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.

By Bart Barry-

It finds the men squaredoff and relaxed in their postures from the prebell instructions of their trainers, assurances of their conditioning and readiness and the high number of times those trainers have been there, here, exactly in this place, so trust me.

It starts in the tops of the hips a quarter of the way from the points to the knees and hollows them, thinning their thighs from dense meatslabs to brittle scaffolding to papier-mâché shells. Knee weakness sings the alarm causing fright. The doublingback on itself begins nature’s progression: Notice begets more fatigue begets concern begets more fatigue begets worry begets more more fatigue begets fear begets more more more fatigue begets panic begets more more more more more fatigue begets resignation. Tension succeeds by beginning its doubts here: Am I ready for this? why do I ask? because I don’t know if they know what they’re talking about? but if they’ve been here so many times before? have they? was it like this? were others like me? were their opponents anything like him? why did I agree to this? what happens tomorrow? when, demons, will that bell ring?

It finds the ref watching the fighters closely because he wants to be fair clearminded effective in his task of ensuring a just outcome imposing little permanent injury as possible. There are the cameras to mind. His trademarked tagline shouted he wants to be deliberate not fidgety; he wants to be invisible to the spectators unless some intolerable something happens then be fleet. But if he’s invisible he relies on chance to get noticed all that fairness effectiveness wasted ignored unacknowledged. Be noticed only to be recognized by strangers? No not that – to be seen participating interacting watching closely watching in case something like that other time happens and a kid falls of his own weight really not a punch, sideways, a slipped punch that began a tilt that became a lean that fired the canvas’s upwards launch at an awareness disconnected offduty lazy. No count, the tension reminds him, no need for a count but flailing at a wrong corner as from a different corner men rushed towards the center of the ring a brother trainer or father and the stretcher paramedics’ scrabbling for an oxygen mask.

The tension gets him by a proportion this queer: The louder the applause for the departing gurney the greater the recrimination for the referee who let the fight go too far.

It finds the judges confident in their intention or their execution of someone else’s. “Score a round 10-10 if you have to and let posterity work it out,” one tells himself and affirms it with a quick nod. Then the cheering becomes disproportionate for the right ethnicity and he begins bleeding from a punch caused by a cut or was it butted accidentally – damn it why doesn’t this referee e-nun-ci-ate for us like the cameras when he tells us these things! The tension mounts him and his two peers with iterations of the same thought: If that round was close and they both scored it opposite the way I scored it my card will look wrong to the majority and I’ll have to defend myself to the commission next week unless I’m sure so I better watch both guys (the other guy) more closely this round in case it’s close.

It finds the promoter defacto manager of the a-side considering his work a success arena full and television revenues pop an accidental cut on the a-side makes the crowd gasp. Awkward as all hell that sound. We haven’t recouped even the signing bonus, says the tension, much less the dozen signing bonuses for other prospects much less the broadcast idea the studio stupidity the infomercial production a hundred takes at a hundred a take, and kid’s up there hamming and gushing and gushing and hamming round like the blood is rolling in his ears listen to the crowd for God’s sake.

It finds the publicist happily looking over press row counting noses ranking noses numbering distribution lists and enthusiasm so very much for the YouTube highlights 20,000 hits and the merchandising to come. Look for action to remind the major writers about: Remember when he landed that left hook, kaboom, the way the crowd jumped this guy told me he had a soundifier-thingy app on his phone and he’s’n last row of the upper balcony, and when the left hook landed, this guy tells me, his app gets an error cause it can’t read that much sound. Not sure his name but I’ll find out. The tension finds him watching the writers watching and squinching their adoring faces about just a little bit of blood no big deal best cutman in the business and you get hit more when you hit the other guy a lot. Boxing 101.

It finds the writers in their usual spot the tension doesn’t have to search for because it never departs them.

It finds the celebrity actorguest with his fist raised for the roving camera that records him to have an image to beam at the arena to ensure the unfortunates they’ve attended for once a happening and are exotic. Did it linger on me long as it lingered on the basketball player long as it lingered on the former fighter? The tension finds him and asks why if he is the star of an incredible upcoming series is his date looking at the former fighter who is shuffling over with a fake smile for him and an arm round her waist for a selfie she promises to send him if he gives her his number?

At the arenaback in the filthy b-side dressing rooms filmed by wet tape shreds and bloody towels it finds the vanquished studying their commission checks and wondering if there’ll be more checks and this one’ll get the eviction sticker off the keyhole of the tiny apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her newborn son Gustavo.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Erislandy Lara defends the WBA Super Welterweight title in a rematch against Vanes Martirosyan; The action begins at 9 PM ET with the WBC Super Welterweight title bout between Jermell Charlo and John Jackson; Jermall Charlo defends his IBF Jr. Middleweight title against former world champion Austin Trout

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Round 1 Good counter right from Martirosyan..straight right..Good body shot…

Round 2 Lara lands a left and a counter

Round 3 Good left hook to the body from Martirosyan..Good counter from Lara..Body shot from Martirosyan..Right..left hook to the body..2 more. and another right to the body

Round 4 Nice hook from Lara..1-2…Right from Martirosyan…

Round 5 2 lefts to body from Martiroysan…combination from Lara..another combination and a straight left…Left from Martirosyan…

Round 6 1-2 from Lara,,lead left hook to body from Martirosyan..Counter from Lara..double left hook to body from Martirosyan..

Round 7 Right from Martirosyan..Lara lands a body combination..Martirosyan gets in a uppercut

Round 8 Lead left from Lara…Left to body from Martirosyan..Nice left from Lara

Round 9 2 left uppercuts from Martirosyan..Combination…Left from Lara…

Round 10 Left from Martirosyan..3 lefts…Good left from Lara…

Round 11 MARTIROSYAN DEDUCTED A POINT FOR LOW BLOWS…Combination for Lara..Jab..

Round 12 Counter jab from Lara…straight left..Martirosyan forcing action..Lead left from Lara..Martirosyan landing to head and body..Lara lands a straight left

Lara landed 162-424   Martirosyan was 94-474

115-112, 116-111, 116-111 for Lara

Round 1 Counter left from Trout..Jab from Charlo…Uppercut from Trout..Straight right from Charlo..

Round 2 Counter left from Charlo..Counter left from Trout..Jab from Charlo…Uppercut from Trout

Round 3 Good body work from Trout..Good right from Charlo…Hard right stings Trout…Body and right from Trout

Round 4 Charlo lands an uppercut..Left from Trout..Jab from both guys

Round 5 Hard rights from Charlo..Swelling around the right eye of Trout

Round 6 Right from Charlo…Good combination..lead right hook from Trout

Round 7 Good exchange..Charlo backing Trout up..combination to the head..double jab, straight hand..Good right uppercut from Trout…Jab from Charlo..lead right..Straight left from Trout…straight left…counter right from Charlo..

Round 8 Counter left from Trout…Counter right from Charlo..Good right..

Round 9 Double-Jab and right from Charlo…Exchanging jabs…Combination and straight left from Trout..counter left..Jab…stiff jab from Charlo..

Round 10 Right from Charlo..Cut over the right eye of Trout (1st time in his career that he is cut)..Counter left from Trout..counter right…left to the body..Stiff jab from Charlo…

Round 11: Counter left from Trout..Body shot from Charlo…Good combination from Trout..Right to body from Charlo..Good lefts from both guys…Good left uppercut from Charlo at the bell

Round 12 Counter left from Trout..Check hook..counter left..Jab from Charlo..counter left to the body from Trout..Good counter right from Charlo..good exchange…..

