By Bart Barry-

TLAQUEPAQUE, Mexico – Thirty kilometers northnortheast of San Agustín de Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, and the meat here is delicious. It may well be the tainting that makes it so, but such tainting can doubtful be sensed by an instrument blunt as the human tongue else the fighting pride of Jalisco, the flamehaired horseman heartbreaker recently humiliated by a positive PED test whose announcement and subsequent coverage got heavily seasoned – bien condimentado – by the word “trace”, never would’ve ingested what plenteous amounts of meat and particularly liver can lead to such damnable positivity.

After another halfweek in Canelolandia and time to reflect during flights to and fro I’m ready to give Saul Alvarez the benefit of the doubt (which I didn’t realize till about a sentence ago). Not because any elite athlete defaults to notguilty in anyone’s mind anymore and not necessarily either because I can barely care less about the matter of athletes, fundamentally entertainers, taking substances that enhance their performance (and imagine what disappointing spectacles we’d’ve suffered and been suffering were other entertainers tested by antidoping agencies – adios to Hendrix and Cobain, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Dickens and Sartre, Freud and Monroe), but because getting caught marks such a fault of professionalism it seems too far outside Alvarez’s character.

Canelo’s myriad of detractors will admit, heck probably declare, he is more calculating than he is nearly anything else. He calculated his way to the final bell with their hero in September, after all, surviving by dint of his wiles 36 minutes of terror with the most transcendentally dangerous middleweight (and junior middleweight and super middleweight, let us not forget) of the last 25-100 years. He didn’t stand and trade with GGG, at risk to his interests and reputation, because he had a strategy that opposed doing so, and regardless of what transpired in the hot blood of combat, he didn’t revise a single prefight calculation.

If Canelo had a strategy for disarming Golovkin he most surely had a strategy for passing drug tests.

So we return to the P in PEDs and posit there’s been no dramatically nonlinear improvements in Canelo’s performances since we saw him patrolling Queer Street with Jose Miguel Cotto eight years ago. Canelo has improved about the way you’d expect a champion to improve in the prime of his career. Which is another way of imparting th’t if Canelo is using PEDs today he’s probably been using them a very long while.

I’m agnostic on this possibility, agnostic by way of ambivalence – it says here no natural athlete is talented enough to dominate a PED era in any sport or ever has been – but it further supports the probability Canelo’s positive test was innocent as his apologists immediately claimed.

One minute of googling Clenbuterol and Mexican meat (I’m assuming; I spent nearly twice that) reveals an authority no less PED-dependent than the NFL warned its athletes almost two years ago about Mexican meat. It’s the secondary-smoke of protein sources, apparently, this beef, as its cattlemen enhance their livestocks’ dinnerplate performance till Mexican carne asada hits the tastebuds like Barry Bonds pulling a 100-mph Eric Gagne fastball 50 feet foul into McCovey Cove. It would seem an athlete would have to consume copious amounts of this beef to fail a doping test, but there are a couple counterarguments to that, too: 1. If anyone would consume copious amounts of animal protein it would be a professional athlete in training, and 2. Just how sensitive have these tests become, after all?

There is a militant faction of sports journalism that can answer that very question even without internet access, yes, and I’m just fine being counted outside its ranks. It’s dreadful tedious. One of the overlooked elements of the Money May era that made it so awful were the hours all of us wasted arguing about PEDs. It looked deep brutal arbitrary – though, to be fair, anabolism does appear the one place an objective line ever got drawn – and deciphering the days’ news and testing developments brought out the Pecksniffian worst of everyone the subject touched. And that’s before one inadvertently began weighing the heavyhanded moralizing at the root of every accusation and counteraccusation – the unspoken assumption not any of us or anyone we respected would do anything so craven as take drugs to make ourselves better at our crafts or rich.

I can’t keep a straight face on that count: I wrote openly about experimenting with ephedrine and modafinil to improve my performance in this very column, without a penny on the line either way.

The enduring irony of our enduring PED anxiety is that none of the greatest beneficiaries of these drugs was caught by testing agencies – their labs got busted, their teammates wrote books, their wives ordered drugs be delivered to the home they shared, their strength and conditioning coaches appeared in infomercials and got recognized by other strength and conditioning coaches.

I don’t know if Canelo Alvarez is above cheating to win, but I do believe he is above getting caught. This area in Mexico whence Canelo hails isn’t sloppy or slapdash as other parts of the country, it isn’t about yelling ¡Fiesta! at sloshed tourists; it’s buttoned down serious with residents that are surprisingly tall and standoffish, more Catalonia than Cancun.

“See? This is just the sort of subjective criteria idiots use to defend their idiotic theories. Try science, moron!”

Yes, I suppose so. But I remain obdurately unpersuaded. Or as they might say round here: Ultimamente, pues, ¿Qué me importa?

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Author’s note: The picture that accompanies this column features a mural by the Tapatío artist Carlos Mesie Rodriguez Balp.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

For 48 minutes, Oscar Valdez Jr. showed more courage than you’ll see in a career. Six days later, I can only worry that maybe it was a career. Valdez’ epic battle in the rain against Scott Quigg at StubHub Center left him with broken teeth and a busted jaw. Only the heart wasn’t knocked out of place.

It was the kind of fight that can leave more than just scars. Truth is, it was more than one fight. There were several within the 36 minutes of exhausting punches and the one-minute between each three-minute battle. Those 60 seconds between rounds offered no refuge, no peace. Valdez spit up blood that fell into a pool faster and deeper than rain into puddles. The rain evaporated. The blood did not.

In the moments before the bell tolled and sounded a resumption of the conflict from round to round – from the second to the 12th, I wondered whether the carnage could continue. It could. It would. It still does. Now, Valdez sits with his jaw wired backed together. The fans and ESPN’s cameras are gone. The business has moved on. He’s left with pain, rehab and inevitable doubts about what kind of fighter he’ll be when he returns.

Valdez, who underwent the medical procedure on Monday, will be back, of course. But questions about whether that repaired jaw can hold up will be there. So, too, will questions about whether the wild fight exposed some newfound cracks in the psyche. The guess in this corner is that the psyche, like that heart, withstood the battle. But somebody will test it. Boxing is predatory art. Always has been.

Still, I wonder if this one could have been different. The controversial weigh-in leaves questions about whether Valdez could have avoided some of the damage he sustained in retaining his WBO featherweight title in winning a brutal decision over Quigg on March 10.

On the day before opening bell, Quigg came in nearly three pounds – 2.8, to be exact – above the limit, 126. He forfeited a chance to win the title and paid a 20 percent penalty of his documented purse, which in this case was a $100,000 contract filed with the California Commission. It’s believed Quigg’s real purse was about five times as big. The filing with California didn’t include UK money. But only the California number mattered, meaning Quigg forfeited at least $20,000, $10,000 of which went to Valdez. According to various sources, Quigg also agreed to pay an additional sum to Valdez, whose purse was $430,000, including Quigg’s penalty. The amount of the additional payment was never disclosed.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, especially if the damage sustained by Valdez was enough to curtail a long career with potential for a lot more money. Quigg paid, but didn’t weigh.

Valdez manager Frank Espinoza demanded Quigg weigh in on the morning of the bout. Espinoza wanted the UK featherweight at 136 pounds. But Quigg, who said his road work was limited by a stress fracture suffered about month before the bout, and his promoter Eddie Hearn refused. At opening bell, Quigg came in at 142.2 pounds an Valdez at 135.6, according to ESPN.

In effect, Valdez was a lightweight fighting a junior-welterweight. Did it matter? Hard to say. Valdez had already shown a brawler’s instinct. He brawled in each of his two prior fights, first against Miguel Marriaga and than Genesis Servania. It was risky then and perhaps even riskier against a fighter who was said to be nearly seven pounds heavier. Midway through the fight, there were moments when Quigg’s advantage in size was hugely evident. In the sixth, he literally picked up Valdez and tossed him onto the canvas.

When Espinoza advised Valdez not to fight when Quigg said refused the morning weigh-in, Valdez – stubborn and determined – said no, he’d fight. From this corner, that was no surprise. The decision to fight was an expression of his brawling instinct and his heart. The purse also had to be a factor. His biggest payday ever hung in the balance.

My question is this: Shouldn’t there be a rule in the books of every state Commission mandating a morning weigh-in if one or both of the fighters in a title bout miss weight the day before? I understand all of the medical reasons for not doing a weigh-in on fight day for every bout. A fighter weakened by a battle to make weight can be a fighter in peril after opening bell. But a fighter with a significant, yet undisclosed weight advantage can put a smaller opponent in danger just as surely as a banned substance. Fighters missing weight is a trend. It’s as if they are using the scale like another PED.

The Japanese Boxing Commission has suspended Mexican bantamweight Luis Nery indefinitely. Nery was at 123 pounds, five heavier than the 118-limit, in his first trip to the scale for a March 1 bout with Shinsuke Yamanaka in Kyoto. Eventually, he got down to 121 and the fight was allowed to go on, although Nery was stripped of the WBC title. Nery went on to stop Yamanaka with four knockdowns in an overwhelming second round. The WBC suspended Nery within days after the bout. The Japanese Commission followed up Wednesday

It’s not clear whether the WBO will act, or even investigate. Valdez won, retained his title and the world moves on. But isn’t it a Commission’s duty to protect the fighters? It’ll be awhile before we know whether Valdez was protected enough to fight on.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night, at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas, moonlighting junior welterweight Mikey Garcia ran his undefeated record to 38-0, turning back a spirited challenge from Sergey Lipinets over twelve tactical rounds. It was typical Garcia: in a fight of some risk, precision and poise ensured victory and little else. There is something resembling mastery in what Garcia does; even when pressed (and Garcia’s face today reveals just how mischievous Lipinets was) the rounds that do not go his way feel like rounds he lost, not rounds his opponent won. So tangible is his control of the action.

Some 1400 miles away, under an appropriately bruised sky at StubHub Center in Carson, California, featherweights Oscar Valdez and Scott Quigg engaged in twelve rounds of ritualized violence whose residuals could figure well after the marks of battle have faded. Valdez rightly had his hand raised in the end, and among his spoils the victor should find a longer than usual hiatus from the ring, one that will diminish not at all the memory of his performance nor the anticipation that will meet his return. Attrition need not be Valdez’ game, but he obliges any such invitation.

While it seems natural to contrast Garcia and Valdez there are problems with such an approach, not least of all the fact that this mode feels reductionist, if only because to establish clearly the demarcation is to pigeonhole both fighters, to misrepresent the breadth of their talents. Still, risks aside, there is a mirroring with Garcia and Valdez of some interest.

Garcia is a fighter who covets control; when it is his, he moves confidently. When that sense of control waivers though, so too does Garcia, and rather strikingly, unbecomingly, of a fighter with his reputation. It is in these moments that one wonders whether this once aspiring police officer who retired long enough to extricate himself from the control of Terence Crawford’s promoter is simply doing the job he is best suited for. And that he knows it. Because Garcia is as calculating beyond the ropes as he is between them—which is why his toughest fight to date was the one that kept him out of the ring.

There was another tremor of Garcia’s resolve on Saturday when Lipinets speared his nose; the product not only of a punch but of a rhythm and pressure that put Garcia on edge. Garcia responded as he always does, not with fire, but with the strategies of control: jabs and a return to space (along with a handful of hard combinations designed to preserve it). And the left hook that dumped Lipinets in the seventh round? An act meant to steady the action more than end it, with Garcia flashing an evil so that he might risk no more in asserting it.

Faced with challenges of his own, Valdez did not react this way, and it is fair to wonder if he would even want to.

No one would have faulted Valdez for pulling out of Saturday’s fight. Yet against an opponent who even given multiple opportunities passed on making weight, and whose disregard for the scale was a sign of how intent he was on winning, Valdez never waivered. Instead, he took the opportunity to punish Quigg for daring attempt to skirt the rules. And punish him he did.

Quigg hardly shied from his fate, fracturing Valdez’ jaw along the way, but every time he hurt the Mexican fighter Valdez responded like one. There is a chance—albeit slim, given the version of Quigg that showed up—that Valdez could have employed a more controlled and controlling strategy, could have mitigated the damage he incurred. But a fighter who tattoos his name on his chest is unlikely to suffer insults well or hush the bloody expectations of his devotees. No, it was always going to be the disassembly line for Quigg.

Whether Garcia recognizes similar expectations isn’t clear. As he has been through nearly forty fights, against Lipinets Garcia was simply too good to be denied control, and that trend should continue provided his talk of moving to welterweight remains only that. Garcia has teased the idea of fighting Errol Spence, but no one who cares about him is likely to encourage such delusion (and no one else is going to credit it). No, better to return to lightweight for a series of hypothetical wins over Vasyl Lomachenko, some fantastic historical comparisons, a few more laps around the track.

The pride of the Garcia clan is going to be remembered primarily for his dominance, greatness having fallen victim to finances, a stubborn hiatus, an eye for preservation—in short, to control. And should that offend Garcia’s supporters, expect them to hurl blame anywhere but at their idol (oh how Mayweather’s shadow still looms). Valdez, by contrast, is not going to achieve the longevity or dominance of Garcia because his style and temperament will not allow it, because the outlay of his success is simply too great, and because his need to succeed is too personal. Garcia is better than him, and shrewder too: where an eye to the future is concerned, he makes better choices. But he is the type of fighter, Valdez, who is remembered for what he does in the ring; there is already no need to consider Valdez outside the context of his fights, as someone isolated from his opponents.

Garcia delivers a verdict; a body is brought before him, he interrogates it and determines its fate. Valdez delivers a product; a body is brought before him, he subjects it to his volition and creates something of value. The appeal of the latter is so much easier to understand.

By Bart Barry-

NOT SAN ANTONIO – Saturday in Freeman Coliseum junior welterweight Mikey Garcia decisioned Sergey Lipinets unanimously to attain a title in Garcia’s fourth weight-class, which we were assiduously assured by Showtime is an historic happening.

