By Norm Frauenheim-

A compelling clash between Leo Santa Cruz and Carl Frampton Saturday in Brooklyn one week after Oscar Valdez Jr.’s ongoing emergence is a sure sign that the featherweights are a loaded division rich with reasons for optimism in a business otherwise clouded by doom and gloom.

In boxing’s boom-and-bust history, the featherweights have become a reliable way to predict better days.

To wit: Manny Pacquiao. His ascent from unknown Filipino kid to worldwide celebrity started with his 2003 upset of Marco Antonio Barrera for a featherweight title in his first bout at 126 pounds.

He caught the attention of hard-core fans with sensational victories at 122 pounds, called either super-bantam or junior-feather, depending on the acronym. It was at 126, however, that casual fans got familiar with his name and copy editors learned how to spell it.

There are some familiar circumstances unfolding in the division now. It begins – and perhaps ends — with Vasyl Lomachenko. He began his pro career already known. He’s a two-time Olympic gold medalist from the Ukraine. In just seven pro bouts, he’s already won two titles and is No. 7 in The Ring’s pound-for-pound ratings.

His promoter, Bob Arum predicts a Muhammad Ali-like impact from Lomachenko, who has already moved up the scale, beating Roman Martinez in a dramatic stoppage for his first title in his first fight at 130 pounds, called either super-lightweight or junior feather. Whatever it’s called, it’s also where Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. began their Hall of Fame careers.

Will Valdez, Santa Cruz, Frampton, Gary Russell Jr. and Lee Selby follow Lomachenko up the scale – in weight and pay – the way Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez and Erik Morales followed Pacquiao?

Valdez’ convincing stoppage of Argentina’s Matias Rueda at Las Vegas MGM Grand for his first major title at 126 – the WBO version that Lomachenko held – was evidence that history is repeating itself. The guess here is that Santa Cruz and Frampton will provide further evidence Saturday at Barclays Center Showtime-televised bout (9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT).

Valdez, a two-time Mexican Olympian, figures to make his first title defense in Tucson, where he went to school and first began to box, maybe on Nov. 26.

It promises to be a bout that will further solidify his championship credentials and his place alongside the better-known Santa Cruz or Frampton. It’s also a bout that would allow Top Rank to continue marketing its new featherweight champion in a way that could lead to a major 126-pound bout against one of Al Haymon’s featherweights –Santa Cruz, Frampton, Russell, Selby, Jesus Cuellar and Abner Mares.

Mares had a fight scheduled for June 25 in Brooklyn against Cuellar canceled because he reportedly failed the New York eye exam. It’s not clear what’s next for the popular Mares, also a former Mexican Olympian. If California licenses him, however, a bout with Valdez is an intriguing option

It’s also possible. Arum settled his $100-million suit against Haymon a couple of months ago. By all accounts, they’re talking. Part of the discussion must include the featherweights. They’ve always been a good reason to get out of the courtroom and back to business.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at a half-full MGM Grand Garden Arena undefeated American junior welterweight Terence “Bud” Crawford dully decisioned Ukrainian Viktor “The Iceman” Postol on pay-per-view to become the lineal and HBO and non-PBC 140-pound champion of the world. A half-full arena was about right and Crawford is almost certainly the world’s best junior welterweight but this thing had no worldly business being on pay-per-view.

If Bud thinks there’s any appetite remaining for a talented American boxer who safely decisions limited opponents Saturday’s pay-per-view receipts should disabuse him and his promoter and their distributor of it. No good whatever came of Mayweather-Pacquiao 1 including the likelihood of fooling consumers with handspeed and defense in lieu of knockouts for another decade. If you are able to dominate a man in the boxing ring you should snatch his consciousness in a half-hour of trying or you’re not trying hard enough for today’s chastened pay-per-viewer. To box Postol the way Crawford did and satisfy disgruntled consumers Postol would need to be big as Golovkin and feared as Kovalev.

Instead Postol was a rangy counterpuncher with a single speed and dimension who last year caught a once-feared Argentine at the end of a witheringly violent career then bounced enthusiastically round the ring with Crawford for 36 deeply unsatisfying minutes. Postol was a C student Saturday who hoped to score a B- by being early to class and trying real hard. Making Postol look ordinary was not a function of Crawford’s greatness so much as making Postol look remarkable was a function of Lucas Matthysse’s October bankruptcy.

Crawford switches stances often in every match and switched early from orthodox to southpaw Saturday and th’t it seemed to unravel every facet of Postol’s training camp at Coach Freddie Academy does not speak well of preparations done by The Iceman or his trainer. Crawford’s choice to screw with Postol’s lead hand for most of the match was tactically sound but hardly ingenious. One imagines the first three or four times Crawford successfully slapped Postol’s left knuckles with his right palm then rolled his fist forward into a jab Crawford thought: “Sweet! Didn’t think that’d work but let’s do it a few more times until this guy adjusts.” If Crawford wasn’t surprised Postol had no cure all night for such a rudimentary poison he certainly ought to have been.

Rounds 6, 7 and 8 were nigh unwatchable and Crawford deserves the blame for it. He learned everything there was to know about Postol in the fifth round and instead of walking him down and putting the Ukrainian’s lights out Crawford decided to show us a defensive prowess not 50,000 people in a world of 7 billion still wish to see. Crawford was able to keep Postol out of position by changing directions and angles continually and if that was genuinely compelling for a full minute that minute passed in the match’s opening rounds and was no longer welcomed. If Postol was still dangerous – even after Bud clipped him and despite Postol’s negligible KO record – all the better: In history aficionados have been willing to spend more than $50 to see only one man remain undefeated forever and Crawford will not be the second.

Not one financially disinterested person is clamoring for Floyd Mayweather’s return to boxing anyway; whatever one feels about watching a skilled practitioner master a lesser man can be felt in a minute or at most a round of boxing; no one needs to see it done 12 times over. It’s not suspenseful like a tightrope walk unless the lesser man is frighteningly larger or at least frightening in some way. Viktor Postol had 12 knockouts in 28 prizefights.

This was a tryout of sorts, we’ll soon learn, for a chance to welcome Senator Manny Pacquiao back from a retirement he didn’t dignify even with skipping a fight. Is Crawford-Pacquiao a compelling match? Actually yes. But decisioning Viktor Postol anticipates the outcome of Crawford’s match with Pacquiao like a clever Facebook post anticipates a Man Booker Prize. Friday night we didn’t know how Crawford might fare in a match with Pacquiao and Sunday morning we still didn’t know.

What plagues boxing now and will do so for at least a generation is its lack of depth. Chris Algieri decisioned a puncher? Put him in with Pacquiao! Viktor Postol attritioned a puncher? Get him to Crawford! It’s not merely that men with Algieri’s and Postol’s records were prematurely fed to far superior practitioners but worse than that there were few opponents with which to build them properly before cashing them out; Postol and Algieri were sacrificed early because they were not going to become more than sacrifices and at least were marketable.

Empty gyms round the country will not remedy this and neither will USA Boxing’s inevitably poor showing next month in Brazil. We can stop the search for our sport’s next savior, in other words, because even if he crash-landed on the Vegas Strip in a spaceship we wouldn’t know what to do with him – though PBC would offer him an advisory contract and shot at “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.

Once more: Order leads to increasing returns which bring chaos that leads to decreasing returns which bring order and so on forever and ever. We’re in the decreasing-returns part of the cycle now and it behooves none of us to deny it. Paying $60 for Crawford-Postol is denying it worse than charging $60 for Crawford-Postol.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Terence Crawford and Viktor Postol fight in a WBC/WBO Super Lightweight unification bout.  The action, from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with a 3-fight undercard with a Featherweight world title bout between Oscar Valdez and Mattias Rueda.  Also on the card will be weltweights Jose Benavidez Jr and Francisco Santana.  The action kicks off at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with a Light Heavyweight tussle between Oleksandr Gvozdyk and Tommy Karpency.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1: Crawford gets in a right inside..Right from Postol

Round 2: Right to to body from Postol..Bidy shot from Crawford..left to body.left to body..Left

Round 3 G.ood right from Postol..right to body…right,,Left from Crawford..2 rights and  jab from Postol..right to the chest

Round 4 Hard left from Crawford…2 more hard lefts..right to body from Postol..right..Right from Crawford..

Round 5 LEFT AND DOWN GOES POSTAL..HARD LEFT AND POSTOL’S GLOVE HITS CANVAS…

Round 6 Postol lands a right..

Round 7 Right hook from Crawford..hard body shot..left

Round 8 Left rocks Postol..

Round 9 Good left hurts Postol..

Round 10 2 straight lefts from Crawford..

Round 11 2 nice counters for Crawford..Body shot from Postol..Right from Crawford…Counter..POSTOL DEDUCTED A POINT FOR HITTING BEHIND THE HEAD

Round 12: 2 shots from Postol..Good right..Hard shots from both guys…

118-107 twice 117-108 FOR TERENCE CRAWFORD

Round 1 Jab from Valdez…2 more left hooks and right..Huge right…Jab

Round 2 Blood from nose of Rueda..Good Jab..ripping right…BODY SHOT AND DOWN GOES RUEDA…BIG COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES RUEDA…FIGHT STOPPED

Round 1 Santana working on the ropes..Body shot by Benavidez..Body…Good uppercut..Santana lands a left hook..hard combination rocks Santana..Hard combination

Round 2 Combination to the head..Hard uppercut from Benavidez snaps Santana’s head..Ripping head..

Round 3 Santana gets in a combination on the ropes..Terrific in fighting on the ropes..Right on ropes from Sanatana..Great round

Round 4 hard work on the ropes from Santana…

Round 5 Body shot from Benavidez…Combination to the head..

Round 6 Hard right from Benavidez..

Round 7 Benavidez countering and landing some hard shots from distance

Round 8 Good right uppercut from Benavidez..Good left from Santana…Right rocks Santana..Santana rallies at the bell

Round 9 Right from Santana…Santana looking exhausted…Benavidez pot shotting …Good combination

Round 10 2 good shots from Santana..

100-90, 96-94, and 98-92 FOR BENAVIDEZ

Round 1 Karpency lands a left…KARPENCY DROPS GVOZDNYK WITH A RIGHT..Gvozdyk lands a left..Left from Karpenct

Round 2 Right from Karpency..Body shot

Round 3 Gvozdyk lands a body shot

Round 4 Gvozdnyk out working Karpency..Good right

Round 5 Karpency bleeding from the bridge of his nose..Left from Karpency

Round 6 Body shot from Gvzdnyk…BODY SHOT DROPS KARPENCY…FIGHT IS OVER

By Norm Frauenheim

LAS VEGAS – It’s a unification fight in a contentious game as divided as ever.

Terence Crawford or Viktor Postol will walk out of the MGM Grand’s ring Saturday night with three pieces of a 140-pound title and into a fractured business hit by declining revenues and unsure about how to proceed.

It’s a rare bout, matching The Ring’s No. 1 and No. 2–rated junior-welterweights and both unbeaten. It’s the kind of fight that media and fans always demand to see, yet rarely do. If interest is measured in dollars and praise, however, it’s not there.

Amid criticism, promoter Bob Arum is offering the fight on pay-per-view for $59.95. HBO is carrying it. Yet, Arum is on the hook for the purses, $1.3 million for Crawford (28-0 20 KOs) and $675,000 for Postol (28-0, 12 KOs). The money for the fighters isn’t in the HBO budget. The premium network reportedly cut its boxing budget for 2016.

Arum decided to go forward with the bout on PPV anyway, in part because he wants to keep Crawford busy. With a victory, Crawford, nearly a 7-1 favorite late Friday, could win a shot at Manny Pacquiao on Nov. 5 at Las Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center. If Crawford gets past the dangerous Postol and upsets Pacquiao, he could solidify his credentials as boxing’s next superstar.