115-113, 116-112, 116-112 for Jermall Charlo

Round 1 Charlo lands a left..Jackson lands a big left hook..

Round 2 Jab from Charlo…Counter left from Jackson..Counter

Round 3 Jackson lands an uppercut..Left hook to body from Charlo

Round 4 Nice left hook to the body from Jackson..Jab and right from Charlo..right uppercut and left from Jackson..good right uppercut inside

Round 5 Charlo lands a left hook…good body and head combo with the right

Round 6 Counter hook from Charlo…

Round 7 Nice right from Charlo…Jackson lands a combination…left hook..body shot

Round 8 HUGE LEFT AND JACKSON IS LIMP ON HIS FEET AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

 

 

By Norm Frauenheim

TUCSON – There was no main event. There was only a reunion.

Roy Jones Jr. and James Toney stole the show — their own show — Friday night, as co-promoters of a card at Casino Del Sol that lost its main event when junior featherweight Hanzel Martinez was hurt Wednesday night in an auto accident.

Jones and Toney, once sworn enemies in a 1994 super- middleweight out called Uncivil War, re-emerged as business partners in what they say is just the beginning.

“We’re going to take over the world, man,’’ said Toney, who made his old rival laugh at his dance steps, jokes and gestures as they stood in the ring, almost arm-in-arm, before each bout televised by the CBS Sports Network. “We’re just starting.’’

More like starting over.

Twenty years ago, the guess was that the two would only meet again in a bitter rematch or an old-fashioned duel. There could only be sequel of the hostility that lingered after Jones’ unanimous decision over Toney in a clash at Las Vegas MGM Grand.

“Nah, nah, nah’’ Toney said. “You gotta get past all of that. Time to grow up.’’

John “Pops” Arthur — Toney’s CEO, advisor, mentor and confidante — said Toney and Jones ran into each other last year at a boxing meet-and-greet.

“James had always wanted a rematch, yeah,’’ Arthur said. “I told him to move on and put his anger aside. I told him to approach Roy like a businessman. When people saw them together, I think they probably thought they’d only agree to rematch.’’

Given their pasts, it would have been a reach to think anything else. Both fighters have continued to fight far beyond their primes, despite calls from fans and media for them to retire.

This time, Arthur said, they shook hands. But not for a remake of some old hostility. This time, it’s all about business, Arthur said.

Arthur foresees a long-term partnership, which would be a lot better for their financials and their brain cells than a rematch ever could be.

“We’ll do a lot more of these, no doubt,’’ Toney said.

With the Martinez-Prosper Ankrah bout off the card because of a concussion and back injury suffered by Martinez during an accident in Tijuana, the show went on with Emmanuel Robles in an eight-rounder against Pipino Cuevas in a junior welterweight bout.

In his first bout since signing with Roy Jones Jr. in early March, Robles (15-0, 4 KOs) made it look easy against an out of-shape Cuevas

Robles floored Cuevas (17-16-1, 15 KOs), winless over his last seven bouts, with a crushing left in the third round. Cuevas got up, but blood poured from his nose. He looked beaten. in the fourth, he would be.

At 25 second of the round, referee Tony Zaino stopped it when Robles landed a series of blows against a defenseless Cuevas.

On The Undercard

Keenan Carbajal (11-2, 6 KOs) wore red-and-white trunks cut in the style of his Hall of Fame relative, junior-flyweight legend Michael Carbajal. Flashed a little bit of his power, too.

Keenan Carbajal, bigger and more confident than ever, delivered a lethal succession of combinations, overwhelming an overmatched Lorenzo Trejo in the second round.

The featherweight bout was scheduled for eight rounds. Carbajal, of Phoenix, could have put Trejo (35-31, 22 KOs), of Mexico, onto the canvas that many times or more, if not for referee Rocky Burke, who ended it at 2:21 of the second and Trejo on the canvas for the third time in the round.

An introduction of Randy Moreno’s power was warning enough for Christopher Turton. Moreno (3-0, 2 KOs), of Las Vegas, rocked him, sending Turton stumbling across the canvas midway through the first round of a lightweight bout scheduled for four. A dazed Turton (2-3, 1 KO), of Colony, Tex., took a seat after the first and quit before the second ever began.

Tucson cruiserweight Jesus Santamario’s debut was a knockout, but not exactly the kind of knockout a young fighter envisions for his first pro bout. Edgar Ramirez (3-0, 1 KO), of Mexico City, crushed him with power he had never encountered, bouncing him off the ropes and onto the canvas for a quick knockdown, then finishing him with short right to the back of the head at 1:13 of the first.

Before the CBS telecast, Phoenix super-flyweight Elihu Soto (5-0, 3 KOs) employed precise and painful body blows to score a four-round unanimous decision over Yezber Romero (2-2, 1 KO) of Eugene, Ore.

By Norm Frauenheim

It’s hard to know what to make of Canelo Alvarez’ surrender of the WBC’s middleweight title late Wednesday in an announcement that wasn’t exactly a shocker.

A disappointment, yeah. But a surprise? Not these days, not in the wake of a fan base eroding faster than political civility in the year since the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao dud.

The best that can be said of Wednesday’s move is that it was an empty gesture.

In boxing speak, Canelo “vacated” the title about a week before a deal was mandated for bout with Gennady Golovkin In a prepared statement, he said he did so because he didn’t want reported negotiations with GGG to be subjected to “artificial deadlines.”

Vacated and artificial are just a couple of ways of saying empty, empty.

Put it this way: Canelo gave up a 160-pound title that he won and defended at 155 pounds. GGG was awarded a title he has long pursued without ever having to throw a punch.

Meanwhile, Canelo is still the division’s lineal champ, meaning he beat the man who beat the man. Think of a flow chart, lines of succession. I’m not sure where any of the lines really lead, other than nowhere in boxing’s current climate.

At best, it was a subtle way of saying that Canelo-GGG won’t happen until next year. But didn’t we suspect that anyway? In so many ways and words during the days before Canelo’s dramatic knockout of Amir Khan on May 7, that was the message.

During trainer’s roundtable a couple of days before opening bell at Las Vegas new T-Mobile Arena, Canelo’s corner man Eddy Reynoso essentially told everybody they’d have to wait until at least next year.

He said that Canelo would not fight a true middleweight in his first bout after Khan, who jumped from welterweight to sacrificial lamb in a bold, yet futile bid to upset the maturing Mexican.

“No, not at all,’’ Reynoso said through an interpreter.

When asked when Canelo would face a fighter with a proven record at 160, Reynoso said: “Maybe in two or three fights. But now, not at all.’’

In giving up the WBC title, Canelo might be getting out from under mounting pressure for him to defend a time-honored title at a catch-weight while forcing the 34-year-old GGG to wait until after still another birthday.

The move also could weaken whatever leverage GGG had in negotiations, which both sides say are still ongoing. He’s no longer the mandatory challenger.

But does any of this matter to fans? Canelo promoter Oscar De La Hoya has said that the GGG-Canelo fight is the antidote for a lingering hangover from Mayweather-Pacquiao. No argument, there.

But De La Hoya is caught in a dilemma. What’s best for boxing might not be best for Canelo and De La Hoy’s business. He’s trying to maximize the money he and his star client can make in a long-awaited confrontation against GGG.

Okay, but the timing is risky. Crashing pay-per-view numbers since the Mayweather-Pacquiao turnoff are evidence that GGG-Canelo has to happen ASAP.

De La Hoya likes to refer to promoter Bob Arum’s old term about how to market a major bout. Marinate, says Arum, who likes to let public demand stoke the fires for a while.

But while Canelo vacates, the public marinates in familiar exasperation and further impatience. An empty gesture this week threatens to create more empty seats everywhere. That’s a lousy recipe in any book.

By Bart Barry–

Arrived too early in their dressing rooms, to satisfy broadcaster’s schedules, and bored, the main event guys do anything to calm themselves: text watch the monitors’ undercard scraps stretch nap . . .

There’s weightshifting in the queue, left to right to right right to left. Someone has a small banner in the right leg of his jeans covered in clever script about a cousin’s friend on the undercard and he fingers its stitching to a rash. Many of the guys wear shiny suitjackets or shirts with shiny script congruent to the MMA fashion show (a redundancy) of the decade past. Others wear flared-tight-flared white buttondown ensembles with roughsilk piping and bluejeans with logos and an overpriced belt they think women notice, a profession of physique and badassery to put others on notice if anyone were able to distract himself from autofixation long enough to notice.

pace undress partially redress, not time yet, talk through handlers’ concerns meet local celebrities absorb familiars’ fears laugh senselessly at a promoter’s lame support tell a bottling company exec how much his sponsorship means

The few women in line clutch their men’s hands in an unspoken theatrical treaty: If all these guys are posers like you, sweetie, then I have nothing for you to protect me from and that’ll make you feel emasculated enough to drink too much and create a petty confrontation to save me from, so let me act a little frightened in this ridiculous red dress you bought me for this occasion to impress your buddies.

lower eyelids cradle napes with folded fingers imagine remembering a hundred training tips fantasize about the purse check stretch stretch doubt the other guy’s routine envy no one

Security at the door is a hyperbolic symmetry of the same sorts of men in line, though paid marginally less, and trying to put a charismatic mask on faces quick to trigger and show offense, all faux players in a faux presentation of peril and might. Keys, wallet, belt and hat resecured, there are the concession lines to navigate, which way’s the beer and why must bottled water be poured in a cup?

listen for noise from the other guy’s room field rumors about the other guy’s camp make fists then relax replay the weighin with goodfaith replay the weighin with badfaith worry what the eyes betrayed of fear or excitement like fear or calm like fearlessness feel lonely enough to blame the manager and familiars

Inside the usual human gambit of imitation for affirmation’s sake finds too many beers bought causing overwrought reactions to a combatant’s bravery via its contrast – his opponent’s inactivity, resignation, caution; failure. No fight is average, no match is scored fairly, no prizefighter makes a simple decent account of himself; every match is a war or a waste of time like I told ya was going to happen, every decision has a corrupt judge or an honest judge whose virtue is wildly offset by two villains, every prizefighter is a future great I saw first or worthless.

feel misunderstood wish the whole thing might be called envision a loss and how it can be soothed tomorrow catch scold think about bills say everything is handled concentrate worry concentrate worry worry worry concentrate begin to exert in relaxing postures get anxious about the middle knuckle of the left hand forget about that knuckle text a compassionate someone, wife friend mom, i love you

The lights dimmed and the main event entrance tunes beginning to roar, press row fills with yawns inexplicably – except yawns as a circuitbreaker, not an expression of boredom, a fatigue courted by anticipation, a recognition of the coming fight’s value, a collective plea that what happens next bring an unbearable spectacle but not quite, all underwritten by a collective of individual fears about talent and presence and the tall pile of unpredictables and unknowables and uncontrollables (luck) that conspire to make a written account of combat either something that duly honors its subject or doesn’t.

obey orders begin to warm meet the referee and seek connection try to read sympathy get frustrated by the cameras and their effect take the trunks off their hanger and leave the robe adjust the cup both balls in and snug but not tight or queasiness put the boots on and slam the heel left foot first and tie the laces watch the other guy’s trainer watch the hands get wrapped notice the games transcend the games wonder if feeling above the games is being a victim of the games then try to be oblivious of the other trainer’s games unless it’s too much but what is too much if it’s his job to be too much

The heeltapping triples its time under the collapsible tables as young writers do a last rewrite of their prework and old writers wish they would just get on with the fight for fuck’s sake.

punch palms with freshwrapped fists out of habit force the open hands in leather stiffness and scent watch the white taperoll go round round round round wonder what the official’s blackmarker scribble means to him more posturing hit the pads endure the national anthem going on and on hear the name amplified wish it were over hear the first notes push through the door surge surge surge clear bright loud glide doubt affirm affirm nod trust hope doubt hope hope . . .

The bell rings and everywhere everything wiggles: relief, no relief, relief, no relief.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder, an emerging champion and a compelling personality, wants to make history. Maybe, he should just make a statement, instead.

Wilder is about to leave for Moscow and become the first American heavyweight champion to defend his title there on May 21 against Alexander Povetkin in a risky venture complicated by ongoing disclosures of Russia’s systematic doping.

Depending on the source and based on a very big assumption that all will be on the up-and-up, the fight is a toss-up. Wilder might win. Might lose. But he would score a victory for everybody – boxers, skaters, skiers, sprinters and swimmers – if he just said, hell no, he won’t go until the Russians clean up their act.

What would he have to lose? Plenty, at first. He’d lose a paycheck. He’d risk lawsuits and his title. The World Boxing Council probably would have no choice but to strip him of the belt. Then, there are crazies in the boxing crowd who would question his guts and his promise to knock out Povetkin.

A Wilder victory on Russian scorecards would have to go down as a contender for Upset of the Year. After all, this is a country that, according to the New York Times, conducted a urine exchange – dirty for clean — though a hole in the wall at the Sochi Olympics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/sports/russia-doping-sochi-olympics-2014.html?_r=0

Yet despite Russia’s Hole In The Wall Gang, there have been no criminal charges while the country continues to move forward on plans for the 2018 World Cup.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/apr/08/russian-doping-scandal-no-criminal-charges-sports-minister

http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/russian-doping-scandals-won-t-impact-2018-world-cup-preparations-116051200324_1.html

The fight will happen two weeks after the WBC announced its Clean Boxing Program, year-round testing that will be administered by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association President Dr. Margaret Goodman.

Wilder Promoter Lou DiBella said Wednesday during a conference call that testing has been underway for seven to eight weeks. However, DiBella also said he would have preferred to have had the testing begin earlier.

The unfolding scandal probably means the Russians will be very careful not to exchange urine samples like shots of vodka before opening bell next week. The world is watching. But that’s not the point.

Thus far, we’ve heard from bureaucrats representing all of the world’s sporting acronyms. We’ve heard threats to ban Russia’s track-and-field athletes from this summer’s Brazil Olympics. Blah, blah, blah. It’s bupkis, or business as usual after the fight. We’ve yet to hear from an athlete in a substantive way. Enter Wilder, who has a chance to say and do something that – long term – would stand as a courageous triumph.

It wouldn’t be the equivalent of the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics for Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. Over time, the boycott, ordered by then-President Jimmy Carter, has been judged to be a mistake. Athletes were caught in the middle, forced to pay a price for an international confrontation they didn’t create.

But state-run doping is all about the athletes. It puts their integrity, livelihood and health in jeopardy.

The heavyweights have a rich history of making a real difference. Jack Johnson broke the color line before Jackie Robinson, becoming the first African-American to win the heavyweight title during an era that spawned The Great White Hope. Joe Louis knocked out Germany’s Max Schmeling in a 1938 rematch that came to symbolize the coming world war between democracy and fascism. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title and license when he refused to be drafted because of his opposition to Viet Nam.

They are remembered for how they responded when confronted by events, each in their own time. It’s Wilder’s time.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Andrew Tabiti, a Floyd Mayweather Sr, trained fighter, hopes to take some of the snoozer out of cruiser against Keith Tapia Friday night in the 200-pound division tonight at Las Vegas Sam’s Hotel and Gambling Hotel in a bout televised by ShoBox: The New Generation.

Tabiti (12-0, 11 KOs), of Las Vegas, is looking for victory over Tapia (15-0, 6 KOs), of of Puerto Rico, that would put him into the championship mix of a Euro-dominated division.

It’s no coincidence that the card (10 p.m. ET/PT) features another cruiserweight bout between 2012 U.S. Olympian Michael Hunter (11-0, 8 KOs) against Isiah Thomas (15-0, 6 KOs) of Detroit.

The undercard includes Tucson welterweight Alfonso Olvera (7-2, 3 KOs) against Sanjarbek Rakhmanov (4-0, 3 KOs) of Uzbekistan.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas lineal middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez wrung Amir “King” Khan’s neck with a single and singular righthand in round 6 of their mismatch. No count was needed and fortunately no stretcher either. It was another installment of contemporary boxing’s Theater of the Fully Expected, a distasteful inversion of most that once made our sport widely palatable.

Let us have no more talk of Khan’s exceptional bravery in waging a fight everyone knew he would not win, already, because if we do that we must also credit Canelo’s equal bravery, and how badly does anyone wish to do that? The 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz teaches us courage requires a sort of symmetry that relies necessarily on a doubtful outcome. Rarely is there cowardice in boxing; an absence of bravery in the ring manifests itself as resignation caused by a doubtless outcome, not openwinged flight.

To be courageous in victory a winner must entertain doubt of a contest’s outcome; to be courageous in defeat a loser must also retain doubt about that outcome – when a 300-pound bouncer snatches the consciousness from a drunk 150-pound fratbro no one credits the bouncer’s courage and, quite properly, no thinking person credits the fratbro’s bravery either. Von Clausewitz’s insistence on a doubtful outcome makes courage an intensely personal quality, a thing only its bearer can certainly audit. As it should be.

There are no fans of reductionism here, so let us traffic in probabilities and possibilities. Is it possible Amir Khan, a fighter 29 of 30 experts expected to lose, did not expect at any time during the proposal and promotion and performance of his fight with Alvarez that he might possibly win and went through with the discombobulating ruse only to amass a fortune? Yes, definitely possible; no, definitely not probable. Is it possible when Alvarez felt that first underpronated right cross from Khan in round 1 Canelo thought, “This is madness, I’m in with a beast, my victory is nigh impossible, and my survival unsure!”? Again possible, not probable.

Somewhere between these poles is where most of life and all but an instant of Saturday’s match happens/ed. Whatever postsalesmanship went off during the telecast with the team’s squinting to assure buyers they’d gotten at least nine minutes of competitiveness more than feared and Harold Lederman ably ratifying their pitch, writing as one person who picked Canelo to win by knockout I can offer without equivocation there were not three seconds of the 900 that comprised the opening five rounds during which even a pinhole of doubt flashed my mind. Khan was going to sleep unless Andre Ward’s trainer mounted the apron midround.

Frankly one didn’t even need to watch Khan’s customarily jittery approach to know it; Canelo’s mien told the entire tale. Certain as I am I did not doubt Canelo would take Khan’s consciousness is how uncertain I am I watched Khan as more than a prop in the opening five rounds – like a fidgety double-end bag. It was not until the fifth round brought palpable contempt in Canelo’s bearing, though, the outcome became doubtless. Canelo got Khan with the same move with which Canelo cut James Kirkland’s lights a year ago in Houston. He even got Khan’s hopeless, unwinding left to play corkscrew and win Canelo his second consecutive knockout of the year, and congrats on that.

Canelo dishragged Khan and it was magical.

The entertainment runnerup Saturday was the contortionist’s trick of HBO broadcasters mentioning repeatedly Mexico City’s WBC and its suddenly binding resolution to make the HBO middleweight champion of the world the WBC middleweight champion, without mentioning the WBC by name. It felt born of what fantastic consequence the nearly inconsequential media assigns itself; with a new man at the helm of the WBC here’s a chance for him to get his agency’s acronym back in our throats (even if half our infomercial series and all of our introductions and postfight festivities are a voluminous WBC endorsement in highdef) but if the new guy chooses not to strip with urgency his country’s most popular fighter, why, he can say adios to a future “Real Sports” feature and an edgy “On Mauricio Sulaiman” film and even a perky journalist saying amazing things about him on “The Fight Game.”

Canelo is selfaware and arrogant enough to know HBO and the WBC need him much more than he needs them, and good luck dictating terms to him about ratifying Gennady Golovkin as the greatest middleweight champion in recent memory (an authoritative prepositional phrase we use when we’re too young to know very much or too lazy to do research more than google). Golovkin will fight Canelo on Canelo’s calendar and by Canelo’s rules or Golovkin will cost HBO increasingly more money in promotional subsidies subsidized by revenues from Canelo’s pay-per-view matches. That seemed to be the message in Canelo’s postfight use of the Spanish term “mamadas” (better even than the colorful translation it got): Your network can take the funds I raise and use them to erect and decorate another fighter at my expense but before you say any of this to my face, Max, remember who works for whom, who pays your salary and Gennady’s promotional fees.

If David Lemieux starts dieting right now there’s a good chance he can make 155 for Sept. 16.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

 

Follow all the action as Canelo Alvarez defends the Middleweight title against Amir Khan.  The action begins at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with a 3 fight undercard with David Lemieux battling Glen Tapia; Mauricio Herrera taking on Frankie Gomez and Patrick Teixeria fighting Curtis Stevens

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Round 1 Hard right from Khan…Combination…right to body from Canelo…Hard left hook..left

Round 2 Alvarez reaches for a right to the body..1-2 from Khan..Left hook from Alvarez..

Round 3 Canelo lands a left hooks..Khan lands a 1-2

Round 4 Good right from Khan…Right to body from Canelo…Left to the body..Counter left from Khan…

Round 5 Canelo lands a right..Good right to the body

Round 6 Hard body shot and left to head from Canelo…Good right from Khan…Jab from Canelo…HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KHAN AND KHAN IS NOT MOVING FLAT ON HIS BACK

Round 1 3 punch combo from Lemieux..left hook..uppercut…

Round 2 Body shot and right from Tapia…2 rights…Left hook fro, Lemieux…right..Huge body shot hurts Tapia..2 good body shots from Tapia…

Round 3 Uppercut from Lemieux…Good jab from Tapia…

Round 4 HARD LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES TAPIA…TAPIA’S CORNER STOPS THE FIGHT

Round 1 Gomez gets in a left

Round 2 Combination from Gomez…Herrera is cut under the left eye…Good  uppercut

Round 3 Right from Gomez…Herrera lands a good body shot…Gomez lands a good right…

Round 4 Hard right from Gomez..

Round 5 Good combination from Gomez..2 good body shot…

Round 6 Gomez flurries on the ropes..Body shot…

Round 7 Gomez moving…boxing well

Round 8 Herrera flurries

Round 9 Gomez lands a right…jab…Hard right to the body

Round 10 Uppercut and combination..Counter right from Gomez

100-90 on all cards for Frankie Gomez

Round 1 Stevens coming out aggresive..Hard left hurts Texeira

Round  2:  Texeira lands 2 lefts…COUNTER LEFT AND DOWN GOES TEXEIRA…TEXEIRA WOBBLES ON THE WAY UP AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Follow all the action as Anthony Crolla defends the WBA Lightweight title against undefeated Ismael Barroso.  The action kicks off at 2:30 PM ET with an appearance by former world title challenger Martin Murray.  Also a big Heavyweight elimination bout between former world title challengers Dereck Chisora and Kubrat Pulev

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Round 1 Crolla gets in a right..Barroso gets in 2 lefts..sharp combination..

Round 2 Body shot from Barroso…uppercut..Left to the body..

Round 3 Barroso gets in a right hook..Crolla gets in a right..

Round 4 Right from Crolla..body shot..Combination from Barroso..Right from Crolla…uppercut…Barroso throwing alot…Crolla cut over his right eye

Round 5 Body shot from Barroso…left to the body…uppercut and body shot from Crolla..

Round 6 Hard right staggers Barroso…another right…Crolla has Barroso in trouble

Round 7 HARD FLURRY AND DOWN GOES BARROSO…HE DOES NOT BEAT THE COUNT

 

Round 1 Right from Pulev

Round 2 1-2 from Pulev..

Round 3 Chisora gets in a round…working the body..uppercut from Pulev

Round 4 Right over top by Chisora…Good combination from Pulev..Jabs and rights on the ropes..

Round 5 Uppercut from Pulev..Jab..2 hard rights

Round 6 Hard right from Pulev..Good right from Chisora..Pulev is cut over his left eye…Right from Pulev…another right..

Round 7 Chisora lands a right to the body..Right from Pulev…Right

Round 8 Right from Pulev..3 hard rights on the ropes..

Round 9 Chisora lands a left..right…Right..Body shot and right from Pulev

Round 10 Body shots from Chisora

Round 11 Hard right and body shot from Pulev…Chisora right eye beginning to swell

Round 12 Right from Pulev..Jab..

116-112 Pulev; 115-113 Chisora; 118-110 Pulev…PULEV VIA SPLIT DECISION

Round 1 Murray working the body

Round 2 MURRAY LANDS A LEFT TO THE BODY AND DOWN GOES SPERA…RIGHT HAND AND DOWN GOES SPERA AND THE FIGHT IS OVER–TIME 1:47

 

Round 1 Singleton lands a sharp right..Right..DOUBLE LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES ANWAR

Round 2 Anwar lands a hard right…2 punch combination

Round 3 Singleton lands a solid right..Left shakes Anwar

Round 4 Right from Anwar

Round 5 Combination from Anwar

Round 6 Good right from Singleton..Right…left hook..

Round 7 Anwar lands a left…Jab from Singleton..Left hook..Right from Anwar

Round 8 BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ANWAR…SINGLETON ALL OVER ANWAR AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim

LAS VEGAS – Canelo Alvarez stood on a stage, beneath threatening skies and surrounded by weathered, scarred and aging faces of fighters who have been what he hopes to be.

He looked to his right and saw Roberto Duran. To his left, he saw Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins. Each has been where Canelo wants to go.

“The thing is, I want to be legend,’’ he said during a conference call a couple of weeks before his fight Saturday night against Amir Khan in a defense of his WBC middleweight title at the new T-Mobile Arena.

There is no map, no well-traveled path, on how to get there. For every great fighter on the stage Friday for a weigh-in in front of the T-Mobile Arena, there were different challenges and controversies. They are legends, in part, because of skill, durability, style and guts.

There’s also luck. Legend making can be as unpredictable as the approaching weather. But there was no downpour Friday despite dark clouds that promised a desert storm. It was just coincidence, but legends can’t be made without good timing. For Canelo, the timing has been almost perfect throughout his career.

De La Hoya, his promoter, calls him the game’s new face. He might not be quite there yet. But Canelo is in the right place and precisely at the right time to put a face on a game that has begun to search for one.

Maybe Floyd Mayweather Jr. is coming back. Maybe not. Crazy stories about him fighting UFC star Conor McGregor are just a sure sign that the comeback talk will be with us at least until we know whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is moving into the White House next year.

Early next week, we’ll know whether Manny Pacquiao is a new Filipino Senator. Elections are scheduled for May 9. After beating Timothy Bradley on April 9, Pacquiao said he’s “50-50” on retirement. If he wins a seat in the Filipino Senate, it will get a lot harder for him to move back into the ring.

Opportunity is in the forecast.

Years from now, Canelo’s date with Khan might not be considered critical. It’ll only be critical if he loses, and few expect that in a 155-pound bout against a skilled, yet undersized Khan, who has been at more than 140 pounds only four times before a two-division jump for a spot on Saturday HBO’s pay-per-view card (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET).

For Canelo (46-1-1, 32 KOs), the key is not so much in if he wins. It’s in how.
If Canelo is a legend in the making, he has to look good – very good — against Khan (31-3, 19 KOs). Five-to-one odds in favor of Canelo suggest that the Mexican will dominate in a style that will only further speculation about a showdown with Gennady Golovkin, who plans to be at the fight.

At the sports book and on the scale, he has key advantages. He is expected to be 17 to 18 pounds heavier than he was Friday. That means Khan, who is not expected to heavier than 165 at opening bell, could be facing a fighter who is a couple of pounds short of being a light-heavyweight. Khan’s quick feet might not be fast enough to keep Canelo off him throughout the scheduled 12 rounds.

“I’m confident that this is my time,’’ Khan said at the weigh-in.

If Khan stays disciplined and resists the temptation to trade punches, maybe it will be his time. Slick defense and agile footwork are supposed to keep him out of range, and away from Canelo’s dangerous combinations.

From start to finish, however, Canelo’s stubborn pursuit and upper-body strength figure to keep the pressure on. The betting odds are one-sided because few think Khan can stick to his game plan. One moment of fatigue, physical and/or mental, could leave Khan’s vulnerable chin open for the KO combo that many believe is inevitable, perhaps in the later rounds of just one chapter in a bigger story.

Notes From The Scale: David Lemieux has been mentioned as a possible foe for Canelo. However, Lemieux has had trouble making 160, much less 155. Lemieux (34-3, 31 KOs) was right at 160 Friday for his middleweight bout Saturday against Glen Tapia (23-2, 15 KOs), who was at 159.5. …Curtis Stevens (27-5, 20 KOs) was at 160 and Patrick Teixeira (26-0, 22 KOs) was at a 159. …Mauricio Herrera (22-5, 7 KOs was at 145.5 and Frankie Gomez (20-0, 13 KOs) at 146 for their welterweight bout.

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS – Canelo Alvarez is not a middleweight now and probably won’t be one until sometime next year.

That, at least, was trainer Eddy Reynoso’s likely timetable when asked Thursday whether Canelo’s next fight would be against a true middleweight if he beats Amir Khan Saturday at a catch-weight in his first defense of the WBC’s 160-pound title.

“No, not at all,’’ Reynoso said during a trainer’s roundtable at the MGM Grand. “Maybe in two or three fights. But now, not at all.’’

The plan is for Canelo to fight two more times this year, once in September and again in December. He intends to fight both times at 155-pounds, the contracted weight for the HBO pay-per-view bout against Khan at the new T Mobile Arena.

The question, however, is whether Canelo still will have the WBC title if the 5-to-1 betting favorite beats Khan.

According to an agreement with the WBC for an interim fight after his victory for the belt over Miguel Cotto in November, Canelo has 15 days after the Khan bout to reach an agreement with Gennady Golovkin, the mandatory challenger and presumptive middleweight champion.

Without an agreement with GGG or another deal for an interim bout in the wake of a predicted Canelo victory, the WBC’s next step would be to strip the popular Mexican of the title.

“We will follow the rules,’’ WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman said.

Canelo’s stubborn demand for a catch weight has generated controversy over whether the 25-year-old is ready for thunbeaten and feared Golovkin.

“We’re ready to fight anyone,’’ Reynoso said. “It’s not a difficult fight. It’s a hard fight to make and we’re going to have to sit down with Oscar De La Hoya to do that.

“But as a fight, it is not difficult, because he (GGG) is a fighter who comes forward.’’

Bernard Hopkins, De La Hoya’s promotional partner, defends Canelo’s right to demand a catch weight.

“Who’s the star?’’ said Hopkins, a longtime middleweight champ in 2004 when he agreed to a 158-pound catch weight for a bout against De La Hoya.

Hopkins came in at 156 and won a ninth-round stoppage in a career-defining bout. De La Hoya was fighting at middleweight for only the second time, but his celebrity propelled Hopkins to more money and media attention than he would have received against any other fighter.

“The guy fighting on Cinco de Mayo weekend is the guy generating the numbers,’’ Hopkins said. “He’s the star. Why does everyone want to give GGG a free pass?’’

Canelo has said that GGG has fought a collection of nobodies. A couple of those nobodies are on Saturday’s undercard. There’s David Lemieux, who lost to GGG in October. There’s Curtis Stevens, who lost to GGG in November, 2013.

“Triple-G not being ready for Canelo?,’’ said Lemieux, who faces Glen Tapia Saturday night. “I don’t think that’s the case. Sometimes, people have got to say whatever they want to say.

“But we all know Triple-G has a long amateur history. He’s a very good fighter. And it’d be a very interesting fight if he fought Canelo. Canelo has fought a lot of tough opponents, but so has Triple-G.”

Canelo, Stevens said, has the leverage because of his pay-per-view numbers, including 900,000 for his victory over Cotto.

“Canelo, he’s the man, the pay-per-view superstar, and he is a junior-middleweight, not a true middleweight,” said Stevens, who fights unbeaten Patrick Teixeira Saturday. “Canelo makes the rules in this case. It’ll be a good fight if it happens.”

By Norm Frauenheim–

LAS VEGAS – Donald Trump and Oscar De La Hoya are accusing each other of cheating and lying. There’s nothing to the rumor that De La Hoya will be Trump’s running mate, either. At least, we don’t think so. But that could all change in a TMZ minute.

The only certainty Thursday was that boxing and presidential politics were one and the same when it comes to the truth. There is none.

In a sequence of tweets and news reports that turned into a rapid-fire farce throughout a few hours, Trump countered De La Hoya’s charges of cheating on the golf course, saying he had never played golf with the Hall of Fame fighter-turned promoter.

http://www.usnews.com/news/sports/articles/2016-05-05/trump-i-have-too-much-integrity-to-cheat-in-golf

Then, TMZ posted video of De La Hoya on the golf course, playing a round of golf in 2010 with the former promoter-turned-Republican presidential nominee.

http://www.tmz.com/2016/05/05/oscar-de-la-hoya-donald-trump-golf/

De La Hoya can be heard praising Trump, who swings a club as if he got a lesson from Charles Barkley.

Trump also said reports of him attending the De La Hoya-promoted fight Saturday between Canelo Alvarez and Amir Khan as “Totally untrue.” De La Hoya said at a Wednesday news conference at the MGM Grand that he had “confirmed” Trump would attend the fight at the T Mobile Arena.

De La Hoya had offered him two tickets. De La Hoya wasn’t sure where he would sit. Given the nature of any fight crowd and Mexican anger at Trump for his controversial comments about immigration, he might have had to watch the bout from a seat in an armored personnel carrier.

Meanwhile, Trump showed up in other photos and video, eating a taco salad. It was his way of celebrating Cinco de Mayo. He said it was made at a Mexican restaurant in the Trump Tower, perhaps by some of the undocumented immigrants he promises to deport if he gets elected.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/05/05/trump-uses-taco-bowl-try-reach-out-hispanic-voters-cinco-de-mayo/83981070/

Anybody for a game of liar’s poker?

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS, Nev. – Amir Khan might be a big underdog against Canelo Alvarez Saturday, but he won the news conference Wednesday.

Khan scored a knockout with a punch line.

“You never know, but this could be the last fight for me and Canelo here,’’ Khan said at the MGM Grand. “That’s it, if Donald Trump becomes president.’’

Khan is Muslim, a UK fighter of Pakistani descent. Canelo is Mexican. Trump’s call to make America great again doesn’t exactly include either.

Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, has campaigned by saying he would bar Muslims. He’s also promising to build a wall, 10 feet high, along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Oh yeah, Trump also might be at the Khan-Canelo fight Saturday night in the T-Mobile Arena’s boxing debut.

After Khan’s line, promoter Oscar De La Hoya announced that Trump would be attending the middleweight bout for Canelo’s World Boxing Council title.

“I just received confirmation that Trump will be here Saturday night,’’ De La Hoya said.

De La Hoya re-confirmed to a handful of reporters after the news conference that he had been told Trump had accepted his offer.

De La Hoya offered Trump two tickets last week during an appearance on Cavuto Coast to Coast on Fox Business News.

Tickets are still available for the fight, an HBO pay-per-view bout. The billionaire politician, who got Mike Tyson’s endorsement last weekend and was at ringside for Gennady Golovkin’s victory over David Lemieux at Madison Square Garden in October, could probably afford to spring for a couple of tickets on his own dime.

But De La Hoya wants Trump to witness a unique, international event between two accomplished athletes from backgrounds he has targeted with comments that have angered Mexicans and immigrants.

“”I have Amir Khan, a Muslim fighter from the U.K., fighting against the most popular boxer in Mexico, Canelo Alvarez, opening up the new T-Mobile Arena,” De La Hoya said when he first made an offer that he figured Trump could only refuse. “We have an opportunity to show Mr. Trump just what Mexicans and Muslims can achieve — and in a city that screams America: Las Vegas. Trump, let me invite you so that you can see what a Mexican and a Muslim can generate.”

It’s not exactly clear where Trump, a former business associate of Don King and Bob Arum, would be seated if he shows up, presumably with somebody other than Ted Cruz. At recent campaign stops in California, violence erupted among demonstrators opposed to Trump, whose name has been booed loudly by fight crowds ever since the ex-promoter became a politician.

“Not in ringside seat,’’ De La Hoya said during the news conference. “But we’ll make sure he sees the fight.’’

By Bart Barry-

Saturday Mexican super middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will defend the lineal middleweight championship of the world, not to be confused with the PBC middleweight championship or the HBO middleweight championship, against Britain’s Amir “King” Khan, currently the WBC’s silver champion of the welterweight division. The match will happen in Las Vegas on pay-per-view, naturally.

All the boxes are checked – Face Off, 24/7, Greatest Hits – but interest is wholly wanting.

I’ve been ringside for fights enough of Canelo’s to know they’re better in person than via television yet I hadn’t a farthing of an impetus or a modicum of that farthing to travel to see this fight. Amir Khan has never struck me as better than a highlight reel of nationalistic and ethnic special effects. Surely some Brits and lots of Pakistanis feel something like pride when they watch him, but in many more cases, I infer, persons claim to be impressed by Khan because their own box-checking told them to be so: Handsome, well-spoken, fast hands, bilingual, beloved by others.

That was certainly Oscar De La Hoya and Richard Schaefer’s calculation way back when. Not too long after Khan – an Olympic silver medalist, have you heard? – got plastercracked by Breidis Prescott in 2008, he won a cynical rehabilitation match against Marco Antonio Barrera 18 months after Barrera resigned his ownership stake in Golden Boy Promotions by retiring, and not long after that Khan began appearing at ringside as Oscar’s guest.

After racing through Paulie Malignaggi in the best performance of his career Khan raced away from Marcos Maidana in the expiring moments of their 2010 match – a performance that couldn’t be talked to pretty. The image of Khan in perimeter-hopping flight, eyes wide, tail high, pride low, endures and endures. It’s why many of us cheered for Danny Garcia in 2012, seven months after Khan lost a decision to Lamont Peterson. Garcia uncorked Khan with a left hook that’s aged better than both Garcia and Khan.

Then it was back to the rehabilitation circuit for King Khan, a string of decision victories against opponents a prizefighter of Khan’s celebrity should not have needed judges to best. After making Chris Algieri, a small welterweight, look formidable enough to get Algieri recently fed to a PBC prospect, a year ago Khan settled in for a victory hibernation. It took a cashout arrangement for Khan and his advisor – I’m going to cash you out, Amir, because I’m out of cash – to get Khan back in the ring, this time in a match for the lineal middleweight championship of the world Cinnamon Alvarez beat from the waist of Miguel Cotto who won the title from a cripple who decisioned a drunk.

Which mightn’t be amusing as it is were it not for the purists now propped high on their hindlegs by dudgeon for Canelo’s refusal to defend this august title above 155 pounds. Gennady “He’ll Fight Anyone Between 154 and 168 Pounds” Golovkin, the reigning, defending and undisputed middleweight champion of HBO, may not have a chance to sue posterity for greatness, his partisans fear, if he cannot accumulate on his record some marquee welterweights or 154-pounders willing to face him at the middleweight limit.

Fans are now clamoring for Canelo to fight Golovkin, except they aren’t. HBO is clamoring for Canelo to fight Golovkin for a combination of reasons like: The Golovkin marketing budget is starting to outpace its effect. Most idiots left boxing with Money May, and the aficionados who remain are more interested in great matches than abetting networks’ lame starsystems, which means the HBO middleweight champion will never get back on pay-per-view without either luring Canelo into a match with him or, heaven forbid, moving up in weight and challenging himself.

Golovkin won’t move up in weight for the same reason Canelo won’t move up in weight: Why the hell take a risk when there are millions to be made by not taking risks? And before you say “Posterity!” wipe that smirk off your face.

Nobody thinks Canelo will beat Golovkin at 160 pounds – so how does anyone expect the disinterested among us to believe there is clamoring for a match whose promotional tagline would be “Ratify Golovkin!”? Canelo knows this, and Canelo knows he is the AAA-side in a match with Golovkin, and he is behaving like it. A question for those who sincerely believe Golovkin’s starching Canelo at 160 pounds is what’s best for our beleaguered sport: Then what? Canelo is off pay-per-view till he can be rehabilitated, and Golovkin has no one to fight with his easy new prestige. Or is the idea actually to harangue the welterweight champion of the world out of retirement?

Goodness, stop it.

Back to Saturday’s spectacle. The best outcome is Khan, SD-12: A narrow, controversial decision in which Khan outbusies Canelo, who shows massive amounts of frustration for his loyal fans at Khan’s unwillingness to engage in a manly way. Oscar, Canelo’s promoter, can get in the ring afterward and tell us about protesting the decision and hiring investigators and so forth. The WBC – to whom Golovkin’s folks pretend they’ve pinned dreams of fairplay; yet in whose sweatsuit Canelo trains – can order an immediate rematch, and knowing Canelo will win that by prefilled scorecards emulate Hollywood by ordering a sequel to the rematch at the same time they order the rematch, filling Canelo’s calendar until Mexican Independence Day 2017, time enough for him to grow in to a middleweight while Golovkin grows out of one.

Some folks will remember Canelo didn’t move up to 160 pounds while Golovkin was still there. Some folks remember Golovkin didn’t move up to 168 while Andre Ward was still there. As we’ve seen, though, that’s nothing some quality agitprop can’t fix.

I’ll take Canelo, KO-8, because, who are we kidding, Khan has no chin.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Badou Jack defends the WBC Super Middleweight title against former world champion Lucian Bute.  The action begins at 10 PM ET / 7 PM PT with an IBF Super Middleweight title bout between James DeGale and Rogelio Medina….NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1 Jack lands a left to the body

Round 2 Bute lands a right to the body..Jack lands a left to the body..Combination from Bute..Jack lands a right to the body and a left hook to the body..Left from Bute..right to the body from Jack..

Round 3 Bute lands a straight left…Cut around the right eye of Bute..Jack lands a body shot..

Round 4 Jack lands a right…Left and uppercut from Bute…Short left to the chin from Jack…Body work..counter shot..

Round 5 Counter right from Jack…Overhand left…left hook to the face..

Round 6 Jack lands a right to the body…Hard right…Right uppercut from Bute..3 punch combination..stiff right from Jack…Left hook to the head..

Round 7 Combination from Bute…Left and right from Jack…1-2…

Round 8

Round 9 jack working the body…Counter left hook…Right uppercut to the body

Round 10 Left and right for Bute..2 lefts and right hand for Jack

Round 11 Right uppercut from Bute…Bute getting better of exchanges

Round 12 Bute coming forward

117-111 Jack; 114-114 twice…..A DRAW

 

Round 1 DeGale landing the jab…landing head punches..right hook..body shots

Round 2 DeGale landing blistering shots…focusing on the body

Round 3 Medina working the body on the ropes..DeGale landing to body and the head…right uppercut from Medina..

Round 4 Medina lands a right..sweeping right from DeGale..Medina digging at the body..Combination from DeGale..Medina landing to the body…left uppercut from DeGale..Counter jab from Medina…body…

Round 5 Left from Meduppercut..ina..Right from Medina..Combination from Medina..Good exchange on the ropes..Right uppercut from DeGale..right…

Round 6 DeGale lands a jab…Medina lands a left hook to the body..right…Huge combination backs up Medina,..

Round 7 Left from Medina…right hook from DeGale…Both get in jabs…Left from Medina…Uppercut from DeGale

Round 8 Left hook from Medina..right from DeGale…Long right…Left hook to the body from Medina..Nice right uppercut and body shots from deGale..

Round 9 Hard uppercut from DeGale…Medina working the body…combination..Combination from DeGale…Right uppercut

Round 10 Medina coming forward trying to work the body

Round 11 Medina making the fight

Round 12 Medina lands a right…Counter from DeGale..right uppercut..Jab from Medina..Nice combination..Left from DeGale..uppercut..

 

115-113, 117-111 twice for James DeGale

By Norm Frauenheim

By now, all the arguments have been stated and re-stated. We’ll hear them again, ad nauseam, next week in the final days before Canelo Alvarez and Amir Khan fight at Las Vegas’ new T-Mobile Arena.

Catchweight or middleweight? Should Canelo surrender the WBC’s 160-pound title or move forward with a mandatory defense against Gennady Golovkin? Those questions will be heard about as often as Donald Trump’s name.

Fair or not, Khan figures to become a footnote, at least in the pre-fight proceedings. That might become a very big piece of motivation for him and he’ll need every bit of it against the bigger, stronger Canelo.

Nevertheless, the GGG question isn’t going to go away. For Canelo promoter Oscar De La Hoya, it’s a classic dilemma.

The young promoter, a Hall of Fame fighter who wanted to fight the best and still does, faces controversy no matter what path he chooses in the wake of a likely Canelo victory.

On the one hand, there’s growing public pressure on him to do the deal for Canelo-GGG in September. On the other, there’s the risk of losing income that Canelo, the game’s current pay-per-view leader, figures to generate if he isn’t ready and suffers a one-sided knockout.

What would you do? For vocal fans armed with the various forms of the social-media megaphone, it’s easy to demand that the bout happens ASAP. They don’t have any skin in the game. It’s not their money. If it was, what would they do? If it was your money, what would you do?

The guess here is that a big percentage would delay the inevitable, especially after watching GGG’s powerful blowout of Dominic Wade last Saturday.

Wade won’t be remembered for anything other than being GGG’s 22nd straight knockout victim. He didn’t look as if he could beat any known middleweight, or good junior middleweight for that matter. Nevertheless, GGG’s dominance was evident in his power, style and body language. He’s in his prime and fought as if he wanted everybody to know exactly that.

With all due respect to unbeaten flyweight Roman Gonzalez and his one-sided decision over McWilliams Arroyo Saturday, Golovkin trainer Abel Sanchez said GGG was pound-for-pound No. 1. No argument here. I didn’t hear much of an argument from anywhere else either.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: Khan’s skill set – fast hands and faster feet – could make Canelo look bad. But Khan’s instinct is to brawl after he gets tagged. At some point, that will do him in, say, after the eighth round. Canelo wins a stoppage, but not in a dominant enough fashion to suggest he’ll have any chance against GGG four months from now. He’s 25, yet still another fight or two away from the kind of maturity he’ll need for a legitimate shot against GGG.

“Many things have changed,’’ Canelo said of how he has grown since his lone loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. “I’m more experienced now. I’m more of a complete fighter. I’ve learned so much in that fight. So many things have changed. I think I have more confidence around the ring, so there’s many things that have changed.’’

But the suggestion is that more still has to change in an ongoing process for the young Mexican who is about nine years younger than GGG. Canelo’s demand for a 155-pound catchweight is just a dodge. Truth is, it’s his corner’s way of saying he still needs to mature. It would be refreshing if they just said that. But pride and business won’t allow them to. Instead, we get euphemistic talk, all rhetorical feints and all very annoying.

For De La Hoya, the question looks to be simple enough. Canelo is the key to his financial war chest, which will be critical for a while.

The boxing business is down, predictably so amid the continuing hangover from Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao, a turn-off for all of the causal fans who bought the hype and the fight last year. HBO has cut it boxing dates. That’s why Bob Arum will stage Terence Crawford-versus Viktor Postol on pay-per-view on July 23.

There’s a further red flag in a $925-million lawsuit that investors have filed against Waddell & Reed, which bankrolled Al Haymon’s ambitious PBC venture. http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/04/28/investors-furious-at-money-put-into-boxing.htm

It’s hard to know where the suit is headed. But it is enough to know that a big risk in September just wouldn’t be wise.

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 13, please click here.
SAN ANTONIO – Thursday evening in this city’s irreplaceable McNay Art Museum, as part of its quarterly series Artists Looking at Art, local sculptor James Hetherington conversed with the museum’s chief curator about what relationships are shared by the materials he uses and their discovery and the works they eventually compose. Series of reactions he catalyzes that often form tributes to the originators of their component parts, Hetherington’s sculptures are large and enormously heavy and assembled from pieces he recovers from a local salvage yard. They form among many things Hetherington’s contribution to an ecological conversation about sustaining our world by repurposing materials.

What Hetherington is after does correlate in its way with boxing (for once).

Somewhere in his language of sustainability, an idea whose cliche is not lessened by the fullness of its artist’s belief, is the idea of taking parts as life presents them and relating them to one another oftener with a welding torch than a saw and prizing the sum of their reactions followed by their new collective’s reactions to the elements of their spaces.

When his thoughts were interrupted by questions about the colors he uses Hetherington confirmed with diminishing enthusiasm the colors of his sculptures come via oxidation much as intention. The artist’s vision for his work is its initial condition and what follows is iterative; the pieces he scavenges in junkyards and fits together and the effects then taken on them by wind and rain and sunlight, elements taking their effects meanwhile and too on those who view the sculptures, harmonize (cooperate) with and alter (compete with) the pieces in a process whose varying results are, like every other experience, equal parts impossible and inevitable.

In this sense Hetherington plays an exceptional boxing trainer much more than a fighter or a middling trainer. Our beloved sport bursts with middling trainers – men who endeavor to carve or melt younger men into proven or at least popular fighting styles and shapes without very much regard for these men’s natural endowments or deference either to nature. Even exceptional trainers rarely prove to be ponies with more than one trick but at least they have that trick, and with promotional-television revenues involved, one trick a multimillionaire can make.

Emanuel Steward was very good at teaching tall men to dominate with straight punches. Freddie Roach is quite good at helping athletic punchers maintain their balance while increasing aggression. But Roach would prove no better at improving Wladimir Klitschko – whose post-Steward dominance of opponents remains proportionate to the number of inches he towers over them – than Steward proved at improving Miguel Cotto.

If the best trainers, then, work to harmonize the materials they’re given within the hard if not narrow boundaries imposed by a sport in which death is possible and permanent damage is assured, a new question arises: How essential are exceptional trainers?

Their essentiality generally relates to the experience of the men they train. While Floyd Mayweather Sr. and Nacho Beristain, both, were perfectly essential in the developmental stages of their respective prodigies, Little Floyd and Juan Manuel Marquez, neither has provided more than comfort and familiarity in his charge’s most recent matches. Maybe even Abel Sanchez once was essential to the development of Olympic silver-medalist Gennady Golovkin after Golovkin was already good enough to win a silver medal without him, but with the competition K2HBO now feeds him, Golovkin could score a knockout with an actual pony in his corner.

This may not be an important question as it relates to contemporary art but it remains an interesting and frequent one since Andy Warhol elevated tracing others’ works, whether labels or photographs, to something critics credited with approximating originality. It’s a question that made James Hetherington a touch sheepish Thursday night too. While he properly believes his talent for vision and scavenging and attachment makes him an artist and his productions art, Hetherington is aware consensus among the commonfolk at times can be shaky.

The laity reliably appraises fine art, as opposed to fashion art, by asking: Could I do this? If the answer is yes the art is fashion and if the answer is no a piece requires secondlooking. Yes, but. Like most who enjoy reduction – pursuing the known, not the unknown – these earnest folks who would doubt a curator that included commonly doable things in an exhibition (still preferable company to what art-school airheads relentlessly shout “a-mazing!” at their classmates’ collaborative doodles) must move the variable t before they reject what they see once it exists.

This seemed to be Hetherington’s slightly defensive rebuttal when he reported he sees all these works in his mind before he finds their parts. That is his art (where welding and pipefitting get regarded as trades and crafts). There’s a reason, Hetherington properly insists, no one else in the neighborhood meanders in the same junkyard then scores commissions to erect his works in public spaces no matter how obvious these creations later appear in their finished states.

It’s a skill, a science even, to reduce works of complexity to their component parts; it’s an art to snatch from the inconstant pulses of one’s own mind a set of shapes and materials to recover and conjoin and ultimately present to the eyes of other impossibly complex beings whose own inconstant minds pulse ever rabidly about. The most Hetherington or any creator can do is drop his works in the universe of feedback loops and hope for the best.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry