercut after missing in the same flurry with hooks and crosses.

If you think Garcia isn’t yet quite what his socialmedia following believes, friend, you’ve come to the wrong place, as this space hopes to be a KingRy fanpage for at least a few hundred of the words that follow.

Without access to any demographic data for 15rounds.com a hunch tells me we lack a reliable readership among women, 18-24, a lack more pernicious than may first appear because our target demographic repels, or at least frightens, women, 18-24. And if you’re thinking “well, frightening them first sometimes does wonders,” you’re making my point – even while you might be right. Consider this column, then, a partial effort to pander and a partial effort to celebrate the potential of a young prospect; if by chance you are reading this column in the year 2024 and KingRy just failed in his fourth attempt to become a world champion, let’s hope it was a 23-year-old woman whose recommendation brought you here.

Rumor has it young women can be charmed by magic tricks, and while this effort, thus far, is bereft of magic, tricky or otherwise, its author has recently taken to juggling for reasons at best tangential to anything prizefighting but a touch germane to Garcia. Let’s see if the metaphor doesn’t collapse before it inflates.

If our focused vision, the detailed and conscious study of a visual object, happens via the cones of our foveae then most of boxing we watch with the rods of our peripheral vision. In a figurative sense this happens during nearly any pay-per-view undercard because broadcasters and promoters stock these with such swill no adult’s fovea need be wasted. In a literal sense, too, we trust most boxing viewership to peripheral vision, what suspenseful happenings occur while we fix drinks for acquaintances or discuss the weather with their wives.

Until Saturday the weight of my viewership of Ryan Garcia fell upon my peripheral vision exclusively; probably I caught some of a couple of his matches during some undercard broadcast or other, and (pander alert) I resolved to open an Instagram account to follow his photogenic exploits, but I never cleared a calendar’s moment for him.

Here’s something you already know but may not’ve considered: The rods of your peripheral vision are far better at detecting both motion and its rate than the cones of your fovea. You’re reading this with your fovea, that is, but if while you’re reading this a redfanged predator is creeping upon you it will be your peripheral vision that does the detecting – and there’s a strong argument to be made it is this, your very unconsidered faith in peripheral vision, that allows you to do something decadent as concentrate on words about boxing (ostensibly).

Which is sort of where juggling comes into play. Like most lads raised in New England I’ve gone through nearly all my life without any fascination whatever for motor sports. My first college roommate was from North Carolina, and until I met him I’d no inkling what NASCAR was nor a first inkling how absurdly popular it was. I still don’t watch live auto racing (or, to be fair, live most-any-sport-but-boxing), but I like sports documentaries of all kinds enough to’ve spent a goodish amount of time in March watching programs about Formula 1 (and even more time watching footage of the late Ayrton Senna). Along the way I caught one pattern more than another: Most Formula 1 drivers juggle to cultivate a discipline like: Look with soft focus on the horizon, say halfway up your windshield, while trusting your peripheral vision to detect others’ motions round you.

Despite an abiding fascination with palindromes I’ve no desire to do anything with a racecar but admit the Formula 1 driver’s discipline has a myriad of applications in life. So I bought the juggling balls (leatherskinned hacky sacks, effectively, the better for not bouncing when you drop them hundreds and hundreds of times) and watched the YouTube videos and did the oneball toss then the twoball toss then the threeball flash and then a halfdozen or so hours into the enterprise things made sense and quite apparently it was easier to keep two balls in the air while juggling three than turn the same feat with only two. (And it applies to this discipline, too: Right now I’m keeping soft focus on a wordcount of 1,000 while trusting peripheral vision will tell me if any worthwhile ideas about Ryan Garcia should come swooping in.)

Oh, here they come. What I like about Garcia: He has his new stablemate Canelo Alvarez’s best offensive traits and moreso. What surprises most about Canelo in person, for translating least on television, is his intensity of attack; if he doesn’t appear much faster at ringside he appears degrees more intentional; he very much wants to hurt you with his punches. The first time I covered a fight of his at ringside was the match with Austin Trout, and the experience impressed upon my memory an enduring sensation like “Wow, this dude is physical.” Not even sure what that means exactly, but you get it.

Garcia doesn’t yet have the same effect, his body is still a boy’s, comparatively, but his attack is relatively more intense than Canelo’s for coming from a relatively less-affected place. Garcia appears more loosely wound when defending than Canelo and meaner when attacking. However much of this should be attributed to opponent-quality remains to be gathered. Garcia mayn’t have Canelo’s chin, and best stop pulling it straight back regardless, but he has a prettyboy’s pride and presence, the relaxed posture of a guy who can pull your girlfriend and likes being resented for it.

Garcia’s a Spanish 102 class and an Olympic gold medal from being Oscar De La Hoya, perhaps, but our beloved sport is a lot more than that from being what it was in 1995, when De La Hoya won his 18th prizefight.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter (though not Instagram, alas) @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Bob Arum threw a rhetorical combo this week, intriguing because of the timing and significant because it further heightened talk about a Terence Crawford-Errol Spence Jr. fight.

It’s hard to know whether a buzz on all of the various digital platforms translates into real momentum for a fight that has rapidly risen to the top of the public-wish list. If it was an early move in a play to make the fight happen, however, it was a good one.

On Monday, Arum tweeted:

@ErrolSpenceJr said that he is ready to fight @terencecrawford. We are ready to do that next, once Bud is successful against @amirkingkhan on April 20. It’s what fight fans want. Al, should I call you or will you call me? @premierboxing

12:05 PM – 25 Mar 2019

On Tuesday, Arum confirmed that the tweet — and message to PBC’s Al Haymon — was his own during a conference call before introducing Crawford as the successor to one of the greatest names in welterweight history.

“Forty years ago, I promoted the great welterweight of that time, Sugar Ray Leonard, and now, 40 years later, I have the honor of promoting the successor to Sugar Ray Leonard, Terence Crawford,’’ Arum said on the call to promote Crawford’s title defense against Amir Khan on April 20 in an ESPN pay-per-view bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Arum, a promoter who understands that hyperbole sells, generated some predictable arguments. That was the idea, of course. To wit: If Crawford is indeed the successor to Leonard, does that mean he is better than the welterweight Arum didn’t mention? Better than Floyd Mayweather Jr.? Better than the retired welterweight who sells himself and T-shirts as TBE, The Best Ever?

A fight against Spence is the only way to answer those questions, a few among many. Making it happen, however, is as problematic as ever. Arum’s Top Rank and Haymon’s PBC mock instead of talk. If Arum can generate some serious momentum on social media, however, the subsequent money will presumably be enough to lure even bitter rivals to the table.

For now, Spence versus PBC welterweight Shawn Porter appears to be more realistic. It’s easier for PBC to keep it in house. Also, it’s a fight that makes money. Increasingly, however, it’s beginning to look as if there is no moneymaker out there bigger than Crawford-Spence. Spence has already done his part, attracting a crowd of more than 47,000 around a ring on top of the Dallas Cowboys home field at AT&T Stadium. Spence asserted his own claim on a spot in the long succession of welterweight greats with a dominant performance against an overmatched and undersized Mikey Garcia.

After a scorecard shutout of Garcia on March 16, Spence addressed all of the PBC possibilities, including Keith Thurman and Porter. Then, he was asked about Crawford.

“We can do him, too,’’ Spence said.

Now, it’s up to Crawford to deliver – and deliver with an exclamation point – against Khan, who has a slick skillset, yet a chin that has repeatedly betrayed and beaten him. Guess in this corner: Crawford’s smarts and dynamic versatility will methodically search for that chin, find it and beat Khan in a stoppage that will further fuel the talk that continued this week with Arum’s combo.

The looming Spence question was inevitable during Tuesday’s call. Khan addressed it. Crawford was asked about it.

“There is a lot of talk about Crawford with Spence, who just came off a fight,’’ Khan said. “All of those people should be talking about Spence against me. I’m not just a number. I know when I have to turn it on. I can turn it on. Maybe in previous fights, I won the fight, but maybe I didn’t look the best. But I know I belong at the level of both.

“I am one of those fighters that — if I am fighting a guy that is supposed to be at the top of his game — that will bring me to the top of my game and bring the best out of me. If Crawford is talking about maybe that fight happening and overlooking me, it’s going to be a big shock. I’m going to be ready.’’

Crawford heard him and promised not to overlook him, in part perhaps because he knows Khan’s long reach and quick hands can give him trouble, especially in the early rounds. But Crawford, who is as smart as he is dangerous, knows something else, too. Khan still has name recognition. Garcia was too small to be a welterweight, but the lightweight champ gave Spence a victory over a big name. Khan’s skillset might be fading, but his name is not. Like Garcia was for Spence, Khan represents a name that can further embellish Crawford’s resume and feared reputation.

“Of course, it is makeable,’’ Crawford said when asked about a Spence bout. “I believe it would be the biggest fight in the welterweight division. But like you said, I have this fight against Amir Khan. After the fight, we can talk about Errol Spence and Al Haymon and Top Rank doing business together. But right now, I am not even thinking or worried about Errol Spence.

“…I am never going to be complacent. I know about the threats that he brings into the ring and the troubles that I can have if I overlook Amir Khan. He’s got everything to gain, so we have to take this fight real serious because the fights that slip out of a fighters’ hands happen when they think the fight is in the bag and it didn’t even start yet. We are going into the fight 110 percent focused and ready for the best Amir Khan come fight night.’’

A fight night that might help set the stage for the biggest welterweight fight in years.

By Bart Barry-

“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” – Jorge Luis Borges

OKLAHOMA CITY – This proud city stands between Arlington, Texas, and Omaha, Neb., though not midway between; this capital of Oklahoma is nearer Arlington than Omaha, a geographical position whose shading made it quite right for Wednesday’s co-promoter / co-broadcaster confirmation announcement of what numbers have frozen our beloved sport in anticipation for nearly a month since PBC on Fox Sports’ welterweight co-champion Errol “The Truth” Spence (waltzing to a harmless decision over Manny Pacquiao in September) toed the pay-per-view line with Top Rank of ESPN’s welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (keelhauling Kell Brook in October). Spence won.

“We did it!” exclaimed promoter Richard Schaefer in Bricktown Brawlers Hall, the third-largest conference room on the second floor of the Cox Convention Center, a meeting place named after the Indoor Football League team that warmed Oklahomans’ hearts in bygone days. “Bob said we couldn’t, and I said, ‘Bob, we’ll see about that!’ And now we have, have not we, Bob?”

“This is a stupid exercise but necessary,” averred promoter Bob Arum from his seat at a makeshift dais before a sprawling purple, black and electric-blue canvas billboard filled with the announcement’s tagline: PURSES COLLIDE. “Only an idiot would take these numbers more seriously than the fights or fighters themselves, and since most of you are idiots who write for idiots, here we are.”

Such levity on Arum’s part did little to defuse what tensions mounted ceaselessly in a war of promotional trashtalk that began at ringside in AT&T Stadium after Spence-Pacquiao and grew only louder at the postfight presser in CHI Health Center after Crawford-Brook. His charge having lost by a few hundred thousand pay-per-viewers, Arum may have been eager to change the conversation to a proposed Crawford-Pacquiao tilt early in 2020, but gathered fans were having none of it.

“You come at the king, you best not miss,” said Lil Audi, a self-proclaimed broadcast aficionado in a blue Fox Sports ballcap who chose not to give his real name. “Dadunh-duna-DAH! My boys beat that ass.”

Though neither Spence nor Crawford was present at Wednesday’s event, representatives from both their networks as well as surprise representatives from both fighters’ former networks, Showtime and HBO respectively, gathered and lent gravity to the proceedings.

“‘The Truth’ is, Errol will always be family,” said a Showtime representative. “While we wish we could’ve done the Pacquiao fight, we understand the economics of the situation, and we’re thrilled to announce a Muhammad Ali documentary we’re working on for next spring.

“It’s a spoken-word mashup of Ali in others’ words, featuring such distinctive voices as Californication’s David Duchnovy and Dexter’s Michael C. Hall. And of course Showtime Championship Boxing’s own Paulie Malignaggi.”

Not to be outdone, HBO’s new Executive Vice President of Streaming Services put her own spin on the event.

“Words cannot express how happy we are to be out of this mess,” said Priyanka Malhotra. “I’m here, in large part, to ensure the stake we drove in boxing’s heart has not been dislodged by money or a detente between rival promoters. And yes, to announce ‘LJ on MJ’ – an original series that takes viewers on a tour of Michael Jordan’s favorite parts of New York City, produced by LeBron James.”

So much attention devoted to who attracted more pay-per-view buys, those observers formerly known as aficionados can be forgiven if they inadvertently and initially mistook Crawford’s round-three razing of Brook as more definitive than Spence’s keepaway scorecard-whiteout of Pacquiao. While Crawford’s predatory instinct and Brook’s inexplicable popularity in the U.K. otherwise might’ve combined for a win, the smart money, as they say, was ever on Spence.

“These fans who think they’re promoters never understand international buys,” said Arum, Wednesday. “They won domestic buys, whatever, but when the money is finally counted and Machiavelli is done keeping his enemies closer than his friends, we’ll see which fighter emerges with the better actual paycheck.

“But don’t expect the Swiss banker to throw another press conference about that number.”

“This is a win and a win for boxing,” replied Schaefer. “It’s a win because Errol Spence won more pay-per-view money. And it is also a win because Errol Spence will make even more money in his next fight, which we are thrilled to announce will not be with Terence Crawford.”

While old timers may scoff at boxing’s new fascination with numbers of viewers between fighters, rather than numbers of punches thrown, truth is, this fascination is hardly new.

“Reminds me of the Money Era,” said Lil Audi. “The haters were all ‘It’s bad for boxing if the two best don’t throw hands in their primes,’ but we got those Maidana fights outta Floyd, right, and we got JMM waxing Pac like Rain Dance.”

“Of course he names himself after a German car,” said Arum, when asked about those comments. “He’s an idiot.”

While serious fans are likely to remain fixated on the implications of Wednesday’s announcement for a halfyear to come, casual fans now understandably obsess over boxing’s flagship division. With no chance of Fury-Wilder 2 or Fury-Joshua or Joshua-Wilder in the foreseeable future, post-presser talk Wednesday shifted to broadcaster DAZN’s subscriber rate and a revenues-growth argument for ESPN+ charging more in 2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It was a disappointing fight. A significant one, too.

Within the ropes, there’s really not much to say about Errol Spence Jr.’s blowout of Mikey Garcia last Saturday. It was forgettable. But it leaves an immediate impact. It can still be heard in the roaring echoes from that hard-to-ignore crowd at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex.

What’s next?

There’s no more relevant question in boxing or any other business for that matter. Spence’s dominant validation as a leading pound-for-pound contender created an ongoing buzz, an unmistakable demand for the biggest fight out there. Today, there’s a lot more debate about the pound-for-pound’s top spot than there is about the one fight everybody wants to see.

It is Spence-Terence Crawford.

Spence’s scorecard shutout of Garcia put it there and it will stay there for a while, or at least until boxing’s byzantine web of rival promoters and networks suffocates another landmark opportunity.

I’ve heard all the reasons why a potential welterweight classic won’t happen anytime soon. Truth is, I’ve heard those reasons for decades. Different names, different times, same reasons. I know them. Everybody among the more than 47,000 at AT&T Stadium knows them. Everybody in a pay-per-view audience projected to be between 300,000 and 400,000 for the Fox telecast of Spence-Garcia knows them.

Knows them ad nauseam.

The litany of why it won’t happen is all too familiar. It also explains why boxing stays on the fringe, where – to be sure – there’s still money to be made. Yes, Spence and PBC can stay busy through at least next year against Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia and maybe Manny Pacquiao. But I’m guessing many in that AT&T Stadium crowd last Saturday would skip those dates. Spence beats all four and beats them predictably.

The biggest bucks are with the fights that belong on the biggest stage. For now, there’s only one of those bouts. It is Spence against Crawford, who figures to beat a faded Amir Khan on April 20. The rest of the welterweight division will probably avoid each of them. But they have each other and they have a stage waiting for it to happen. If anything, Spence-Garcia will be remembered for a major-league audience hungry for the big-league bout that should soon follow.

All the reasons to believe it won’t, however, are still in place, too. There are no signs that the rival promotions will ever get together on a deal. Spence is with Premier Boxing Champions (PBC); Crawford is with Top Rank. Never the twain shall meet, or at least it looks as if Spence and Crawford won’t until they’re past their primes or have been beaten a couple of times.

Imagine if the boxing business was as divided four decades ago as it is today. History might have been robbed of Sugar Ray Leonard’s 14-round stoppage of Thomas Hearns in 1981. Leonard was 25; Hearns was 23. They were in their primes and at their optimum weight, welter. It was an enduring classic, followed about eight years later in a thoroughly forgettable rematch.

I’m not suggesting that history would repeat itself with Spence-Crawford. Still, it has a chance, a chance to be a classic for a new generation of fans. But there is some urgency to doing it and doing it within the next couple of years. Crawford is 31 years old. Spence, who might soon outgrow the welterweight division, is 29.

Time to make some money. Maybe, some history, too. But it can only happen if the promoters take the time to talk to each other.

By Bart Barry-

ARLINGTON, Texas – Saturday in the middle of AT&T Stadium in the middle of the DFW metroplex welterweight titlist Errol Spence beat lightweight titlist Mikey Garcia 36-0 on official scorecards, 37-0 if you count one scorekeeper’s view of a latemiddle round. Accurate tallies, both.

It was a Spence masterpiece until the 11th round ended with Garcia still conscious. After that began the doubts, the narrative’s rewriting, after that began the deeper suspicion on his finest night Spence was not quite Bud Crawford, whose name should not be spoken.

Spence had not before faced an opponent of Garcia’s talent and craft, and Crawford still hasn’t and likely won’t, but Spence fought Garcia with a civility, a decency, a compassion, even, a quarter, finally, Crawford affords no opponent. This makes Spence a lighter soul, a more marketable product, a person you’d rather like to meet, but it makes him less of the one thing anyone reading this wants in his favorite prizefighter.

Indulge a thought experiment: What might Crawford have done otherwise, immediately before or after the 11th round? It’s in the eyes and where Crawford’d’ve set his. Not on the Garcia he was wounding with nearly every punch but on the Garcia manning the corner’s cotton. Crawford would’ve said with his eyes and voice, if his eyes were not emphatic enough, “Robert, I am going to spike your little brother till it spikes your conscience – I am going to break your will, not Mikey’s.”

Spence is everything most want in a prizefighter and promises many joys to come, but he is an athlete-specialist, not a predator. Would he be specialist enough to beat Crawford? I’m not sure he wouldn’t, but at ringside I was sure he would be until halfway through Saturday’s final round. He had a dispirited and physically reduced little man in front of him and an older brother trainer who’d floated the idea of flying the white feather eight minutes earlier, and instead of snatching consciousness with a proper dose of cruelty Spence went sweet on us.

My work is done here, he said, à la Money May; let’s use this time to prep the postfight interview and revel in my accomplishment. It was an acceptable and marketable thing to do, and if we’re honest, such relentfulness likely matchmade a payday with Manny Pacquiao (a man with enough bonedeep cruelty to steel via transfusion the entire PBC stable, lightweight to heavy), but it was disappointing to those know who what’s what.

It was a signature PBC fight in that sense. Little blood, gloves a bit too big. Safe boxing, as it were. There’s something still sanitized about PBC fare, an abiding sense, even at ringside, none of the anointed ones is in true danger. Mikey took the sort of sustained abuse that writes neurology whitepapers 20 years hence but suffered none of what gore’d make Fox Sports reconsider its recent investment.

Let’s precede the next turn like this: PBC has improved considerably its relationship with print media, largely by hiring retired newspapermen, and to imply writers were treated less than fantastically Saturday in AT&T Stadium would be inaccurate as it were ungrateful. But the outfit’s mysterious figurehead was invisible as usual and inaccessible as ever. And his absence brought a postfight thought like: He’s not a violent man, he doesn’t want violence in his life, and he signs fighters according to every criterion save savagery.

All the stable staples were ringside for the main: Floyd, a purple and bedizened toddler; AB, a gleeful rogue in pink, trailed by Gervonta and a greenhaired date; Leprechaun Shawn; Manny, declawed and spacey; the Brothers Charlo, lion tamers more than lions; Deontay, garishly garnished, unable to stop smiling. For edgy you had to look in the cheaper seats and see the elder Benavidez brother – but we know how Bud did him.

It was pleasantly safe the whole night. A better, more committed writer – hell, even this writer 10 years ago – might impart this was not as things should be, but again, the whole night was too pleasant to notice. PBC is a socioeconomic achievement in that sense, too, and an intentional one, one suspects. To have so many men whom the (white) American imagination makes so dangerous assembled in a small space, at the center of which actual violence is the point, and have it blanketed by appreciable calm and fun was at least a part of Al Haymon’s original vision. For it could not be accidentally so.

It really was fun during the ringwalks, too. There’s nothing like the energy of the stadium ringwalk, tens of thousands of lubricated throats and psyches foreplayed into a froth by undercard mismatches and earsplitting technobeats, rising as one in the ecstasy of anticipated violence. Mikey’s mariachi production and glinting eye; Errol’s marching band; both men making a much longer walk through a crowd much longer assembled than anything a casino could host.

The main event that followed was nearer a dud than a classic, true, but that was attributable to every reason every one of us thought the hour the fight was announced and dutifully went about forgetting in the months that followed. Spence was quicker than the man Mikey prepared for; a regimen of adding weight and sparring weighty men did as it ever does, putting weight on Mikey’s chin, not his fists, but quickly it made perfect sense no sparring partner big or bigger than Spence would have the Texan’s reflexes – else that man would be a world champion, not a sparring partner. By round 3 it was not a question of whether Spence would beat the 147-pound Garcia 12 times of 10 but whether, in a hypothetical tilt for Mikey’s lightweight title, Spence wouldn’t be the favorite there as well, so much better were Errol’s reflexes and footwork and accuracy than Garcia’s.

What Spence revealed in Garcia was an excellent technician of exceptional power (below 140 pounds) whose skills were actually orthodox and basic as suspected. The lesser man in size and strength, precision and mobility, Mikey had, by round 9, nothing on which to depend but his whiskers and Spence’s mercy. And blessed he was with both.

While his older brother and protector, dullfaced and resigned, watched silently in the corner.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Errol Spence Jr. defends the IBF Welterweight title against Mikey Garcia in a battle of undefeated stars.  The action kicks off at 8 PM ET / 7 PM PT with a 4 fight undercard featuring former Heavyweight champion Charles Martin taking on Gregory Corbin.  Chris Arreola battles Jean Pierre Augustin.  Luis Nery takes on McJoe Arroyo and David Benavidez battles J’Leon Love.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.

Round 1:Left to body from Spence

Round 2 Left from Spence..1-2 from Garcia..Left to body..Jab from Spence..

Round 3 Left from Spence..Body shot..Left..Right from Garcia..Big left from Spence..left..Hard body shot..Staright left

Round 4 Straight left from Spence..2 jabs..2 shots..2 lefts..2 more lefts..uppercut..Body shot..Right from Garcia

Round 5 3 rights from Garcia..Good left from Spence..Hard left..Straight left..3 jabs..

Round 6 hard left and body shots from Spence..hard left and right…Hard right hook..Right from Garcia..Good body shot

Round 7  Left from Spence..

Round 8 Hard left from Spence..Left to body from Garcia..Combination from Spence..another..Hard left..Spence outlanding Garcia 189-52

Round 9 Straight left..Uppercut on inside from Spence..Straight left…Jab..hard 4 punch combination..Hard jab..Body shot..2 jabs..

Round 10 3 punch combination from Spence…Left to body..Right hook..left inside..hard left..right from Garcia..

Round 11 Spence landing a heavy barrage of Punches…Garcia looks beaten…Hard shots from Spence..Spence with a big round..Spence out landing Garcia 318-67

Round 12 Left from Spence..Straight left…Good left.combination to head and body..Hard left…. PUNCHES 345-1082 For Spence  75-406 for Garcia

120-107….120-108 for ERROL SPENCE

Round 1 Left from Benavidez…RighBody shot from Love..Hard left rocks Love..hes in trouble on the ropes..Right..3 punch combination

Round 2 Benavidez landing in the corner..HARD RIGHT..LOVE IS HURT ON THE ROPES AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Right from Nery..

Round 2 Right to body from Arroyo,,Hard right hook from Nery..Jab..Body combination…SHORT LEFT UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES ARROYO..Hard combination on the ropes..

Round 3 Hook from Nery…Jab…RIGHT HOOK AND DOWN GOES ARROYO…Hard jab..

Round 4 Body combination from Nery…BIG COMBINATION…DOWN GOES ARROYO..COMBINATION ON ROPES DOWN GOES ARROYO

Round 1 Straight left from Augustin..Left and right..

Round 2 Augustin lands left…Jab from Arreola..

Round 3 Hard right from Arreola..Hard right..Augustin wobbled..Jab..HUGE COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES AUGUSTIN..VICIOUS COMBINATION ROCKS AUGUSTIN…FIGHT STOPPED

Round 1: Left from Martin..Right from Corbin..2 Jabs from Martin..Right from Corbin

Round 2 Martin lands a left to the body…Good left..Hard left..

Round 3 Hard left from Martin…Left to body..Hard left…Double left..Right hook..

Round 4 CORBIN DEDUCTED A POINT FOR A LOW BLOW.. Martin cut over left eye..Right Hook from Martin and left…Cut from accidental headbutt

Round 5 Straight left from Martin..CORBIN DEDUCTED ANOTHER POINT FOR LOW BLOW..

Round 6 Good left from Martin…Hard left..ANOTHER LOW BLOW–POINT DEDUCTION FOR CORBIN..

Round 7 Left from Martin

Round 8 Right hook from Martin…CORBIN DISQUALIFIED FOR A LOW BLOW

By Norm Frauenheim-

ARLINGTON, Tex. – Home is where the chants are.

At least, that’s what Mikey Garcia hoped he was hearing Friday at AT&T Stadium during the weigh-in for his bid to upset welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. Saturday in a ring near the middle of the Dallas Cowboys homefield and beneath a video screen that makes everybody look bigger than life.

This is Texas, after all. Nothing small here, including the hometown fighter who has all of the measurable advantages. Spence, who grew up about 20 miles from Dallas in DeSoto, is three-and-a-half inches taller and has a four-inch advantage in reach.

At 146.25 pounds, Spence was only three-quarters of a pound heavier than Garcia at Friday’s formal trip to the scale. But that difference is expected to grow by multiple pounds by opening bell for the main event on a Fox pay-per-view card (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET).

Spence is expected to be at least a middleweight, and perhaps five pounds heavier at 165. He could be 10 to 15 pounds heavier than Garcia, who hopes to be 155 at fight time. In other words, Garcia, a former featherweight champion, could be making only his second appearance at welterweight against a fighter who could be just three pounds short of super-middleweight.

It all adds up to a very steep challenge for Garcia, who is fighting to become the third ex-featherweight champ to win a significant welterweight belt. Henry Armstrong is the first to accomplish the feat. Manny Pacquiao, who is expected to be at ringside Saturday, is the second.

A harder factor to measure, however, is the crowd. So far, it looks as if it might favor Garcia, who grew up in Oxnard, Calif. At a media workout Tuesday and again at the weigh-in Friday, the chants were one sided, al for “Mikey, Mikey.’’

He acknowledged the crowd and its support for him repeatedly. He held up five fingers, symbolic of the fifth world title he is seeking. His trainer and brother, Robert, wore a T-shirt that said: “Because He’s Mikey.’’ That message included an inherent assumption, one that gives an edge to Garcia for his smarts and fundamental tactical skill.

A crowd, predicted to be at least 35,000, might agree with that. The chants throughout the week before opening bell suggest that visitor will get most of the cheers from Dallas’ big Mexican-American community.

But will that only motivate Spence, the International Boxing Federation’s champ, to fight for his own turf? In the end, it his town. It’s his belt.

After Spence stepped off the scale Friday, he looked at the crowd and said:

“I’m going to eff him up.’’

Then crowd couldn’t hear him. They were chanting Mickey.

By Norm Frauenheim-

ARLINGTON, Tex. – It’s been a journey that has taken a father and his sons from Phoenix to southern California to Omaha to Seattle and back again, all in a tireless search for peace among themselves and a quiet place that would allow them to prepare for the violence encountered against others in the ring.

It hasn’t always been easy or predictable. Then again, these kinds of trips don’t come with a guide. Travel at your own risk. Jose Benavidez Jr. and his two sons, David and Jose Jr., have. So far, the risks have been lessons. Fail at your own peril, and there’s been plenty of that. There was a gunshot on a Phoenix canal bank and positive test for cocaine.

But the fight to survive and perhaps prevail goes on Saturday night under some very bright lights in a ring atop the Dallas Cowboys homefield at AT&T Stadium with the youngest Benavidez, David, fighting for some redemption against J’ Leon Love in his first bout since he was stripped of the WBC’s super-middleweight title after a positive test last September.

“I’m more motivated than ever just to prove to the people and everybody that I let down,’’ Benavidez said in a conference call a couple weeks before his Saturday night return on Fox pay-per-view card (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET) featuring Mikey Garcia against welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr.

That motivation was brewing back in October when David accompanied Jose Jr. to Omaha for his older brother’s loss by 12th-round stoppage to Terence Crawford in a wild bout, both dramatic and contentious. It was Jose Jr.’s first fight since he was shot in the right leg, above the knee, while running on a canal bank on August 23, 2016. It’s still not clear what happened. Nobody has been charged or arrested.

Days before Jose Jr.’s first fight since the shooting, David was restless. Jose Jr. did most of the talking that day and the next when he shoved Crawford in a weigh-in scuffle that could have canceled the fight. In the background, it was almost impossible not to see David’s impatience. He was restless for his own chance.

Finally, it’s here and it has come at a moment when David, now 22, says all of the fundamental planks are in place for a new beginning to a career that began with him winning a title at 20 years old. He was boxing’s youngest champion. There’s peril in that too.

“Nobody tells you that when you start making money … there’s no instructions that come with it,’’ David Benavidez told Los Angeles Times sportswriter Lance Pugmire in a terrific story. https://www.latimes.com/sports/boxing/la-sp-david-benavidez-boxing-20190314-story.html.

“That’s why some fighters get lost and feel like they’re ripped off. You live and you learn. I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Now, I know how to take care of things.”

Benavidez says he has emerged from his absence from boxing with a renewed love for the sport and his father. There had been stories about trouble between David and his dad.

Pugmire’s story reports that those issues were a factor in David suddenly signing a contract with Top Rank, which promotes his older brother. However, Sampson Lewkowicz already had a contract with David, nullifying the Top Rank deal and forcing David to return a $250,000 signing bonus.

A positive test for cocaine and a contract controversy awakened David Benavidez to the realization that his career had taken the kind of beating he has never sustained within the ropes.

“It wasn’t a good feeling to have everything you worked for taken away from you in an instant,” Benavidez (20-0, 17 KOs) said during the conference call. “But it happened and it just made me hungrier and more motivated to keep working harder and to get back what’s rightfully mine.”

Part of that task appears to be a step to resolve whatever issues he had with his dad. Jose Sr. hired a Scottsdale psychologist to work with David.

“I love you, I’m here, I’m here to help you achieve your dreams,” Jose Sr. said he told his son.

A father’s tough love has also included the miles that have taken his sons from streets that never go anywhere. The dad has seen those streets. Has seen where they lead. That’s why he’s moved his sons, first from Phoenix to southern California, then to Omaha and then to Seattle. It’s a lot of road work, but it’s a run away from the familiar dead end that a dad knows is always there.

The ultimate destination, however, is still the ring. There’s an old debate about whether a father should ever train his sons. Part of that debate might have been evident in David’s contract flap. But it’s probably a little early in the game to say the Jose Benavidez Sr. and his sons have resolved everything between them. No family ever stays out of disputes.

The difference is that Benavidez family also fights for a living, this time against J Leon Love instead of themselves, or a recreational drug, or a bad contract, or a mysterious gunman on a remote canal bank.

One thing, at least, is becoming more evident. The siblings, Jose Jr, and David, are a lot alike before a fight. Jose Jr.’s surprising trash talk at Crawford last October wound up with an ESPN bout that scored boxing’s highest television rating in 2018.

The talk resumed Thursday with David jawing at Leon Love (24-2-1, 13 KOs) with words that could have been borrowed from his brother’s rhetorical trashing of the feared Crawford, perhaps the best fighter in the world.

“You’re going to sleep, going to sleep Saturday night,’’ David said to Leon Love Thursday during an undercard news conference.

Leon Love looked around a podium that separated him from the youngest Benavidez and said: “Stop that tough-boy bleep. …Guess they do that in Arizona.’’

Turns out they do it everywhere. It only started in Arizona.

By Norm Frauenheim

ARLINGTON, Tex. – Errol Spence Jr.’s poker face and impassive eyes reveal nothing. His body language says nothing. But there was a decided shift in Spence’s mood Wednesday with edgy words that were a sign of frustration, if not anger, at Mikey Garcia.

Blame it on a bad mood. Spence did exactly that during interviews after the last formal news conference on the floor near one end of the Dallas Cowboys home field at AT&T Stadium where they will fight Saturday night in a FOX pay-per-view bout.

But his mood wasn’t part of a foul weather front that blew into Dallas early Wednesday with 80 mile-per-winds, ominous thunder and sheets of stinging rain. Spence has just grown weary of a Garcia confidence expressed repeatedly and never with any hint of doubt.

“A one-sided massacre,’’ Spence finally said when asked how he thought the fight would go.

By then, it was evident who he thought would do the massacre.

And who would get massacred.

There are reasons to think he might be right. Spence is the bigger fighter, the biggest in the current welterweight division. Garcia, still the World Boxing Council’s 135-pound champion, is fighting at 147 pounds for only the second time. Spence, who is defending the International Boxing Federation’s welterweight belt for a third time, is at home. He grew up in DeSoto, a Dallas suburb.

Yet, Garcia talks as though he has all the advantages. The news conference’s moderator referred to Garcia’s proven tactical skill. Then, there was this question: Who is the most technical boxer you’ve faced?

Before Garcia could begin to exhale in an attempted answer, Spence said:

“I am.’’

Garcia has long believed his skillset is underrated. His brother and trainer, Robert Garcia, confirmed that Mikey had been sparring with partners as heavy as 180 pounds. All of them were surprised by his younger brother’s power.

“Errol doesn’t know, but he’ll find out,’’ Robert Garcia said.

Garcia’s unbeaten record (39-0, 30 KOs) is filled with examples of fighters who have become opponents. He mentioned that Wednesday and, again, Spence (24-0, 21 KOs) had another pointed counter.

“I’m not another opponent,’’ Spence said.

This one begged for a Mikey Garcia counter. Ever the craftsman, he delivered.

“Yes,’’ he said to Spence, “you will be another opponent on Saturday night.”

Mikey Garcia couldn’t help noticing that on Wednesday Spence had said a lot of things, many of them almost contradictory.

“I don’t know a lot of the things that might be going on in his head right now,’’ Mikey said in comment that suggested the Garcia camp might be gaining a psychological edge as opening bell approaches.

On Wednesday, Spence said he was ready for a 12-round fight. He also said he would be prepared to stop Garcia if the opportunity was there.

“Knock him out in three or four rounds, that’s a bonus,’’ said Spence, who hopes a victory will propel him to the top of the pound-for-pound rankings. He also wants to succeed Floyd Mayweather Jr. as the so-called face of the game.

To do that, he ‘ll have to make Mikey remember news reports that Robert didn’t want him to ask for a fight against Spence. Nevertheless, Mikey called out Spence before and after a victory over Robert Easter in June at Los Angeles’ Staples Center.

“I’m going to prove that Mikey’s brother was right,’’ Spence said. “I’m going to make him wish he didn’t want this.’’

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Carson, Calif., American welterweight titlist “Showtime” Shawn Porter decisioned Cuban Yordenis Ugas by controversial splitdecision scores in an uncontroversially dull prizefight broadcast in primetime by Fox Sports to promote the network’s upcoming pay-per-view debut. Saturday’s controversial decision came out more palatable than usual, though; having the match’s loser be the one who wins the outrageously lopsided card, it turns out, helps the medicine go down.

Saturday’s final round reduced to an evernarrowing matter of who wanted it more and ever-reducedly made manifest this answer: Neither man. Ugas, effectively if not expectedly, reduced “Showtime” Shawn to “Fox Sports” Porter, a feinting, doubting, boxer-strategist much more like his PBC stablemates in 2019 than himself in 2015.

Porter’s strategy appeared like: They expect me to attack so they can counter me, and I’m not going to fall for that. Good far as it goes, no sense in giving a challenger exactly the champ for whom he prepared, one supposes, but what was the second part of that plan? It could not have been to meltdown Ugas from making him chase or miss since even minimal preparation on Porter’s part would’ve uncovered Ugas’ reluctance to lead, a culturally ingrained reluctance no camp or chiefsecond might eradicate in under a tenyear, and Porter strikes no one as unprepared.

Or maybe that is no longer so. It was true for the last halfdecade at least, but Friday’s scale reported otherwise, and we might as well not ignore it. If Porter was not before voted by peers Least Likely to Lose His Title on the Scale he was verily in the running each year since gaining his first belt in 2013. Not a stylist gifted as his stablemate welterweights, the madefortelevision gaggle that can’t seem to fight one another despite sharing both the same contractwriters and the same signing pen, Porter remains the most attractive of the lot because of his honesty.

There was something charming about Sugar Shane Mosley’s being ringside Saturday to see Porter; honesty recognize honesty, as it were; if Mosley weren’t at least twice the fighter naturally that Porter is he was also a fighter honest enough to keep choosing newer and bigger and better foes till he came to the same choices Porter often finds himself making. If it’s not certain a prime Mosley would beat Keith Thurman and Adrien Broner in the same night it’s probable enough to wonder if Sugar Shane, inspired by the long money Manny Pacquiao got for such easy work in January, wasn’t in Carson scouting.

If Porter is an honest fighter he gave a performance less honest than usual, Saturday, and if that isn’t Ugas’ fault it’s mostly Ugas’ fault. Whatever else an honest prizefighter does he must at least endeavor to hit his opponent often and hard as possible even if it means being hit in return. In the annals of Cuban prizefighters there are precious few men who meet that standard and Ugas sure as hell isn’t one. (Said list in the modern era likely starts with Joel Casamayor and ends with Luis Ortiz.) Instead Ugas is the latest graduate from Havana’s be-not-shamed school of boxing.

This was the thought that happened halfway through Saturday’s match – when Ugas glared and asserted postround dominance over a man he’d just refused to punch-first in 180 seconds of opportunities. It’s a congenital condition among Cuban prizefighters in the sense it happens at their birth as professional fighters. Many international amateur bouts are fitness competitions much as they are acts of combat, judged and slightly menacing CrossFit happenings wherein you must throw early and often to outpoint your opponent. The Cubans do this masterfully and once understood the geometry of computerized judging (1992-2012) too; there were dead zones on the canvas, wherein the required three of five judges were unlikely to register a landed punch, and the Cubans knew better than to exert while upon them.

Everything changes for these guys, though, once the gloves get smaller or the rounds get longer. They arrive at an ethos that finds immense shame in their being hit cleanly or stopped. Losing “controversial” decisions bothers them little if at all, no matter how many times they and their countrymen lose exactly the same way. Porter’s corner was loudly concerned Saturday their man was putting his title at risk by not engaging more and ferociously with his challenger. Ugas’ corner, contrarily, saidn’t once something like: “We never win these close decisions, so for heaven’s sake hurt this man until he is unconscious!”

There was Ugas, then, in the championship rounds of a match there for his taking, feinting and glowering and taunting and threatening but never leading with anything but the safest of getaway jabs. It can’t be a technical thing, not for a Cuban. So it must be a cultural thing that consigns gifted men to the same tough-test game-challenger robbed-unto-perpetuity role so many Cubans play in professional fighting. And always with the sympathyseeking autobiography, too; if it’s not a loved one’s terminal illness it’s a family jailed by the Castro regime. Anymore it feels like a script designed to excuse a contender’s lack of ferocity with a narrative trick like: After everything he’s sacrificed to be a world champion only the most dastardly official wouldn’t give him every close round, and they’ll all be close – only the scrofulous judge’d render an unfavorable tally.

Whatever say our insipid brethren on the scorecard-ethics beat, I’m glad for every close decision that goes against the challenger. Take the champ’s consciousness or take your seat quietly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Shawn Porter defends the WBC Welterweight title against Yordenis Ugas.  The action kicks off at 8 PM with two fights featuring Heavyweight Efe Ajagba taking on Amir Mansour.  Abel Ramos battles Francisco Santana in a welterweight clash

The Page will update Automatically.  NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Right from Porter..Jab from Ugas..Body shot from Porter…Jab from Ugas

Round 2 Jab from Ugas..Good right from Porter..Ugas lands a body shot..Counter right from Porter..Roght from Ugas..

Round 3 Jab from Porter..Body shot from Ugas,.Right from Porter..Body shot from Ugas..Jab..left.

Round 4 Jab to body from Ugas..Left hook..

Round 5 Jab from Porter..Jab..Right from Ugas..Good right..Hard right..Uppercut..Right from Porter..Body shot from Ugas.

Round 6 Counter right from Porter,,Right…Right..Jab from Ugas..

Round 7 Counter right from Ugas..Porter gets in a right..Right from Ugas..

Round 8 Right from Porter..Right from Ugas..Left from Porter.2 rights from Ugas..

Round 9 Combination from Porter..Counter left and right..Left from Ugas..Jab from Porter

Round 10 Left from Porter..Jab..Right over the top..Good right..Porter cut over his right eye

Round 11 Ugas lands a left and right..Big jab from Porter

Round 12 Right from Ugas

116-112 Porter…117-111 Ugas…..115-113 Porter

Round 1  Ramos lands a jab..Body shot from Santana..Left..

Round 2 Right from Santana..Combination..Right from Ramos..2 counters from Santana..another counter..Big right from Ramos….HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES RAMOS..

Round 3  Santana lands a right and left hook to body..Right from Ramos..Right…Right..Hard right..Right hand and lefy hook from Santana..

Round 4  Ramos lands a right to body and left…

Round 5  Good combination from Ramos

Round 6 Blood from the nose of Ramos..2 Rights from Ramos..Left from Santana..Uppercuts from Ramos..Body shot from Santana

Round 7 Jab from Ramos..Right..Body shots..Body shot..Uppercut..left to body from Santana..Left to body from Ramos..Hard flurry rocks Santana..Big left

Round 8 Hard counter from Santana..1-2 from Ramos..

Round 9 Left from Ramos..Good uppercut..

Round 10  Ramos lands a hard combination..Good right..Ripping hooks..

Round 1 Right from Ajagba..HARD RIGHT AND DOWN GOES MANSOUR…LEFT AND DOWN GOES MANSOUR..

Round 2 Right from Ajagba…Left From Mansour…Right from Ajagba…hard right

FIGHT STOPPED IN THE CORNER…AJAGBA WINNER VIA TKO END OF 2

By Norm Frauennheim-

It’s not exactly David-versus-Goliath, but it might feel like it to Mikey Garcia when confronted by Goliath-like odds stacked against him in a role he asked for months before next week’s risky fight against Errol Spence Jr, the welterweight division’s heir apparent ever since he stunned Kell Brook nearly two years ago.

Garcia opened as a 4-to-1 underdog. Depending on the bookmaker, the line has moved to 5-1. Those are good odds if you’re shopping for a deal at the race track. But don’t confuse boxing with the ponies. Odds suggest Garcia will have to do something very special to upset Spence.

That’s what makes the bout in a ring somewhere near the 50-yard line on the Dallas Cowboys homefield at AT&T Stadium so intriguing. Garcia is special. He has a unique blend of poise, skill and smarts. What’s missing is the size many believe he’ll need to counter, or perhaps withstand Spence’s singular power, which was frighteningly evident in his 11th-round stoppage of the bigger Brook in the UK on May 27, 2017.

The seed of Spence’s KO of the gutsy Brook might have been planted nine months earlier (Sept 10, 1916) in middleweight Gennady Golovkin’s stoppage of Brook within five rounds. GGG left Brook with an injured right eye. Spence’s middleweight-like power compounded the injury, leaving Brook with a fractured eye socket.

Call it a warning, perhaps ominous for Garcia, a former featherweight champion and still reigning lightweight champion who will be fighting at 147 pounds for only the second time in his quest for pound-for-pound supremacy. Only in harm’s way, however, can Garcia (39-0, 30 KOs) really stake his claim on legacy. Guess here: He has a better chance than the odds or an old adage might suggest. That adage, of course, is just bit of common sense. To wit: In a bout between two good fighters, always bet on the bigger guy. There’s no way to know how much bigger Spence will be at opening bell.

But it’s safe to assume he’ll be somewhere near middleweight (160). Robert Garcia, Mikey’s trainer, says his brother walks around at 155 pounds. Hard to say whether or not he can get back to that weight after the formal weigh-in on the Friday before the pay-per-view fight (FOX Sports) Saturday (March 16).

But it’s safe to say he’ll have to be at least 150 pounds. A difference of 10-to-15 pounds at opening bell only increases Spence’s chance at some sort of stoppage, perhaps in the later rounds when inevitable fatigue leads to the predictable. Hands drop, a fight-ending punch lands on an exposed chin.

The intrigue rests in Garcia’s ability to throw different punches from angles set up by footwork the unbeaten Spence has never seen. I’m not sure how much the unbeaten Spence has been forced to adjust over a 24-fight career, including 21 KOs. His power rules. It’s the bottom line, the decision-maker. But that power might be negated by some of Garcia’s evident tactical skill. Spence delivers his power off his front foot.

Can he fight backing up? He might have to. Can Garcia get up from a big shot? He might have to.

Just a couple of questions preceding a bout with enough of them to think it might be the Fight of the Year

Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

Soon undefeated welterweight Texan titlist Errol Spence will defend his IBF belt against undefeated lightweight Californian titlist Mikey Garcia at AT&T (formerly Cowboys) Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on a PBC pay-per-view card distributed by Fox Sports. The ticketselling onus is on Spence much as the entertaining onus be on Garcia. While one can’t help but appreciate the quality of both prizefighters one is equally challenged to forget the unsatisfying way similar such handicap matches have gone in the last few years. But anyway a preview must be written.

There’s something hopeful about writing a fight preview you don’t find in any other column subject. Indulge me a bit, here, as this might be more about the mechanics of the craft than the upcoming fight – which you’ve got a wellformed opinion about already and hardly need information from me to refine.

At best a preview column might remind a reader of something he already knows. On rarest occasions there’s something overlooked by every expert and a writer taps it, but that’s unlikely to the precipice of impossible in the internet era. Some styles mesh unexpectedly. All fighters have flaws, and the surprises come along when, for reasons indecipherable enough to be called “chemistry”, an underdog sees a favorite’s flaws with a clarity unanticipated by all that favorite’s previous opponents. This is exceedingly rare with every trainer having access to footage of every prospective-opponent’s efforts.

Nothing trustworthy comes out of camps because they’re intended to deceive. You already know this. Every fighter has had the best camp of his career before the biggest fight of his career until he loses. Then you hear about the hand injury, the lacerated eyebrow, the pneumonia, the chief second’s visa issues.

The part of column writing one improves at most over the years is sizing ideas. Your first year of columns invariably includes a Homeric treatment of your chosen subject’s appeals. In this case it would be a humanitarian justification of prizefighting’s very being: makes heroes of underprivileged kids, provides official supervision of violent events that were going to happen anyway, affords the cultural edification of seeing courageous acts publicly done. You know going in these are 100,000-word ideas and you think: Imagine the literary density that’ll happen if I can get a 100,000-word idea compressed into a hundredth of its due!

This doesn’t work, and if you don’t end up in the shabbiness of bullet points you might as well. So you retreat into newsitorials, opinionated reporting, verse-chorus-verse. Then you take another chance in your second or third year: Growing the 100-word idea into 1,000 words. The essence of a left hook, the telltale snicker from the final presser’s dais, why some challenger’s wearing “I Luv U Mom” on his trunks foretold every single thing that happened in round 4.

This is enervating work but more rewarding than year-one’s compression initiative. Here’s why. By missing widely on the spectrum’s opposite end you’ve set a more-workable range than if you tried to make a smaller correction. By trying to stretch 100 words into 1,000, in other words, you’ve improved yourself disproportionately more than a lad who tries in his second year to compress a 50,000-word idea in to 1,000.

If you stay with it long enough, of course, you can’t help but improve. But endurance in this case, and especially in a case of no financial reward, is a function of talent; you might have written 1,000-word columns about a seasonless sport like ours for a decade without more than a lick if you needed to do so to pay rent. But to turn the same feat for free requires facility of some sort – at some level, however invisible it be to the practitioner, doing this must be easier for you than the hundred or so folks who threaten to do it but don’t.

What’ll happen a couple Saturdays from now in Arlington? What we already think will happen. Two of this generation’s best fighters in an unsatisfying handicap match. For what could happen that would satisfy? Garcia stretching Spence is the only thing that comes to mind. And how likely is that? Spence stretching Garcia would be cathartic in its moment, like when Canelo fabric-softened Amir Khan then folded him with ruler-scored creases, but that catharsis would deteriorate quickly into an idea like: Spence did what he was supposed to do.

Some of you may tell yourselves seeing Garcia make a masterclass in boxing and play keepaway unto a 12-round decision would induce longlasting euphoria, but if that were true we would talk about Leonard-Hagler today often as we talk about Hagler-Hearns. Which we don’t.

Errol Spence is one of my favorite fighters. Mikey Garcia was one of my favorite fighters eight years ago – the night in 2010 he took the staples out Cornelius Lock on a card in Laredo was memorable impressive. Garcia squandered much of aficionados’ high opinions of him with the way he ended things against Orlando Salido in 2013 and the way he began them with Juanma Lopez five months later. Not long after that began his hiatus and a comeback against opponents either unproved or proved underwhelming; only in a promoter’s alternative universe is decisioning Robert Easter a meaningful feat for someone of Garcia’s gifts and pedigree.

Which is why Garcia now shoots at the moon, bounding up a couple weightclasses and fighting one of the world’s two best welterweights. He has hall-of-fame gifts unjustified by his resume. Spence’s case is more sympathetic. He wants to unify a division whose fellow titlists are wanting for one reason or another, but absent that he might as well go for the biggest payday available. One assumes this is that. But I’m not sure. Ringside in December a veteran of many Garcia fights told me: “He never did sell tickets for us.”

But one doesn’t book a football stadium otherwise, right? We’ll know soon enough.

Garcia’s quest, to justify his gifts, brings us neatly back to the craft of column writing about boxing. For all but a practitioner or two it is the only reason to file regularly. To justify one’s perceived gifts in a way that precludes regret, to preclude the gnawing sensation that accompanies an admission of one’s own ungratefulness.

Doubtful AT&T Stadium is the place to complete such a journey, I’ll take Spence, KO-11.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Interim can mean just about anything. Interim is a way station, or a stop to nowhere, or a euphemism for forget-about-it. In a business where the word has been used way too much, it’s back all over again.

Forget about an immediate rematch. Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder will fight interim bouts. I’m not sure how to apply interim in this case, other than to say:

Meanwhile, it’s back to business as usual.

There was plenty of healthy anticipation and reported momentum toward a Wider-Fury rematch just a few weeks ago, when suddenly the optimism vanished, or perhaps was put on hold with Fury’s surprising deal with ESPN and Top Rank as a co-promoter. Welcome back to the waiting room, a place that is beginning to feel a lot more permanent than interim these days.

I get it. I understand the reason for pushing the projected rematch date from May 18 to later in the year. Timing for a later date makes sense, mostly because of Anthony Joshua’s British Invasion of America on June 1 at Madison Square Garden against Jarrell Miller. Joshua-Miller will happen nearly a month after Canelo Alvarez middleweight title defense on May 4 against Danny Jacobs.

A mid-May rematch wouldn’t leave much in the pay-per-view budget for most fans. What I don’t get are plans for interim bouts for both Fury and Wilder. Interim means risk, a huge gamble for both the fans and the fighters. Let’s face it, neither Fury or Wilder are great heavyweights. What they have is each other and the chance to extend their controversial draw on Dec. 1 at Los Angeles Staples Center into a compelling sequel and a good payday. But if either loses in the interim, who cares about a rematch? The real trouble is that either can lose to just about anybody. In the interim, consider Luis Ortiz, who in the interim is perhaps the biggest danger to Fury-Wilder II.

Ortiz is fighting Christian Hammer Saturday at Brooklyn’s Barclay Center. If he wins, he has a strong argument for a rematch with Wilder, who was losing on the scorecards when he scored a 10th-round stoppage of Ortiz a year ago. Ortiz could have beaten Wilder in March. He could beat him in May, too. Truth is, anybody from Dillian Whyte to Dominic Breazeale can beat Wilder.

Interim bouts are seen as a way to further introduce both Fury and Wilder to a wider audience. Despite the drama surrounding their December rematch, the PPV audience was reported to be 325,000. Top Rank’s Bob Arum guesses in several media reports that an immediate rematch would have done about 400,000. Arum hopes to market Fury, whose UK roots as an Irish Traveller has given him an innate sense of theater.

After getting up twice against Wilder in December, he got a room full of reporters at Staples to sing along in his own rendition of American Pie. Before the sing-along, he spread out his arms like a preacher and asked: “Did we entertain you?’’

Did he ever.

It is Arum’s thinking that the PPV number for the rematch could surpass one million if more people get to know the likable Fury. Nobody is more adept at creating celebrity than Arum’s Top Rank machine. But the marketing would be built around an interim bout. Therein, rests the danger.

As his unbeaten record attests, Fury is good enough to beat anybody, yet there are still questions about a heavyweight who got up, yet still absorbed a huge punch in a dangerous knockdown from the powerful Wilder.

There are further questions about whether a more skilled heavyweight might be more of a danger to Fury than the one-dimensional Wilder was in December.

Fury dominated the pace against Wilder with a good jab. He controlled the ring until Wilder’s power connected in the ninth and again in the 12th. A multi-skilled heavyweight might force Fury out of doing what he does best – a comfort zone he occupied for eight-plus rounds in December, a year after he was reportedly heavier than 400 pounds.

The fear here is that interim bouts will leave Fury and Wilder with nothing more than a couple of interim belts. It’s not worth the risk, especially for the fans who have been left holding a pile of interim for too long.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a prizefight between formerly good lightweights matched 15 pounds and nearly so many years past their primes Mexican Humberto “La Zorrita” Soto decisioned American Brandon “Bam Bam” Rios by wide Mexican scorecards in Tijuana. Probably the cards were unfair to the American’s activity and ineffective aggressiveness, yes, but they were precise reflections of the difference the men shared in class. A blessing on such uncommon precision.

What surprised mostly, for being unobstructed by either man’s reflexes, was how markedly better Soto was than Rios, better in a way which caused one’s mind to race backwards and color his memories with doubt’s shadow. Whosoever won the match on an honest card wasn’t relevant to nary a spectator; that sort of determination required a calculus of activity and generalship and sundry other considerations properly dispensed of by any aficionado who knows knockouts matter more than the aggregate value of every other outcome. Perhaps Rios did enough to unsteal some of the rounds Soto otherwise stole, and perhaps it means naught either way.

What mattered Saturday was the clarity of the disparity, as it were, the entire levels, much less details, which separated the combatants’ skillsets. Rios shone as an object lesson in what a toughguy can do in a region and sport whose every participant is not a toughguy and how much it helps, too, if you speak English and once used it to give premium broadcasters juicy soundbites. Soto, conversely, showed how strikingly competent a prizefighter had to be to come out Mexico when he did.

Soto, one can be forgiven for not realizing, lost his first world title challenge – getting nearly shut-out by Joan Guzman in their WBO super featherweight tilt – the same year Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez fought for the WBC’s title in the same weightclass. Soto was 10 years and 52 scraps into his prizefighting career without so much as a ticket for the Pacquiao-Marquez-Barrera-Morales lottery.

Soto didn’t get out Mexico without he lost a fourtime. There’s an element of craftbuilding there, though, American prizefighters, even a generation before today’s, rarely endured. Early losses on American resumes were a blemish cursed for getting a fighter blacklisted from television. In Mexico, though, where an undefeated record courted suspicion much as it evinced prospective greatness, fighters like Soto realized the only chance to make a fortune in prizefighting was as a world champion, and if you deserved to be such a thing there were avenues enough to attain it, and if you didn’t deserve it then you didn’t deserve it and the only way to know was to fight and fight.

Little in the Soto dossier looks like a wellmanaged prospect cherrypicking a madefortelevision title. Meanwhile, one border and 16 pounds away Andre Berto was saturating HBO’s airwaves with a six-defense run as the WBC’s welterweight titlist, even while sympathetic pundits agreed he probably wasn’t ready to fight other titlists in his same weightclass. You got onthejob training, in other words, as an American prospect, complete with generous cable contracts and inflated rankings, even while your fanbase couldn’t fill a Tijuana cinema much less a bullring.

Onto this scene exploded Brandon Rios with his 2011 stoppage of Miguel Acosta. Four months later Rios was on HBO obliterating Urbano Antillon, a oncepromising prospect ruined by SoCal gymwars, and five months after that, in December, Rios was back on HBO missing weight and fighting someone named John Murray, a man who’d qualified for his title shot by getting knockedout that July. Seriously. By now there was little limit to the silly things experts were saying and scribes were penning about Rios’ otherworldly feats of chin and fist.

Then came the Richar Abril debacle on HBO. Rios missed weight again and got outclassed in every sense of the word – and only Adalaide Byrd happened to notice. Rios got his toughman matchup after that, making a trilogy with Mike Alvarado, and a lot more money from HBO, interrupted only briefly by his being heavybagged in China by a rehabbing Manny Pacquiao who dropped to Rios a total of perhaps 30 nonconsecutive seconds of the 2,160 the men spent together.

All the while somehow persisted the myth Rios was a prodigious infighter, a man who knew well how to mill on the inside, which he did not. I recall distinctly a gaggle of smug South Texas doofuses (a doofusi?) helping me understand how badly I misunderstood my own eyes during Rios-Abril, a match wherein Rios routinely set his head behind Abril’s left shoulder and winchcranked a lefthanded lob (to replicate the power of this shot, raise your left hand, make a fist, and flex your left bicep, then pull your fist into your cheek). Because every Mexican is a tough infighter.

Except Rios is a Mexican-American infighter, which, as Soto showed so ably, is a lesser breed. The opening rounds of Saturday’s match looked like a YouTube video of a fat American partyanimal picking on the wrong Mexican abuelito in a bordertown cantina. Rios had nothing but the rude force of (relative) youth; there wasn’t a single element of fighting Rios did well as Soto, and if Soto’s cultural norms precluded clowning he nevertheless appeared surprised by how easy Rios was to hit and make miss. Exhausted a minute into the fight Soto still managed to hit Rios whenever and however he wished for the 35 that followed. Rios’ generally overrated, if likable, trainer, Robert Garcia, beseeched Rios stop allowing Soto to win every round with merely 10 seconds of exertion, but Garcia must’ve known what Rios didn’t bother telling him which was the difference in class be so vast Soto probably didn’t need more than five seconds of roundly exerting to do it.

The evening’s biggest losers were its oddsmakers, pros who usually know better, for having installed Rios as a wide favorite fighting a Mexican in Mexico. Guess lots of folks believed those HBO press releases way back when.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Tyson Fury’s surprising deal with ESPN and Bob Arum’s Top Rank as co-promoter is generating further talk about a division that not long ago was dormant.

Dormant, as in dead.

It’s hard to judge whether it’s just more noise for all of those social-media mega-phones or a true buzz that foretells a heavyweight revival. The hope here is a revival. There probably will never be another era quite like Ali, Frazier and Foreman. Still, there’s nothing quite like the dynamic elements of a good heavyweight fight. Proof of that was in the drama generated in the Fury-Deontay Wilder draw on Dec. 1.

On the skillset scale, Fury and Wilder will never be ranked among the heavyweight legends. Yet, Fury and Wilder reminded us that heavyweight power separates the division from the rest of the weight classes. Explosive drama is always there, lurking in every punch. Wilder landed a couple of them. Fury got up from both of them. It was dangerous. It was beautiful. It was classic, if only for the way it summed up why the division has always been a sport unto itself. To wit: There are the heavyweights and everybody else.

It’s hard to know whether Fury’s new deal will lead to the immediate Wilder rematch that seemed so inevitable just a week ago. Then, May 18 was projected. Maybe, that date gets pushed to later this year.

In large part, there’s timing. The announcement last week that the UK’s Anthony Joshua’s American debut against Jarrell Miller will happen on June 1 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Two of the biggest heavyweight fights in years within a couple weeks of each other might be hard to market and harder to sell, especially on pay-per-view. Also, a lot of attention and pay-per-view dollars will be spent on the middleweight fight between Canelo Alvarez and Danny Jacobs on May 4.

May is crowded. A date in October or November or December might be a better time for the Fury-Wilder sequel. The public appetite will still be there, buoyed in part by what happens in Joshua-Miller. The ongoing buzz in the wake of the Fury deal with ESPN and Top Rank is a sign of a reawakening in interest in what was once known as the flagship division.

That flagship disappeared like the Navy’s old class of battleships. But it’s lore and legends are still afloat in the public imagination. You can hear it. An intriguing element is what a healthy heavyweight division can do for the rest of the business.

There was a time when many thought boxing was only as good as the heavyweights. Subsequently, that was disproved by Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. But it’s fair to argue that the sport sank to the so-called fringes during the post-Mike Tyson days. Suddenly, however, networks and streaming services increasingly want boxing.

They need bouts, which means they need boxers. For now, the business remains paralyzed by the Byzantine patchwork of rival promoters. Their reluctance to do business with each other continues to keep some of the best fights from happening.

But that’s not sustainable. At some point, Top Rank’s Terence Crawford and PBC’s Errol Spence Jr. will run the table on the available number of boxers within their respective promotional stables. The fans will demand they fight. Crawford and Spence might demand it too. The guess here, however, is that the networks will make it happen.

Fury’s deal opens the door for that to happen. Arum says he has reached out to Wilder with what he calls a “terrific” deal for the rematch. Wilder, like Spence, is a star under the PBC umbrella. If a deal for Fury-Wilder can be made, other dominoes could fall. There’s the aforementioned Spence-Crawford. If Mikey Garcia goes back to lightweight or junior-welter after his risky jump to 147 pounds against Spence on March 16, maybe we the long-talked-about Garcia-Vasiliy Lomachenko fight can happen.

It all starts with some renewed talking, and we’ve heard a lot of that this week.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Anthony Joshua’s American debut on June 1 was formally announced this week, 55 years after the Beatles landed at JFK in February 1964 in what was the beginning of the first popular British Invasion.

Beatlemania followed in an early step toward unprecedented global celebrity. I’m not sure any kind of mania is awaiting Joshua, at least not against Jarrell Miller in a heavyweight title defense at Madison Square Garden. But prepare for promoters and advertisers to hype that inevitable parallel more often than a Beatles’ lyric.

Make no mistake, Joshua-Miller is an interesting fight. But in terms of pay-per-view numbers, it’s about as interesting as the Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury bout, a compelling draw last December that attracted a PPV audience of about 350,000.

Joshua-Miller might do better, if the Wilder-Fury rematch in fact happens on May 18. As of Thursday, the rematch for Wilder’s World Boxing Council belt was still being negotiated. It’s not clear how, if at all, the Joshua-Miller announcement affects ongoing talks. The sequel could serve as some solid advertising for Joshua-Miller, however.

I say could instead of would because there aren’t any guarantees about either bout. Wilder-Fury 2 is a pick-em fight. Controversy erupted when Wilder escaped with a draw because of two late knockdowns, one in the ninth and again in the 12th. Many in the Los Angeles Staples Center crowd and television audience thought Fury had done enough to win through the first eight rounds.

Let’s say that in mid-May the clever Fury figures out how to stay away from Wilder’s power and wins a decision many thought he should have had in December. So much for the American step in Joshua’s plan to go global. The only heavyweight known to casual fans in the American audience is Wilder. If there’s no chance at Wilder-Joshua, that crossover demographic won’t watch the DAZN live stream of Joshua-Miller on June 1.

Let’s say that Wilder’s power does land and this time it keeps Fury on the canvas. That’s a distinct possibility. Wilder is still unbeaten because of his singular power. At December’s weigh-in, he was surprisingly light at 214.75 pounds. At opening bell, he was even lighter at 209.4. For the six fights before Fury, Wilder’s weight bounced between 220 and 229. Add 10 to 15 pounds to his body and punching leverage. The result might add up to just enough power to finish Fury in the second go-round.

Then, it would be up to Joshua. He’s favored over Miller. The best guess is that Joshua’s uppercut lands and knocks out Miller, who is as fearless as he is talkative. The aggressive Miller likes to move forward, a tactic that will put him in range for a direct hit from Joshua’s best punch.

But Miller has also proven to be resilient. I watched him three years ago in a tough fight in Tucson against a Davenport, Iowa, heavyweight, Donovan Dennis. Dennis rocked Miller with power of his own in the fourth and fifth rounds. Miller was hurt. Yet he recovered, scoring a seventh-round stoppage. Miller showed he can take a heavyweight punch. Question is, can he take Joshua’s kind of power? If he can, Miller has a real chance — one I’m not sure Joshua foresees.

Joshua’s tone was almost apologetic in a video he posted on social media when the fight was announced Wednesday.

“The current state of the heavyweight division right now is full of boxing politics,’’ said Joshua, who is expected to collect a $24.3 million purse in his first business trip to the U.S. “But you know how it goes. I just roll along with the punches. You know I would have loved to fight at Wembley Stadium and brought you guys an undisputed championship of the world.’’

He was talking about Wilder. Everybody has been talking about Wilder-Joshua for the last couple of years. It’s hard to know who or what to believe about all the talk that has come and gone about the proposed fight. Remember when it was supposed to happen last April 13? Still, it’s the only heavyweight fight that matters for a worldwide audience.

If there is a deal for a Wilder-Fury rematch this spring, it’ll look as if there’s a plan in place for finally making the only heavyweight fight the world wants to see. Then again, Miller and/or Fury can do to that plan what Mike Tyson say happens to most of them when they get hit.

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Outside the coffeeshop where this effort happens Nature is entirely mixed-up, leafless branches beside trees suddenly in bloom beside trees still shedding dead leaves. One week ago winter was a sleeting vengeance, a few days ago it was 90-degrees, today is more autumn than spring but neither Thursday’s summer nor Monday’s winter. It makes one wonder what dramatic changes home-construction philosophies will undergo necessarily in the next few decades, how inadequately traditional remedies and materials may serve.

This was to be an essay about the difference between what Andrew Cancio did a couple Saturdays ago as the underdog in a world title fight and what Leo Santa Cruz did a late-replacement Saturday as a prohibitive favorite, and maybe it will be at some point accidentally, but there’s reporting and writing and homages of sorts, and this rarely be a space to come for reporting, so let this instead be a written homage in its way to what Santa Cruz did and the way he did it, busyness for its own sake, a ferocious pelting of partially aimed exertions that feel portentous in their moment but ultimately leaven’t a mark on their objects or audience.

Biomimicry, according to neuroscience (that wonderfully flexible science of whatever you wish it be – with every one of a trillion neurons representing the potential for a specialized field), increases human creativity, and so an observation about a dog on a hiking trail: He absolutely has a sense of himself, he is selfconscious enough to know “mine” – whatever else might territoriality be? – even as he hasn’t a grasp, really, of “yours” and at best a fleeting grasp of “not mine” much the way a human child grasps “my toy” years before “not my toy” years before “your toy”. And a dog is better for it since whichever comes first, selfconsciousness or memory, being unable to grasp not-mine or very much of the past-tense allows a creature to go through life with very few lamentations and nearly nothing akin to nostalgia. Most resentment probably reduces to “not mine anymore” and so even if biomimicry hasn’t made this effort any more creative it has limited finely its author’s chances at resentment – like: A talent for writing columns is not mine anymore – and if that doesn’t eliminate anxiety it certainly closes one door to it.

A brief reminder: Howsoever much we fetishize work ethic, when the real thing arrives, true and natural and genuine talent, it is a lightning bolt. That obvious, that different, that awestriking. It is a phenomenon so complete it causes us immediately to ask questions about luck, to pose riddles about what happened to a talent’s possessors born too soon or too late – what happened to the child born with Johann Sebastian Bach’s gift 5,000 years before the violin and harpsichord? what happens to the child born with Bobby Orr’s gift in Lima instead of Ontario? Maybe it’s all luck and has been and always will be, whether genes luckily arranged or luckily arranged genes lucky to come along when and where they did.

Unbeknownst to its readers, y’all, this column gets written after 3 1/2 hours of volunteering at a bus station on Sunday mornings with a nun-organized interfaith coalition whose ministry is easing the passage of just-released Central American asylum-seekers, predominantly women and very young children, as they make their ways to sponsors’ homes all round the country. Backpacks with blankets and coloringbooks and other sundries and bags of nonperishable foods get distributed, one to a family, sometimes 500 in a week, and itineraries get reviewed and maps gets drawn and on the occasion of stranded passengers shelter gets found, and it all adheres with remarkable consistency to a Karma Yoga principle something like: Work without expectation of reward. None of us is the caricature U.S. politics and its media coverage make us; the detention-facility contractors who escort the asylum-seekers to the bus station aren’t heartless or morally compromised, the Central Americans aren’t predatory or transactional but frightened and grateful, the busline is nothing like a psychopathic profitseeking entity, and the volunteers aren’t wholly without competing selfinterests. Every thing buzzes and improvises.

Sunday, though, a young mother with an infant child asked about her younger brother and where he might be, she had his bus ticket, and would they be bringing him to her, he was only five years-old – should she take her afternoon bus to Houston or wait for him at the station, and surely someone must know where he is, a five-year-old? Because the person who accompanied him from Guatemala was not his biological mother but his biological sister he had been sent to a different detention facility, and now his older sister stood in an unknown city, with a Spanish name at least, asking what she should do next.

You pass her on to a volunteer from a different, legal-counsel group, since she might have contacts at the detention facility, and you pass the griefcounseling role to a Mexican nun from a local monastery, and you walk it off by volunteering to get medicinal supplies from the basement of a local church. If fatigue makes cowards of every man so does powerlessness for the same reason, and there be naught so pathetic as impotent rage. With that as a disclaimer, then, take this in the spirit of its intention: The executive who enabled these policies may well be old enough to escape their consequences, but his abettors will not be – there will be trials for this someday, too much evidence has accrued since June and it evinces too much inhumanity, and so lets this act as but a tiny marker. When the apologists emerge, babbling about sovereignty this or patriotism that, calling every prosecution politically motivated and every sentence deeply unfair, know this: Justice is being served, finally if tardily.

Nothing unjust seems to happen in a boxing ring while the fighting happens. Fouls occur, yes, but no one gets to a level of televised combat without he knows how to suffer and avenge such things. There are refs who shade one way or the other, generally a-side, but they don’t get to where they are, either, without a thousand hours of practice. Our beloved sport’s injustices happen offcanvas. Judges, promoters, managers, so forth. The more decisive a man is in the act of fighting another the better his chances of going unrobbed by refs and judges, though, which is another reason to celebrate what Andrew Cancio did some Saturdays ago in California, when he beat his opponent to quitting and took the matter directly out of any hands but his own.

As one ages the more easily he finds it to celebrate individuals who manifest justice with their own fists than to catalog injustices. Or perhaps that is what laziness and cowardice catalogers would say it is.

Outside on the communal green of this revived and repurposed historic brewery a collective of acrobats or yogis perform balancing acts we once called cheerleading but now bedizen with spiritual elements, perhaps deservingly, and it’s the performative act of the whole thing that rankles. But no sooner does one reach for a metaphor about social media’s ills than he realizes human spirituality has often as not been a performative act, has it not, and, anyway, he’s too young, still, to be so curmudgeonly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday in California on a surprisingly rich card of mostly anonymous fighters (outside the Golden State anyway) DAZN and Golden Boy Promotions delivered something wondrous as it was unexpected: American super featherweight Andrew Cancio beating to broken undefeated Puerto Rican titlist Alberto Machado. With unfortunate infrequency does an underdog win a world title and still less often by round-four bodyshots stoppage. Even if it now starts happening monthly it will never be tiresome.

One might fairly infer from this the glimmeringest of hopefuls, yes? We are a dissatisfiable bunch, the aficionados, drawn as we are to violence, subjected as we are to disappointment oftenlike, that no sooner do we have airwaves (cablewaves? satellitewaves?) saturated by our sport than we begin loud lamentations – in volume relative to our experience – the offerings’ quality shall plummet. And it shall. The same way teamsports leagues become diluted with each expansion so too has our beloved sport with its each new league, be that league DAZN, ESPN, Fox or Showtime.

What happens when network trafficopters filled with cash cropdust cities that haven’t opened a new boxing gym in a decade but have closed three or four. When the undeserving suddenly get rich the deserving make comebacks or delay retirement plans under the auspices of what Golden Boy Promotions partner Bernard Hopkins once called “back wages”. Nobody amongst us generally blames them because we know the brutality of this entertainment medium, what grisly things these men do for our amusement, and even a band of misanthropes misanthropic as ours can’t quite cross the line to begrudge them. We suffer it then, unenthusiastically, caustically, characteristically, so long as commentators properly stay their throats and scribes stay their fingers, admitting the fare be reheated retirementplan mush and not worldclass prime.

We’re not the suckers they think we are but a resentful lot. Anyone ever attached to any local boxing scene gets this; every carpetbag promoter comes cantering about with his unique recipe, asking insiders his same rhetorical questions we’ve all heard from each of his predecessors, the conman’s shimmer in his smile, and no sooner do we try to answer earnestly, telling him what we’ve seen work and what expectations are reasonable, but his head swivels elsewhere, the better to spot a new mark. A friend and colleague of ours who’s forgotten more about Arizona’s boxing market than Phoenix’s next dozen promoters will know in the aggregate, Norm Frauenheim, has a typically sanguine view of those swivelheaded promoters: “I figure, hey, it’s their money.”

The new broadcasters don’t care because they’ve run the numbers and know if aficionados were a mass critical enough to seduce HBO’d’ve found a way to sate us and stay in the game. So it’s a game of capturing the naive, which is itself a game for the naive. For among the target demographic of naive combatsports fans who’d fall for such swindles regularly or longly enough to justify recent budgets are gaggles of former boxing fans who pretty loudly declare their lost allegiance attributable to dilution – in the form of too many champions and too many weightclasses and too many too-manies making worthless fights too many.

Shoving into this maw an annual Gervonta Davis mismatch is a surefire way to get canceled (two months ago I finished with Showtime nearly a year to the day after I finished with HBO). Which leaves three leagues: Fox, free, ESPN+, cheap, and DAZN, cheaper than premium cable but more than ESPN+ and Fox combined.

In the apparently revived WBSS, DAZN has something uniquely special, something no other league approaches, and that is meaningful combatants making meaningful fights that go somewhere. It’s a best-of-the-rest strategy aspiring to be more and quite possibly succeeding at such aspirations: No one has come close to building an Oleksandr Usyk mightily or quickly as WBSS just did.

Which brings us to Saturday’s wonderful surprise and what it might portend. Golden Boy Promotions, since its figurehead’s plunge and CEO’s termination a few years back, is a regional attraction with a single moneymaker – currently prizefighting’s greatest – and a magazine. Three years ago that wasn’t just not-much but barely anything at all. But the outfit got through the thinnest of years by equally thick margins and is out the other side, with a meaningfully massive infusion of cash via its association with Canelo Alvarez and a committed network which doesn’t want for dates.

Five years ago this would’ve meant fizzing cases of Tecate commercials stacked shamelessly atop shameless mismatches. But Saturday it surely did not. The favorite got canvassed in the final undercard bout, the favorite got canvassed in the comain, and the favorite got keelhauled in the main. More of that, please, whenever you can, thanks.

There’s something simply cynicism-proof about watching an unretired longshot like Andrew Cancio win a world title by breaking an undefeated favorite in half, especially after that favorite drops him in their match’s opening 90 seconds. It speaks to Golden Boy matchmakers’ matchmaking prowess, too, it does. Years ago, at the firm’s inception, Golden Boy’s fatted matchmakers made ugly showcases; their CEO scammed HBO with sparkly a-sides, and the matchmakers’ job was not to blemish the records attached to those names. Golden Boy didn’t build many fighters and didn’t make many great matches either. That matchmaking staff, now, is chastened and leaner. When the company’s primary earner fights all comers, too, it’s nigh impossible for coworker talents, whether contenders or prospects, to refuse whoever they’re offered. Which is how we get matches like Saturday’s – matches made to be entertaining contests more than gory coronations.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Jose Ramirez defends the WBC Super Lightweight Title against Jose Zepeda.  The action kicks off at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT with a lightweight fight between Ray Beltran and Hiroki Okada.

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Round 1: Good left from Zepeda..

Round 2 Straight left from Zepeda..Jab to body

Round 3 Right from Ramirez..Counter left from Zepeda..Right to body from Ramirez

Round 4 Left from Ramirez..Blood from Ramirez right eye (Ruled a punch)

Round 5 Left to body from Ramirez..

Round 6 Left from Zepeda

Round 7 Right from Ramirez

Round 8 Combination from Zepeda..Blood under left eye of Zepeda…Ramirez lands a left to the body..Good right..2 lefts to the body..a big right and left from Zepeda

Round 9 Good right from Ramirez…Counter.2 rights to the body..Hard left to the body

Round 10 Right from Ramirez…Body shot from Zepeda

Round 11 Left from Zepeda..Body shot..left..Right hook lead..

Round 12 Straight left from Zepeda..Combination from Ramirez

114-114; 115-113; 116-112 JOSE RAMIREZ

Round 1 Jab from Okada…Jab from Beltran..Body shot from Okada..2 punch combinaton..Right from Beltran

Round 2 Right HAND AND DOWN GOES OKADA…Hard left buckles Beltran….Okada landing a flurry on the ropes

Round 3 Left from Beltran..jab..Good combination from Okada..left hook from Beltran…combination..Good right.left hook tot the body..3 punch combination..Okada is cut over the left eye

Round 4 2 punch combination from Beltran….Hard combination on the ropes..Beltran cut around left eye…

Round 5 Good right from Okada..

Round 6 Left hook from Beltran..Right from Okada.

Round 7  Blood from around right eye of Beltran..Beltran lands a left hook

Round 8 Beltran lands a combination..left and right from Okada

Round 9 Double jab and right from Okada…BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES OKADA..BIG FLURRY,,OKADA WOBBLING AROUND THE RING AND DOWN HE GOES AGAIN…FIGHT OVER AT 2:09

Follow all the action as Gervonta Davis defends the WBA Super Featherweight title against Hugo Ruiz.  The action kicks off at 10 PM ET / 7 PM PT with Javier Fortuna taking on Sharif Bogere.  Also, Mario Barrios battles Richard Zamora.

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Round 1: Body shot from Davis..Right from Ruiz…2 lefts from Davis..Straight left to body///lead left…combination…RiGHT HOOK AND DOWN GOES RUIZ..THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Good right from Zamora

Round 2 Double jab and right to body..Overhand right..Good right…

Round 3  Good right from Zamora..counter left hook..Barrios lands a body shot…jab…Big Right…

Round 4 Right from Barrios..Right uppercut..left…Hard shots ..Zamora in trouble…Zamora lands a right..Hard left hook from Barrios..big right staggers Zamora…HARD RIGHT AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Bogere lands a jab to the body..Counter right from Fortuna..jab to body by Bogere..

Round 2 Right hook from Fortuna..Another one

Round 3 Jab from Fortuna…Counter jab,,Short left uppercut to body..right hook,..Bogere lands a combo to body…Counter from Fortuna

Round 4  Fortuna gets better of exchange..Right from Bogere..Crowd booing…Right uppercut on inside from Bogere

Round 5 Body shot from Bogere..Right…Flurry from Fortuna at the bell

Round 6 Fortuna opening up…toe to toe action..Blood over the right eye of Bogere (Headbutt)…LEFT HAND AND DOWN GOES BOGERE…

Round 7 Fortuna gets in a right on the inside…Flurry on the inside..

Round 8 Combination from Fortuna

Round 9 Combination from Bogere..

Round 10 Right from Fortuna

96-93 on all cards FOR JAVIER FORTUNA

By Norm Frauenheim-

Comebacks, always perilous and often controversial, help separate the good from the bad in a notoriously unpredictable craft. It just wouldn’t be the same without them, which is another way of saying it wouldn’t be the same without Ray Beltran.

Beltran’s life has been about comebacks. They define him. Beltran makes another one Sunday, an appropriate day for an ESPN card (7 p.m., ET) that features a couple of the good guys.

There’s Beltran in the co-main event at a heavier weight and with a still inexhaustible will to fight on. In the main, there’s Jose Ramirez, who is raising money to fight cancer before and after he fights Jose Zepeda at Save Mart Arena in Fresno, Calif.

For Beltran, the bout at junior welterweight against Hiroki Okada marks the his 20th year as a pro in the unforgiving art of landing – and taking – punches. Two decades as a prospect, journeyman, heralded sparring partner, contender and world champion are for most fighters an exhaustive resume.

But most aren’t Beltran, who emerges from it all as a survivor with some of the inevitable scars, yet still a trademark smile that says – again and again – that there’s much left to do. Above all, his title as world champion at lightweight was too short. Beltran, Manny Pacquiao’s former sparring partner, won it a year ago in a decision against Paulus Moses and lost a first defense against Jose Pedraza six months later in Glendale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, his adopted hometown.

He’s back, perhaps, because he wants to add some time and money to his reign with a title belt. There’s motivation, perhaps, in seeking proof his brief time with a title wasn’t a temporary coincidence and could have been brought on in the eighth round by a torn tendon between his wrist and left hand.

But I’m also guessing he’d be back no matter what. He could have been a champion for three years. He could have had five successful title defenses and made big money in a loss to Vasiliy Lomachenko in a sixth defense.

But he’d be back, regardless, because the long fight is in his genes.

Before his loss on the scorecards to the surprising Pedraza on August 25, I asked Beltran (35-8-1, 21 KOs) what he wanted to do after boxing. He hesitated. Then, he said he might like to try working in the media or in some other role at ringside. But his real answer was in the hesitation. For now, he isn’t going anywhere other than through those ropes and into more of harm’s way.

That’s his identity. He has stood in lines, waited his time and learned his craft while awaiting his green card for permanent U.S. residence. Beltran, who grew up in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, told me he eventually wants to gain his U.S. citizenship, while presumably also re-gaining a world title.

For now, that means a move up the scale, from 135 pounds to 140, against Okada (19-0, 13 KOs), who will fight in the U.S. for only the second time after winning his first 18 bouts at home in the same arena – the 1,800-seat Korakuen Hall in Tokyo. The Japanese junior-welterweight then signed with Top Rank and won his U.S. debut last September, also in Fresno on a card featuring Ramirez.

I know very little about Okada. Then again, I didn’t know much about Pedraza, a Puerto Rican lightweight, before he upset Beltran and moved on to a loss to the feared Lomachenko. It looks as if Top Rank is looking at Beltran or Okada as a possibility for Ramirez, who is poised to become a major player in a weight class full of emerging stars.

“If it’s at 140, then I will be a two-division world champion,’’ Beltran said when the Okada fight was announced. “And if it’s at 135, then I will be a two-time lightweight champion.’’

No translation necessary. He’s not going anywhere.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday or Sunday on ESPN+ Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev decisioned Colombian Eleider “Storm” Alvarez in Texas to reclaim one of the titles Kovalev won, in part, by losing so spectacularly to Andre Ward in 2017 that Ward decided to retire on the highest note of his career. In avenging his latest knockout loss, Kovalev boxed well, Saturday, and Alvarez did not, and that was that.

Kovalev is and will be remembered as a b-level prizefighter cleverly presented as much more by a b-level network, in mid-descent from a-level, a symptom more than a cause, a titlist folded in half by the only a-level prizefighter he faced – average ingredients well-prepared during a famine. Much of what happened Saturday, much of what you’ll read and hear for the rest of Kovalev’s career, is and will be about preserving illusive credibility despite concessions to illusions past.

“Others are wrong!” in other words, not “I was right.” Overtraining this or distractions that. Paeans to Kovalev’s age aside, what aficionados saw in Kovalev-Alvarez 2 was the same guy they saw tentatively box to victory against Bernard Hopkins, a once a-level prizefighter 50 or so days from his 50th birthday.

Now that we have the hindsight of the same B-Hop being knocked outframe, outboxing, outring by Joe Smith 13 months after Kovalev’s careful showing we might reexamine our insightfulness before we reappraise Kovalev. Could he punch? Sure he could. Was he a frontrunner? Sure he was. Could he finish? Yup. Was he great? No, never.

There’s selfservice in Andre Ward’s ongoing postrematch analyses of Kovalev, even while there needn’t be, an opening desire to reassert Ward’s superiority followed by a closing desire to burnish Ward’s legacy a smidgen more at halfprice. What remains constant as gravity, though, is a fact like: Were Ward and Kovalev matched at Ward’s best weight, not Kovalev’s, Ward would’ve gone 10-0 (10 KOs) in both this lifetime and the next.

Saturday’s question, finally, isn’t whether Kovalev underwent some historic revision in one training camp with Buddy McGirt (he didn’t) or whether Eleider Alvarez underwent some historic dissipation in the last halfyear, but why we actually care. Some of it, though much less than years past, is standard Stockholm-syndrome stuff. The January boxing calendar is historically anemic, leading young fans and pundits to get unseemly giddy at anything better than an obviously mediocre happening before March.

Most of it, though, is vestigial HBO hype. Like the network’s defunct commentary trio scoring midrounds according to prefight prejudice, quite a few of us did not notice HBO’s shift from singular authority to underbudgeted shell, when it happened, because it was incremental.

The emerging consensus is that HBO Sports’ last great boxing authority was Lou DiBella, who left the network in 2000. That feels about right. The talents and promotional relationships DiBella built and featured carried the network a little less than a decade before the network’s dearth of knowledgeable programmers began showing its ribs. The departure of a talented producer though talentless programmer in 2010 began the qualitative freefall that followed. Wealthy and knowledgeable became wealthy and gullible became middleclass and gullible became poor and gullible became canceled.

Nearabout HBO’s middleclass and gullible stage arrived a surfeit of prizefighters raised in the Soviet Union to prey, at once, on the juvenile nightmares and adulthood nostalgia of fiftysomething viewers. It took little in the way of imaginative squinting, then, for HBO Sports’ target demographic to see in Kovalev, and his fellow Eurasian bogeyman, Gennady Golovkin, far more than what they actually were (later confirmed, of course, when both were beaten by smaller men from North America, “controversially”). A reflexive reality still happened in viewers’ minds and that reality affected commentators’ perceptions even as they sought to affect viewers’ perceptions.

One monument to this, probably the greatest, was Kovalev-Hopkins in 2014. Kovalev dropped Hopkins in their first round together and then did not imperil him again in the 11 that followed. A fearsome 31-year-old puncher, in other words, was unable to snatch consciousness from his dad in 36 minutes of trying. Absurd as that sentence reads today we all obeyed a tacit moratorium on calling it what it was – desperate as we were to keep the juggling balls in the air, to contend our oncegreat sport broadcasted on a oncegreat network was something more than risible goofy. Surrealer still was the twoyear, fourfight Kovalev victory pageant HBO hosted in the great man’s honor after Kovalev decisioned a man 10 years nearer Social Security eligibility than his physical prime.

This really happened. You may even be old enough to remember it.

It took super middleweight Andre Ward 20 rounds to do it, but this too happened surely enough: Kovalev, eyes averted, belly up, offered himself to Ward with thighs splayed – the better to be sniffed – in an act of animal submission more ably narrated by David Attenborough than Jim Lampley.

And still HBO persisted! This time with silly opponents and sillier narratives right up until Kovalev got himself whupped by a shortnotice Colombian making a world-title-match debut after his 33rd birthday. Yet another coursecorrection ensued and Eleider Alvarez, a man who’d knocked-out a perfectly symmetrical if entirely unimpressive 12 of 24 opponents, became some Andean beast whose fists Kovalev would need God’s own luck to survive.

OK, fair point: This last was ESPN’s manufacture, not HBO’s. Alvarez regressed to his mean; the Krusher character begins its next rewrite. Fortunately Kovalev’s latest comeback has found its proper platform, off premium cable and on a $5/month boxing-after-midnight app.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Eleider Alvarez tries to retain the WBO Light Heavyweight title against the man he won the belt from in Sergey Kovalev.  The action starts at 10 PM ET / 9 PM CT with 2 world title fights.  Richard Commey and Isa Chaniev battle for the IBF Lightweight title.  Oscar Valdez defend the WBO Featherweight title against Carmine Tommasonne.  Rising star Teofimo Lopez takes on former two-time world title challenger Diego Magdaleno.

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Round 1: Good body shot from Alvarez

Round 2 Right from Kovalev..Another..

Round 3 Left from Kovalev..Jab from Alvarez..Left hook from Kovalev..Kovalev outlanding Alvarez 47-28 through 3 rounds

Round 4  Body shot from Alvarez..Good uppercut from Kovalev..Left hook..Jab and right hand

Round 5 Good right from Kovalev..Left..Combination..Right from Alvarez..2 lefts and right from Kovalev..

Round 6 Right from Alvarez,,Good right..Right from Kovalev..Jab from Alvarez..Double left to body from Kovalev..Right from Alvarez…Swelling under right eye of Kovalev…Good right from Kovalev

Round 7 Good body work from Alvarez..Good right

Round 8 Good jab from Kovalev..Alvarez lands a right

Round 9  Good jab from Kovalev…2 more…Right hand land..Sweeping left..Over hand right from Alvarez..Hard jab from Kovalev…176-86 for Kovalev in punches landed

Round 10 3 punch combo from Kovalev..Left rocks Alvarez on the ropes

Round 11 Right from Alvarez..Double jab from Kovalev..Good counter right

Round 12 Right and left from Kovalev..Hard jab..Good right from Alvarez…Right from Kovalev..Right..

116-112 TWICE AND 120-108 FOR THE WINNER AND NEW CHAMPION SERGEY KOVALEV

Round 1 Hard right from Lopez

Round 2 Straight left from Magdaleno..Counter right from Lopez..Big right uppercut..Hard straight left..Uppercut and hard right..Left hook..sweeping right..Short right…Blood on bridge of Magdaleno’s nose..

Round 3 Lopez lands a counter uppercut..Straight right..Combination to the body

Round 4 Uppercut from Magdaleno…Combination from Lopez

Round 5 Right Hook from Magdaleno..Hard uppercut from Lopez..Left from Magdaleno..Lopez lands a punch from behind his back..

Round 6 Counter uppercut from Lopez..Hard right..HUGE LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES MAGDALENO..Big Right at the bell

Round 7 Lopez lands about 8 hard shots..Right uppercut...2 NASTY LEFT HOOKS AND DOWN GOES MAGDALENO…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Right from Valdez..Tommasone goes to the body with a right..Jab from Valdez..

Round 2 Jab from Valdez..Nice right to the body

Round 3 Counter right from Valdez..Right to the body..

Round 4  Good left hook buzzed Tommasone…Blood from nose of Tommasone…RIGHT HAND AND DOWN GOES TOMMASONE…Jab and TOMMASONE GOES TO A KNEE

Round 5  Body shot from Valdez..Body/Right combo..Blood from Mouth of Tommasone

Round 6  Left froM VALDEZ AND DOWN GOES TOMMASONE..3 Punch combination

Round 7 HARD UPPERCUT TO THE CHIN AND TOMMASONE GOES DOWN AGAIN…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Commey lands a left hook..Uppercut from Chaniev..Commey lands a right..Short right..another right..Straight right..Good exchange..COMMEY LANDS A PERFECT RIGHT AND DOWN GOES CHANIEV..Commey lands more power shots and then trips

Round 2 HUGE LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES CHANIEV…Commey all over Chaniev..STRAIGHT RIGHT AND LEFT AND DOWN GOES CHANIEV…FIGHT OVER

By Norm Frauneheim-

“Everybody has a plan until you get hit.”

— Mike Tyson

A sensible quote from a dysfunctional life in a violent business has become a modern mantra. Philosophers and politicians, preachers and phonies, are using the line from a heavyweight champ who knows how much chaos one punch can spawn. Everybody is quoting Tyson these days. Who knew?

Saturday, Tyson’s scarred wisdom will be as relevant as ever in a place that helped create it when Oscar Valdez Jr. returns to the ring for the first time since suffering a broken jaw.

Valdez faces 2016 Italian Olympian Carmine Tommasone at the Dallas Cowboys training center in Frisco, Tex., (ESPN/10 p.m. ET)) in his first bout since an almost frightening display of courage, guts and blood in a decision over Scott Quigg on a rainy night in Southern California last March. If it wasn’t Fight of The Year, it was year’s bloodiest.

Memories of the dramatic 12 rounds are Valdez’ misshapen jaw and a puddle of blood amid all the puddles of rain. Valdez’ blood collected on the canvas in front of his stool and it stayed there, seemingly undiluted by persistent showers at an outdoor ring in Carson, Calif. For six-plus rounds, he fought with a mouthpiece that could not be withdrawn for fear of further fractures.

It was stark and unforgettable. Defining, too. It said everything about Valdez’ character. But it said something else. As defining it was, it was also a reason for him to redefine his future. It’s not as if he’s starting over Saturday night on a card featuring a light-heavyweight rematch of Eleider Alvarez’ August upset of Sergey Kovalev. Valdez still has the WBO’s featherweight title. He’s still unbeaten (24-0, 19 KOs).

But he is fighting for a way to ensure he has a long career. He wants more defining moments beyond that dramatic night against a heavier Quigg.

That brings us back to Tyson’s increasingly-familiar quote. Valdez, a Mexican Olympian who began boxing as a schoolboy in Tucson, resumes his career against Tommasone (19-0, 5 KOs) with a new trainer — Canelo Alvarez cornerman Eddy Reynoso instead of Manny Robles — and an adjusted plan.

Newfound defense is its cornerstone.

For Valdez, it is as much a mindset as it is a tactical adjustment. It’s not as if he doesn’t know the fundamentals. Two-time Olympians know the basics. They know their way around the ring. The dilemma is in Valdez’ instincts. He loves to brawl and fans love him for it.

That instinct became dangerously evident against Miguel Marriaga in April 2017 in Carson, Calif. That’s when Valdez — comfortably ahead on the scorecards — invited Marriaga to step forward and into a give-and-take, head-rocking exchange over the last couple of rounds. The crowd went wild. Valdez survived and won on the cards. His Top Rank promoters were as relieved as they were happy.

Things got more dangerous five months later in front of a hometown crowd in Tucson against Genesis Servania, an unknown and then unbeaten Filipino. Servania knocked down Valdez in a wild fourth-round. Valdez, a survivor as much as he is a brawler, paid back Servania with a knockdown of his own in the tenth. Again, Valdez won on the cards, but not without mounting questions.

Then, there was Quigg. The broken jaw, subsequent surgery and months of rehab dictated that it was time to change.

“The injury opened my eyes in a lot of ways,’’ Valdez told Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times in a well-done story from the Mexican featherweight’s training camp in San Diego. https://www.latimes.com/sports/boxing/la-sp-oscar-valdez-20190130-story.html

“I need to learn from my mistakes, and listen to the people who know. If I was somewhat disciplined before, I have to become more disciplined, because I know now that my next fight could be my last. It’s made me become more cautious, more disciplined, more prepared, so that doesn’t happen again.”

An early answer is awaiting impact. Valdez has been hit on the surgically-repaired jaw repeatedly in sparring and at least once, according to Pugmire’s story, while playing softball. Thomas Valdez, Oscar’s cousin and a Tucson lightweight, said he sparred with him before Thomas beat Luis Coria at Casino Del Sol in November. His cousin’s jaw, Thomas said then, has healed. Oscar Valdez is better than ever, he said.

But sparring doesn’t include punches thrown in the heat of battle. There are questions about whether Tommasone, who is fighting for the first time in the U.S., has enough power to do any damage. Five stoppages in 19 bouts indicate he doesn’t.

Saturday’s bout, perhaps, is the first step in a longer process, one Valdez hopes will lead to a chance at unifying the featherweight title.

But it will provide the first hint at whether Valdez’ plan can withstand the hit that Tyson says will always land.

Attachments area

Follow all the action as Jaime Munguia defends the WBO Junior Middleweight title against Takeshi Inoue.  The action starts at 7 PM ET / 6 PM CT and will include the WBA Featherweight Title bout between Jesus Rojas and Xu Can.  

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Round 1: Big right from Inoue..Munguia lands to the body..Jab

Round 2 Counter right from Inoue..Hook to body from Munguia

Round 3 Hard right from Munguia..Hard body shot from Munguia..Inoue cut over left eye (Accidental Headbutt)

Round 4  Hard body shot from Munguia…Uppercut…Right from Inoue..Right..body..Hard right

Round 5 Hard right from Munguia..Good body shot and 2 hooks to the head..Hook to the head..Left hook

Round 6 Right from Inoue…Hard body shot and right from Munguia…wicked left hook..Big right from Inoue..Great left hook to body from Munguia..Munguia has his mouth open

Round 7 Body shots from Munguia starting to to effect…Good right from Inoue…3 body shots from Munguia..Inoue lands a booming right at the bell

Round 8 Right from Inoue...Hard left hook from Munguia…Inoue just walks through them..Right from Inoue..left hook..

Round 9 Body shot from Munguia…2 rights from Inoue on the ropes..and another..Yet another…Munguia cant get out of the way of eight hands..Munguia lands a hard body shots…Right from Inoue..Left to body from Munguia..Left hook to head..

Round 10 Munguia landing big shots in close..Hard right..Right to the body..Inoue lands an uppercut…Straight right from Munguia..Body..over hand right..Wicked right and left..Right from Inoue..Turning into a war..Left from Munguia..Right from Inoue…Wickec combination…Inoue staggering and he is very hurt at the bell

Round 11 Right from Munguia..Rights from distance to the head–Hook to the body..Hard left hook..

Round 12 Inoue trying to press the action..Hard rights from Munguia.Good body shot from Munguia..Counter right from Inoue..Ripping left hook from Munguia and a body shot…

311-133 punches in favor of Munguia

120-108 TWICE AND 119-109 FOR MUNGUIA

Round 1 Jab from Can..Uppercut off the jab..Right from Rojas..Right to the body from Can..1-2

Round 2 Hard right from Can…Hard right to body..Body shot from Rojas..Right..Great action at end of round

Round 3 Can lands a body shot..Left hook to body..Hard right from Rojas..Uppercut..Combination from Can..Hard right from Rojas..Rojas working..Right from Can..4 punch combination..Rojas lands 3 of his own..Left hook to the body..Can lands a flurry..Rojas coming back..

Round 4 Trading power shots..Combination from Can…Uppercut from Rojas..Good body shot

Round 5  Can lands a hook..Rojas just coming forward..Combo from Can..

Round 6 Rojas lands a combination..Hard right from Can..Can lands a body shot..Body and head from Rojas..Combination from Can..Right from Rojas..Big uppercut from Rojas (Snaps Can head back)

Round 7 Body shot and jab from Can..3 punch combination (Hard right punctuates it)..Hard right from Rojas

Round 8 Combination from Rojas..

Round 9  Right from Rojas

Round 10 Rojas landing thudding shots..Head shots from Can..Combination..Combination from Rojas

Round 11 Can trying to jab his way in…Good right..Hard exchanges..

Round 12 Combination from Can…Rojas lands a jab..Right and 7 punch combination..Combination from Can…3 punches on the ropes..Right

118-110; 117-111; 116-112 FOR XU CAN

Round 1 Nice straight left from Rincon..1-2..Jab..Good left..

Round 2  Good left from Rincon…Ramos trying to come forward..Nice 1-2..counter..good body

Round 3   Good Combination…Right hand from Ramos..Rincon Backing up..Body from Rincon…Right from Ramos

Round 4  Good body shot from Rincon..Good right..Good left..Hard right

Round 5 Ramos landing a combination..Body shot from Rincon..Good left to head,..Good counter…Good combination

Round 6 Straight left from Rincon..Blood from Nose of Ramos…Right from Ramos..Left..

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

By Norm Frauenheim-

Call it the Welcome Back Division. At least, that what it is in mid-to-late January as the welterweights shake out who’s real. And who’s not.

First, there was the U.S. homecoming for an enduring standard in Manny Pacquiao last Saturday and this Saturday there is the return of Keith Thurman, who is back after a 22-month absence against Josesito Lopez at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in a Fox-televised bout (5 p.m. PT/8 pm ET)

Despite his age, the 40-year-old Pacquaio stamped himself as still relevant at 147 pounds by outworking a much younger Adrien Broner in every conceivable way. The caveat is that Broner helped him do it. Broner might have collected more money per punch than anybody in the history of prizefighting. According to CompuBox, Broner landed 50 punches, or a little more than four a round. If he collected a $5 million guarantee, he got $100,000 per punch.

“Time to cash checks and have sex,’’ Broner said of his plans after the bout (Showtime replay 10:30 p.m. ET/PT)

His hands were a lot busier endorsing those checks than they were against Pacquiao. Then again, Broner did his job. In part, he was there to showcase reasons Pacquiao can still be a factor 147 pounds. He pursued throughout 12 rounds. His power was still potent enough to send Broner into retreat midway through the fight and almost into hiding over the last couple of rounds. But the undiminished power in his name was more meaningful than anything he still has in his left hand. The Filipino Senator is still a draw.

Showtime’s pay-per-view audience was reported be about 400,000, modest by standards that Pacquiao set during a bygone era when anything short of one million was a disappointment. By today’s standards, however, the audience size and an estimated PPV revenue of $30 million are solid numbers.

That begs the obvious question, of course. Floyd Mayweather Jr. was at ringside, prompting inevitable speculation about a rematch of their revenue-record setting fight, a Mayweather victory by decision in 2015. Mayweather didn’t answer the question about whether he’s interested. His silence, of course, leaves the door wide open for months of further speculation and media attention. Leonard Ellerbe, of Mayweather Promotions, spoke for him Saturday, saying he had no interest and reminding everyone that he’s retired.

A couple of days later, Pacquiao ran into Mayweather at Los Angeles’ Staples Center at an NBA game. Remember, real negotiations for the first fight began at an NBA game in Miami. This time, however, there were no signs that history would repeat itself.

“I only want to continue to fight the best,” Pacquiao said. “If Floyd can no longer fight at my level, then of course he should stay retired.”

Only a fool would doubt whether the speculation will continue. Meanwhile, however, Pacquiao says will continue fighting. His retirement date is now a couple of years away. He mentioned 42. That could mean three, maybe four, fights, all against fighters he says will be “the best.’’

For those considered the best, the welcome mat is out. Pacquiao is older, but the guess here is that he can still outdraw any of the world’s other contending welterweights.

Terence Crawford-Errol Spence Jr. fight might change that. But there’s no immediate prospect of that one happening. Instead, Crawford will fight a faded Amir Khan in April. Spence has an intriguing date against Mikey Garcia on March 16. Put Pacquiao in against three — Crawford, Spence or Garcia — of those four, and you have a pay-per-view attraction that could boost that PPV number by a couple of hundred thousand. That’s why everybody was so happy to have an effective Pacquiao back Saturday. Like the Mayweather questions, however, potential danger can’t be ignored.

A Pacquiao with relevancy restored in a one-sided victory over a shrinking Broner might be a Pacquiao set up to get hurt by the young lions.

Crawford, who ranks as No. 1 on this pound-for-pound list, seems to be sharpening the edge on his skillset and killer instinct with each opening bell. Spence, the strongest of today’s active welterweights, is also the biggest, which makes him too big for Pacquiao, whose natural weight is at about 140.

In terms of size, a Pacquiao fight with Garcia, a lightweight and junior-welterweight champion, makes some sense, especially if he is competitive against the bigger Spence. In terms of age, however, they have little in common, other than December birthdays. Mikey Garcia was born on Dec.15, nine years after Pacquiao was born on Dec. 17. Garcia is still in his prime. Pacquiao is not.

Fighting to get back on the list is Thurman, who is two inches shorter than Spence and two inches taller and a decade younger than Pacquiao. Thurman, who flashed huge power and instinctive smarts, was shoved off that list by injuries to an elbow and a hand. He under surgery. He got married. In the time he was idle, there Crawford’s impressive jump for 140 to 147 and Garcia’s risky challenge of Spence. Now, there’s Pacquiao, on a lengthening list full of reasons for Thurman to hit the welcome mat with a big win.