But would the money be there for him? Given today’s economics, could Pacquiao, a new Filipino Senator, expect his usual $20-million guarantee? Arum says Pacquiao understands that the business is in decline since the Filipino collected a reported $180 million for a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, a colossal dud, is seen as the beginning of the ongoing crash.

In some ways, Crawford-Postol represents the start of a different era with smaller expectations, at least in terms of purses. Getting used to it, however, might take some time. Arum is not happy about it. He’s expressed frustration at the criticism he’s getting for putting Crawford-Postol on PPV.

“I want to thank the press for telling the fans not to buy the fight,’’ Arum said to a few reporters as he left the media room after the weigh-in Friday. “I’ll remember.’’

Arum needs 80,000 pay-per-view customers to break even, according to several sources. It was hard to predict whether he’ll even get that number. An estimated crowd of fewer than 1,000 was at the weigh-in Friday. Crawford, of Omaha, tipped the scales at 140 pounds. Postol, of the Ukraine, was 139.5.

Despite the one-sided odds and media complaints about pay-per-view, the fight itself looks intriguing. Postol has developed a nasty, powerful uppercut since Freddie Roach became his trainer. Roach, also Pacquaio’s trainer, will be in Postol’s corner for the fourth time. He’s so confident that he came into the media room after the weigh-in Friday, showing off a betting slip. He wagered $1,000 on the chance to collect $9,000, picking Postol to win by knockout.

“In any round.’’ Roach said.

That might turn out to be better bet that big a pay-per-view audience.

By Norm Frauenheim-
LAS VEGAS – From Salvador Sanchez to Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales, the history of Mexican featherweights reads like royalty. Is Oscar Valdez Jr. next in line? Bob Arum thinks so.

Arum anointed Valdez as a heir apparent Thursday during a news conference for the 25-year-old’s bid for his first major title against Argentina’s Matias Rueda on the undercard of the pay-per-view bout featuring junior-welterweights Terence Crawford and Viktor Postol Saturday night at the MGM Grand.

“The great Mexican featherweights include Morales and Barrera,’’ said Arum. “Juan Manuel Marquez campaigned at featherweight for a while. We believe Oscar Valdez can surpass those legends.’’

Valdez smiled. Might have gulped a little bit, too. It’s great to be mentioned alongside all-time greats. But predicted potential can also be thorns on a burdensome crown.

“I think he exaggerated,’’ said Valdez, whose easy-going streak of humility includes a healthy sense of humor.

Valdez (20-0, 17 KOs) grew up in Tucson and Nogales on the Mexican side of the Arizona border as a kid who idolized Morales. The two-time Mexican Olympian has met Morales. He’s always wanted to be like him. But Valdez has taken his dad’s advice. Oscar Valdez Sr. said he told his son to forget about the comparisons.

“I don’t like to think that way, about Oscar becoming a Mexican idol like Barrera and Morales,’’ said Oscar Valdez Sr., who introduced his son to boxing in Tucson and then moved back to Nogales where he lives and works in real estate today. “I’d like him to go just step-by step.

“I don’t like to think that he’s a big star now, because he’s not. So, I tell him he needs to go, little-by-little. I told my son not to think he’s the big super-star, because he’s not.’’

Father knows best. Valdez has no illusions about the here-and-now, which is the immediate task of facing an unknown, unbeaten Argentine with 23 knockouts in 26 victories for a WBO title vacated by new junior-lightweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko.

“To be compared to Erik Morales means a lot to me, but I ‘ve got a long way to get to what he and Marco Antonio Barrera did,’’ Valdez said. “A long, long way.’’

Valdez said he was surprised to hear Arum say he would surpass his heroes.

“Yeah, it did surprise me,’’ he said. “Of course, it did.’’

Arum’s projection creates bigger expectations for the promising Valdez. But, as Charles Barkley once said, pressure is for tires. Valdez doesn’t seem to feel much, if any. Above all, he appears to enjoy the bigger stakes and heightened attention.

“It puts me on the spot, ‘’ said Valdez, the potential star on an Arizona-accented undercard that includes former junior-welterweight Jose Benavidez Jr. of Phoenix at welterweight against Francisco Santana (24-4-1, 12 KOs) “But it’s good. I never get pressured. I’m very focused on what I do in training. I’m aware of what I’m capable of.’’

Against Rueda, he plans to display some more of those emerging capabilities. Rueda is fighting for only the second time in the United States. He won a bout in Tampa in October, 2015. He’s unknown. Then again, so was fellow Argentine Marcos Maidana before he stunned Victor Ortiz in 2009.

“I’ve seen tapes of him,’’ Valdez said. “Sometimes, he barely hits guys and they fall. So you can tell he has a hard-hitting punch. But I’m ready for him. I’m ready.’’

Ready for Rueda and everything else that might be next, too.
Attachments area

By Norm Frauenheim-

Adam Lopez, a former Phoenix super-bantamweight now of San Antonio, hopes to celebrate 15 years of ShoBox with a victory of his own.

The unbeaten Lopez (15-0, 7 KOs) is in the main event for the 15th anniversary of “ShoBox: The New Generation” Friday night (Showtime 10 ET/PT) against Roman Ruben Reynoso (18-1-1, 7 KOs) of Argentina at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Conn.

Lopez hopes his career unfolds the way other careers have during the long run of the Showtime series. Deontay Wilder and Andre Ward, to name just two, fought on ShoBox early in their careers.

Lopez is coming off a decision over Mario Munoz for a minor title on Feb. 19 in Atlantic City. Reynoso has won 10 straight.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at the Bartow Arena in Birmingham the reigning Alabama and PBC heavyweight champion Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder discouraged California’s Chris Arreola to a referee or corner stoppage after the eighth round of a match Arreola took on short notice because he was going to lose anyway after Wilder’s intended opponent anticipated his country’s ban from the Summer Olympics by failing a drug-related IQ test. The PBC on Fox in conjunction with Showtime but not CBS and NBC as part of a synergistic agreement with ESPN, Spike and Fox Sports 1 (though not Fox Now’s buggy app) had the call in the U.S. and apparently much of the broadcast was ad-free.

Though Wilder’s confidence grows with each title defense his precision diminishes more quickly.

Somewhere in the last month or so I read about the virtues of watching television programming at increased speeds. The article grew from an unrelatable foundation like: There’s so much television one simply must watch today and so little time when one considers other necessities like, I suppose, Facebook updates and Snapchats th’t one must utilize technologies to gulp what one’s parents sipped. I neither sip nor gulp from television and so I filed the article under curios and downloaded the Chrome plugin to procrastinate from doing something strenuous as yoga – and if you don’t know what a Chrome plugin is you probably paid three times too much for your laptop. Since then I’ve deactivated my Flash player and casted about for a chance to be amazed by this amazing new technology and none presented itself till Sunday morning.

There’s always something better to do on a Friday or Saturday night than watch PBC matches live because the main reason to watch live sports is to prevent others’ robbing you of the suspense and drama of outcome (unless you’re one of those few honest folks who entertains the collective delusion one’s witness to an event from distance changes the event, which remains probable as it is impossible to prove) and PBC matchmaking delivers both suspense and drama at ratios low enough to be historic. Anyone interested in our sport enough to read this column could run his index finger down the next two years of PBC main events and mark the winner with 95-percent accuracy and Saturday’s mismatch was more mismatched than usual. Where the pessimist drops his head in his hands and gnashes teeth at what’s become of boxing, though, the optimist sees an opportunity to test a wonderful new technology he downloaded sometime in the last month, with a YouTube video of Saturday’s main event.

Pay close attention because a bit of technological dexterity may be needed to decipher the riddle of the next few sentences.

You should not watch a PBC heavyweight match on YouTube at 2x speed because you’ll miss a few of the punches and the Scottish guy on the commentary team sounds muddy more than muddled and while his insights are reliably nil his garbled consonants distract from the action before you at speed. You should try 1.5x; anything less is not worth the trouble of a plugin download and if you’ve not been watching much faster and better prizefighting in lower weightclasses for the past two decades you may find heavyweights moving 50-percent faster than usual a touch too suspenseful. Goldilocks says 1.7x is the perfect rate.

It’s so right and Sunday morning’s 20 minutes were so proper I’ve decided to put the perfect viewing rate of a PBC heavyweight match right in the name of the PBC’s flagship commodity: Deontay “1.7x” Wilder. At the 1.7x rate his Saturday opponent moved like a cruiserweight and even appeared at various intervals to want to fight the man across from him.

There are two reasons Wilder did not stop Arreola in Alabama. The first is Arreola’s sense of pride that trends inversely with his conditioning in a ratio that allowed Arreola to lumber from a fat guy who could box to a trimmer guy who bleeds on cue and absorbs like a paper towel. The second reason is Deontay Wilder is awful at boxing.

According to breathless ringside reports Saturday night Wilder tore his right bicep while punching. Do you have any idea how difficult that is from an orthodox stance? To turn the trick one cannot merely throw a straight punch wildly crooked but also must touch no part of his knuckles to the target at impact. It’s a feat of both technical incompetence and faulty depth perception; if you throw the right hand correctly while being blind in one eye or throw the right hand incorrectly while trusting a third dimension exists, either one, you cannot tear your right bicep while punching and that means you fail in a way Wilder succeeded Saturday.

He succeeded for the right reason at least and that was rage. When Wilder gets another man hurt in front of him he verily loses his mind and while his finishing moves resemble an infant in tantrum more than a predator in the wild he looks dangerous to inexperienced eyes, 9,000 of which showed a patriot’s zeal in Birmingham.

Wilder is a great regional champion, the best heavyweight in Alabama and perhaps the entirety of America’s South, but in a meritocratic world he’s a scalp. Even at age 50 Vitali Klitschko would wear Wilder’s silly bronze mask like a codpiece.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action live as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight title against Chris aArreola.  The action begins at 8 PM with a Jr. Middleweight bout between Erickson Lubin taking on Ivan Montero.  The co-feature will pit Sammy Vasquez Jr and Felix Diaz in a welterweight bout.  After Wilder – Arreola, stick around for bonus action as Gerald Washington takes on former world title challenger Ray Austin in a heavyweight bout, former world champion Vic Darchinyan battles Enrique Quevedo in a super bntamweight tilt and welterweights Jamal James and Wale Omotoso do battle.

THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY–NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1 Right from Wilder..

Round 2 Wilder lands a right.  Arreola cut on the nose.

Round 3 Arreola working the body..Chopping right and another right from Wilder..

Round 4 Uppercut from Wilder..BIG COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES ARREOLA..Arreola bleeding from his right eye..Big right rocks and wobbles Arreola

Round 5 Wilder lands a hard jab…left hook..Body shot from Arreola..Uppercut from Wilder

Round 6: Jab from Wilder..

Round 7 Wilder lands a jab…Good right..3 punch combination..right hand..Big right at the bell

Round 8 Nice jab from wilder..3 punch combination..Body shot..Arreola left eye is closing..Left hook…THE FIGHT IS STOPPED IN THE CORNER

Round 1: Lubin working the body

Round 2 Combination and body shot from Montero.  Combination and Body shot from Lubin..Good left..Nice left hook..Over hand left..

Round 3 Lubin working the body…Straight left

Round 4 Jab from Lubin..Body shot…

Round 5 3 body shots from Lubin

Round 6 Good combination from Lubin..2 jabs..right to body

Round 7:  Uppercut from Lubin

Round 8

Round 1:  Body shot from Vasquez

Round 2  Diaz getting through with a couple lefts

Round 3 Diaz lands a body shot

Round 4 Diaz lands a body shot..Both going ti the body..Good uppercut from Diaz,,

Round 5:  Diaz continuing with the left

Round 6: Vasquez lands a body shot…Straight left by Diaz..Combination

Round 7: Right from Diaz..Good body shot

Round 8:  Vazquez beginning to bleed from his left.  Diaz lands an uppercut…Right Hook

Round 9:  Diaz lands a shot in the corner ..Jab..Good left…Vasquez lands a left

Round 10 Vasquez cut over the right eye..Vasquez lands a left..Vasquez deducted point for spitting out mouthpiece

96-93, and 95-94 twice for Diaz

Sergey Lipinets scored a 7th round stoppage over Walter Castillo in a junior welterweight bout in Tunica,
Mississippi.

Lipinets landed a hard right that hurt Castillo in the seventh frame. He landed several clean power shots that backed Castillo into the ropes and a few more shots forced the referee to stop the fight at 2:45.

Lipinets, 141 lbs of Beverly Hills, CA is 10-0 with eight knockouts. Castillo, 142 lbs of Managua, NIC is 26-4-1.

Tugstogt Naymabayer stopped Rafael Vasquez in the first round of their scheduled ten round featherweight bout.

Nayambayer dropped Vasquez in the first thirty seconds with a straight right, Thirty seconds later, it was another right that put Vasquez on the canvas again. Another big right hurt Vasquez, and he ate three more chopping rights that sent him to the canvas for a third and final time and the bout was stopped at 1:24.

Nayamabayer, 123.6 lbs of Van Nuys, CA is now 9-2 with six knockouts. Vasquez, 124 lbs of Brooklyn is now 16-3.

David Perez won a six-round unanimous decision over Adam Ortiz in a bantamweight bout.

Perez dropped Ortiz in the first round with an uppercut.

Perez, 119.5 lbs of Houston, TX won by scores of 60-53, 59-54 and 58-55 and is now 7-0. Ortiz, 122.2 lbs of San Marcos, MX is 9-2.

By Norm Frauenheim

A Viktor Postol victory over Terence Crawford could lead to a Postol-Manny Pacquiao fight and force trainer Freddie Roach to choose between Postol and Pacquiao.

It sounds awkward. But Roach, trainer for both Postol and Pacquiao, says it wouldn’t be.

“It wouldn’t be the worst position in the world,’’ Roach said Thursday during a conference call nine days before the Postol-Crawford junior-welterweight bout July 23 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. “I feel like Viktor has done everything to get ready for this fight, to win this fight.’’

“If that does happen, I’ll have to deal with it.’’

The possibility emerged this week amid reports that Pacquiao would fight later this year in his first bout since he was elected to the Filipino Senate a few weeks after his rematch decision over Timothy Bradley in a welterweight bout in April.

Danny Garcia appears to be the leading possibility when — and perhaps if — Pacquiao decides to resume his career. Longtime Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum, who also promotes Crawford and Postol, also said the July 23rd winner could land a shot at the Senator with a spectacular performance.

Postol and Crawford will fight at 140 pounds, which many believe is Pacquiao’s ideal weight.

“If that fight will happen, we’ll then sit down with each team to see how it goes,’’ Top Rank vice-president Carl Moretti said.

Then, Moretti couldn’t resist the chance to deliver a good punch line.

“As far as Freddie goes, it would be great to see him run back-and forth, from corner-to-corner,’’ Moretti joked.

That wouldn’t happen, of course. Roach’s longtime role as Pacquiao’s friend, confidante and corner man dictates that he would be in the Filpino’s corner.

“Me and Manny have been together for 15 years,’’ Roach. “It would be very difficult to go against him, of course. But, you know, I know Viktor is a very good fighter also.’’

If the Postol-Pacquiao happens, Marvin Somodio, Roach’s longtime aide, would probably train Postol.

BROOKLYN (July 13, 2016) – Former two-division world champion Paulie Malignaggi is set to defend Brooklyn’s World Championship Belt in a 10-round welterweight showdown after being challenged on Twitter this afternoon by fellow Brooklyn-native Gabriel Bracero on Saturday, July 30 live on SHOWTIME EXTREME.

Malignaggi earned the title of “King of Brooklyn” when he defeated another Brooklyn-born star in former world champion Zab Judah in December of 2013 at Barclays Center. This version of the “Battle for Brooklyn” will once again have local bragging rights on the line, with both men looking to impress in front of a hometown crowd.

“Representing Brooklyn with this belt has been something I’m very proud of,” said Malignaggi. “I relish the competitive spirit of being able to defend it against another quality Brooklyn fighter like Gabriel Bracero. I fight for Brooklyn and I represent Brooklyn with everything I’ve got each time I step into the ring and on July 30 it will be no different.”

“This fight is going to have two Brooklynites, finally meeting inside the ring, in a really exciting matchup,” said Bracero. “What better way to highlight that, then having the Brooklyn’s World Championship Belt on the line. Growing up in Brooklyn is what has made me the man and the fighter that I am today. I respect Paulie for giving me this opportunity, for putting his belt on the line and everything he’s done in his career. On July 30 though, that belt is coming home with me. I will be the new champion of Brooklyn.”

Click HERE for video of Bracero’s challenge and HERE for video of Malignaggi’s response

Tickets for the live event, which is promoted by DiBella Entertainment in association with Cyclone Promotions and presented by Premier Boxing Champions, start at $38 and can be purchased online by visiting www.ticketmaster.com, www.barclayscenter.com or by calling 1-800-745-3000. Tickets are also available at the American Express Box Office at Barclays Center. Group discounts are available by calling 844-BKLYN-GP.

“Malignaggi-Bracero figures not only to be a highly competitive fight, but is truly a battle of Brooklyn,” said Lou DiBella, President of DiBella Entertainment. “Paulie has had a fantastic career, but this is a dangerous matchup for him against a tough fighter.”

“There’s nothing more fitting than two Brooklyn fighters, Paulie, of Bensonhurst, and Gabriel, of Sunset Park, standing toe-to-toe in the ring at Barclays Center,” said Brett Yormark, CEO of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment. “Paulie holds the title of Brooklyn’s World Champion. On July 30, his belt is on the line. Who’s going to take it?”

The July 30 event features a SHOWTIME CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING headlined by a featherweight world title clash between Leo Santa Cruz and Carl Frampton. Coverage begins live on SHOWTIME at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT and features former two-division world champion Mikey Garcia returning to the ring to take on former champion Elio Rojas plus 154-pound contenders Tony Harrison and Sergey Rabchenko in a world title-eliminator. Lightweight sluggers Ivan Redkach and Tevin Farmer will also battle in televised action on SHOWTIME EXTREME.

A former world champion at 140 and 147-pounds, the 35-year-old Malignaggi (35-7, 7 KOs) will return to the ring to fight at Barclays Center for the fifth time. He has faced a slew of big names throughout his career and has been victorious over the likes of Judah, Vyacheslav Senchenko and Pablo Cesar Cano. Born and raised in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, “The Magic Man” was victorious twice fighting in his birth country of Italy last year after unsuccessfully challenging unbeaten Danny Garcia in August.

Another Brooklyn-native, Bracero (24-2, 5 KOs) comes off of a sensational one-punch knockout of rival Danny O’Connor in their rematch last October. The 35-year-old owns victories over Dmitry Salita and Pavel Miranda in addition to his first triumph over the previously unbeaten O’Connor in 2011.

# # #

For more information visit www.SHO.com/Sports follow on Twitter @SHOSports, @LeoSantaCruz2, @RealCFrampton, @BarclaysCenter, and @Swanson_Comm or become a fan on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/SHOSports, www.Facebook.com/DiBellaEntertainment, www.Facebook.com/barclayscenter. PBC is sponsored by Corona, La Cerveza Mas Fina.

ABOUT BROOKLYN BOXING™
Upon opening in 2012, Barclays Center brought major championship boxing back to Brooklyn after more than 50 years. Over the past four years, the BROOKLYN BOXING platform has hosted more than 120 bouts and more than 20 world title fights while giving local fighters their own shot in the spotlight. In April 2016, BROOKLYN BOXING extended its brand by creating an active wear and lifestyle apparel line that is available at www.BrooklynBoxingShop.com. BROOKLYN BOXING is proudly presented by AARP.

By Bart Barry-

Sometime soon – or conceivably as you read this – light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev will beat up a South African named Isaac Chilemba in a Russian city called Yekaterinburg. HBO will air the mess sometime this evening as part of a yearlong promotional attempt to have Kovalev fight Andre Ward in the network’s one anticipated fight of 2016.

Since now everyone is a promoter anyway . . .

This afternoon the man who calls himself “The Golden Boy” but others know as the Joburg Jo and the Malawi Malcontent, the Gauteng Gatlin Boy and the Terror of Turning Stone, Miguel Isaac Chilemba Zuze, brings his broadfists and rage in a Russian ring with the express purpose of mauling Sergey Kovalev not far from the Soviet Union’s best-known nuclear-waste dump. Frankly the broadcast in broad daylight should be rated R and the reason HBO will not do its tapedelay till after dark. That a network specializing in naked violence and graphical gore like “Game of Thrones” would ultimately flinch at a live broadcast of a boxing match reports to its viewers the unalloyed peril that accompanies Chilemba whenever gauze mounts his knuckles and leather rides his flying fists.

Actually Chilemba is the right man for the job of launching HBO’s one-off MNB series as men returning from second shifts at work will conduct an informal race with Krusher to determine if Kovalev can put Chilemba to sleep before Chilemba snatches the consciousness from HBO’s viewing audience. Such suspense now heralds the Monday arrival of the manly art of self-defense.

The case of Chilemba raises what has become a common question for main events in a way it once was a common question only in undercards and walkouts: Does Chilemba know he is going to lose or will awakening from unconsciousness bring him more than the standard surprise? And if he does know he’s going in the ring as a sacrifice, did he know it before signing the contract or while boarding his flight to Russia or during the weighin that probably happened while this got written?

There was a time so many Mexican taxistas and albañiles staffed the nohoper side of undercards one brought his opera glasses to spot Alfonso Zayas at welterweight or Tun Tun at straw, a time competent matchmakers allowed nary a victor to shuffle from the red corner across a 12-match marquee. After showing valor and a certain whimsical willfulness for a quarter hour this hopeless opponent of the prospect being developed would catch a left hook or right cross flush and drop as if shot then rise to his right knee before the seven count and retain his crouch till the fabled 10 1/2-count at which time he would spring upright and spread his gloves to plead the ref allow his continuance. The referee would make some avuncular gesture or other embracing the lad to tell him neither could conscience his absorbing one more blow. Then the nohoper would do a shameless lap of posture and disbelief before conceding it was not the prospect’s fault and in a show of abiding sportsmanship raise the victor’s taped fist high above both heads.

After a short medical suspension this taxista or albañil would be back on the circuit making enough money to bid zealously on a used pickup truck postfight (my favorite such character was the supremely courteous Genaro “Trancazos” Trazancos who after beginning his career 1-1-1 managed to get himself on television a number of times and fight Miguel Cotto’s older brother and Steven Luevano and Edwin Valero in a three-loss streak that became a curtain-calling 1-11 [10 KOs] close to his career). Such men had no believable chance of prevailing but truly believed they might ring one up and slice the other man just once – since it takes only a punch – and gave honest fighting efforts in a way few of us circumstanced similarly would do. Their job was to ensure a knockout. They were stuntmen who expected to complete the jump but didn’t mind a net stretched just below.

With the advent of the PBC and its quality bending effect there’s no longer any banking on an opponent’s honest effort. Most of the a-siders have adjusted to this and found solace in admonitions to win tonight and look good next time and while that next time never comes it’s not a thing PBC handlers think a biographical video cannot fix. Writing of biographical videos, the only reasonable explanation for HBO’s signing a contract that binds the network to air this farce is a chance to roll viewers towards a Terence Crawford infomercial for a pay-per-view match that mayn’t find its 100,000th viewer in a couple weeks.

Kovalev is a problem for the contemporary nohoper arrangement. He’s a bully-cum-sociopath who derives open joy from torturing lesser men. One might hope performing before a crowd of fellow Russians would leash his psychopathy a teensy-weensy bit until one recalls Kovalev killed Roman Simakov in the very same city five years ago. Kovalev is a loving father now, we’re told, and probably appreciates human life fractionally more than he did then and so Chilemba may well be safe this afternoon.

Therein lies another explanation for boxing’s moribund fanbase: Another main event, an HBO main event no less, finds aficionados fixated on the health and safety of its network-sanctioned opponent.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Cesar Juarez stopped previously undefeated Albert Pagara in round eight of their scheduled 12-round super bantamweight bout at the San Mateo Event Center in San Mateo, California

At the end of round one, Pagara dropped Juarez with a left hook.

Juarez rushed out of is corner in round eight and landed a hard right that drove Pagara to the corner and down for the count at 15 seconds of round eight.

Juarez, 121.2 lbs of of Mexico City is 18-5 with 14 knockouts. Pagara, 121.2 lbs of the Philippines is 26-1.

Jason Pagara scored a third round stoppage over Abraham Alvares in a scheduled eight round welterweight bout.

Pagara dropped Alvarez with a right hand and the fight was stopped at 55 seconds of round three

Pagara, 146 lbs is now 39-2 with 24 knockouts. Alvarez, 147 lbs of Sinaloa, MX 21-11-1.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Sergey Kovalev returns to Russia on July 11 for his first fight in nearly five years with titles and an emerging celebrity he never had or perhaps could have ever envisioned.

Kovalev won his first championship, the WBO ‘s light- heavyweight version, in Wales with a 2013 stoppage of Nathan Cleverly. He defended it for the first time in the French-Canadian town of Quebec City with a knockout of Ismayl Sillah , also in 2013.

The Russian, a first-time champ in Wales with an initial title defense in Canada, gained his first chance at American-style stardom a 2014 upset of an enduring American legend, Bernard Hopkins in Atlantic City.

Therae was a Robin Williams’ line in Moscow on The Hudson, a 1984 film about the defection of a musician in the old Soviet circus during a tour stop in New York.

“Yesterday, I bought my first pair of American shoes,’’ the Williams character wrote in a letter home. “They were made in Italy.’’

In true American fashion, Kovalev is made of a lot of things, many of which are still being discovered in an ongoing story that is moving toward what could be a defining chapter against Andre Ward on Nov. 19 in Las Vegas.

First, however, a few things have to happen and not happen. Kovalev (29-0-1, 19 KOs) has to beat Isaac Chilemba (24-3-2, 10 KOs) in Ekaterinburg, 137 miles from Kovalev’s hometown, Kopeysk, in a bout that HBO will televise, tape-delay (10:15 p.m., ET/PT).

“I must get my victory for my next possible fight,” Kovalev said. “You lose once, everything goes broke.’’

Broke comes with a double meaning. The much-anticipated Ward-Kovalev bout sets up the winner as one of the game’s potential big earners. In a poll featuring boxing’s top earners in 2016, for Fortune magazine this week, Ward is ranked No. 5 and Kovalev No. 6.

Given the decision by Canelo Alvarez–Fortune’s No. 1–to bypass No. 3 Gennady Golovkin until at least next year, Kovalev-Ward looms as the biggie in 2016.

Ward has to uphold his part in the deal on Aug. 6 against Alexander Brand in Oakland. The guess here is that neither Kovalev nor Ward is in much risk of a loss. The bigger threat is an injury that could delay the fight, using it into 2017.

Kovalev, often as bold before a fight as he is dangerous during one, is already promising to do what no one else has.

Chilemba, awkward and mostly unknown, has never been stopped.

“Nobody has ever knocked Chilemba out,’’ Kovalev said. “I want to be the first.’’

Fighting at home for the first time since 2011 might come with some unfamiliar pressure on Kovalev. A hometown crowd might want something spectacular from a newborn star, who has been deadly on the road. Who knows how he’ll react at home?

There’s another element in all the plot lines surrounding the geography. Kovalev will be back in the same arena where his opponent, Roman Sinkov, died after he won by a stoppage.

Since then, Kovalev has said little about the tragedy. The people around him talk about it more than he does. For Kovalev, the job is more about the here –now, the immediate task in front of him.

Nevertheless, the Sinkov death is an unmistakable part of the Kovalev story in each day and every step he takes toward opening bell on Monday. If he wins as expected, he ‘ll have a definitive answer.

Maybe that’s just one reason he has gone home. Unresolved questions are a little bit like unfinished fights. They have to be confronted and Kovalev has yet to back away from one in a lifetime full of traveling from one confrontation to the next.

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – There’s a coffeehouse and bar concept called Halcyon in the south-downtown part of this city called Southtown and what brought me here the first time years ago were the make-your-own open-flame s’mores they bravely serve under the paintings local artists hang for-sale on their walls. What brought me here this afternoon was the eclectic crowd that assembles on Sundays and Mondays. If this column is about boxing at all its author’ll be surprised.

There’s a finch nest tattered in the corner above the window that reflects beside my seat. The nest hung there a month or so and by design was unnoticeable unless you were seated directly beneath it when an occupant flew home or you were an airborne predator and in the second case it was still necessarily unnoticeable. The nest came apart a half hour ago when the wind took the dominant strand away and the unraveling accelerated to disorder. The occupants returned a few minutes ago, a couple – not unlike the folks who just sat across from me on a couch fractionally comfortable as it looks and we’ll see how long they endure it. The finches have no apparent memory how was the nest when they departed but recognized instantly the place they alighted on is uninhabitable currently but shows potential as a home with some repairs – a fixerupper possibly in foreclosure. They set off fusslessly on their task and collect from the ground a blessedly large collection of twigs – what good fortune, this! – that is their former nest unbeknownst to them.

The lass across from me is attractive but covered in tattoos each with a story and pretty clearly in the throes of a tinder date with a douchebag of sorts who nonetheless satisfies the Texas female’s one mating requirement: He is tall. He’s whispering to her about me and it raises an interesting question for any writer: Did he know I thought this about him before I read what I’d written and realized I thought this about him because I didn’t realize I’d noticed him so much as the finches, much less like a competitor, till the beginning of this runon sentence? They’re giggling girlishly now (about my hat probably) and it brings to mind the timeless wisdom of Sir Mix-A-Lot: “I’m a giggle wit’em, ‘cause I wanna get wit’em.”

It’s later than usual and that keeps the brunch crowd from occupying too many tables and it makes the mix in Halcyon right now quite good – modellish women, bearded men, students, lesbians, a few toddler siblings dressed in matching purple outfits by their conscientious mom. The temperature is rising unfortunately because there’s only so much of the good fight any establishment might wage against the summer suffocation of South Texas and if the cooling system kept things below 75 when the place was 1/3 full it’s got no chance against the arrival of the second- and third-third. Its initial emptiness signed departed South Texans, our townsfolk off and enjoying the holiday elsewhere, and much as one hoped the city removed itself to Calgary or Montreal to enjoy rejuvenating climes the greater likelihood is folks who’d otherwise be here brunching were instead floating inebriatedly southwards on one of our many waterways.

Even a year ago I might’ve glanced at a boxing calendar on some site or other before writing a column about not writing a boxing column but it didn’t cross my mind last night when the idea for this column scurried on in. That marks its own demarcation of an extraordinary sort: There was a time I started worrying about my next column Tuesday morning and chastised myself openly if Wednesday evening didn’t bring a workable plan. While I haven’t quite drawn a bead on what my more honorable and mechanical self of 2005 should’ve opined about the writer I am now I suspect he’d have been amused – an appreciation of absurdity being the one thing that held constant in the boiling variable stew of this last decade. Or so I hope.

A good column in a good paper this morning returned me to a months-old pledge to read more Rudyard Kipling and so I enjoyed “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” before going to Central Library, this city’s colorful architectural event that comprises a Botero sculpture in the front atrium and Chihuly glass in its middle. There was a time a tale of cowardice and redemptive courage such as Kipling’s on a Sunday morning would’ve won a tangential inclusion in the week’s column. Instead its allusion here is direct and freely unrelated. Read Kipling because he’s imaginative and not in order to learn something.

Funnily enough the working title for this column was to be “Planning a trip to Johannesburg instead of writing a column” – as planning was what I’d planned to be do doing – but thoughts of a short and wonderfully cheap flight to Cape Town midway through a two-week stay in South Africa seemed unacceptably premeditated when set below all that preceded. It’s something like intuition the way these destinations get chosen or a feeling assembled preconsciously of sounds and images and promised delight from Dublin to Barcelona to Bogota to Joburg.

And now I’m going to mention the young lady who replaced the tall-n-tatted couple on the lima-green sofa, in a faded midnight-blue blouse with upsidedown pink elephants marching between paisleys because I just imagined a conversation with her in which I’d tell her I’m writing about the rebuilding birds’ nest reassembling above us in lieu of writing about boxing and after a 20-minute soliloquy about creative process at the end of which she’d say in exasperation she was overdue at her boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s place I’d tell her to check this column the next morning and see if I was joking when I said I’d mention her.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

The birthday was a long shot. Few guessed it would ever happen. Mike Tyson is 50. Buster Douglas probably faced smaller odds when, as a 42-to-1 underdog, he beat Tyson more than a quarter of a century ago.

Tyson’s milestone, instead of an early headstone, came and went Thursday amid some headlines, but none of the deafening craziness that defined him for so long.

That’s an upset. Tyson’s biggest victory, too.

In doing a cover story on Tyson for The Ring in 2014, he told me: “Let’s be men about this. Be honest. You didn’t think we’d be talking to each other like we are right now. Did you? Come on now, be real. You thought I’d be dead, right? Hey, I thought I’d be dead.’’

Tyson survived — survived prison, drugs, booze, outrage from the infamous bite he took out of Evander Holyfield’s ear and all the rest – because he learned how to deal with the personal demons, who once outnumbered the crowd in his entourage. How did he do it? He grew up.

It sounds simple enough. But it wasn’t, especially for a kid from the streets of Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood who won the world heavyweight title faster than anyone in the fabled division’s history. He was 20, which is another way of saying he just wasn’t ready for worldwide attention and unprecedented money.

“There ain’t no future in my past,’’ he told me in 2014.
He began to figure to figure that out after the past landed him at rock bottom. He was virtually finished as a fighter when he arrived in Phoenix in the fall of 1998, searching for a way to resurrect his career after the infamous Bite Fight disqualification at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand in 1997. He was in Arizona for counseling and to train at an old gym that the city was about to demolish.

Central Boxing was scheduled for the wrecking ball when Tyson decided he wanted to train there in beat-up building without air-conditioning. There’s AC there, now. But Tyson liked it for the hot box it was. Within its old walls, temps could hit 130 degrees during summer days in the Arizona desert.

Tyson saved the gym. It’s still there, near the state capitol and with AC. But nothing could save his career, which Holyfield effectively ended by stripping him of the intimidation that defeated so many frightened opponents before opening bell. After moving to Phoenix, he fought 10 times, winning five, losing three and getting no-contest in two. But he scared no one any more, other than himself.

It was that period in Tyson’s life when he used talk, often ad nauseam, about what a waste it had been. Again and again, he said he was sick and tired of boxing. He knew he didn’t want to be in the ring anymore, but he was because of a tax bill and other financial responsibilities.

When I first met him as a reporter for The Arizona Republic newspaper, I was cautious, fearful perhaps that he’d go off on a rant and take a piece of my ear. I’d stop at Central and he’d look through me as if he had never seen me. Then, there were times he welcomed me like an old boyhood friend. He just wanted to talk and he would, almost non-stop.

After one workout, I told him I had to leave. He followed me out into the mid-summer heat and to my truck. I opened the door and Tyson dropped his heavy right hand on my left elbow. I felt a hint of the power that frightened the heavyweight division for so long.

With one quick yank, he could have pulled my arm right out of its shoulder socket. I froze. Tyson talked. I listened.

It was then I realized Tyson was mostly afraid of himself, especially when he knew he was finished as a fighter. What was next for somebody who knew nothing else? He talked then, and continued to talk for another couple of years, as though he was trying to exorcise the demons. I was skeptical that he ever could. But he did, confronting tragedy when a 4-year-old daughter, Exodus, died in an accident on treadmill in Phoenix in 2009.

The tragedy helped forge the man. He would be back in Phoenix to visit ailing Muhammad Ali before Ali’s death on June 3. A week later, Tyson was a pallbearer for Ali’s funeral in Louisville.

Tyson was there to honor Ali. It was a sad moment, a reason to grieve, yet also fitting in terms of a heavyweight history full of champions, each different and yet each linked by what they did and how they did it.

Happy Birthday, champ.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn, Florida welterweight Keith “One Time” Thurman hit Ohio’s “Showtime” Shawn Porter many many times and all over though not too often on the chin and beat him by three fair scores of 115-113. Social media reacted with uncharacteristic sobriety to a match Showtime-on-CBS-presented-by-PBC commentary mistook for a historic war from opening bell to closing after promising a historic war over and over and over.

The match was better than expected and about a third what viewers heard it was from the PBC’s circusbarking play-by-play dude. Somewhere in his relentless drumbeat of historic punchstat figures and legendary power this contradiction became obvious in a way best posed like a question: How come Mike Tyson never set any activity records in his heyday?

Television, mankind’s greatest yet enthusiasm-dissemination device, embraces then amplifies emotions as they arise, picking them up and setting them down instant by instant, and therefore no conflict registered to Saturday’s on-air lunacy. But here it is in a plainspoken way television can’t do: If Keith Thurman hits so damn hard, how come 200 chops with the Thurman axe didn’t dent much less fell the Porter tree? How come a Sunday morning camaraderie pic of Thurman and Porter saw Porter looking so clean, safe and sane?

Because Porter has a legendary chin! Sure, right, whatever; legends don’t get dropped by clowns like Adrien Broner and Porter did.

Great acts of combat inspire great prose.

“They both appeared exhausted in the final round but let it all hang out,” wrote ESPN’s Dan Rafael.

“With the kind of tremendous action they created in the ring, a rematch is a no-brainer and an easy sell,” wrote USA Today’s Mike Coppinger.

Porter was what his supporters believed he was and Thurman was a bit less. Like every other volume puncher in history Porter erred with his chin over his front knee, too anxious to impose himself and consequently wide open to counter uppercuts. Thurman landed a few and more of other counters like his left hook but often Thurman was in such frantic and tanglefooted retreat the punches did not measure on Porter’s chin the way they attacked PBC viewers’ ears.

Congratulations of a sort for that: The missing component of television broadcasts has long been its flattening audio that makes all punches sound the same. PBC raced directly past that issue in a wide circle that now has every punch sounding much louder and the same.

It is easy to call Porter a fun fighter without calling him or Saturday’s match legendary and probably advisable too. Being anywhere but Brooklyn for a columnist had the advantage of being far from the event’s boorish puppet-promoter sweating and screaming across press row about the quality of his product. Porter combines athleticism, desire, and yes, intelligence the way young Timothy Bradley and Juan Diaz did. He is aware of his limitations in a way his opponents are not; volume guys do not fear violence or exhaustion or ridicule the way they shudder at others’ right uppercuts but it takes a Juan Manuel Marquez – much more than a Keith Thurman – to plant and hold steady with a wildman racing your way. Porter’s jab wasn’t merely the decoy it appeared but wasn’t much more than that either. When the two men jabbed together Porter’s jab was often the first arriver but no credible source ever said Thurman had a great jab.

What Thurman has is a right hand and sometimes a left hook but it’s been so long since he fought an opponent bad enough to make him look invincible it’s admittedly hard to recall what made us so excited about him years ago but speed and intensity are good places as any to look. Or perhaps it was our delirious search to find some welterweight who might ice Floyd Mayweather that made us see in Thurman more than was there. Whatever images once danced in our heads Thurman’s footwork today rates, on a scale of novice-to-master, about: Amir Khan + 1.

Porter was able to jab him out of position and spin him fairly easily because, whatever postfight allusions Thurman concocted about Muhammad Ali (who as an aside gave away opening rounds in order to knock George Foreman out, not decision him narrowly) Thurman’s feet rarely anchored his body properly. His vaunted power, which took precious little fight out of Porter, relied heavily on Porter’s aggressiveness and Porter delivered that aggressiveness, swinging and missing ferally and fairly often(ly), but Thurman was out of position or in-position and retreating at the time of Porter’s arrivals mostly. A generation raised to confuse wide circles and wasted effort with great defense surely saw in Thurman’s tactics something like genius but not the rest of us. Better put: In 36 minutes of what horizontal ferocity snaps heavybags from gym ceilings vertically Thurman didn’t once show Porter as much conviction or technique or effect as “About Billions” did.

Still, Thurman-Porter 1 was dramatic throughout and suspenseful occasionally. Let us see an immediate rematch. According to their Sunday pic neither guy was ruined by Saturday’s match and according to previous box-office receipts neither guy is popular enough to spend another year starching novices. Provided the check clears this week CBS should agree to air the rematch in December, too – maybe even at a discount.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

In the final seconds of round three, Karl landed a big left hook that sent Solis to the canvas.

In a battle of previously undefeated Jr. Welterweights, Darwin Price won a eight round unanimous decision over Semajay Thomas.

Price scored a knockdown in round one from a left hook. In round seven, Thomas began to bleed from his nose.

Price, 138 lbs of Houston won by scores of 80-71 twice and 79-72 and is now 10-0. Thomas, 140 lbs of Chicago is 7-1.

Price landed 131 of 387 punches. Thomas was 102 of 480.

Follow all the action live from ringside as Keith Thurman defends the WBA Welterweight championship against former IBF champion Shaw Porter.  The action begins at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with a battle of welterweights Jarrett Hurd & Oscar Molina.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Left from Thurman…counter right..right,,,left to body…

Round 2: Right from Porter..rights and left from Porter on the ropes…left…Porter smothering Thurman on the ropes and landinginside left..

Round 3: Left from Thurman..right from Porter..Good right from Porter…Hard right and left from Thurman..Porter comes back with a flush right and left..

Round 4:  right to top of head by Thurman..left..left..Left from Porter..Trading big shots…left hurts Thurman…

Round 5:  Tremendous exchange…Jab from Porter..Body shot from Thurman..Both land good rights..

Round 6: Jab from Porter…right over the top..Porter applying a lot of pressure..Counter right from Thurman..right over top from Porter…

Round 7: Left from Porter…inside left from Thurman..Left from Porter..Good right from Thurman..Hard right from Porter..

Round 8:  Combo from Thurman…Hard left to the body hurts Thurman..Uppercut on inside..right,,,

Round 9: Right from Thurman…left to body…Big combination from Porter..Thurman is cut over left eye..Great exchange on the ropes..Left from Porter..Cut caued from Headbutt

Round 10:  Big right from Thurman..right…good exchange on ropes..left from Porter…Left buckles Porter,,,another exchange in the corner..

Round 11:  left from Thurman…Right to body from Porter..

Round 12:  Right from Thurman..Left..

115-113 on all cards…AND STILL WBA WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPION, KEITH THURMAN

Round 1:  Hurd jabbing to the body..Molina digging with the left..left to head..left from Hurd…BIG RIGHT UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES MOLINA..

Round 2: Hurd lands a left to the body

Round 3: Jab from Hurd…triple jab..left uppercut…Left hook to head from Molina…Jab to body from Hurd..

Round 4:  Right from Hurd…Molina lands a counter right…left to body..right to body from Hurd..uppercut from Molina…trading left hooks..right to body from Molina…

Round 5:  left to body from Hurd…left to body from Molina…left to head…right from Hurd…right on insde…flicking right and left…left from Molina

Round 6: Right from Hurd drives Molina back…left on inside…uppercut and right…hard right uppercut…

Round 7:  Left from Molina..hard right from Hurd…Hard left hook from Molina..right…left from Hurd

Round 8: Combination from Hurd..Hurd working inside..Jab..hard counter right…right..big right

Round 9:  Right and left from Hurd…1-2 from Molina..Jab from Hurd…Good work by both fighters..Good right from Hurd…

Round 10:  Hurd shoves Molina to canvas…Right from Molina…left and right from Hurd..Hurd pounding the body..Counter right from Molina..3 SHOTS TO THE HEAD THE FIGHT IS STOPPED FOR HURD

Chris Eubank Jr. stopped previously undefeated Tom Doran in round four of scheduled 12-round middleweight bout.

Eubank dropped Doran with an uppercut in round three and sent Doran down three times in round four and the bout was stopped at 2:35

Follow all the action as Anthony Joshua defends the IBF Heavyweight title against Dominic Breazeale in a battle of undefeated former Olympians.  The action begins at 5:15 ET / 2:15 PT and 10:15 PM in England

BROWSER WILL REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1: Joshua lands a 3 punch cobination

Round 2:  Upercut and right rock Brezaele

Round 3:  Joshua showing good hand speed.  Brezeale taking shots well.

Round 4:  Joshua lands a big uppercut

Round 5:  Breazeale right eye beginning to swell.

Round 6:  Joshua teeing off on the bad eye of Breazeale

Round 7: Joshua lands a hard right..FOLOW UP COMBINATION DROPS BREAZEALE.    JOSHUA LANDS A HARD LEFT HOOK..3 MORE PUNCHES DOWN GOES BREZEALE AGAIN AND THE FIGHT STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

The news hasn’t been good. More like lousy.

On the Canelo Alvarez-Gennady Golovkin front, nothing is happening. On Wednesday, there was news – more like non-news — that they have agreed not to agree, meaning the fight will probably happen in the fall of 2017. That’s when public demand is supposed to peak. At least, that’s the bet.

If television ratings in free fall are a trend, however, the source of that demand might not be there. PBC’s last primetime telecast, featured by Joe Smith Jr.’s quick stoppage of light-heavyweight Andrzej Fonfara last Saturday on NBC, approached the infinitesimal, dipping into the fractions at .8, barely a heart beat.

So, why am I feeling optimistic? Not sure, other than to say that the boxing is back at the perilous place where it always seems to be at its best. Beneath all the scars, there’s defiance.

It explains the resiliency, which within the ropes is personified by the fighter who gets up from a devastating knockdown to win. It explains how the business has survived the obits, of which there are many right now. Yet, that stubborn defiance, double-edged and chaotic, always pushes the game to the brink, too. Nothing is safe, not even – or perhaps especially — prosperity.

It’s back at that brink, all over again, for well-documented reasons, starting with the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao dud in May, 2015. The litany of bad news — an eroding fan base and falling revenue, sets the stage for another comeback.

One might already be underway with super-featherweight Orlando Salido’s dramatic draw on June 4 with Francisco Vargas at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif.

The next chapter might be played out Saturday night in the welterweight clash between Keith Thurman and Shawn Porter at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on CBS (9 pm ET/6 pm PT). Potentially, it’s a classic match of power (Thurman’s) against speed (Porter’s) between fighters just entering their primes.

Thurman (26-0, 22 KOs) is 27; Porter (26-1-1, 16 KOs) is 28. There might be better welterweights. There’s the UK’s Kell Brook, who scored a majority decision over Porter at StubHub in 2014. There’s emerging Errol Spence, who a couple of years from now might be the best in the division.

In the here-and-now, however, there is Thurman-Porter on a big stage in a bout with enough elements for enough drama that for one night can make everybody forget about whether Canelo-GGG will ever happen.

“You got two young fighters in their prime, fighting on primetime,’’ said Thurman, who calls himself One Time. “I mean, this is the time. This is the primetime. Mayweather is gone. Pacquiao is gone. There is no better time than this time, you know, for this fight to go down and for each one of us to showcase our skills and our talent to the world and take it to that next level.

“So nothing – there should be not one ounce of hesitation from either fighter. It should be a great night of boxing. I’m definitely looking forward to it.’’

Stephen Espinoza, of CBS subsidiary Showtime, is hoping for what Thurman has promised.

“Boxing takes criticism for not making the right fights at the right time,’’ Espinoza said Thursday at a news conference. “One of the bad habits we have is that we spend time thinking about fights that might get made. But now we have the right fight, at the right time and at the right venue. It’s a disservice to not recognize that what is going on Saturday is very special.’’

Very necessary, too.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn in what remains of an anticipated title match for an expiring sport Ohio welterweight “Showtime” Shawn Porter will square up with Florida’s Keith “One Time” Thurman in a match that figures to disappoint what exaggerated expectations desperate aficionados have affixed to it. This will be yet another chance and in all probability one of the last for PBC to captivate a nationwide audience and win new fans to its brand of boxing.

Thurman and Porter have nearly identical records and nearly identical stretches of inactivity, and while that sort of thing once may have marinated things richly today it does little more than serve as a reminder of the incompetence with which they’ve been handled. Their manager/promoter group, once the brainchild of a visionary and rapidly becoming what kids these days call a cautionary tale, has taken whatever whitehot enthusiasm ever existed for either of these fighters and doused it to soggy.

Thurman, a charismatic action fighter whom an accomplished promoter like Bob Arum might’ve made an international heartthrob, is now a joke of sorts. He has steadily lost others’ esteem even while not losing a match. Wait, when did I last see him fighting? – you probably wonder. In a July homecoming fiasco that saw Luis Collazo wave off his own bout to ensure the PBC darling got another w and Collazo got his name engraved on the PBC Employee of the Month plaque hanging above a headquarters restroom with what majesty GoPros hang off PBC-referee headbands.

Is that too irreverent? Then let us acknowledge the irreverence as a reflective surface off which bounces former aficionados’ disgust with what has become of their, our, oncebeloved sport.

Nothing holds constant in this game. That is the lesson of what has happened to a sport that was passably popular if not thriving just five years ago. No, folks round the proverbial watercooler were not fluttering their tongues about prizefighting but those who cared about the sport had four or five annual events worth traveling to, incredible happenings in no way tarnished by others’ absent interest. That is gone now. Quickly as the quality of combat deteriorated the reverence for sanctioned combat accelerated directly past it. Boxing attracts misanthropes and was long vulnerable to its supporters’ routine sneers. What it collects now is fulltime indifference occasionally interrupted by derision. People, often former readers, now ask boxing writers what sort of writing we’re doing these days, convinced it couldn’t be boxing and too uninterested to find our URLs in the forgotten Boxing folder of their Favorites bar.

Do Porter and Thurman deserve the blame for all that? Of course not, but their manager and promotional network deserves a halfshare.

Thurman postponed the match, too, helping folks to assume someway it would not happen. But that postponement should not undo our memories; if this fight had happened when it was scheduled to go off, the gap in both men’s careers still would’ve been unacceptable: Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, two fighters whose first match in 1981 remains the standard against which all welterweight tilts are measured 35 years later, each fought less than three months before their championship match – a true superfight.

This is what that has come to: Both Thurman and Porter went in tough about a year ago, Porter barely surviving Adrien Broner and Thurman needing Collazo’s selfejection to remain undefeated. Neither Leonard nor Hearns would’ve needed more than five rounds to obliterate either Collazo or Broner (or Thurman or Porter), and both men would’ve fought again round Labor Day having done so. With the collective departure of Mayweather and Pacquiao, Thurman and Porter are two of the world’s three best welterweights and considered the benevolent PBC god’s reply to years of aficionados’ futile prayers.

The worst part is the fight won’t be great and likely not entertaining either. Porter, for all his ferocity, just isn’t very good. He’s a boxing-is-bodybuilding sort whose physique anticipates a concusiveness well subverted by his technique. But what musculature!

Whatever we thought Thurman was three or four years ago he hasn’t been very much of it in recent fights. If your talent or tactics see you grinding out a lame decision against a 40-year-old Leonard Bundu, you’re probably not going to go HAM on someone with 16 career knockouts. Expect a keepaway effort from Thurman, while the announcing team drills and exercises about courage and nonstop whatever.

It will be sanitized, too, whatever else it is. PBC boxing feels far too safe to keep serious fans or attract casual ones. It is Mayweather’s brand of violence without Mayweather’s brand of promotion. It is men behaving like gentlemen in press conferences and amateur boxers in the ring, concerned with points and safety and so forth more than violence or pain or willfulness.

I’ll take Thurman by dull decision, in a match social media, queued by PBC commentary, initially mistakes for a historic war.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Legacy is for sale these days. Bottle it, slice it up into parcels, package it, label it with an acronym and sell, sell, sell it on caps and T-Shirts. Just dial 1-800-LEG-ENDS, and you can have one too.

It’s become a cliché, mouthed in locker rooms, gyms and studios so often as to become meaningless. But Muhammad Ali’s death re-defined it for what it really is. Legacy ain’t cheap.

In fact, it can’t be bought at all, at not least in the dollars that these days seem to serve as the final arbiter of what and who has value. Of what and who doesn’t.

It took Ali’s death on June 3 and an extraordinary funeral on June 10 in hometown Louisville to remind us of that. This is not meant to be another eulogy of who he was and what he means. How history looks at him will change and evolve from generation to generation.

In the here-and-now, however, Ali’s singular place as a heavyweight champion and a cultural icon serves as an example of what boxing has been, can still be, yet isn’t because of a business model gone awry.

The worldwide reaction to Ali’s passing is a sure sign that there is still a global fascination with boxing. I know, I know. Media and corporate elites uncomfortable with the sport’s inherent brutality say Ali was bigger than boxing. But he would have been just another gasbag if not for a ring that allowed him amplify his fearless nature.

Fifty years from now, I’m willing to bet he won’t be remembered for pictures alongside Malcolm X or of him being escorted out of a federal building in Houston after saying no to the Army’s draft at the height of the Viet Nam war. It’ll be that Neil Leifer photo of him posing over a fallen Sonny Liston.

That was Ali in a snapshot.

It sums up the fighter and personality who didn’t calculate his career and life in terms of the risk-to-reward ratio, an equation built to enhance the money while eliminating the chance of defeat.

He took the risk. Paid for it too, in a brutal 1975 victory over Joe Frazier in a second rematch and a 1974 victory over George Foreman in a fight famous for the rope-a-dope. Ali exhausted Foreman by absorbing punches that make you wonder whether one night’s tactic led to the Parkinson’s discovered a decade later.

Parkinson’s terrible symptoms were what subsequent generations of fighters would see and many would avoid.

At the same, time, the best of those generations would always strive to achieve what Ali had in his legacy-defining career. The unusual twist is that Ali never talked about legacy during his battles with Liston, Frazier and Foreman. Who did? It could have been a brand of cologne for all he or anybody else knew.

It became a part of every fighter’s vocabulary because of Floyd Mayweather, Jr., who has said he surpassed Ali. TBE – The Best Ever, Mayweather calls himself, mostly because he is unbeaten (49-0) and Ali wasn’t (56-5). The TBE acronym is on shirts and caps in every size. Just try one on. No legacy is too small or too big.

But this off-the-rack legacy cheapens what Ali did and, in turn, has turned off most of those in the global congregation that mourned his passing.

Mayweather’s real legacy is money. Nobody in any sport has ever earned as much. Maybe, TBE means The Biggest Earner, because that’s what Mayweather is and will be for awhile, if reports of his $240 million for a victory over Manny Pacquiao in May, 2015 are accurate.

In today’s dollars, Ali’s $6 million for his ‘75 victory over Frazier would be about $27 million. Very big money, but just a few more Bugatis in Mayweather’s garage.

Mayweather, a terrific boxer and a better businessman, turned Ali’s legacy into a calculation that enriched him, yet left the rest of the business scrambling in the wake of his victory over Pacquiao.

On-and-off negotiations for Mayweather-Pacquiao inflamed the public’s imagination for years. It’s no coincidence that the global appetite for boxing, dormant for so long, suddenly came alive in anticipation of a bout some thought would be the second coming of Ali-Frazier.

That didn’t happen. Not much of anything happened, other than the consequences. That’s no secret in an ongoing decline reflected in crashing PPV numbers – a reported 400,000 to 500,000 for Pacquiao’s rematch victory over Timothy Bradley in April and 450,000 to 600,000 for Canelo Alvarez’ knockout of Amir Khan in May.

That’s not a legacy anybody would want

In the weeks after Ali’s death, boxing starts over. It’s no coincidence that he will be mentioned often. That will begin June 25 for Keith Thurman-versus-Shawn-Porter in a CBS-televised welterweight bout at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

It will be the first time CBS has televised boxing in primetime since Leon Spinks upset Ali on Feb 2, 1978. Appropriately enough perhaps, it set the stage for another of Ali’s trademark comebacks – a decision over Spinks – the following September for his third heavyweight title.

“With the return of boxing to CBS Primetime, we’ve got big shoes to fill,’’ Stephen Espinoza of Showtime, a CBS subsidiary, said during a conference call this week. “It took something very special for CBS to step back in, and that’s exactly what we have.’’

Call it a moment, a chance, to remind a lost generation of fans that legacy is more than a T-shirt.

By Bart Barry

Originally conducted for the San Antonio Historic Preservation Society in 2012, this interview is reprinted with the gymnasium’s permission.

BB: I sure appreciate your getting together to do this chat with me. It’s an odd request, I admit.

SF: Not a problem. Surprises me more people don’t ask. This isn’t going to be a podcast?

BB: No, this is for print.

SF: Obscurity does not offend me.

BB: You began as a bowling alley, correct?

SF: In part. The apartments (Soap Works, today) round me were all part of a campus. We were a Catholic school, and I its gymnasium. The legend is another thing.

BB: Of the church or the saint?

SF: The church. I don’t know much about my namesake. We feel our influences but don’t know our fathers too well. What I know comes from construction chatter as the walls went up.

BB: Before we began, you mentioned being a young edifice in an old city is a different experience from being a young edifice in a young city. These things are relative, too. But what informs your thinking of one city being older than another?

SF: Friendliness. I notice it when there’s a tournament upstairs or down. People come from younger cities. They’re used to bending edifices which way they want. They’re gentler to the walls, harsher to the regulars and staff. Things break all over me after big tournaments. Always with the water. They talk faster. They talk about making a difference to their sons or the generation after that. That’s young-city talk.

BB: That’s not refreshing in some sense?

SF: In no sense. If they get their way, I get torn down, made into more hospital parking or another hotel in –

BB: But you recognize the value of touri –

SF: Some of the buildings I admire most are hotels and hospitals, yes.

BB: As someone who moves around on your mats –

SF: (Smiling) I’ve seen you.

BB: Figuratively speaking, then, as someone who moves around on your mats, there’s a unique, almost hollow feeling. There’s not concrete on –

SF: There’s concrete down here, but you don’t want to touch it.

BB: It’s wooded-over, then?

SF: Yes, exactly. I began as a bowling alley. Some of the wood rotted. It’s been a half century. Those were fun times. Made quite a racket. The buzzer is not torturous as the candlepins were noise-wise. But it’s worse in its way.

BB: Not volume?

SF: Not at all. It’s soft and tinny by comparison.

BB: Then?

SF: My concept of time is decades. It’s hard for me to imagine increments less. Like y’all with millimeters –

BB: Milliseconds?

SF: Yes. I prefer metric. The buzzer goes off so often, so many times, and it builds this terrible anticipation. Like waiting for the next water to drop on your forehead. Relief comes when the damn thing gets turned off at night.

BB: Speaking of which, you’re well preserved in part because of how little time you’re actually open these days. You get mornings off.

SF: That is true. I do enjoy a lighter schedule. It began round 1980, six years after the Close Call.

BB: When they were going to raze you?

SF: Pretty euphemism.

BB: How close did you come?

SF: Well. They had demolition guys walking round. You think they do that at Monticello?

BB: How the hell do you know –

SF: Be surprised the things one picks up.

BB: Basketball game?

SF: Roller derby. They began coming on Tuesday nights some years ago. Then there’s the basketball people. And you guys in the ring below.

BB: Ever have any famous roller-derby participants?

SF: Any what?

BB: How about basketball players?

SF: Doubtful.

BB: Boxers?

SF: Plenty.

BB: How can you tell?

SF: It’s a congregation thing. There’s a way men and women upstairs look at certain players. It’s an admiration, like they’re watching while they imagine themselves being those persons. Then there are the looks sometimes downstairs. It’s a look of incredulousness. It’s the look persons give to persons they did not think they would ever see in front of them.

BB: It’d help this exercise a lot if you remembered any names.

SF: Julio Cesar Chavez, Mike Tyson, Danny Lopez, Jack Johnson, Oscar De La Hoya, Evander Holyfield, Salvador Sanchez.

BB: Those guys have all been here?

SF: Except Jack Johnson. Made that one up.

BB: He was from Texas at least.

SF: Like me.

BB: I’ve read there’s a rule every building grows. But you seem not to have grown.

SF: Inside, some, but no, not outside. They’ve updated bathrooms and put on coats of paint. The lockers and shower downstairs, those weren’t with me before. There are walls inside, concrete. The materials are cheaper inside than out. Because of that infernal heater, I guess.

BB: It’s the only part of you I hate. Who the hell installs an industrial heater in steamy South Texas?

SF: The crazy Portuguese, that’s who!

BB: Joe Souza?

SF: Yes. He did all my interior decorating, too. Such as it is.

BB: These are his fight posters?

SF: All of them. They say his family wants them. The Parks & Rec guys will probably paint me again once they’re gone.

BB: How long have you been city property?

SF: 1974.

BB: Does it bother you?

SF: Not like it did. We are not all destined to be museums, coddled and soft, temperature-controlled this and that. There’s the historic-preservation people, too. Seeing y’all makes me hopeful. It means if someone decides to buy me from the city, which I do not expect to happen, these people will not be able to tear me down.

BB: That’s good.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

Muhammad Ali’s journey, 74 years long, ends Friday where it started. The world that worshipped him will gather in the city where he was born. Heads of state, old rivals, actors, rappers, preachers, priests, promoters, poets and punchers are in Louisville for the Funeral of the Century.

Ali, who lost to Joe Frazier in the Fight of the Century 45 years ago, planned it. He’d give the eulogy if he could, but not even The Greatest could manage that. He’ll have to let former President Bill Clinton speak for him. He’ll have to let the crowd cry, cheer and chant his name.

Ali Bomaye! Ali Bomaye!

That was the African chant before, during and after his 1974 stoppage of George Foreman in what was then Zaire. Listen for that and for the butterfly, the bee and everything else on the sound track that helped define the young Ali, who once said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick.

He’ll be remembered for all the crazy words. For Foreman, Frazier and Sonny Liston, too. For Malcolm X. For refusing to serve in the U.S. Army because of his opposition to the Viet Nam War. For changing his own name, too. Born Jan 17, 1942 as Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, he returns to the Kentucky city with the Muslim name that will never be forgotten.

He might not have been history’s greatest fighter, a spot that belongs to Sugar Ray Robinson. He might not even have been the greatest heavyweight. Joe Louis probably hit a little harder and didn’t let his hands drop in a way that left Ali perilously open, leaving only his durable chin as a defense.

Only Ali would take punches from the powerful Foreman and label the tactic as rope-a-dope. It was risky and unexpected. But Ali did it, exhausting Foreman in a bout that makes you wonder whether it was factor in the terrible disease that would befall him a decade later. Ali couldn’t exhaust Parkinson’s, but he fought it – day-to-day, hour-to-hour – with quiet dignity for 32 years before he died in Scottsdale, Ariz., last Friday at 9:10 p.m. (PST).

I’m not sure how I’ll remember him. As an Army beat living in faraway bases, I had my ear pressed against my dad’s radio to hear what ever I could above the static of the blow-by blow accounts of his victories over Liston.

As a young sportswriter in Florida, I watched the back-and-white telecasts of his 1971 loss to Frazier at a closed circuit venue. I went to a crowded movie theater to see him beat Frazier in their first rematch. Then, I saw him beat Foreman and Frazier again in Manila, all in grainy-and-gritty black-and-white.

It wasn’t long before I moved to Phoenix. My interest in boxing was still there and had peaked with eventual Hall of Famer Michael Carbajal, whom I began to cover at the 1988 Olympics.

Then one day in 2005, I looked up and saw Ali standing in front of me at halftime of a Phoenix Suns game. We shook hands, yet said very little. I wasn’t sure whether Parkinson’s had yet robbed Ali of his speech. I soon found out that it had not. He grabbed me from behind and whispered in my ear.

“You sure are uglyyyyyy,’’ he said.

Surprised, I turned and looked into dancing eyes full of playful mischief. On other encounters, there were the familiar magic tricks.

Then, there was an afternoon in downtown Phoenix about eight years ago. I sat next to him at a Diamondbacks game. He grabbed my notebook and pen. Fifteen minutes later, he gave them back.

On a page in the notebook, there’s a sketch, a stick figure walking toward a leafless tree that seems to be on the edge of a faraway canyon. I wasn’t sure what to think of it then. But I looked at it again this week while thinking of Ali’s death and his funeral Friday. Ali was looking at the uncertainty of the end he knew was coming.

He did the only thing he could do. He got ready.

By Bart Barry-

Muhammad Ali died Friday evening at the age of 74. His death was long anticipated by those who follow our sport and know the ruinous effect it visits on each of its professional practitioners. Round the world Saturday persons instantly and for the most part sincerely began to mourn a man most had not thought about in decades, reliably imparting how much larger Ali was than his and our sport.

The happiest benefit of writing for a site like this, a boutique affair designed for aficionados, is the relief that washes over a writer when he remembers on days like these he does not need to put the accomplishments of a prizefighter in the larger context of others’ fantasies. If he doesn’t have a champion’s record memorized, quite, he has access to memories enough to write confidently about the only interest a reader should bring to a site like this. It isn’t liberating in the wildeyed gamboling-through-a-daisy-patch way we lately understand the word but it’s sufficiently liberating to make an exercise futile as this one doable.

This won’t be a piece that cherrypicks anecdotes showing how well the deceased represented my specific and fairly narrow worldviews, a selfhelp epic stiffened by another man’s violence, and it won’t be an exhaustive and autobiographical drumroll either; my earliest recollection of Ali was his being a sad foil to Larry Holmes, and therefore no amount of YouTube immersion makes Ali’s effect on me deep or enduring as those taken by champions of my youth and adolescence like Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Mike Tyson.

If you’re here for a definitive obituary you’re going to be disappointed. What follows is better read as an honest attempt at an obligatory act.

It begins with violence. In the press to canonize Ali his impulse to violence has been scoured till bleached. He danced and floated with a gorgeous face and an enchanting physique and golden glow because he was a pacifistic poet who would shape a generation and show a worldful of people their better selves. No, not really, but the cardboard saint must be propped high – the better to reflect us for us.

Doubt not the importance of Ali’s reflective surface on the legacy so many now celebrate. As Parkinson’s (disease, syndrome, etc.) made a marble facade of his once-expressive and often-offensive countenance Ali’s capacity for challenging others’ ideals to a point of repugnance and rage congealed to a face tailored for beloving. Ali went along with it because he did love others’ adoration and because he also loved money and because, ultimately, how much choice did he have as he watched in amusement an entire country following a pattern of attraction seen in bars round the world every night: Repulsion to curiosity to fixation?

Ali was an original who inadvertently provided future marketing masterminds a template they ably applied to Tiger Woods then Barack Obama, neither of whom was possible before Muhammad Ali.

Back to violence. Look closely at how Ali set his mouth when he threw righthands – hurting punches thrown with every intention of bringing pain or unconsciousness or both to the men across from him. Don’t dismiss this as an anomaly either; Ali had athleticism and charisma enough to make his living quite a few ways other than hurting others but he hurt others for a living because he was great at it in a way we rightly call historic. That is an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one; it is a reminder Ali’s ascent from Olympic gold medalist to heavyweight champion of the world relied necessarily on his conversion from an athlete who boxed for points to a fighter who hurt other men, and he didn’t do it reluctantly.

Look at his mouth when he threw right hands and look at his eyes when he took other men’s consciousness. Ali was all fighter. Since that is not palatable to many target demographics today we are told how much larger than his profession Ali was by people who for the most part do not understand Ali’s profession and wish to assert the greatness of their times by making the greatest of their times relatable to absolutely everyone.

This collision happened a lot in the obituaries that happened in the hours after Ali’s death, obituaries many sportswriters began composing a decade ago. What to say about a great man when one’s peers in radio and television use the word “great” to describe a hundred things weekly? Ultimately, if you have any craft at all you revert to understatement and hope for the best, as many of our craft’s best craftsmen did. Otherwise you convict language itself of inadequacy then use a sprinkler-system approach, dashing from accomplishment to accomplishment in the hopes some rule of sheer yardage will capture the totality of the man.

Inspiration is ephemeral but sexy to claim from another. Of those millions who today claim Ali as the source of their inspiration, it is proper to ask: Inspiration to do what?

Social media answers the question in most cases: Try to become famous.

Those claiming to be inspired by Ali to do other things are persistently unreliable with one exception: Fighters. There’s some mention of Ali in every boxing gym across the land (at our gym, curiously, there’s a black-on-gold mural of Ali with a quote attributed to him that goes: “Champions are not made in the gym”) and Ali surely inspired a large number of fighters in the generation following his to don gloves and dance, hands lowered, looking pretty. And most every one of those guys got his clock cleaned in month one and retired instantly thereafter.

To the cultural critics goes the task of naming, numbering and coloring-in every way the man was larger than his profession. To aficionados it need go no further than this: Muhammad Ali was the very best fighter in his division’s very best era.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Olympic boxing’s long slide into irrelevancy continued this week with an acronym’s decision to let pros fight amateurs for medals.

The outrage was predictable because, of course, it’s dangerous. Men shouldn’t be allowed to fight boys, although that’s been going on ever since the Cubans began their dominance of the medal stand’s top pedestal generations ago.

Olympic boxing has been an unfolding accident ever since Roy Jones Jr. got robbed of gold in a documented fix at the 1988 Seoul Games. In the wake of a scandal at an Olympics also marred by 100-meter dash winner Ben Johnson’s positive test for steroids, there were some cosmetic moves.

Olympic bureaucrats altered the scoring, replacing the cards with computers. But software is as corruptible as pen and paper. Since Seoul, the whiff of corruption has hung over Olympic boxing. There has even been speculation that Olympic movers-and shakers have thought about eliminating the sport altogether.

That would be tough to do, mostly because countries without the money for swimming pools and equestrian can always produce a boxer or two. Nevertheless, the sport has moved from the midway to the fringe, from prominence to obscurity. Sugar Ray Leonard won his gold at a Montreal venue near the gymnastics arena where Nadia Comaneci won her 1976 gold.

Twenty-eight years later, you had to leave the main Olympic park to find the boxing venue, a rundown building in rundown part of Athens, to see Andre Ward win in 2004, America’s last gold.

Four years later, the city was different, but boxing was as hard to find in Beijing as it was in Athens. It was if the Olympic establishment and the sponsoring networks wanted to keep it out of sight, if not out of mind. In 2008, a scandal erupted over how judges were assigned. There were allegations that some shadowy figure in an Eastern European country was offering money in an attempt to influence the assignment of favorable judges.

A news conference was called and held late at night, somewhere in between Michael Phelps’ eighth gold medal at the pool and Usain Bolt’s first at the track.

A couple of reporters, including this one, showed up. Stories were written, filed and ignored. Point is, nobody cares about Olympic boxing anymore. There’s outrage at AIBA’s decision to allow pros into the ring, starting this summer with the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, the Zika Games.

But it will subside, a little bit like the Olympic sport itself. AIBA’s decision pushes boxing closer to tragedy – a serious injury or fatality – than it has ever been. Then, it really will vanish. But will anybody really care?

By Bart Barry-

“By the time the matador enters with his cape and sword, the bull is already swaying sideways and forwards as if at sea, with punctured and twitching muscles – surprised, I think, and offended, but here is the thing – seeing itself for the first time in true relation to something else, no longer alone and dominant, but suddenly half of a two-way exchange.” – Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

Cast
RAMIREZ …. Barber and trainer, former amateur boxer in San Antonio, tall.
SIL …. Aircraft engineer, former Texas Golden Gloves champion in Dallas, fast.
BIG RICK …. Construction worker, former Alabama defensive lineman, strong.
SAFE HANDS …. Writer, fifty pounds overweight, relaxed.

RAMIREZ: Big Rick gets done with him, and I say, ‘Another victim.’ Safe Hands starts auctioning it all off. He donates his headgear to the gym, kept his gloves, and gives a Mexican kid that hightech mouthpiece he was so proud of.

BIG RICK: Was a surprise, dude. I didn’t think it was that bad.

SAFE HANDS: It was that bad. Let me be clear.

SIL: Good chin and a long fuse when we sparred, Safe Hands.

RAMIREZ: Same thing with Big Rick.

SAFE HANDS: Y’all weren’t getting hit by him.

BIG RICK: I went easy. I didn’t put it on you. What would’ve happened if I did?

SAFE HANDS: No worse because you’d have tensed up, slowed down. Only time in my life I had this terrible thought: What if he kills me by accident?

RAMIREZ: Never been there. I take that shit personal.

SIL: Me either. It’s a fight.

RAMIREZ: Safe Hands, you kept leaning left, putting yourself in cannon alley.

SAFE HANDS: I was out of my mind. Every time Big Rick hit me, I wondered why the hell I was still conscious.

BIG RICK: You make me into more than I am.

SAFE HANDS: Bullshit. Fear doesn’t lie.

RAMIREZ: You ever spar him, Sil?

SIL: Safe Hands? Lots.

RAMIREZ: Big Rick.

SIL: Once. I don’t know about them right hands. I wasn’t availing myself of them.

BIG RICK: Frustrating as shit, man. I couldn’t find him anywhere I looked.

RAMIREZ: I only did pads with him. Did that before I put him in with Safe Hands. I knew what was coming.

SAFE HANDS: Thanks, friend.

RAMIREZ: (Laughing) You’re welcome, friend.

SIL: Why they start calling you ‘Safe Hands’?

SAFE HANDS: Ask Ramirez – his nickname.

RAMIREZ: I seen this lazy whiteboy barely hitting the bag. Putting in no work. Three minutes was his finish line, and he don’t care how he gets there. But he knew how to wrap hands. Safest hands in the gym, ain’t that right, Safe Hands?

SIL: He used to war a little with me.

SAFE HANDS: You brought it out, Sil. That incessant tapping. He’d make me wear headgear, which I hated, just so he could aim at that Everlast label on my forehead. A target.

SIL: I told you.

SAFE HANDS: No lie. He told me to get headgear with a label so he’d have something to aim those jabs at. Tap, tap, tap.

SIL: Eventually he’d get mad and pounce. It was either wrestle him or war with him, and we usually wrestled. He had a chin and some hook. I don’t war with that.

RAMIREZ: Why didn’t we ever spar, Safe Hands?

SAFE HANDS: I’ll tell you exactly why. That kid Joe. He was my height, much faster and about half my age. I watched you run him into that left elbow four times. Fifth time you split his eyebrow.

RAMIREZ: You’re gonna to be a tall Puerto Rican in Little Mexico, kid, you better have something. I got scalps with that elbow.

BIG RICK: Ramirez can crack. Tall skinny dude who brings it.

RAMIREZ: It’s the chinups. I tell the kids do chinups. A knotted upper back is how you get power.

SAFE HANDS: Or you can be three hundred pounds of muscle like Big Rick.

RAMIREZ: That’ll do.

SIL: Not every big guy –

RAMIREZ: Was just going to say that.

SIL: – knows how to punch. You weigh three hundred pounds, you can hurt another man. But there’s a difference between that muscle-punching and a guy who has technique.

SAFE HANDS: Big Rick was rough when I first saw him. I told my wife, ‘Black guys hate getting hit in the face. I’ll just put a jab in his face, his hands’ll go way up, I’ll jump in under his elbows, and he’ll get tired after a couple rounds.’

BIG RICK: You were right about hitting me in the face.

SAFE HANDS: Did I?

RAMIREZ: You landed a couple.

SAFE HANDS: Big Rick got out of range so damn fast. That first step backwards, man, that’s what did me in. He’d be out of range, and I’d be soldout over my left knee, and then, boom!

BIG RICK: I’m strong as shit, dude, but I can move.

SAFE HANDS: I wasn’t ready for that. Sil, sure, he’s polished. But not you, Big Rick.

BIG RICK: I ain’t moved like Sil in my life.

SIL: (Smiling) Put the sweetness in the science, brother.

SAFE HANDS: How tall are you, Sil?

SIL: I tell people six-foot.

RAMIREZ: I’m six-four, Sil, and I got you by half a foot.

SIL: Hush, child.

SAFE HANDS: First ten times I sparred with Sil, I swore he was seven-foot. He was ten feet away from me. I’ve never sparred with anyone who understood space like Sil.

BIG RICK: I still ain’t hit him, seen him.

SIL: Got to keep the young folks at bay.

RAMIREZ: You calling Safe Hands ‘young’? How old are you Sil?

SIL: Not important.

RAMIREZ: He shaves his head and refuses to talk.

SAFE HANDS: What do you guys think of that quote at the top?

BIG RICK: About the bull?

SIL: I kinda liked it. But I like sparring more than sex truly. Moving around is a drug for me. It’s why I’m still doing it –

SAFE HANDS: At whatever age.

SIL: There you go.

RAMIREZ: You ever get sparring so good you don’t care if you lose, if you look bad, because you’re just so glad you found someone you match so well with?

BIG RICK: Hell no.

SIL: Nah.

RAMIREZ: Me either. But I hear stories.

SAFE HANDS: I have.

RAMIREZ: Fucking Safe Hands.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Roberto Duran has been everywhere lately. He was in France, at the Cannes film festival, a few days ago, hanging out with Robert DeNiro, for the first look at the big screen portrayal of his life, Hands Of Stone.

He was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago for the Canelo Alvarez-Amir Khan bout, marketing the movie and mostly doing what he does best:

Being himself.

This weekend he’s in Arizona, where he has some roots. His father used to work and live in Flagstaff in the mountains a couple of hours north of Glendale, a Phoenix suburb where on Saturday night he’ll be working a corner for Shane Mosley in the 44-year-old’s ongoing comeback against David Avanesyan at Gila River Arena in a CBS Sports Network-televised bout (10:30 p.m. ET/7:30 pm PT) on a seven-fight card scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. (PT).

There’s an ongoing fascination with Duran that doesn’t need twitter or Facebook or some other modern manifestation of social media to further it. The film, starring DeNiro as trainer Ray Arcel, is just the latest expression of how there’s no end in the interest the public has for Duran, who ironically was once known for uttering no mas.

The growing Latin influence in American media and culture helps explain some of it. The current generation of Latino fight fans all had dads who told their sons about Duran. But there’s more to it than just that.

From this corner, Duran has become the face of what boxing once was. Through the days before Canelo’s crushing stoppage of Khan on May 7, I ran into Duran hugging fans, kissing babies and telling stories. History is full of the so-called People’s Champ. But, I suspect, a true measure of one is what happens long after the final bell. So many just vanish from our collective memory. They show up at staged events and autograph shows. They’re there for a few sound bites and then are gone all over again.

But Duran is still in the crowd, stirring up emotions and imaginations if he had never left. One of those weathered hands of stone will grab you and leave an indelible mark.

Every time I see him, I go back to a memorable 40 minutes that Bart Barry, my longtime colleague and wordsmith extraordinaire, and I had with him. He was in Phoenix. We were a couple of reporters, alone in big ballroom for a press conference otherwise ignored by local media. Had it been just about anybody other than Duran, he’d been gone, angry and embarrassed at the lack of attention.

But for the people-centric Duran, two reporters were an audience he couldn’t resist. He talked to Bart and me as if the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were in the room. He talked about punching out a horse for the chance to win a fifth of Chivas Regal, which was worth more than the purse he got for winning an earlier bout in Panama City.

He talked about injuries he suffered in auto accident in Argentina. Barry, bi-lingual, was the designated translator. Through Bart, he said he had been in a coma for two months. In English, I immediately interrupted by saying “Two months?’’

Here came that hand of stone. It grabbed my forearm. Suddenly, Bart’s able translation was not necessary.

“Two months, two weeks, two days, two hours, two minutes,’’ Duran said in English. “A coma, OK?’’

OK.

He talked about being in the hospital, although it didn’t appear to be a hospital when he first awoke. He said he looked up and saw a white circle above him. He explained through Bart that he took that as a heavenly sign. He had made it, he said. And, he said, he started chanting exactly that, loudly and often.

Suddenly, he said, an arm reached out and grabbed the wrist on one of those hands of stone. Then, there’s a voice from the occupant of a nearby bed, an old man, who told him to shut up, because he was only in a hospital room.

I didn’t know how much was true, or embellished. At that point, however, it didn’t mater. Bart and I didn’t care. We didn’t know whether to believe the story, but we just wanted to hear him tell it. There was a generosity in Duran’s spirit and energy in just telling a story. It was more than a sign that Duran liked to perform. It was a moment – one of 40 – that said Duran genuinely liked people, no matter how many there were or who they represented.

This is the same fighter who agreed to a rematch with Sugar Ray Leonard within six months after winning a unanimous decision over him in Montreal on June 20, 1980. On November 25 of that year, Duran lost the rematch by uttering the then- infamous no mas during the final seconds of the eighth round.

In explaining the circumstances leading up to that fight, Duran said he had been living in New York, celebrating non-stop.

“Women-women-women, drink-drink drink, eat-eat-eat,’’ he said through Bart.

Somewhere between the women, the booze and the food, Leonard’s management offered the rematch. The money, Duran said, was too good to pass up. But I also suspect that Duran knew he owed something to fans. He loved them as much as the women, the booze and the food.

He owed them a rematch –a bout — that they wanted as soon as possible. Would that happen these days? Could it? It took years for Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao to happen. The same scenario appears to be unfolding amid all the talk about Canelo-Gennady Golovkin.

Duran said yes to the Leonard rematch despite the fact there really wasn’t enough time to get ready. Duran took the risk, suffered for what he did and said, yet re-emerged nearly 36 years loved as much, if not more, than ever.

It was genuine then and looks to be more genuine now in when compared to today’s way of throwing up artificial delays that only wind hurting the people.

Duran’s people.