Well.

About five years ago I drove four hours each way to cover Garcia’s match with Juanma Lopez in Dallas; I saw him unbundle Cornelius Lock in Laredo, 2010, and knew there was nothing counterfeit about Mikey; however hinky Garcia’s eightround decisioning of Orlando Salido (by which Garcia acquired a featherweight title he never defended) I believed Garcia might be a generational talent and wished not miss a thing he did.

Then Mikey missed weight widely in his first title defense, in Dallas (a then-unheralded Nebraskan named Terence Crawford stole the show). Then Mikey was unremarkable against Roman Martinez, winning a super featherweight title he would defend once, in Corpus Christi (and an unknown Jamaican named Nicholas Walters stole the show). One fight and a couple months later Garcia went on extended sabbatical. A year ago Mikey won his lightweight title by smashing someone named – just a sec, BoxRec is refreshing – Dejan Zlaticanin, a title Mikey hasn’t defended, then did an exhibition thingy with “About Billions” Broner.

Saturday Garcia fought 10 miles from my home, and I chose instead to keep easily reschedulable plans 30 miles west of Freeman Coliseum. I watched the Showtime broadcast of Garcia-Lipinets, though, and felt exactly no regrets being elsewhere, even before seeing Richard Schaefer and Sam Watson jockeydancing behind Jim Gray.

The telecast featured a bunch of happy talk about Garcia’s place in history alongside Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao, for his having won titles at featherweight and super featherweight and lightweight and junior welterweight, which inadvertently shone some insight on PBC’s enduring inauthenticity. Garcia is a proper cherrypicker now suing posterity for considerations he doesn’t deserve.

At featherweight Pacquiao blitzed Marco Antonio Barrera and drew with Marquez, who made four defenses of his featherweight title before decisioning Barrera to win a super featherweight title he lost to Pacquiao, who’d gone 7-1 (4 KOs) at 130 pounds. To attain his lightweight titles Marquez iced Joel Casamayor and Juan Diaz, and to become a junior welterweight champion Pacquiao poleaxed Ricky Hatton.

And to become a lightweight titlist Pacquiao assaulted David Diaz, and to become a junior welterweight titlist Marquez beat someone named Serhii Fedchenko. Pacquiao’s win over Diaz and Marquez’s win over Fedchenko were cherrypicker delights, disappeared by what remarkable matches the two men made with one another and other hall-of-famers. Nobody remembers Marquez or Pacquiao for those wins, however “historic” they be.

The telecast’s other contextual reference for Garcia’s achievement Saturday, Alexis Arguello’s failed attempt at the same four-weightclass-title feat, managed to mention Aaron Pryor without supplying to younger viewers some helpful context on Pryor like “who was somewhere between 11 and 27 times the fighter Sergey Lipinets is.”

Garcia, whose branding now includes postfight celebrations of his charitable acts, considers himself poised for the celebrity turn of his career, going the GGG route and threatening men in three divisions at once. His trainer and brother says Mikey’s best weight is 135, and maybe he’s right – the rest of us have only seen Mikey weigh that once, and he did look spectacular. But before we meander any deeper in Familia Garcia fantasyleague we need put a bold black line or two through the words “welterweight champion” – as even PBC’s alternative universe has at least two titlists Mikey wants no beef with.

Then there’s Bud Crawford, isn’t there? “Now all of the sudden 140 is this stacked division when I leave,” tweeted Crawford, derisively, about Mikey’s fight. Crawford is now promoter Top Rank’s very best prizefighter, which is exactly what Mikey was supposed to be.

As Saturday’s match happened in San Antonio, here’s an associative anecdote of sorts from the city’s historic San Fernando gym:

For years the gymwalls’ sole decoration comprised fight posters belonging to the late Joe Souza. One was telling. Jan. 18, 1997, Oscar De La Hoya made the first defense of his 140-pound title at Thomas & Mack Center. In the comain Kostya Tszyu made the fifth defense of his 140-pound title. But the promotional poster shows one man fighting a “light welterweight” match, while the other fights for a “super lightweight” title.

The subterfuge worked: I made passing glances at that poster for a year before realizing it was a riddle – th’t there was about as much promotional interest in putting a 24-year-old De La Hoya in a ring with Tszyu back then as there has been in putting Mikey Garcia in a ring with Crawford since about 2013.

Mikey looked duly more hittable Saturday than he’s looked generally. Because fighters gain weight on their chins more than their fists at 140 Garcia’s power is stunning, not stopping; to have the same effect he must now throw more and harder and avail himself of counters accordingly. He clipped Lipinets with a lightsaber left in round 7, but Lipinets found it dissuading more than devastating. Even within the bounds of PBC’s measured-gladiator spectacles there’s something perilous about scaling weightclasses, which is why most of history’s nonheavyweights are known precisely by their abilities to do so.

Even still Mikey’s white gloves Saturday looked bigger than they did a few years ago; even discounting white’s outsized reflective properties Mikey’s fists appeared overpadded, softer, a touch fluffy.

Things rarely feel grimey or dangerous during a PBC fight, which must be by design, and may be a very good idea – supposing our beloved sport can become more attractive to casual fans by being less violent.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Farauenheim-

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. – If you think it never rains in Southern California and Scott Quigg never misses weight, think again.

Quigg failed to make weight for the first time Friday and showers are expected Saturday night for a featherweight fight against Oscar Valdez Jr. in an outdoor ring at StubHub Center down the freeway in Carson..

Bring an umbrella and leave your assumptions at home. Let’s just say that there is plenty of unpredictability in the forecast. The only sure thing is that Quigg (34-1-1, 25 KOs) won’t be fighting for Valdez’ WBO title. He forfeited that opportunity and $20,000 for being 2.8 pounds heavier than the 126-pound maximum at the weigh-in. Valdez 23-0, 19 KOs), who came in at 125.8, will vacate the WBO title if he loses.

Quigg was not allowed a chance at trying to make weight because of a California rule that prohibits fighters more than two pounds heavier than the limit from returning to the scale.

Quigg apologized to Valdez, his trainer Manny Robles, manager Frank Espinoza and fans jammed into a ballroom for the weigh-in. But it didn’t end with an apology. Robles called the Quigg camp “unprofessional.’’ Then, the Valdez camp asked Quigg to step on the scale for another weigh-in Saturday morning.

Negotiations for the Saturday weigh-in were underway not long after both fighters stepped off the scale for a fight scheduled to be telecast by ESPN (7:35 p.m. PT/10:35 pm ET).

The Valdez corner wanted to be sure that Quigg didn’t add too many pounds through re-hydration during the hours between the formal weigh-in and opening bell. The exact weight under discussion wasn’t clear. However, indications late Friday was that it would be at about 136 pounds.

Further money from Quigg to Valdez was also discussed. But the amount of money under discussion also wasn’t clear.

Immediately after the weigh-in, there were mixed signals whether the Quigg camp would even agree to the morning weigh-in. Quigg promoter Eddie Hearn said it was decided early Friday that the UK featherweight could not cut any more pounds. Hearn said they would go on with the fight, even with out a chance at the belt.

“All the things he usually does, his body wasn’t responding,’’ said Hearn, who said Quigg couldn’t shed the last few pounds during a workout Thursday night. “He would usually lose three or four pounds. He lost one. You have to think about his health. I feel for Scott. He’s devastated. He was in tears. He wanted to challenge for the title. It’s very frustrating.”

Quigg’s failure to make weight would cost him $20,000 penalty. The fine represents 20 percent of the $100,000 contract that was filed with the California Commission. Quigg’ final purse is believed to be much more, perhaps five times as much. It didn’t include UK money, most of which came from a deal with Sky Sports.

The fine, calculated off the number filed with California, will be split two ways — $10,000 for the state and $10,000 for Valdez. It would boost Valdez purse to $430,000 from the $420,000 field with the Commission before Friday’s weigh-in.

“Nothing about this changes anything for what I have to do,’’ said Valdez, a two-time Mexican who went to grade school in Tucson. “I made weight. I did my job in the gym. Now, it’s time fro me to do my job in the ring. I’ll come out with the win. I’m taking that belt back to Mexico with me. ‘’

By Norm Frauenheim-

LOS ANGELES – Oscar Valdez Jr. has watched the video repeatedly. But not to celebrate, even though he got off the deck for the first time in his pro career and won a dramatic decision over Filipino Genesis Servania last September.

Instead, it’s film that provides a lesson plan, a primer on what not to do the next time.

“I watch it and I get mad at myself,’’ Valdez said Thursday, just a couple of days before the next time arrives Saturday night on an ESPN-televised card (7:35 p.m. PT/10:35 p.m. ET) against Scott Quigg at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif.

Valdez, a two-time Mexican Olympian who went to grade school in Tucson, studies the film and sees mistakes that could cost him an unbeaten record and his WBO title. It doesn’t take long for a sloppy student to become a former champion.

“We went back to work, back into the gym and went back and forth on the mistakes,’’ said Valdez (23-0, 19 KOs), whose instinctive aggressiveness often left him with hands down and vulnerable to big shots from Servania. “We worked hard to correct them. I‘m excited.’’

Excited, perhaps, to prove that he’s still evolving. Excited, too, to test that process against a Freddie Roach-trained featherweight who many believe is Valdez’ greatest threat. Quigg (34-1-2, 25 KO) is tough and tested. His lone loss was by split decision to Carl Frampton. His promoter, Eddie Hearn, is surprised that Valdez and his promoter, Top Rank’s Bob Arum, agreed to fight Quigg.

“I was shocked,’’ Hearn said at a news conference in downtown Los Angeles. “They could have picked somebody easier,’’

Quigg delivered a quick follow-up, saying he would make sure that they would regret picking him.

It all sets up an intriguing clash at 126 pounds in an outdoor ring and on a night when there’s rain in the forecast. It never rains in Southern California, or at last that was a popular song in the early 1970s. Quigg grew up in the UK, where it always rains. He had his own lyric.

“I’ll be dancing in the rain,’’ Quigg said.

But Valdez trainer Manny Robles doesn’t need a weather map. He has already seen a lot of Quigg.

Valdez and Quigg sparred about a year ago. Valdez was training for his unanimous decision over Miguel Marriaga in another back-and-forth battle on April 22, also at StubHub. Robles recalls twelve rounds over two sessions.

“It was good,’’ Robles said. “Oscar did well.’’

So, who won the sparring? Robles wouldn’t say. At least, he didn’t name the winner. But his answer hinted at a forecast all his own for Saturday .

“I don’t think you you need me to tell you who won the sparring,’’ said Robles, who trained Valdez for Quigg at a camp in Mexican mountains near Guadalajara. “I don’t you need me to tell you why we didn’t think twice about taking this fight.’’

By Norm Frauenheim-

LOS ANGELES — Anthony Joshua promoter Eddie Hearn is confident a Joshua-Deontay Wilder fight for the undisputed heavyweight title can happen in 2018 if Joshua beats challenger Joseph Parker on March 31.

Hearn talked about the Joshua-Wilder possibility Thursday after a news conference with his UK featherweight, Scott Quigg, for Saturday’s ESPN’s bout with WBO champion Oscar Valdez Jr. at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif.

“The Wilder fight is the one,’’ Hearn said. “It’s the biggest fight in world boxing.’’

Hearn said there is no uncertainty about whether Joshua-Wilder would happen. He called the fight “inevitable.’’ But there are still questions about when. First, Joshua, the IBF and WBA champion, has to beat Parker, the WBO champ, at the end of this month in Cardiff, Wales.

If Joshua — a prohibitive favorite – wins as expected, Hearn says he then will consider a couple options. Before Wilder retained the WBC version of the heavyweight title with a stoppage of Luis Ortiz Saturday, there had been talk about Joshua making U.S. debut against Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller in August.

“Options are that we go in August against someone and then Deontay Wilder, or straight on to Wilder,’’ said Hearn, who said the Showtime ratings (peak audience 1.2 million/average 1.1) for Wilder-Ortiz were good. “But if we do Wilder, it probably will be October, November December.’’

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, American heavyweight Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder made the seventh defense of his title, knocking out Cuban, Luis “King Kong” Ortiz in ten rounds. In a tense and sporadically torrid fight, Ortiz went loudly to his fate, but Wilder, always louder, left him silent in the end. A right uppercut, the brutal punctuation to another of Wilder’s inarticulate tantrums, broke Ortiz, leaving him bowed like a penitent.

Of course, with a lucrative fight with Anthony Joshua looming, Wilder was unlikely to lose. Ortiz, 38 years old, had failed two drug tests in the past three years, including one in September that temporarily canceled the Wilder fight. When it was revealed that Ortiz’ second dirty test was the result of blood pressure medication he was free to pursue Wilder again, and did so, though the New York State Athletic Commission was so concerned about his condition that the PBC brass flew Charles Martin to New York as a replacement opponent.

Then there was the strange delay to the start of the eighth round, where Wilder, pulped by Ortiz in the seventh, was examined a second time by the ringside physician. If the precipitous fatigue that colored his ensuing efforts was any indication, Ortiz wasn’t going to end the fight in the opening seconds of the eighth, but the reason to deny him the chance is best explained with a nod and a wink. And the scorecards? Conveniently though not egregiously all in Wilder’s favor, and identical in their tally. With respect to Errol Spence—throw in an apology as well, considering the disparity in craft between the two—it is Wilder who most controls the fortunes of the PBC—and he benefits accordingly.

This is how boxing operates, and such privileges, while certainly not available to all, are there for enough that no one would prefer the potential for such preferential treatment removed. Nor will anyone be thinking about Saturday night when the opening bell for Joshua-Wilder rings.

Besides, Wilder earned his knockout of Ortiz and proved something of himself in the process. A scatologist could lose himself for hours examining Wilder’s technique; those ridiculous flaps of his wings, that backward-leaning and floppy bugalooing to safety. But Ortiz proved that Wilder can take a punch, and that, for however spastic he is defensively, it is difficult to hit him cleanly. Yes, much of that can be attributed to his height (and a little also to the perils of being countered) but there are few fighters in the division tall enough to negate that advantage. It is worth noting too that Wilder steadied himself through the sternest challenge of his career and won by knockout; that on the night he most had to prove himself he did, and in a manner that thrilled the crowd.

All of this is to say that Wilder did what he had to against Ortiz, which is all he can do, and that this remains enough for now. Imagining what a heavyweight version of Adonis Stevenson would have done to Wilder Saturday might make you laugh, might make you cringe, but as there are no such threats on the horizon, and considering Wilder can only fight the fighters available to him, it is possible that this reign of lucky genetics and auspicious timing persists well into the future. Size, power, and a fighter’s constitution have taken him some distance in this sport, and matchmaking has picked up the considerable slack.

Still, for all the earnestness of his effort, and for the improvements trainer Mark Breland has managed to instill, the notion that Wilder will one day suffer a beheading befitting of both his shortcomings and his personality is an easy one to endorse; one made easier not only by the eye-test but by the performance of Jose Uzcategui on the undercard. While talk of Wilder-Ortiz dominates—a fight characterized as much for its pregnant stretches of inaction as by those violent eruptions easiest recalled—Uzcategui, who unmade boxing repeat offender Andre Dirrell in nine rounds, was the most impressive fighter on the broadcast.

When Uzcategui and Dirrell first fought, the Venezuelan was sucker punched twice by Dirrell’s uncle after being disqualified for hitting after the bell—a foul “Bolivita” indeed committed, but one hardly worse than Dirrell’s cheap (and successful) efforts to steal another victory as a man unfit to continue. Yet to the rematch, Uzcategui brought little malice. Instead, wearing a smile impossible to suppress, he appeared appreciative of both the opportunity to remedy the past and his successes to that end. With intelligence and gusto, head, arms, fists, working kaleidoscopically within harm’s way, this king of limbs parried and slipped his way past Dirrell’s punches and battered him to (another!) bungling submission. In a manner reminiscent of Roman Gonzalez, Uzcategui treated Dirrell with a respect nearing affection and made multiple efforts to celebrate his victim in the aftermath. (One can only hope Uncle Leon was watching.)

No easy task that, following a performance of such skill and comportment. But then, a comparison isn’t quite fair, is it? Uzcategui is a very good fighter, and Wilder might not even be that. There is no fight Uzcategui can make that holds nearly the appeal of Joshua-Wilder, though, and criticisms of Wilder that fail to recognize this currency either ignore or miss this point. Somehow a fighter who doesn’t understand how to navigate a southpaw jab has managed to make himself into one half of the biggest heavyweight fight that can be made (Tyson Fury being irrelevant until he can prove otherwise). Any honest explanation of Wilder’s rise to that position will be complex, and the greater the complexity the less likely a favorable estimation of Wilder should persist.

But then, no one will be thinking about that either when the opening bell for Joshua-Wilder rings.

***Thank you to Anthony Wilson for the wonderful artwork in this column. Expect further contributions from him here. You can find him on Twitter at @antwonomous and more of his artwork at https://www.behance.net/collection/168268093/Boxing.***

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Barclays Center in Brooklyn undefeated American heavyweight titlist Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder windmilled to unconsciousness in round 10 undefeated Cuban heavyweight Luis “King Kong” Ortiz in a spectacle wild and unsightly and violent, and perhaps even unjust, as it was dramatic and suspenseful and thrilling. It does feel cathartic to admit Showtime’s mainevent was wonderful.

I was cheering for Ortiz, I’ll also freely admit, cheering for Ortiz and laughing at Wilder, while quietly conceding how damn intense and entertaining the fight was even while nothing happened. There were whole rounds in the match’s first half when both fighters landed naught yet returned to their corners spent, reminding close observers how fundamentally different heavyweight prizefighting is from all other forms of combat sport.

Wilder and Ortiz more closely resembled two lightweight grizzlybears in a territorial dispute than two lightweight prizefighters. And justice was served on those terms, too – the creature of greater surface area and rage prevailed. There was no need for a roped boundary; neither monster had the wind or whim for a 40-yard flight. They fought like undefeated giants, which was compelling. It was fantastic compelling.

There is probably no end to the offense Wilder will give the sensibilities of boxing purists. He is exactly as bad at boxing as he looks even to the eyes of the chastest casual fans among us. That skyhook fastball righthand thing he threw during his closing scene with Ortiz? It’s not enough to write you can’t Ctrl+F that in the boxing lexicon; you can’t find a surface upon which to practice it safely in any boxing gym the world over: You hit anything less submissive than a speedbag with your hand like that and you break your wrist and tweek your elbow while separating your shoulder.

If there’s method in Wilder’s lunacy it must reside in an effort to disbalance his opponent. Wilder stakes his life on those drowning-man combinations, and when he misses you with his fists and every other part of his arms his overthrowing motion still collides his body with yours, and a man that large moving at that speed can fairly unsettle a Kia, much less another man. The sloppiness of Wilder’s finishes lends a bit of dread to their violence, too, as we’re now told is the design. A Wilder finish is deeply unsettling because experience leaves you unprepared for it. Men that large are never that resentful, that affected, that menacing.

Why would they be?

Wilder has gone and learned how to market himself like a nightmare, which is also compelling. I met him in Tucson after his sixth pro fight and sensed a giant, gentle Southerner, friendly with writers if a touch insecure. Only the giant part remains today, nine years later.

Saturday he made battle with a genuine, if aged, item, and prevailed. Wilder surprised himself. Not in winning – it’s been so long since he was matched competitively, he has no recollection of any alternative ending – but in winning a fight he had a fine chance of losing. Wilder attacked a man who countered him and knew how. It speaks to how dismal Wilder’s competition has been that a 38-year-old southpaw generally missing with counter left crosses chastened the Bronze Bomber effectively as it did, but it did.

I watched the fight with a 78-year-old Mexican aficionado, and we both found Wilder’s approach in round 1 risible enough to laugh in concert at the Alabamian’s peculiar display of footwork and, ahem, “athleticism” in retreat. Wilder, too, sensed what devastation such skittishness might wreak on his brand and didn’t go it again. Credit for that; it showed Wilder is nearly as much a fighter as he is an athlete (after Saturday’s comain showed an all-athlete-no-fighter quit three or four times in his corner before appropriately going thespian in the last televised gasp of his career).

Finally it was conditioning, not craft, that proved the difference. Wilder, the one medalist on USA Boxing’s abysmal 2008 squad, took from that experience and its coaching what little of value there was for the taking – a fetishistic commitment to conditioning (memorably derided by trainer Kenny Weldon: “How long are those rounds, two minutes? I can hold my breath for two minutes!”).

That was how Wilder recuperated so much faster and more completely than Ortiz did. Wilder didn’t need what shenanigans referee David Fields and abetting New York officials tried to pull at the start of round 8, checking Wilder’s pupils for evidence of dilation or something, after Wilder clung to Ortiz like a flotation device in the closing minute of round 7. Wilder’s survival of Ortiz’s attack in the seventh and eighth rounds changed the fight altogether. Wilder recovered much better from Ortiz’s pummeling him than Ortiz did. When the bell rang on round 9, Wilder looked fresh and lucid in a way Ortiz did not. Wilder is a bully, and once Ortiz was unable convincingly to punch the bully in his face, Wilder ran free, freely running all over the blackmat in a signature display of ferocity ungoverned by technique.

And yet. There was nothing unschooled or defective about the right uppercut Wilder sleeped Ortiz with, was there?

It’s time for American aficionados to embrace Wilder as an act of vengeance on the pride Europeans long took in Wladimir Klitschko. In his enormity and power and gracelessness Wilder is a righteous contemporary-American metaphor to the rest of the world. A beneficiary of genetic chance who sees only merit in the mirror Wilder gives Americans our chance to imagine tactical brilliance where Europeans once imagined courageousness in Klitschko.

At least until Wilder someday gets triplestarched by Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight title against Luis Ortiz.  The action begins at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with the interim IBF Super Middleweight title with a rematch between Andre Dirrell and Jose Uzcategui

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Round 1: Jab from Ortiz..Jab

Round 2  Jab from Wilder..Ortiz lands a left and falls down..left..Jab..Right from Wilder

Round 3 Left from Ortiz..Right from Wilder

Round 4 Jab from Wilder..Straight right..left and right..1-2..Left from Ortiz..Good straight left..another..

Round 5 Jab from Wilder..Counter right..Left from Ortiz..Hard right hook..BIG RIGHT ROCKS ORTIZ AND HE IS DOWN..

Round 6 Right from Wilder..Big right ..1-2….Jab from ortiz..Jab..Straight left..Left buckles Wilder..Straight left

Round 7 Straight right from Wilder..Left from Ortiz..Right from Wilder..Big combination,Wilder in huge trouble..taking thunderous shots on the ropes

Round 8  Big lefts from Ortiz.Hard left..Wilder looks exhausted..

Round 9 Right from Wilder….Left to body from Ortiz..3 hard straight lefts..Right drive Ortiz back…Right

Round 10 Big counter right rocks Ortiz…Wilder Hurts Ortiz badly and down he goes.   Ortiz in serious trouble…Huge combination and big right hands…down goes Ortiz and the fight is stopped..2:05

Round 1 2 rights from Uzcategui..Body shot..Counter right from Dirrell drives Uzcategui back..Body/Head from Uzcategui..3 more punches land..Counter left from Dirrell..Straight left

Round 2 Right and 4 body shots from Uzcategui..Dirrell answers with a left..Straight left..Uzcategui gets in a right….Straight right..2 rights

Round 3 Right from Uzcategui..right..another right..Jab from Dirrell..Left off the ropes..Hard left from Uzcategui..left and another from Dirrell..Body shot drives Direell to his knees at the bell..no knockdown

Round 4 2 hard rights from Uzacategui..Hard 3 punch combination…2 counter rights..Body..2 Big counter rights

Round 5 2 hard rights from Uzcategui…Dirrell cant get out the way from any punch..Overhand left from Dirrell..Big counter right from Uzcategui

Round 6 Left to the body from Uzcategui..Uzcategui continuing to touch Dirrell..Hard left from Dirrell..Right from Uzcategui

Round 7 Straight left from Dirrell..Another..Left from Uzcategui..Right..Body shot..left from Dirrell

Round 8 Body shot from Uzcategui..Right..Right..Dirrell gets in a left,.Combination on the ropes from Uzcategui..left from Dirrell..Left to body from Uzcategui..Right uppercut from Dirrell..Hard counter right from Uzcategui..another flush right….DCOTORS LOOKING AT DIRRELL IN THE CORNER

Round 9 THE FIGHT IS STOPPED…UZCATEGUI IS THE WINNER

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder, whose powerful right hand is often called his single dimension in the ring, is fighting a multi-dimensional campaign on both sides of the ropes for further respect and a bigger audience.

Short-term, that means a chancy test against Luis Ortiz Saturday night in a Showtime-televised bout (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET) at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Long-term, it’s a fight for numbers – audience share — in an attempt to pressure Anthony Joshua into a fight later this year instead of 2019.

It’s problematic. Ortiz, who has plenty of his own power, is good enough to beat Wilder, especially if he is distracted by his attention on business beyond Saturday night.

If Wilder looks right, left, ahead or at anything other than the Cuban heavyweight directly in front of him, a big Ortiz punch could quickly leave him with only a look at bleak future. Simple as that.

During the last couple of weeks, Wilder (39-0, 38 KOs) has been promising a third-round knockout of Ortiz (28-0, 24 KOs, 2 NC) while also calling out Joshua, who has been quietly at work on taking care of some of his own business later this month, March 31, against Joseph Parker.

Is Wilder good enough at multi-tasking to accomplish all he hopes to? Maybe. Ortiz is reported to be 38, yet looks older and often moves around like a man with more years on his body than on his birth certificate.

“I don’t have any worries about Ortiz at all,’’ Wilder said in one of many interviews “When I look at Ortiz, he doesn’t look powerful. I know he has nice skills like all Cuban fighters. That’s nothing to me. It’s going to be up to him to prove me wrong.”

Guess here is that Wilder’s bigger body and over all athleticism will be enough to wear down and eventually wear out Ortiz. But an upset would not shock.

Put it this way: there’s a better chance Wilder loses to Ortiz than Joshua loses to Parker, of New Zealand. Depending on the bookmaker, Wilder is favored from minus-325 to minus-230. On those same books, Joshua is an overwhelming favorite – a prohibitive minus-2500.

Meanwhile, any talk from Wilder about Ortiz inevitably turns to Joshua.

“I don’t want anybody to change their prediction about me versus Joshua after what they see on Saturday night,’’ Wilder said not long after he said he had no worries about Ortiz.

But there’s more than an Atlantic ocean that separates Joshua and Wilder. There’s a universe of options and Joshua has all of them. The London heavyweight has become a rock-and-roll-like star in the UK, drawing crowds of 90,000 and 70,000 in his last two fights. Wilder isn’t even the biggest draw in his hometown, Tuscaloosa, also home for Alabama’s Crimson Tide, college football’s perennial power.

In large part, that’s why Wilder is talking. And talking. He’s trying to get more American fans interested in him, and he’s trying to talk his way into a 2018 date with Joshua, who already has a couple of possibilities. The biggie would be a rich blockbuster with UK rival Tyson Fury. The trouble with that one is the unpredictable Fury, whose erratic lifestyle has been a bigger opponent than just about any heavyweight contender.

If that lifestyle continues to keep Fury out of the ring, there’s always a plan for Joshua to introduce himself to the U.S. First rumored stop: New York. But there’s speculation that Joshua’s American debut would be against Jerrell “Big Baby” Miller instead of Wilder. Maybe, a big audience and a big Wilder victory could change Joshua’s mind. Wilder’s quick stoppage of Bermane Stiverne on Showtime last November drew a peak audience of 887,000, according to Nielsen. A Fox audience for his stoppage of Gerald Washington last February peaked at 1.86 million, also according to Nielsen.

If there’s an increase in the audience by several multiples and a dramatic Wilder knockout of Ortiz, maybe Joshua re-considers. But, again, maybe is the key word here. Even if Wilder accomplishes all he hopes to with Saturday’ WBC title defense, Joshua promoter Eddie Hearn might want to let the interest in Wilder-Joshua percolate for a while. Marinate is the promotional word for it.

Marinate would only frustrate Wilder. But that’s a better option than losing to Ortiz.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night, at the Forum in Inglewood, California, super flyweights Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and Juan Francisco Estrada gave HBO subscribers still forking over premium dollars for a mostly derelict product reason to temper their buyer’s remorse. Sor Rungvisai won a majority decision, proving once more that, however loose his grip on it, the division is his; Estrada, incredulous at the result, should ready himself for a rematch as daunting and winnable as its predecessor. HBO should encourage that rematch be scheduled immediately lest its promise be forgotten—taking a reason to maintain an HBO subscription along with it.

There is little need to revisit the action, assuming first, that anyone reading this column will have already seen the fight, and second, that their observations and analysis are equal or superior to those you will find here. Suffice to say that of the two it is Estrada who better instantiates the ideal: his craft, technique, ring intelligence, all superior and all on display Saturday night. He made a fool of Sor Rungvisai on a number of occasions, crashing an uppercut and left hook into his charging opponent before pivoting to safety, burying his cross and pulling back as a timed and measured counter hook whistled harmlessly (and to his noticeable relief) past his nose. And unlike Roman Gonzalez, who was visibly unnerved by Sor Rungivsai’s incorrigible belligerence, Estrada seemed barely to register what dirty work came his way.

And yet he lost, somehow outlanded by an opponent without a jab, one who rarely threw more than two punches at a time. How Sor Rungvisai managed that feat speaks to the craft complementing his presence and proclivities. You do not, after all, go (debatably or otherwise) 3-0 against Gonzalez and Estrada merely by taking better than you give and giving more than most can take (though he never accomplishes that feat without this ability). Sor Rungvisai has an uncanny ability to land punishing shots, but that is not where his charm lies. No, what is so endearing about Sor Rungvisai is that which is so often off-putting: the way he enjoys and exploits advantages in size and strength. There is little agency with such advantages—and scant credit typically attended to their use. Yet Sor Rungvisai wields them with undeniable appeal.

Like fellow southpaw Errol Spence, Sor Rungivisai is a hard puncher who throws hard punches; there is a harmony here between power and disposition, and the tax of so simple, so committed an attack compounds its effect. He could meet painfully the ceiling of his ability should he move up in weight, where his punch and chin may not follow. But at 115lbs, Sor Rungvisai is confined to attrition—and embraces that inevitability with a cool and unsettling arrogance. He can look clumsy, almost novice in his preoccupation with landing his power, yet this version of him, a giant gassed up on his success, has an orbit even world class fighters struggle to exit. It bears repeating that Estrada, and especially Gonzalez in their first fight, abused Sor Rungvisai. But a fight with the Thai is both too long (you cannot tame him for 36 minutes) and too short (you need more than twelve rounds to grind him down). Still, Estrada could very well defeat Sor Rungvisai with a second chance; even short on spite he is fighter enough to overcome both Sor Rungvisai and the bias toward aggression the latter seems to instill in judges.

There is no reason for that rematch to not happen, which means Sor Rungvisai could hang consecutive defeats on both Gonzalez, a generational fighter even past his prime, and Estrada, Gonzalez’ former nemesis. Such matchmaking places this diminutive fighter at a distance far enough from his peers to cast them in his shadow.

True, a fighter can only fight opponents who are available, and some divisions are wanting for talent. But that is hardly what is keeping fights from happening. Intrigue results from two evenly matched and complementary styled fighters meeting, so if your division is bereft of talent, or if you are peerless even in a good division, the solution is to find your challenges at higher weights. Promotional acrimony and pigheadedness scuttle some fights, like the Vasyl Lomachenko-Jorge Linares chimera, and even in-house fights can be difficult when you pay your stable discouragingly well. The fighters in HBO’s informal Superfly tournament suffer from neither a dearth of intriguing challenges nor promotional sabotage, and are, in a sense, paid according to weight—not even two 115lb Sor Rungvisai’s cost anything near what one 250lb Anthony Joshua does. (And there is nothing wrong with paying fighters in accordance with what dollars they generate. Doing otherwise has repeatedly proven a mistake.)

Sor Rungvisai was and is well-positioned then, for an impressive run, but he still has to deliver in the ring. He has, and in doing so has put both fighters and many of boxing’s business practices to shame. And while explanations (those brash and brawny excuses) for why others do not follow in his path may have some legitimacy, asterisks and apologies do not a memorable career make, and hypothetical victories have only hypothetical value—which is to say little if any.

Whatever reasons conspire to prevent other fighters from following his lead, they dull Sor Rungvisai’s shine not at all. In doing what others have not or will not do he enjoys something like a charity of imperilment: he could be 2-2 in his last four fights and his story would still be remarkable. And in a sport where each fighter is a protagonist and careers are stylized in the arc of fiction, such stories are not soon forgotten.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles, Thai super flyweight world champion Srisaket Sor Rungvisai majority-decisioned Mexican Juan Francisco Estrada in a fantastic prizefight HBO deserves much credit for enabling. It was the second installment of a SuperFly series that resides alongside the World Boxing Super Series cruiserweight tournament as the best things to happen to our beloved sport in some years.

Once again it was Sor Rungvisai’s composure that fascinated. Volume punchers are men of a composure begotten by great self-awareness; volume guys know their limitations much better than cocky defensive specialists or fragile psyche-ed powerpunchers. But Sor Rungvisai is no longer much of a volume puncher; he no longer wastes much motion with shifting his opponent’s footing or considering his opponent’s timing. He no longer wastes hardly a motion at all. He stands placidly at ringcenter and attacks when whim dictates and throws nearly no setup shots. Everything Sor Rungvisai throws intends, now, to devastate.

He wears the same obliviousness mask today with which he greeted the world’s best fighter about a year ago. His countenance betrays no emotion whatever. Not even his eyes seem to grow or slighten. He got angry a few times at Estrada, Saturday, and his body showed deep fatigue by the fight’s 35th minute, but his face remained wonderfully expressionless throughout.

One hesitates to project too much on a man who is determined to be unknowable, but watching Sor Rungvisai’s face in combat while considering his ledger brings to the imagination a man who achieved unattachment by first attaching himself to prizefighting and its myriad of cruelties then letting disgust with it all detach him from prizefighting and its systemic irregularities until he was sufficiently unattached to career or outcome to match himself with prizefighting debutants in his 44th and 45th and 46th career matches. That bears repetition: Sor Rungvisai passed the entire second half of 2016 feasting on three men who’d nary a prizefight between them.

That was how he prepared to swap fists with his profession’s master, Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez. That evinces some combination of otherworldly arrogance, noteworthy misfortune and perfect unattachment. Sor Rungvisai then brought the arrogance and unattachment to Chocolatito and delivered him noteworthy misfortune, breaking the master body and spirit – Chocolatito was resigned unto tranquility at the brutal end of his September match with Sor Rungvisai.

Until the final round little that happened Saturday surprised Sor Rungvisai, which was itself surprising because Juan Francisco Estrada is one hell of a creative counterpuncher. Estrada made Sor Rungvisai miss often, too. But Estrada appeared so relieved each time one of Sor Rungvisai’s weighty fists flew harmlessly past he took few retaliatory acts till he was certain the worst of Sor Rungvisai’s power was spent.

Notice how infrequently Estrada pursued Sor Rungvisai even when the Thai allowed aggression to imbalance himself. Compare that to the savagery with which Estrada’s inspiration, Juan Manuel Marquez, pursued Manny Pacquiao each time the Filipino’s aggression circuitbroke his footwork. Some of that was a difference of conscious choosing but much of it wasn’t; Estrada needed a lot of rounds to override what panicked signals his body disseminated across the nervous system each time Sor Rungvisai’s knuckles made definitive contact.

You cannot problemsolve in a panicked state or think creatively while your mind madly scrambles for refuge. Whatever plans Estrada and handlers made for Sor Rungvisai’s attack went largely ignored for rounds 2-9 while Estrada searched frantically for a means of avoiding Sor Rungvisai’s punches.

Sometime after that, though, Estrada’s experience and training and gradual adaptation to the pain wrought by Sor Rungvisai’s punches led the Mexican to throw a right uppercut, the one punch to which Sor Rungvisai’s aggression made him singularly vulnerable. That got both men’s attention, converting Sor Rungvisai from a machine to a man, emboldening Estrada for the championship rounds no matter how little import Sor Rungvisai initially showed Estrada’s emboldened spirit.

By the match’s penultimate minute it was Sor Rungvisai whose consciousness got overwhelmed by what panic fatigue visits on every fighter. Sor Rungvisai was the unthinking man in the fight’s final 90 seconds, not Estrada, but Estrada had only so much remaining impetus. Estrada absolutely did not win Saturday’s fight, whatever the Forum’s partisan-Latino crowd opined, but he verily did win the fight’s final round, which should make the Mexican hopeful for his chances in a rematch.

Now some words about the telecast.

HBO’s combination of Jim Lampley and Max Kellerman no longer works at all – they haven’t chemistry, and they step all over each other’s lines, either by embroidering them needlessly or negating them with dead air whose effect is most pronounced by a telecast featuring so little of it. This is mostly Kellerman’s fault, yes, but Lampley no longer helps things. Kellerman believes himself an extraordinary improviser, which would work better if he didn’t believe his audience too ordinary to hear his brilliance on first or second recital.

So much exhausting noise of every telecast now goes to Kellerman reiterating decent points till dullness, ostensibly for the audience’s benefit – for if not the audience’s benefit, whose? Occasionally Jim and Max must discipline Harold for a scorecard that deviates from the consensus narrative, and they do, but Kellerman cannot possibly believe Roy Jones or Andre Ward needs his help to understand the combat happening a yard or two from their eyes.

Kellerman and Lampley now disrupt one another’s rhythm in a way that is five parts irksome for every one part entertaining, and they talk far far too much. They don’t need to be fired, but they do need to be separated; either man might work just fine by himself with Ward, who’s much better than Jones, and nowhere is it written a four-man team needs to explain a two-man combat.

In its first two years the Peter Nelson era at HBO Sports has been marked by its marklessness, Top Rank’s departure and a gray detente with the PBC. HBO has become the official network of the super flyweight division, which is noble, while Showtime has cornered the exponentially more consequential heavyweight division (unless you count Andre the Giant). Nothing about HBO Sports today portends boldness. Separating Lampley and Kellerman is a subtle move, then, that might at least bring aficionados more enjoyment.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Location, location, location. It’s no surprise that the real estate won’t change for the Canelo Alvarez-Gennady Golovkin rematch. The middleweights will pick up where they left off at Las Vegas T-Mobile Arena on May 5, Cinco de Mayo. Canelo de Mayo, too.

Canelo always said he would re-claim the holiday for Mexicans. He has. Now that Floyd Mayweather Jr. has moved on and presumably won’t try to move in on the date like he did three weeks before the Sept. 16 bout late last August against Conor McGregor, Canelo will continue to reign as the NHL arena’s primary boxing resident. Tickets go on sale Tuesday.

“I am happy to return for the fourth time at T-Mobile Arena for this historic rematch against Golovkin,” Canelo said Thursday in a news release announcing that there will be no change of address. “I opened the doors of this place to the world of boxing, and it has become my favorite venue. This is where the fight started, and this is where I’ll end it by doing what I and my fans most desire: knocking him out.”

On the prediction scale, Canelo’s KO promise is boiler-plate. Still, a stoppage of GGG might be the only way for him to silence some boos from Mexican fans unhappy with his performance in the draw last September. Canelo fought in spurts. He’s going to change up his preparations this time around.

He’s headed to Colorado to train at altitude that might augment his conditioning. I’m not sure that will weaken GGG’s chin, however. Can Canelo win? Yeah, oh yeah. Above all, he’s proven to be a very good student, especially in the aftermath of an embarrassing loss to Mayweather in September, 2013. At 27, it’s safe to say we have yet to see the best of him.

Meanwhile, the theory is that GGG is a step beyond his prime. He’s 35. He’ll be 36 at opening bell. His birthday is April 8. More telling, perhaps, are the bruises and swelling apparent in his face after his last three fights – Kell Brook, Danny Jacobs and Canelo. Those optics are early signs of an aging fighter. But sometimes the younger man shows up, especially in fighters as good as Golovkin has been.

From this corner, the intersection of time and place appears to favor Canelo. But early betting odds say something else. They slightly favor GGG (minus 170) over Canelo (plus 140). In other words, it’s almost a pick-em fight. Surely, the rematch is intriguing on multiple levels, even more so than the first one. Canelo promises explosive drama by saying he’ll knock out GGG. Good enough. Knockouts sell. But adjustments fascinate. Look for plenty of the latter. Each fighter possesses a high-ring IQ. There’s some danger in that, of course. Their respective smarts set up a sequel that could go to the scorecards all over again. Judging proved to be a huge controversy in the first one. If there’s any surprise about the rematch’s site, it’s the state not the arena. GGG was angry at the draw delivered by the judges last September. Some of his fans urged him not to return to Vegas.

The first bout and post-fight news conference will be remembered for outrage over Adalaide Byrd’s 118-110 score for Canelo. For some at ringside, Dave Moretti had it right a 115-113 card for GGG. Lost amid all of the anger at Byrd, however, was Don Trella’s card. He scored it a draw, 114-114.

Like the fair-minded Moretti, he gave the final rounds to Canelo. But his score for the seventh is curious. Moretti, most in HBO television audience, the crowd at T-Mobile and the ringside press gave the middle rounds, including the seventh, to GGG. Even Byrd scored the seventh for Golovkin. In fact, it was one of only two rounds that Byrd gave to GGG.

But Trella gave the seventh to Canelo, 10-9. Had he scored it as most everyone else seemed to, GGG would have won a split decision.

GGG’s reunion with the Nevada State Athletic Commission figures to be the biggest story during the weeks before the rematch. There will be plenty of talk about the assignment of the judges. Safe to say, it won’t be Byrd. But that and the location, location, location of a possible trilogy are the only sure things.

By Bart Barry-

There were two very good title fights in the super middleweight division Saturday, but as the victor of the more widely watched one once got himself origamied by Carl Froch we’re going to treat the victor of the other one instead, and he is 21-year-old David Benavidez. And Benavidez looked sensational rematch-decisioning Ronald Gavril.

Benavidez’s body is syrupy runon oblivious (like this sentence) more than deflated ambitionless immature or unprofessional, like the scolds’ll say of it in their petty and anxious search for surface perfection, the weight of insecurities they project on everything belying the seriousness they tell themselves their scowls purport. His body is shaped to deliver a surprise precision to opponents who doubtlessly peplecture themselves on what deepdigging camp sacrifices they made and he didn’t the better to wilt him with their will the way their seconds and thirds promise them after the middle rounds of fights they know they can’t win unless Benavidez cedes them, and sometimes he almost does too.

Benavidez’s age and facility and shape may as yet prove liabilities – as he’s young enough and easy enough to get bored by the rigors of his craft, and his body says one thing that’s obvious and another that isn’t. What’s obvious is the size and shape to which his body’ll grow unless he brakestomps its homeostatic state hourly; a month of “just eating like everyone else” will weigh him 200 pounds. Easily. What’s less obvious is that, for all the wonders of his punching form, he’ll not have the pop he’d’ve had at 154 had he not once weighed so much more than 154 that 154 is chanceless.

That’s what the inflated middle knuckle of his right hand suspicioned Saturday: There’s no way I should’ve bounced off another man’s face and head so many times with so much force in one evening’s work. The knuckle was right, too; it wasn’t simply the chin of Gavril but the slightly less than atomic pop on the end of Benavidez’s otherwise perfect punches.

What inspires such thoughts are comparisons to a young Thomas Hearns that happened early Saturday, in one writer’s imagination anyway, and the 14 to 21 pounds of inefficiency Benavidez’ll never manage to flense, inefficiency Hearns never had for never having to flense a millimeter. Benavidez is necessarily punching men with more absorbent chins than Hearns did when Hearns became a contender, which means Benavidez’s knuckles’ll have to endure more earlier than Hearns’ did. That may serve to make Benavidez more compelling than he’d’ve otherwise been – for had he stopped Gavril in three rounds there’d’ve been no reason to doubt he could stride through the winner of the World Boxing Super Series and all its participants, and given Benavidez’s body and age such doubtlessness would be no boon.

Then there’s the troubling bit about his overbooked management company and its inability to match its fighters frequently or steer any of them greatness’ way. PBC intended create an alternate boxing ecosystem closed to every unsigned prospect and unbought media, and it worked partially for a couple years when other people’s money was plentiful. Once PBC returned to Showtime, though, head bowed hat-in-gloves, it found a less compliant host, one hardened by PBC’s previous treachery, however often Showtime denies it, and much more likely to do things Showtime’s way, not PBC’s (can you imagine a timebought commentary team listing a Top Rank titlist like Jeff Horn alongside PBC’s welterweights in 2015?), and that means frequent mention of every PBC fighter’s unfortunate inactivity and unfortunater opponent preferences.

Showtime interviewer Jim Gray is now nearer despicable than insufferable but by asking every premier boxing champion whom he wishes to fight next he highlights PBC’s fundamental weakness, in his signature snotty way. Gray was the perfect press vehicle for extracting from Keith Thurman a confession that looked like a boast he’d be fighting exactly no one the next time Thurman appears on Showtime.

What an extraordinary sense of entitlement PBC’s ecosystem has wrought: I’m going to show up at your event and tell you I neither intend to fight anyone you want me to fight nor performed the professional courtesy of curating a one-name-deep list of men I might consider rehabbing my shoulder against on your airwaves.

One hopes Showtime will tell PBC: Here’s the list of opponents we’ll pay Keith Thurman to fight on Showtime, here’s the list of opponents we’ll pay Keith Thurman to fight on our Twitter feed, and everyone else composes the list of opponents you’ll pay us to broadcast Keith Thurman fighting on Snapchat.

PBC may be the perfect management outfit for a Thurman or Deontay Wilder but it’s all wrong for someone with David Benavidez’s youth and ambition and propensity for weightgain. Benavidez needs to be defending his title or unifying other titles at least thrice annually. But now that he’s become a PBC a-side by doublebeating someone from The Money Team he’s about to see his activity and competition cut by a third or more, and if he’s unlucky enough to add another title at 168 he may be suspended from the PBC calendar entirely in 2019.

Just look what the PBC did to Danny Garcia, a once-sympathetic-if-never-beloved man who after upsetting Nate Campbell, Kendall Holt, Erik Morales (twice), Amir Khan, Zab Judah and Lucas Matthysse, in 29 months, needed nearly four years to make another meaningful fight in a weightclass too high, lose, and then celebrate his 11 1/2-month layoff by spearchiseling a retired lightweight to little amazement and a fair dollop of derision.

David Benavidez appears to be a special talent. The PBC has a special talent for mismanaging special talents.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action from The Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas as former two-weight champion Danny Garcia takes on former lightweight champion Brandon Rios.  The exciting co-feature will be a rematch between WBC Super Middleweight champion David Benavidez defending against Ronald Gavril.  The card opens at 10 PM ET / 7 PM PT with a welterweight elimination bout between Yordenis Ugas and Ray Robinson

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Round 1: Garcia lands a jab..body shots..1-2..Combination..Double left

Round 2 Left hooks from Garcia..Combination..Jab from Rios..

Round 3 Double left hook to the body from Garcia..Counter..combination..Over hand right from Rios..Hard right from Garcia..Right from Rios..Double left hook from Garcia.

Round 4 Jab and right from Rios..Lead right from Garcia.Right..right uppercut from Rios…Ripping right from Garcia..and another..Big right and Rios smiles at Garcia

Round 5 Garcia lands a big right..Good left hook from Rios..2 right uppercuts..Right uppercut on inside..Check left hook and hard uppercut from Garcia,,,over hand right…Lead left uppercut..Combination..Right from Rios..Garcia comes back with a right

Round 6 Rios lands a short right and left..Counter right from Garcia..Right uppercut on inside from Rios..Short left..Garcia lands a jab

Round 7 Good exchange..Garcia lands a jab to the body..Hard right..lead right to the body..Good combination..Counter left hook..right..3 punch combination..Counter right..Body

Round 8 Rios lands 2 uppercuts on the inside..3 punch combination from Garcia..Right uppercut on inside by Rios..good body work..double jab from Garcia..right/left combination…Right from Rios..Body..Garcia lands a combination to the face..Counter left from Rios

Round 9 Garcia lands a combination to the body..right to head..double left hook..Garcia lands a short left to the body..Big Right..right cross..HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES RIOS…RIOS STUMBLING TOWARDS REFEREE KENNY BAYLESS AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Benavidez backs up Gavril with a right.  Over hand right..Body work from Gavril..Benavidez lands a jab

Round 2 Gavril lands a jab to the body..Benavdiez lands a right and left hook..Jab..Double jab/right hand to the body..Right..Left uppercut..left hook..Piston-jab..Body from Gavril..Counter right from Benavidez..1-2..Hard combination..Body shot from Gavril

Round 3 Right from Benavidez..Combination from Gavril..Uppercut from Benavidez..Right to body from Gavril..Combination from Benavidez..lead left

Round 4 Huge right rocks Gavril..Flush right..Combination..double right..2 big uppercuts..4 punch combination..1-2..Gavril attacking the body..combination

Round 5 Uppercut from Benavidez..Jab from Gavril..Right on the ropes from Benavidez..Left uppercut..Jab..Right backs u Gavril..Jab..Blood from the nose of Gavril..Nice right from Gavril..

Round 6 Good right from Gavril..6 punch combination from Benavidez..hard right and left..Right to head from Gavril..left to body..right to head..Jab from Benavidez..

Round 7 Gavril lands a combination..Benavidez lands a combination

Round 8 Right from Gavril..Sweeping left hook from Benavidez..jab to the body..Left uppercut..Left hook to the bidy..Right to the body..flush shots

Round 9 Jab from Benavidez..triple jab..left hook..left ti the body..Ripping body punches..Gvaril lands a combination on the ropes..

Round 10 Combination from Benavidez..

Round 11 Doctor checking out Gavril..3 punch combination from Benavidez..

Round 12 Right from Gavril..Right..right..Benavidez jabbing

Benavidez landed 315-942 punches…Gavril 176-757

Round 1 Robinson lands a counter left..Counter right from Ugas…HARD RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ROBINSON..Nice combination from Robinson..counter from Ugas

Round 2 Ugas lands a right to the body..Straight right..Right uppercut..Right..Right hook from Robinson..Counter right from Ugas

Round 3 Nice combination from Ugas..Good left from Robinson..Sweeping right..Counter left..Right to body..Right from Robinson

Round 4 Trading jabs to the body..Good combination from Robinson..Counter right from Ugas..Check hook from Robinson..Right from Ugas and a body shot..Right..Counter right..Right behind the guard..Body..Straight backs up Robinson..Good exchange..Robinson lands a right that drops Ugas after the bell..ROBINSON DEDUCTED A POINT

Round 5 Right to body from Ugas..Right..right hook from Robinson..Right..Right to body and combination..Short left from Robinson..

Round 6 Counter right from Ugas…Right to body..Right to body

Round 7 BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ROBINSON…UGAS ALL OVER ROBINSON..7 HARD RIGHTS IN THE CORNER AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Follow all the action as George Groves defends the WBA Super Middleweight title against Chris Eubank, Jr. in the semifinal of the World Boxing Super Series.  The action begins at 5 PM ET / 2 PM PT and 10 PM in the UK

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Round 1: Groves land a jab…jab..Eubank lands a jab

Round 2 Jab from Eubank..Right from Groves..left..Good right from Eubank..Jab from Groves..

Round 3 Left and right from Groves..Hard left and right from Eubank..Eubank cut over the right eye..jab from Groves..Cut caused from an accidental head clash.

Round 4 Good right from Groves..Lead left and right from Eubank..Left hook

Round 5 Lead left hook from Eubank..Uppercut and left hook..Chopping right from Groves..Right on inside from Eubank

Round 6 Lots of rough housing..Right from Groves..Jab..

Round 7 Good right from Eubank..Jab..Right from Groves..Hard right

Round 8 Right from Groves..Right from Eubank..Long right..Guys swinging wild

Round 9 Eubank going after Groves..Lands an uppercut…Combination at the bell

Round 10 Lead left from Eubank..Jab..jab from Groves..1-2..Left to body from Eubank..Eubank lands good body shots on the ropes..

Round 11 Left hook from Eubank..Hard right from Groves..Jab..Eubank throwing desperation punches

Round 12 Good right from Eubank…Groves ducking punches on the ropes..Good right uppercut from Groves.Hard right from Eubank Huge shots by by both guys,,,Big right from Eubank..Uppercut from Groves

117-92 Punch advantage for Groves

117-112; 116-112; 115-113 FOR GEORGE GROVES

Over the past decade, fighters from Eastern Europe have infiltrated and have become dominant fighters in the world of professional boxing. Fighters like Gennady Golovkin, Sergey Kovalev, brothers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, and Vasyl Lomachenko, to name a few, have become prominent and must-see television in the United States.

Last week it was announced that Bakhodir Jalolov signed a promotional contract with New York based Fight Promotions Inc., and will now ply his trade in the United States to join that exclusive list of european imports to realize their American Dream.

Jalolov has an impressive amateur pedigree and is considered to be one of the top prospects in the heavyweight division. At just 22 years old, Jalolov represented his country of Uzbekistan in the 2016 Olympics. Jalolov was so highly respected that he was given the coveted position of being the flag bearer for the games.

Jalolov utilizes his height by using a strong jab to keep his opponents at bay. He likes to mix it up as he is confident in his defensive prowess. The few times that Jalolov has been hit, he has shown an impeccable chin, and he has never been knocked down.

Jalolov plans to start his professional career very shortly, and he is definitely one to watch as we enter the next decade. He will be training with highly accomplished trainer Pedro Diaz in Miami, Florida.

Fight Promotions, Inc. also promotes Sergey Derevyanchenko, Ivan Baranchyk, Ivan Golub and Elnur Abduraimov to name a few.

Follow all the action as Ray Beltran and Paulus Moses vie for the vacant WBO Lightweight title.  The action kicks off at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with welterweight battle between Egidijus Kavaliauskas and former world champion David Avanesyan.  The show kicks off with Olympic Silver Medal winner Shakur Stevenson taking on Juan Tapia in a Featherweight bout.

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Round 1: Beltran lands a right..2 hard lefts..Jab from Moses…Right for Beltran

Round 2 Beltran lands a left to the body..Both land lefts..Beltran gets in a left..Moses lands 2 rights..Beltran cut over the left eye

Round 3 Good right from Moses..Jab and right..

Round 4 Good jab from Moses..Uppercut..Long right from Moses..Right and double left from Beltran..

Round 5 Right from Moses..Hard left from Beltran..jab from Moses..Beltran cut under his left eye

Round 6 Moses lands a right

Round 7 Good 1-2 from Moses..Short right from Beltran

Round 8 Beltran working on the inside..

Round 9  Hard right buckles Beltran..Left from Beltran..1-2..2 body shots…Moses lands a jab..Combination from Beltran

Round 10 Hard right and left from Beltran

Round 11 Beltran lands a left to the body..Right to body and another

Round 12  Beltran outlanding Moses

117-111, 117-111 and 116-112 FOR RAY BELTRAN

Round 1 

Round 2 Kavaliauskas lands a right..Jab from Avanesyan..Right from Kavaliauskas

Round 3 Crisp right from Avanesyan…Kavaliauskas lands a combinations drives Avanesyan back..Left hook..

Round 4 Avanesyan switches southpaw..Lands a left..Right from Kavaliauskas..Jab..Rght,..

Round 5 Good body shot from Kavaliauskas

Round 6 Kavaliauskas lands a hard right…Avanesyan is hurt…HARD FLURRY OF UNANWERED PUNCHES AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Stevenson lands a jab..Short right uppercut

Round 2 Stevenson lands a right hook..

Round 3 Stevenson lands a jab…Hard right hook..Good body work

Round 4 Hard lead left from Stevenson…

Round 5 Straight left from Stevenson.. Stevenson outlanding Tapia 73-15

Round 6 2 hard body shots and  a left hurt Tapia..Body work..right to body

Round 7  Body shot and 3 punch combination from Stevenson..Good right from Tapia..B;ood from mouth of Tapia..Jab from Stevenson..lead left

Round 8 Good combination from Stevenson

By Norm Frauenheim-

Emanuel Steward’s impact on boxing endures long after the famed trainer died. He’s been gone for more than five years now. Yet there are moments when echoes of his voice can still be heard and his influence still seen.

You’ll hear and see it Friday night (ESPN 9 p.m. ET) in Raymundo Beltran.

Steward brought Beltran to the United States, using his influence and celebrity to introduce him and his potential to American media in October 2002. I was there, a reporter for the biggest newspaper in Phoenix, when Steward asked me to say hello to the world’s next great fighter.

“They’re already calling him Sugar, Brown Sugar, in the Phoenix gyms I’ve taken him to,’’ Steward said with the gentle smile that always seemed to be there when he knew he had found somebody special. “Can’t be a Sugar if they don’t think you’re fighter.’’

Steward didn’t project multiple titles or even a legacy for Beltran. But Steward knew there was something there, something within the young man from Mexico that would last.

It has. Beltran has.

His long journey has taken him from a talked-about talent, to a forgotten prospect, to a sparring partner, to a club fighter, to a champion, an ex-champion and a good guy. I’m not sure the last element doesn’t matter the most. Above all, however, Beltran has become somebody a lot like his American mentor. In some capacity, he’ll always be a fighter.

At 36, he steps through the ropes in Reno, Nev., against Paulus Moses (40-3, 25 KOs) for the 43rd time in a bid for the World Boxing Organization’s lightweight title. It’s a fight he calls “the most important” in his career.

On a couple of different levels it probably is. For one, it puts him in line for what could be very good payday. If he wins, there’s talk about a title defense against Felix Verdejo or Vasiliy Lomachenko. Then, there’s the ongoing battle for a green card amid the rancorous immigration debate.

The stakes are huge, of course. They are all part of what motivates Beltran (37-7-1, 21 KOs). They are the components to what a fighter can use. From bell to opening bell, it’s the fuel that keeps him going to the gym, doing his roadwork. But it would just be spilled gas if not for the motor and mentality that keeps Beltran moving forward and in harm’s way.

At a defining level, his whole life is his most important fight. It never ends. In an era when the O is to be protected at all costs, Beltran fights on. There aren’t many fighters today with seven losses who are still active at 36. Name one who is near the top of the game? Beltran is just about the only answer. It’s a craft defined by adversity. Beltran hasn’t exactly embraced it. But he hasn’t run away from it either. Instead, he’s learned from it.

His adopted home continues to be Phoenix. That’s appropriate. The first four fights in his pro career were in Arizona — a debut in Tucson and then three bouts in Phoenix. His headline-grabbing battle to stay in the United States is in many ways a reflection of Ground Zero in the immigration debate. What is now an angry national confrontation began in Phoenix with demonstrations against state legislation, SB 1070. Beltran has seen it. Lives it. Continues to fight it.

In a noteworthy sidebar, his fight in Reno could lead to a noteworthy moment in Phoenix’s long and lively boxing history. If Beltran wins the WBO title Friday and David Benavidez (19-0, 17 KOs) retains the World Boxing Council’s super-middleweight title in Showtime-televised rematch against Ronald Gavril (18-2, 14 KOs) at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Saturday night (7 p.m. PT/10 p.m. ET), it’ll be a first ever that two fighters from Phoenix will hold major belts at the same time.

It almost happened in 1990. Louie Espinoza, now a carpenter in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, held the WBO’s featherweight title, but lost it to Jorge Paez in a controversial decision in April of that year. Just a few months later in late July eventual Hall of Famer Michael Carbajal won his first junior-flyweight title, the International Boxing Federation’s version, with a seventh-round stoppage of Thailand’s Muangchai Kittikasem.

Who knew that a simple handshake might introduce some Phoenix history some 16 years later? I’ve got a hunch that Emanuel Steward had a pretty good idea. I can hear that voice and see that smile now.

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – An uncommon bout last week with a common cold and what distraction it brings, maybe this is what adults affected by attention deficit disorder constantly feel, brought me to a weekend without a subject fit for a Monday column, and so there’s no telling what might come next. But come along, nevertheless.

These are what columns I dreaded writing for years. There mightn’t be a thing to write about that was boxing but proximity enough to treatable events one feels a negligent stir for indulging his interests more than boxing’s. Such was about maintaining a readership in the sense of maintaining an editorship, a chance to write for men who already had readers or an appearance of them anyway. I’d find myself scraping away – like that throaty sound harddrives used to make – at uninteresting subjects like Roy Jones’ farewell match or George Groves’ upcoming tilt. Even mentioning those subjects today makes this gray today altogether grayer.

Recently I moved very close to La Fogata, a Mexican restaurant a few miles north of downtown. That name almost certainly rings no recollective bells for you but you may have read the name before if you’re into the best of contemporary American literature: It’s the restaurant where novelist Richard Ford’s invention, Frank Bascombe, planned to take his family for a Christmas feast a few years ago in “Let Me Be Frank with You” – part of a hypothetical holiday to include also the Pedernales River and Johnson City. I thought of making this column a conversation with Bascombe at La Fogata about the creation of a prizefighting cryptocurrency but stopped not because it felt too outlandish, we must rush at such sentiments, but because I suspect Ford would not approve anyone borrowing his character, and his disapproval is weighty.

Six or so years ago I bought charming stationery and began writing letters to writers whose works I admired, and forgive me if I’ve written about this before. Nothing particularly remarkable came of those 80 or so letters, no epiphanies about the creative process or major insights even about myself, and I stopped when I ran out of writers (and painters and lyricists and even a former Secretary of State) whose works I admired enough to find 300 words for. If there were any surprises about the exercise, it’s this: While very few people wrote back, those who did composed the top 10-percent of the talent I wrote to.

Richard Ford wrote back. He lamented the lack of esteem in which contemporary novelists get held by their publishers, and he expressed admiration for this craft of boxing writing (as I must’ve mentioned I did this sort of writing in my letter to him). He also gave the Spurs a real chance of winning the NBA Finals that year.

This has nothing to do with the recent cryptocurrency craze except that I thought about cryptocurrencies a few days ago while eating enchiladas de mole poblano from La Fogata and thought about them in the rotating relational context of how Ford might have Frank Bascombe treat them, if at all. He’d embrace their absurdity in some way but not an obvious way, and a month’s worth of reading about possible uses of blockchain technology – cryptocurrencies’ universal and decentralized general ledgers – convinces me counterarguments against the technology that underlies cryptocurrencies deal solely in obvious absurdity.

It’s the word “currency” that gets folks leaning wrongly right off. They immediately impose whatever they recall about fiat money from that macroecon class, freshman year, then barrel towards central authorities and GDPs and a variety of irrelevant accounting practices. They do this to assert an illusion of control, primarily, justifying whatever sum of youthful hours they once committed to regurgitating Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises. It’s why tokens are a better metaphor for cryptocurrency than currency, since nobody’s about to use technical analysis on what goes in carousels or pinball machines.

There are details yet to emerge, but the general vision is the elimination of both accountants and arbitrage; as every transaction is public and stored on tiny pieces of hundreds of millions of computers round the world, there’s no pricing ignorance to exploit or later correct. Without this sort of drag to overcome, things can be sold for things without they hop through a labyrinth of exchanges:

This is how many 2018 Ford F-150s Gilberto Ramirez earned a couple Saturdays ago, instead of: This is how many dollars were in Ramirez’s purse minus income tax divided by the exchange rate into Mexican pesos minus the markup at Mazatlan’s number one Ford dealership minus taxes and registration plus the reduced commission for buying in bulk minus the delivery charge.

Why, but that’s just bartering! Actually, yes, that’s exactly what it is – bartering performed with absolute trust anywhere in the world with a single secure transaction log no company or government can own. Certainly it could help medical commissions enforce boxing suspensions, too, while improving the way medicine is practiced everywhere.

Nothing about this column knows quite whence it heads till it gets here, and so a little gratitude th’t what’s above didn’t find its way in a dialogue with Frank Bascombe between bits about punching men in the face and wearing suede shoes – Frank in Hush Puppies, me in a pair of green British Walkers. Now the circling back to find somewhere to fit boxing in all this.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Roy Jones, a lot more of a Senior than a Junior these days, walks away and hopefully stays away after what he says was his final fight Thursday night in the same Pensacola arena where it all began nearly a decade before there was Google.

That’s a lot of hits.

He’s landed them.

And absorbed them.

Jones’ 75-fight career, including major titles in four weight classes over 29 years, amounts to a legacy that will lead to the Canastota Hall in upstate New York five years from now.

About that, there’s no debate. The only real question is whether he was an all-timer, a rival to the legends in any era. He says yeah, hell yeah.

“You can’t pretend there has ever been anyone come close to doing what I did,” Jones said in several rounds of media interviews this week. “Nobody you could name could touch me and I’m talking about nobody who’s around now, nobody who was around in my prime, and nobody who was around any time.’’

Muhammad Ali in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Sugar Ray Robinson in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s? Not sure. It is tough, perhaps impossible, to compare great fighters from very different eras.

But there is a compelling element to Jones’ all-time claim. Within the ropes, he says, he was a better than Floyd Mayweather Jr, who has caps and T-shirts that boast the acronym TBE – The Best Ever.

Jones, who turned 49 on Jan. 16, has no argument with Mayweather’s business acumen. He is The Best Earner in history. Mayweather perfected the risk-for-reward ratio. He surpassed late heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano’s iconic 49-0 mark, going 50-0. But he did it by beating a Conor McGregor, a mixed-martial-arts star yet a novice boxer, in August.

The point to Jones’ argument, however, is that Mayweather was better at making money than he was at fighting. It’s hard to contest that one. On virtually every level other than financial, Jones proved to be resilient, coming back from repeated losses. He stayed busy, beginning with a middleweight title and reviving a dormant light-heavyweight division while also beating John Ruiz for a heavyweight title in 2003. He is the first middleweight to win a heavyweight belt since Bob Fitzsimmons did it 120 years ago. He also has a signature win, a 1994 dominant decision over James Toney, who at the time was a pound-for-pound frontrunner.

What undercuts Jones’ all-time claim was an early reluctance to travel, especially to Germany for a bout against Dariusz Michalczewski. At the time, Jones was at the peak of his physical powers. He was everywhere — in the ring and elsewhere.

In north Florida, he was the most versatile athlete since Florida State’s Deion Sanders, a cornerback who on one day in 1988 played in a spring football game, played baseball and ran in a track-and-field meet.

Eight years later, Jones played point guard for Jacksonville of the United States Basketball League in the afternoon and scored an 11th-round knockout of Eric Lucas in a super-middleweight title defense that night.

The guess here is that a Jones’ victory over Michalczewski would have been a slam-dunk in Germany or Antarctica. But an apparent reluctance lingered in Jones, perhaps from what happened to him at the 1988 Games in Seoul. It was a heist of Olympic proportions, a proven fix that gave the gold to a forgotten South Korean and left Jones with silver. Twenty years from now, that infamous moment might be how Jones is remembered.

From this corner, however, his pro career is at least worthy of some all-time consideration. Let’s just say he’s in the conversation. At the risk of contradicting myself on the difficulty of comparing different eras, I’ll make an exception: Four Kings.

That’s the title to the terrific book by the late George Kimball, who wrote about the Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran rivalry that defined the 1980s. It was boxing’s last great era. The guess here is that Jones in his prime could have held his own against those guys. There would have been Five Kings, each an all-timer.

By Bart Barry-

PORT ARANSAS, Texas – Directly across Corpus Christi Bay from American Bank Center, a 30-mile circle and ferry ride by car, this Gulf island town of 3,000 or so souls represents, five months later, one of many grounds zero for Hurricane Harvey, and it looks the part, too. There are seawalls now where there were busy restaurants a year ago, and the devastation is widely chronicled. But as one doesn’t often see a large edifice scattered to component parts in a neighborhood or a marooned 30-foot fishing boat resting sideways a mile from the ocean, there’s still something jarring about the sights here.

American Bank Center hosted Saturday promoter Top Rank’s Gilberto Ramirez versus Habib Ahmed mainevent and did so competently as Ramirez unbuttoned Ahmed in six rounds. In an exceedingly more consequential mainevent before that, on the other side of the world, Murat Gassiev unmanned Yunier Dorticos to advance to the finals of the simply fantastic World Boxing Super Series cruiserweight tournament.

What got best shown Saturday across the six or so hours stretching between the spectacles, Gassiev-Dorticos and Ramirez-Ahmed, is the fatuity of derivative evaluations, hypothetical appraisals, assessments of who would beat whom if ever they did fight. It’s a fanboy game that existed before but crystallized in the Money Era, when beating men in the press and imagination acquired an outsized import and ruined a generation of aspiring aficionados. No longer was the craft about picking a decisive moment in an actual confrontation, a hook-leaduppercut combo five rounds before the knockout, but the absurder imagining of a full, 36-minute tilt, a mixedmedia gargoyle of the left Money threw against Diego Corrales and the shoulder roll he used against Robert Guerrero and the trunks he wore against Zab Judah.

It was a period of such deep frustration some of us still write about it bitterly. Good riddance to that awful era.

It’s germane because its residual effect got to me a bit Saturday ringside at American Bank Center. The co-comain of an eight-fight card featured Philadelphia’s Jesse Hart slapdashing an illprepared Ghanaian named Thomas Awimbono with a masterful right uppercut in the fight’s opening minute or so. Again, as it is said Dominican beisbolistas do not walk off their island, having to hit every pitch and take very few, so too one might say no fighter runs out of Africa – you don’t get off that continent and onto ours lest you can take hellish abuse. To see what Hart did Saturday was to imagine instantly no 168-pounder the world over could want any of that.

And yet. Not even five months ago Gilberto Ramirez dropped and decisioned Hart in Arizona. That was difficult to imagine Saturday, no matter how well El Zurdo handled his own Ghanaian opponent. The matchmaking appeared to intend a rematch, Ramirez and Hart, and certainly a rematch is the only proximate possibility Hart wanted entertain afterwards.

Some hours before that in Russia’s Bolshoy Ice Dome undefeated Russian cruiserweight Murat Gassiev made a nearly perfect fight with undefeated Cuban Yunier Dorticos, ceding geometry to Dorticos for half the fight while putting multiple deposits in the account of Dorticos’ body, then changing the geometry subtly until it was Dorticos retreating, his punches nearly popless, and Gassiev smashing through Dorticos’ guard. This was a different sort of combat, more masculine than wiley, perpetrated by Gassiev on Dorticos; put your hands up, son, leave them there, now I’m going right at them.

It’s a sort of hyperaggression even within boxing’s hyperaggression, a way of sending unmistakable signals to the most vestigial and predatory part of the human mind: You can no longer dissuade me, you must attack me now or turn and flee. Dorticos played his role perfectly, fighting open and hard as possible, and Gassiev ripped his consciousness right out his skull.

There was a frightening dispassion to what Gassiev did to Dorticos, a fellow titlist, a fellow undefeated prizefighter, a man of extraordinary violence and talent and pride. There wasn’t an iota of contempt between the men before or during or after their 35 minutes together; Gassiev brained a fellow human being without displaying even a flinch of animosity towards him, then displayed immense affection and empathy for Dorticos afterwards. It was a bondmaking casual fans do not understand and cannot fathom – the depths of intimacy Dorticos and Gassiev shared, the passion they will feel for one another the rest of their days.

This is not hyperbolic. Watch Gassiev’s concern before he comforts his crestfallen opponent afterwards. Dorticos, wherever his career ambles from here, will have no more-committed fan than Gassiev.

Being in this leveled township puts an edge on you, admittedly, and some of it projects itself on what happened Saturday night. Longtime Phoenix boxing scribe Don Smith traveled here for undefeated Arizonan Jose Benavidez’s return from a gunshot wound suffered 20 months ago, and generously gave me an excellent line about the difference between the Brothers Benavidez: “David is the poster child for milk; Jose is the poster child for oil and vinegar.” Such vinegar got sprinkled on Friday’s weighin when Benavidez and consensus pound-for-pound best Terence Crawford exchanged threats.

Crawford sat one row before us, mostly alone, Saturday, occasionally forcing smiles for overfed doofuses requiring pictures with the champ. Crawford has the distinctive air of an unassuming Midwesterner about him, flashless, in an outfit with Jordans but otherwise doable for $25 at Target. Lots went on round him and the rest of us, and he doesn’t attract attention, but if he once expressed genuine mirth to anyone but ESPN commentator Timothy Bradley and Bradley’s wife, I missed it. Crawford’s not unapproachable and certainly not arrogant, but he has exactly no interest in most of his surroundings or the people that compose them – he tolerates others’ assumed intimacy but doesn’t wish to understand it or share it. He will remain unknowable.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the actions as Gilberto Ramirez defends the WBO Super Middleweight title against Habib Ahmed.  The action kicks off at 10:15 PM ET as Jerwin Ancajas defends the IBF Junior Bantamweight title against Israel Gonzalez.

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Round 1: Both guys trying to jab..Right hook from Ramirez..left..

Round 2 Right from Ahmed..Combination from Ramirez..Right uppercut..Right to the body..

Round 3 Ramirez cut over his left eye..Body shot from Ramirez..Cut ruled from an accidental headbutt..Doctor looking at the cut…Left hook from Ahmed..Straight left from Ramirez..

Round 4 Ramirez jabbing

Round 5  Right hook from Ramirez..another..Big left..Body shot..Big right hook..Left..Hard left

Round 6  Ramirez landing big uppercuts..body shots..Huge left,,,Ahmed taking a lot of punishment..Big head shots..CORNER THROWING THE TOWEL…RAMIREZ WINS BY TKO

Round 1 HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES GONZALEZ…Gonzalez trying to jab..Straight left from Ancajas..Left from Gonzalez..

Round 2 Right from Gonzalez..Straight left from Ancajas..Right hook

Round 3 Combination from Gonzalez..Right..Left from Ancajas..left..

Round 4 Left from Ancajas..Straight left..

Round 5 Good exchange…Straight left from Ancajas..Right hook..Hard left…

Round 6 Ancajas lands straight left

Round 7 Left from Ancajas..Another left..Right hook…Sharp right..

Round 8 Jab from Ancajas

Round 9 Ancajas outlanding Gonzalez 110-38…Good left from Ancajas

Round 10  Right hurts Gonzalez..Combination AND DOWN GOES GONZALEZ..BIG RIGHT HOOK DOWN GOES GONZALEZ AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

Amid all of the hyperventilating, over-eating and hyperbole preceding the annual Super Bowl spectacle, there’s now another reason for indigestion:

The G.O.A.T. debate.

The acronym — Greatest Of All Time — is often traced back to Muhammad Ali. In 1971, Ali began to call himself the greatest, often adding “of all time.’’ He never called himself the G.O.A.T. Who did? It was a loser’s label in those days

The four letters evolved later in pick-up games on asphalt courts and rap lyrics on street corners. In 1992, Lonnie Ali, whose husband died 20 months ago in Scottsdale, Ariz., incorporated Greatest of All Time, Inc. (G.O.A.T. Inc.), licensing it as her husband’s intellectual property.

Ali created it.

Owned it.

Yet, the original G.O.A.T. is not part of the argument in the hours before the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots kick off Sunday in Minneapolis. At most, there’s a passing mention of Ali during the endless rounds of give, take and redundancy about who is better: Pats quarterback Tom Brady or retired NBA star Michael Jordan.

One number appears to be at the heart of the current debate. Actually, it’s one ring. Jordan has six NBA championship rings. Brady has five of the NFL’s version. If Brady wins his sixth Sunday, who’s the best? If it’s only about the respective resumes — Brady’s versus Jordan’s – fair enough. But don’t ever put ever next to best. And don’t ever talk about The Greatest without mentioning Ali. In 1971, that would be enough to make you the lower-case goat.

Depending on who is debating, Ali gets tossed out because he wasn’t involved in a team sport. In other words, he didn’t have a Scottie Pippen or Randy Moss. But how does that eliminate him? Yes, this is a column on a boxing website. Am I biased? Of course.

From a boxing perspective, an individual sport is a better test of how great an athlete really is than team sport ever could be. There was never a back-up quarterback in Ali’s corner. When he got hurt, he had to reach within and fight on or he was finished.

Jordan and Brady always have had a reserve waiting to come in long enough to shake off pain or some other trouble. In boxing, adversity of just about every strip is part of the contest. More than that, it helps explain what it means to be the G.O.A.T., which is what Ali was in coming back from a 1971 loss to Joe Frazier and enduring George Foreman’s massive power in 1974.

It’s also impossible to fully define G.O.A.T. by restricting it to what happens in the arena. Ali, named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Century in 1999, had a personality and fearlessness that went far beyond the ropes. In fact, there are reasonable arguments within boxing circles that Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis might have been better boxers. But nobody had Ali’s impact on culture and politics.

He is remembered for his controversial stand against Viet Nam. He’s also admired for paying a price that neither Jordan nor Brady ever had to pay. He was banned from the ring for three years. Ali’s history doesn’t need to be repeated here or anywhere else. At times, however, it seems to be forgotten in what really takes to be the G.O.A.T. Jordan and Brady will be remembered for rings, victories and money. They might be the greatest athletes of their time. But of all time? There’s still only one.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday undefeated Ukrainian cruiserweight Oleksandr Usyk (14-0, 11 KOs) decisioned undefeated Latvian Mairis Briedis (23-1, 18 KOs) in the penultimate round of the World Boxing Super Series, in Latvia’s capital city of Riga. Their match graced no American airwaves. Saturday HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program featured Argentine retread Lucas Matthysse avoiding his fifth career loss by jabbing to temporary unconsciousness a Thai fighter named, one second here, Tewa Kiram, in Los Angeles. These fights are juxtaposed for more than their common date.

What you had in Latvia were two undefeated titlists in a unification match that was the semifinal of a tournament to crown a unified cruiserweight champion of the world. And both hail from the former Eastern Bloc. Surely this was in HBO’s wheelhouse such that if HBO didn’t salivate at the bell Showtime should swoop in and spite-buy it, no?

No. Evidently, absolutely no. Dogged reporters might doggedly do reporting on this and uncover a sprawling, innocent mess of conflicting dates and logistics, a waterfall of prohibiting algorithms, that makes seamless sense of why none of this series is televised in the U.S., but here’s an unsolicited guess instead: Richard Schaefer.

The former CEO of Golden Boy Promotions is back in boxing and associated with the World Boxing Super Series, which seeks to do with the cruiserweight and super middleweight divisions what the Super Six World Boxing Classic started doing with the super middleweight division nine years ago. That tournament, excellent if snakebitten, sent aficionados to Showtime, who captured their allegiance from HBO and hasn’t yielded it much since. Back then boxing insiders confused Schaefer for a genius often as they confused him for an honest broker. But his eventual arch enemy, Bob Arum, had a true line of sight on him: Swiss banker.

Schaefer was an unscrupulous opportunist who brought contemporary accounting and marketing practices to boxing’s 18th-century way of doing both, which made him look brilliant, and a selfinterested operator who promoted an ethical approach to promoting while furtively selling his company out from under its namesake.

Schaefer, fired and barred from boxing three years ago, looks more like an Al Haymon toady, in retrospect, than a master of the universe. Whatever fellow World Boxing Super Series organizers had in mind when they hooked up with him, getting their tournament blacklisted from American television was doubtful it. That’s all conjecture, of course, but one needn’t be a fishnets-certified fanboy to see some irony in HBO’s broadcasting “Washed: The epic rebranding of Lucas Matthysse’s second comeback” in lieu of something at least five times better and more consequential.

With unfortunately few exceptions these days HBO’s Golden Boy Promotions cards are about ensuring biannual Canelo cash infusions and conceding that without access to Top Rank or PBC fighters it’s brutally hard to fill a boxing calendar. As the world moves acceleratingly away from both network television and America, the happy news for aficionados is our confinement to whatever American cable companies gift us now hurtles towards its proper end. Last weekend you didn’t need to blackpatch an eye to see Usyk-Briedis in gorgeous highdef well before Boxing After Dark lumbered along.

And what you saw in Usyk-Briedis was a very good prizefight that was oddly entertaining for a no-knockdowns affair. The gloves looked rightsized, in other words, to two 200-hundred-pound men, and both fighters, as the results got read, looked like they’d been punched oftenly. The right man won on scorecards that leaned expectedly Latvian in Riga; a forensic examination of results would find most points Briedis accumulated came via extralegal events and hometown support.

If Usyk is not a particularly large puncher he is a large man with excellent relative mobility, an Olympic gold medal that means an opponent’s style can hardly surprise him, and the sort of oblivious goofiness that supplies Tony Robbins’ charm. Usyk is a very good prizefighter but nothing like a prodigy.

Briedis, too, gave a professional accounting of himself – he was just the wrong the man against the wrong man. He wasn’t going to fight busier than Usyk and wasn’t likely to outbox him either; to get Usyk to settle down Briedis needed to worry him by concussing Usyk with every landed punch, and at the championship level Briedis does not hit hard enough to do that.

He does know some tricks, though. Howsoever inevitably and unintentionally came the early clash of heads between Usyk’s southpaw attack and Briedis’ forward-lean orthodox counterpunching, Usyk certainly got the worse of it. A Briedis baby-hiptoss in round 6, too, went someways toward destabilizing Usyk. Not enough is made generally of how much it affects a fighter to get dropped on the canvas via push or slip. The referee clears it of scoring consequence with a wave, and the felled man has no grogginess with which to contend, but his legs, trained for six weeks and a career precisely to stutterstep and twist in combat and spring upwards from a stool after respite, suddenly have to fold beneath their body and push upwards from a kneel. It’s surprisingly fatiguing. And Briedis followed Usyk’s rise from the canvas with more offensive enthusiasm and effectiveness than he’d shown to that moment.

Most every round before and after that was a copy of its predecessor, though only Usyk employed cruisecontrol and only for a little bit in the 12th round, at that.

This Saturday the second World Boxing Super Series semifinal happens with undefeated Russian Murat Gassiev (25-0, 18 KOs) and undefeated Cuban Yunier Dorticos (22-0, 21 KOs) trading fists in Russia. That one shan’t appear on American airwaves either.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Lucas Matthysse and Tewa Kiram vie for the vacant WBA Welterweight title.  the action begins at 10:30 PM ET / 7 :30 PM PT/12:30 AM in Argentina and 10:30 AM in Thailand with the WBA Lightweight title bout between Jorge Linares and Mercito Gesta

THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.  NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: 

Round 2 Right from Matthysse…Body shot..Kiram jabbing..Matthysse lands a right..Jab from Kiram..

Round 3 Matthysse lands a right..Kiram jabbing..Mouse under the left eye of Matthysse..Good body shot from Matthysse

Round 4

Round 5 Matthysse has an abrasion over his left eye

Round 6 

Round 7 Kiram holding..

Round 8 BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES KIRAM….RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KIRAM AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Gesta lands a left..Lefts and right from Linares..Left from Gesta

Round 2 Linares lands 3 right hands..Right hook from Gesta..Right…

Round 3 Right and body from Linares..Good left hook

Round 4 Combination from Linares..

Round 5 Good straight right hand a combination to the body..

Round 6 Hard right from Linares..

Round 7 Great body shot..6 punch combination..

Round 8 Left from Gesta..Linares cut over his right eye…Good straight right

Round 9 Gesta lands a combination..Good left and right from Linares…

Round 10 Trading shots..Linares lands a right to the body and another right..Right hook from Gesta..

Round 11 Left hook from Linares..Good body shot

Round 12 Counter left from Gesta,..

By Norm Frauenheim-

It didn’t exactly resemble the NFL’s release of its annual schedule. Then again, nothing remotely resembles boxing.

Still, Showtime tried to put some order onto the sport’s trademark chaos Wednesday with an orderly news conference full of dates, hopes and fighters dressed like first-round draft picks.

On one level, it worked. It offered a plan and expectations with a calendar-like reliability about what should happen.

From this corner, the best of the promised dates is a featherweight rematch, Leo Santa Cruz against a re-energized Abner Mares on June 9 at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, the setting for the first one — a dramatic Santa Cruz victory by majority decision in 2015.

On another level, Showtime’s announcement was familiar. Remember, this is boxing, meaning the sort of intrigue that is an uncomfortable mix of anticipation and concern.

To wit: Deontay Wilder-Luis Ortiz on March 3 at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. It’s a key test for Wilder’s heavyweight aspirations and a pivotal step toward a potential blockbuster – Wilder-Anthony Joshua. The worry is that it will never happen because of Ortiz’ PED history. Ortiz was forced to withdraw from a Nov. 4 bout because of a positive test. Instead, Wilder beat an out-of-shape stand-in, Bermane Stiverne. Wilder frets he’ll never see Ortiz in the ring because of another positive test. He should worry. Showtime should, too.

The network’s calendar of nine cards runs through June and opens on Feb. 17 with Phoenix super-middleweight champion David Benavidez in a rematch against Ronald Gavril on Feb. 17 in Las Vegas.

It’s something of a blueprint, something to build on. That means it’s incomplete, in part by design, yet also because of the chaos that is always there.

Despite anticipation for Santa Cruz-Mares and the unsettled intrigue surrounding Wilder-Ortiz, there are doubts about a potential fight that has had everybody buzzing in the days since welterweight Errol Spence Jr. put himself squarely in the middle of the pound-for-pound debate with a stoppage of Lamont Peterson.

There’s a lot of talk that Spence is already the world’s best. Not sure about that one. I’d still like to see him in another big bout before putting him ahead of Terence Crawford, Vasiliy Lomachenko and Mike Garcia. But after Saturday his name has to be included in any current pound-for-pound debate.

Forcing Peterson to quit after the seventh round was a display of Spence’s dynamic skillset, yet the victory was hard to judge because of everything Peterson lacked.

Spence, it seems, is one fight away from proving he should be No. 1 in the pound-for-pound debate. A fight against Keith Thurman.

For now, however, it looks as if he might denied that opportunity in a fight later this year. Thurman told reporters Wednesday at the Showtime news conference in New York that it wouldn’t happen in 2018.

On the Showtime schedule, Thurman is scheduled to fight May 19 in his first bout since undergoing elbow surgery last year. For now, there’s only TBA next to Thurman’s name for that date. To Be Announced is not on anybody’s list of contenders. For Thurman, however, it’s a reasonable way to test that elbow.

But then what? Another TBA? Thurman called 2018 “a get-back year’’ Wednesday. If he looks good on May 19, however, there figures to be calls for him to re-consider a late-year showdown with Spence, who has a June 16 date somewhere in hometown Dallas, perhaps in a mandatory title defense against Mexican Carlos Ocampo.

Spence said he is wiling to give Thurman “a pass” in his first bout this year. But it’s not clear if that pass will still be there 10 months from now.

Trouble is, Spence is on the fast-track to stardom. Already, there’s talk about opportunities for him at 154 pounds, which would allow to move up the scale and into a division that Floyd Mayweather Jr. also dominated.

Thurman is understandably careful. He’s been battling injuries. He hurt a shoulder while training in 2014. He hurt his neck in an auto accident in 2016. He will have been idle for more than a year when he finally returns in May.

He’s right. He needs time. If Thurman takes too much of it to get back, however, Spence might be long gone.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Errol “The Truth” Spence made the first defense of his welterweight trinket at Barclays Center in Brooklyn Saturday night, comprehensively battering Lamont “Havoc” Peterson until Peterson’s trainer Barry Hunter could offer only what he has always offered his fighter: compassion. After seven rounds, with Peterson lost for answers and looking for the one opportunity he dare not request, Hunter waved responsibly his white towel.

So ended what was always going to be an easy first defense for a fighter who wanted anything but. Fights of the magnitude Spence desires (and is there any reason to doubt him?) require the type of opponents PBC practices have long discouraged such opponents from taking. Eight months have passed since Spence travelled to Sheffield and made a repeat capitulant of Kell Brook. That may be an acceptable amount of time to secure a unification fight, something at least with a whiff of intrigue, but it is months too long a wait for a conclusion both arbitrary and foregone. Peterson has a name, yes, is endearing in both style and character, but had done nothing in his career to suggest he might trouble if not the best welterweight on the planet, the best threat to the bearer of that distinction. One fight in two years is hardly sound preparation for such a challenge.

Dogged, fearless as he may be—and he is both in charming amount—Peterson was there to be run over by Spence and run over he was. A slow starter who acclimatizes to opponents behind a wide stance and a high guard is unlikely to prosper against Spence, who works without any consideration for his opponent’s pace. Peterson paid dearly for what he gleaned of Spence’s attack; there was no parsing, no rejoinder, just a man who crumpled further in the rounds he expected to compete in. When Peterson turned up his aggression Spence varied his assault. To his headlong abuse he added a more elusive, mobile, yet no less destructive attack, countering Peterson and cracking him at angles. This wrinkle served as testament to Spence’s versatility and willingness to listen to trainer, Derrick James. These are qualities that will serve Spence when something more daunting than the eye-test awaits.

If there was some solace in watching Peterson teeter ominously under even the punches he blocked it was that Hunter did not wait long to begin the conversation that would end the fight. It says very little about the matchup that that dialogue started as early as it did, but it speaks volumes about what Peterson means to Hunter. And if that is romanticizing the cruelest sport so be it. A sport that is propelled by what-ifs and glorifies sacrifice has room for such idealizing.

Idealizing extends also to who is next for Spence, though perhaps it is too early in the new year to issue loaded questions—especially in this column, which has resolved to gripe less about a sport that can be discarded easily for alternative entertainment, a sport that will always—if not quite frequently—deliver thrills however long the doldrums in between.

Besides, Spence, at least for now, resides in the unique position of being compelling regardless of opponent. Such an assessment is a criticism of his opposition, otherwise the emphasis would not be on what Spence does in the ring but who he does it to. That such a criticism can be issued one fight removed from his breaking Brook speaks to the penalty of inactivity, yes, but also to how very good Spence is. For any other welterweight a win over Brook would make a victory lap tolerable.

Such grace periods should be short-lived, of course, and it is hard to imagine Spence devouring a pablum diet remains compelling for more than another fight or two. But that soft stretch shouldn’t persist any longer than that. Keith Thurman, the object of Spence’s obsession for years, will return to the ring eventually, and Spence will be waiting, unlikely as he is to be unmade by anyone willing (or allowed) to fight him until then. The financial realities of the PBC are such that the Thurman fight should be delayed only as long as it takes for “One Time” to return. Despite his inactivity, Thurman has never shied from taking a stern challenge after a long layoff (so make what you will of any shuffling of his feet where Spence is concerned). If Thurman is more professional boxer than fighter, and there is some evidence that he is, Spence will show it, titles will change hands, and the what-if that really follows Spence will loom greater than before.

Because what it takes to diffuse Spence doesn’t appear to be a semi-active, uninspired pseudo-puncher with the unfortunate habits of both relying on his legs for defense and wilting from body punches. Rather, Spence’s nemesis is more likely to be a fighter who can fight him as a fellow southpaw, one whose power is predicated primarily on accuracy and timing, who can fight coming forward or backing up; a fighter with the intelligence to put himself in the position to win, and the malice to deliver a victory once poised for it. Incredibly, that fighter exists, and he too is running out of suitable opponents. There are significant obstacles between the two, of course, but this is the sport of what-ifs, right?

So fuck it, let’s make it explicit: Errol Spence-Terence Crawford. What if?

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Barclays Center welterweight titlist Errol Spence unmanned former junior welterweight titlist Lamont Peterson in a very good fight that was stopped by Peterson’s corner after the seventh round. Spence used well the physics and geometry of combat to attain his career’s first title-defense victory.

The inevitability of that victory happened in round 2 when Peterson jabbed to Spence’s body and Spence parryswatted that jab – a classic no no; you do thousands of reps of abwork so you don’t have to parry or block jabs to the body – then Peterson feinted the same punch about a minute later, watched Spence’s hand drop, blasted Spence with a lead hook, and absolutely nothing happened. When one fighter executes perfectly his tactic and the other fighter hardly notices, the match becomes obviously a mismatch. From there the larger, better, more predatory man beat to soft his challenger until mercy intervened.

One hesitates to celebrate the conclusion of the match much as one may wish. In the generally unoriginal and unabashedly imitative domain of contemporary boxing telecasts one fears the rippling consequences of a writer subsequently embracing a corner stoppage by a decent man – for fear it becomes a thing, as the kids like to put it, a shortcut for selfaggrandizing towelboys before television cameras – but with that preamble in place, let us celebrate it nonetheless.

Whatever popular consensus says, and it appears a universally positive consensus, Barry Hunter has the air of a cool cat, a man’s man, a proper gentleman. Even still, if you watch his jaw and the work it does on his chewing gum as he awaits the right moment to stop Saturday’s match, you see right manifested the internal conflict a man like Hunter prides himself on hiding. He knows what a corner stoppage says to a prizefighter about his corner’s confidence, and he knows what happens to a corner once its fighter knows he no longer has its confidence: Time to move on.

Was Hunter’s evident anxiety about getting fired?

No, of course not.

Such a petty concern appears beneath a man like Hunter. It was more an instant weighing of probabilities: This is the last time Lamont can have me in his corner, which means this is the last time I can protect him from himself, which means either this moment releases him into a harsher boxing world, or this moment retires him. Notice Hunter asked for the round number before he made his decision; one imagines if he’d heard, say, “tenth”, he’d have let Peterson out for another while – Lamont deserves to finish, Lamont finishes strong, Errol’s punches lose steam after nine. But the distance from eighth to twelfth, that quarterhour, was too great, so why attempt the leap partially?

What should not be understated in this dynamic, though, is the precedent of Hunter’s commitment to his man. This wasn’t a mercenary trainer doing a celebrity signon with a shot fighter to get himself a new car and recruiting video before hearing his conscience suddenly clang. This was a man proving in the decisive moment his fighter’s decision to give his faith to him, decades before made, was right and good.

None of that makes Peterson a candidate for the Hall of Fame, even had he decisioned Spence – an absurdity Saturday’s broadcast floated before the opening bell. Torn through in his prime by Timothy Bradley and Lucas Matthysse, neither of whom likely gets in the Hall, Peterson got caught with performance enhancers shortly after his one defining win, a desperately narrow decision over Amir Khan – a guy who’ll only get in Canastota by paying $13.50 at the door. And Peterson’s excuse for needing testosterone other than his own was a decided inanity, especially from the bearded mouth of a man covered in muscles. But something had to be manufactured to sell tickets Saturday, and the “Juvenile Brothers Peterson on the Streets of Washington D.C.” narrative was already dustybare from overuse.

All of this indeed takes from Spence’s victory, but one senses Spence won’t mind, honest as he is. Before the match Spence conceded his status as a prizefighter PBC stablemates avoid shamelessly is both evidence of his professionalism and a source of appropriate frustration. Here’s that concession’s flipside: No outfit in boxing history has consistently paid so generously for meaningless fights as the PBC, even while its fighters aren’t active enough against competition enough to achieve universal acclaim (PBC fighters rarely grace pound-for-pound lists, no matter their talent). Spence is the one redeeming part of Al Haymon’s aggressive Team-USA-signing initiative of 2012, an initiative that offered a first peek at Haymon’s generally woeful eye for talent, and aware of, if courteously silent about, the circumstances that got him his title shot on foreign soil in May.

During or immediately after which Spence sustained an injury that kept him from fighting for the rest of . . . no, that’s not what happened at all.

Immediately following one of the year’s most captivating performances nothing followed immediately for Spence. In fact nothing followed for the rest of 2017 except a halfassed announcement he’d be making a halfassed title defense in January.

While it’s possible Spence wouldn’t’ve gotten a chance to drawnbutter Kell Brook if Spence’d not been with PBC, it’s nigh impossible to imagine a worse outfit to direct the career of a new champion if that new champion wants anyone but an accountant to review his reign. “It’s called prizefighting, ya dummy!” – I know, I know. Maximum reward for minimal risk is the Money way, which became the PBC way, which now becomes the Showtime way. But in that case, let’s show a little solidarity, guys, and have the competent commentary crew at Showtime stop harping on how damn inactive PBC fighters are.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry