Here’s one more reason to attend fights whenever possible rather than sit complacently on a couch feeling satisfied by a medium that tells you to: Delightful spectacles happen at ringside. In January 2011 at Pontiac Silverdome, a decidedly undelightful venue, one such delight happened in the form Cornelius “K9” Bundrage’s copiously furred winter coat draped over its bearer’s impressive shoulders while he circulated press row – its writers all runny noses and doubt – flashing his unforgettable smile and schmoozing and distributing laminated brochures about himself.

Whatever one knew about Bundrage’s fistic rage or justifiable displeasure with then-promoter Don King, who happened to be co-hosting a major card in the IBF light middleweight titlist’s backyard without inviting him to participate, one strained to take Bundrage seriously in that shimmering, furry getup. Which was fine; as Showtime viewers saw in Bundrage’s barking postfight interview, Saturday, “K9” does not take himself too seriously either.

That interview came after Bundrage blitzed and assaulted former world champion Cory Spinks, stopping the son of Leon and nephew of Michael at 2:32 of round 7, after forcing him to the canvas four times with an assortment of blinding and blind overhand rights.

Bundrage pitched the right hand at Spinks in their rematch the same way he threw it in their 2010 match: without regard for anything but ferocity. It was a faithful effort; Bundrage believed, in accordance with very limited evidence, if he stepped outside, removed his eyes and head fully from his target, and sailed the right hand in a wide enough arc, it would devastate Spinks.

It is a task to describe adequately how awful Bundrage’s punching form can be. Usually his overhand right overshoots its mark by being too wide to clip even a target’s far ear or temple. When it scores, it does so by bringing the outside of the knuckle of Bundrage’s right index finger crashing into some part of the left side of an opponent’s face. The “outside of the knuckle of Bundrage’s right index finger,” really, is too charitable by half. It’s the pleated folds of the Grant glove between the V where the thumb breaks from the fist and the small strip of leather that fastens the appendage back on at its thumbnail – that is what crashes against the left side of an opponent’s face.

From there Bundrage’s Sunday punch is mainly muscle. The cuff of his right glove pressed to an opponent’s chin, Bundrage throws the opponent downwards, as his right foot swings over his left like a little-leaguer on a dangling rubber whose lost footing unbalances the follow-through. Often the most devastating part of the Bundrage right hand comes from the blue mat onto which his opponent is tossed. Such was the case, Saturday, when the most concussing blow of Bundrage’s seventh-round barrage came when the apron bounced off the back of Spinks’ head.

But Bundrage, bless his soul, is all fighter. He is not an athlete who nearly got a basketball scholarship and dejectedly followed a friend downstairs after a pickup game, put on a pair of gloves, collected immediate compliments on his hand speed and reflexes and athleticism, and then set about doing his best Roy Jones Jr. impersonation. (Though that does appear to be what Bundrage is after.) Like golfer Lee Trevino imagining his swing on Ben Hogan’s plane, Bundrage looks nothing like RJJ. All the better; he lacks everything a prime Jones had, including an aversion to combat and well-matched opponents.

Jones once peppered a postfight interview with this suspicious and suspiciously delivered suspicion: “Y’all just want to see me bleed.” Bundrage would bleed on-command if asked to. Because any eye can see Bundrage’s formless ferocity, though, those who purport to be experts turn their heads away in disapproval, tacitly implying anyone could do what Bundrage does. That’s wrong.

Bundrage, for all his spread-eagled awkwardness Saturday, consistently placed his lead foot well outside the southpaw Spinks’. Perhaps Bundrage is not in boxing’s doctorate program, but critics must concede he’s well past putting Boxing 101 on his transcript.

Writing of transcripts, does anyone think Manny Steward wants a picture of Bundrage on his hall-of-fame-trainer résumé? One imagines Steward watching Bundrage spar fellow Kronk Boxing Gym standout Andy Lee and wondering what other marvels life might bring. How the hell did these two end up apprenticing in the same studio? Steward is among boxing’s great trainers because he is offense-oriented, and boxing, when done properly, is too. That much Steward must love deeply about Bundrage; “K9” never needs to be peptalked with a street poem about an opponent’s trying to steal food from his family.

“K9” already takes punches so personally the only enemy to the fight in that dog is fatigue, which is Bundrage’s great affliction of course. One doesn’t wear Bundrage’s short, tight musculature, and keep it tensed at all times, without dropping his jaw to suck breath, as Bundrage does early and often.

If Saturday’s card, opened by effectively undefeated Cuban southpaw Erislandy Lara and closed by Detroit’s Cornelius Bundrage, was a casting call for Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s next supporting actor, it was a failure. Neither Lara, “age 29,” nor Bundrage, age 39, should be allowed the unconscionable leap from ShoBox: The New Generation to pay-per-view main event. But if Golden Boy Promotions and Showtime do make plans for hara-kiri on Sept. 15, Bundrage-Lara could make an excellent co-main.

Lara, who has every boxing tool, often fights reluctantly, and fights not at all once an opponent gets inside his punches. Bundrage, whose toolbox comprises only a piece of jab and a stub of cross tossed carelessly on a bed of befuddlement and fierceness, wants nothing but to fight. Let Lara try that no-hand head-butt trick on “K9,” and watch what chaos ensues. There are worse ways to spend an undercard, no?

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

The furor surrounding Tim Bradley’s victory over Manny Pacquiao is more of the same in a tiresome, if not redundant, succession of lousy decisions. But there was not much argument about Pacquiao, who has been robbed more by time than judges.

Speed, especially in hands once as lethal as lightning, is gone. That suggests more controversy on the scorecards for his remaining fights, be they against Bradley or Juan Manuel Marquez or Miguel Cotto.

The big tease, Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr., is now full of more potential controversy than drama, simply because both are in decline. What Pacquiao has lost in his hands, Mayweather has lost in his feet. A better bet than a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight later this year, or early next year, or in any year is that Mayweather and Pacquiao won’t be No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in Forbes’ 2013 ranking of the world’s highest-earning athletes.

In the rush to find crooks, or conspiracies, or fault with the failing vision of aging judges, there’s still a simple solution as fundamental and reliable as a jab. Who’s next? Stardom’s successor is out there. Retirement is on the horizon for the current pound-for-pound generation that includes Mayweather, Pacquiao, Cotto, Marquez, the Wladimir-and-Vitali Klitschko empire and Bernard Hopkins.

What will that pound-for-pound crowd look like a couple of years from now? Here’s a guess from No. 1 to No. 10.

1 –Andre Ward. The reigning super-middleweight possesses classic skill, poise and surprising toughness. Everything, it seems, but a large fan base. In a media session before the June 9 craziness over Bradley’s split decision over Pacquiao, Ward said “give it time.” It’ll happen, he said. Give him the right opponent, too. An insightful friend says the right foe might be Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who is growing into Ward’s weight class. Chavez also has his dad’s legendary name and the Mexican audience, which might like what it sees in Ward when introduced to him.

2 – Nonito Donaire. He has been riding a crest of popularity since his crushing knock out of Fernando Montiel last year. There have been some mixed performances since then, perhaps brought on by a promotional controversy. Now that he’s back and apparently comfortable with Top Rank, he figures to regain the dramatic edge he had against Montiel. “He might be the best pound-for-pound fighter there is,’’ manager Cameron Dunkin said of Donaire’s 122-pound bout on July 7 against South African Jeffrey Mathebula in Carson, Calif. “In my opinion, he is. Five, six, seven titles? Who knows?’’

3 — Sergio Martinez. The Argentine middleweight often looks beatable, but the former soccer player’s unusual style has made fools of nearly everybody who has tried. The junior Chavez is expected to try on Sept. 15 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. It’s a defining bout for Martinez, mostly because Chavez is beginning to define himself with some toughness that few thought he had. If Martinez beats Chavez, he’ll have to move up in weight and onto another defining step against Carl Froch, Arthur Abraham and even Ward.

4 – Chavez Jr. and junior-middleweight Saul “Canelo’ Alvarez. We could break this tie if Top Rank, Chavez’ promoter, and Golden Boy, Canelo’s promoter, could sit down at the same table, break bread and agree on a date and weight. Then again, we’d probably get only a food fight. Too bad. Canelo’s combinations against Chavez’ emerging toughness would be a beauty.

6 – Abner Mares. If you’re sick of hearing about Pacquiao-Mayweather and Chavez-Canelo, prepare for more indigestion. At the lighter weights, there’s not a fight the public wants more than Mares-versus-Donaire. It could be the best rivalry in the lighter divisions since Michael Carbajal-Humberto Gonzalez. Without an end to the Top Rank-Golden Boy food fight, however, it won’t happen. Mares is a Golden Boy fighter and its first prospect to win a major title. Donaire is promoted by Top Rank. Mares has many of the qualities that makes Ward so intriguing. He’s smart, tough and skilled.

7 – Adrien Broner. What’s not to like about the unbeaten junior-lightweight from Cincinnati? He has speed in his hands and feet. He’s also a lot of fun. He likes to talk almost as much as he likes to fight. The showmanship includes a brush that might be worth some endorsement money if and when he moves to lightweight and junior-welterweight in search of name opponents and bigger victories.

8 — Chad Dawson. His bout on Sept. 8 with Ward will say something about his staying power, although the light-heavyweight will be at disadvantage in Oakland, Calif. – Ward’s hometown — and at Ward’s weight – 168 pounds instead of 175. A close loss wouldn’t keep him off this list, however. His future still might be at heavyweight, where the search for the next great American continues. Yeah, it might be former Michigan State linebacker Seth Mitchell. A couple of years from now, however, it could be the more experienced Dawson.

9 – Amir Khan. The UK junior-welterweight has as much to prove as he has potential. His split-decision loss in December to Lamont Peterson in Washington, D.C., was every bit as bad as the one that went against Pacquiao in the loss to Bradley. But it also left doubts about whether Khan is as good as he looked in victories over Marcos Maidana and Zab Judah. We’ll know more on July 14 against young Danny Garcia at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay. The athletic Khan is smart and knows how to market himself. If one punch exposes a suspect chin, however, he could quickly fall to the canvas and off this list.

10 – Bradley. It would be interesting see him in a Pacquiao rematch with healthy ankles. He injured both – a sprain to the right and damaged ligaments in the left — early in the June 9 bout. With both ankles intact, the result might be the same, but without the controversy.

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday, Hector “Machito” Camacho Jr., fighting for the first time in 16 months, dropped an overmatched opponent on the red canvas of an outdoor ring erected in La Villita’s Maverick Plaza about a two-minute stroll from the River Walk. Meanwhile at ringside, and on message boards everywhere, and on YouTube, debate about Bradley-Pacquiao continued, though in significantly politer terms.

Camacho’s comeback, as these things go, does not appear a particularly serious one. He is George Foreman, with the religious awakening and cheeseburgers but without the stopping power. Camacho is a Puerto Rican welterweight/junior middleweight/middleweight/super middleweight, not an American heavyweight, and so he also must rely on shtick more than Foreman did. Shtick is a family specialty, though; cry not at all for Machito.

His dad, without whom the Camacho name in Puerto Rico would be more obscure, by far, than the Chavez name in Mexico, does not care a whole lot about his son’s conversion to Islam, one that finds Junior prefacing statements with “God is great” and donning a white thobe that clings more than billows at ringside. Saturday, Camacho’s shiny silver trunks, too, clung, in a summer look that said, Whoa, even I didn’t think my ass could get this full. And “full” is good a word as any to describe Camacho’s physique.

Four and a half years ago, when he weighed an embarrassing 173 pounds in Scottsdale, Ariz., for a fight the day before Super Bowl XLII, Camacho said he thought maybe he should get down to 147, to prove he was serious. He’s not down there yet, though he claimed Friday he weighed as little as 157 before his opponent fell-out and he learned the sacrifice they were trucking up from Corpus Christi would be well over the middleweight limit. That sacrifice, J.D. Charles, caught a Camacho left uppercut to the belly in the second minute of their main-event tilt and went down and stayed down. Afterwards, he said he could have gotten up but didn’t. With the short notice and purse they offered him, in other words, he’d more than fulfilled his obligation when the 120th second passed. Camacho didn’t grandstand or insult Charles.

Therein lies a little of the appeal Camacho holds for those who’ve crossed paths with him during his 16-year campaign. He can actually fight when he wants to and is so wonderfully self-deprecating, and therefore empathetic, he would never fault a fellow prizefighter for wanting effort. Camacho understands the exact brutality of our sport and talks candidly about it. In all his court-jesterliness, he is, when the bell rings, additionally a reminder of something Carlo Rotella wrote in an excellent 2003 book called “Cut Time”:

“The lowliest of professional opponents . . . can fight better than almost everybody else on earth. Any one of them could beat the hell out of the typical top-flight contact-sports jock remotely his size, and any one of them could single-handedly clear out a bar full of fight-goers, writers, and other smart alecks who dismiss him as a stiff when he boxes in the ring.”

Camacho, seeming stagy but sincere, tells you he is embarrassed about what shame he’s brought on his career. Then he tells you about the women he enjoyed during that run – and you realize the insincerity of those lines about shame. For a short, chunky kid with a birthmark that runs the left side of his face, he’s done things to women more than reason expected. Where his father was a character, a leading actor in many a hijinks, Machito is a storyteller, a supporting actor who doubles as narrator. Had his reflexes been a tad slower, he’d have made a good cameraman in gonzo pornography – such is his charisma, timing and capacity for disarming inquisitors.

“F–king the girls I was f–king in my days?” Camacho Jr. explained in the foyer of Allstar’s Gentlemen’s Sports Club, Friday. “You can’t blame me, man! I was f–king the baddest girls, from Switzerland and Europe. You cannot blame me, man!”

Ah, the effects of the camera. Saturday, a third ringside experience in as many weeks brought another chance to reflect on what happened in Bradley-Pacquiao, and what happened to those at ringside and those at home. Locked in a narrative that said Pacquiao would win an easy decision, after the sixth round, many a serious ringside journalist on a tight deadline – thank Pacquiao’s fascination with the NBA playoffs, in part, for that – put his head down and wrote while the last 15 minutes of the fight happened. Then he turned-in a scorecard that was not close as perhaps it should have been, for a fight all three professional judges saw turn on a single round.

The home viewer? He was treated to an experience that bore only a derivative resemblance to reality, and primed for another outrage. That outrage was nearly universal, but rather than fixate on the “universal” part of that clause, in a maniacal search for absolute consensus some have fixated on the “nearly” part. Well. You’ll get no apologies for those three ringside scorecards that dissented, so stop asking.

A few days after the latest unconscionable robbery that is the reason no one will ever watch another prizefight again in the history of humankind, apropos of nothing at all I had a conversation like this:

“I like the ‘blue raspberry’ slurpees at 7-Eleven better than real raspberries.”

“You know those drinks are filled with artificial sweeteners, concocted in laboratories to be delicious, unfilling, and to make you buy more, right?”

“They still taste better.”

The televised-fight experience – with its infallible commentators, scorecards and superduper slow motion – may well taste better than the real, ringside experience. But for goodness’ sake, do not tell a gardener that the corn-syrupy, synthetic blue mess in a plastic cup you got at the corner store tastes “more like real raspberries” than what he picks from red canes.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Light middleweight prospect and former amateur standout Richard Hargraves ends a fourteen-month layoff many miles from his hometown of San Francisco, California as he takes on Michael Faulk in a six-round featured attraction at the Black Bear Casino Resort in Carlton, Minnesota this Saturday night.

Hargraves (2-0-1, 2 KOs) turned pro way back in December of 2009 with a quick stoppage over John Dunham in Sacramento, California. Unfortunately for Hargraves, the 2009 U.S. Championships bronze medalist at 152-pounds, finding willing opponents has been a difficult task as he has attempted to advance his career.

“I couldn’t really land a fight,” explains the frustrated Hargraves. “There were a few guys that didn’t want to fight me and that’s pretty much what it was. When you don’t have a promoter it is a little tough to get in the game and stay in the game, as opposed to somebody that is promoted. Unlike myself, they already have everything set in place.”

Hargraves, whose size creates an imposing figure for any prospective opponent able to make 151 or so pounds, admits it has been hard to keep an eye on the prize with fights failing to materialize. “It is a little hard to stay motivated,” admits Hargraves honestly. “There are times when you just want to let go. When you are an amateur, you train hard every day because you can get a fight on any given day, so you stay ready. But as a pro, you want to tone down and let your body have a little rest. So I did lack a little motivation, but luckily some guys at the gym helped keep me motivated by the way they fight. So when you go to the gym and you are not motivated, those guys will cut you up. And I don’t want to get beat up at home too much.”

Luckily for Hargraves, Saturday’s bout came together with plenty of time for him to prepare both mentally and physically. “Fighting at 151, this is the first fight for me in a year and a couple of months and I am very excited,” Hargraves told 15rounds.com just moments before boarding his flight on Thursday morning. “I had a good month and a half of training camp. My body feels good and mentally I feel good. This is my first six-round fight I am just excited to go out here and not leave it in the judges’ hands. Be more active, be first, be last. Be great on defense and if I see the opportunity to get him out of there, get him out of there.”

The sport’s critical eye has been focused squarely on scoring in recent weeks, and by fighting Faulk (2-1) of Saint Paul, Minnesota near his home base, Hargraves could potentially be at risk for some home cooking, an idea not lost on the Californian.

“In the wake of the Pacquiao-Bradley decision, that weighs more heavily on my mind,” says Hargraves. “On national TV, that type of stuff can happen. But this is the sport we live in and the sport that we love and that is part of the game. To counteract all that, if I can knock him out, then I’m going to knock him out and take it out of the judges’ hands. But if the knockout don’t come, then just be more active, land more punches and do the best that I can. I just have to make it so impressive to where the judges can’t deny me.”

In Faulk, Hargraves goes up against a guy with some amateur credentials and only one loss on his ledger, which came at the hands of an undefeated prospect in Dominic Wade back in May of 2010 at middleweight. The San Franciscan, who fights out of the increasingly famed Straight Forward Club under Ben Bautista, does not underestimate his opponent.

“I think that if I am on my game, I should be able to beat him 80, 90 percent of the time,” explains Hargraves. “I just have to go out there and execute. I’m not taking anything away from the guy. He’s pretty good. He’s got good hand speed and he’s long in the limbs. But other than that, he’s a decent fighter and I did see him at the nationals one year. So he has to be pretty good to have won his state and go out to the nationals. But it’s going to be the battle of the 2s and one of us want to get win number three. And I want it more than he does, so that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

Tickets for Saturday’s event, promoted by Draw Events, are available online at Ticketfly.com. The bill, which includes eight total professional bouts, features unbeatens Cerreso Fort and Dave Peterson in the eight-round main event for the Minnesota State Light Middleweight title.

Mario Ortega Jr. can be reached at ortega15rds@lycos.com

From Duane Ford to Forbes, the rapid succession of headlines during the last few weeks is either a shotgun blast that adds up to chaos tipping further into anarchy or business generating more interest and money than it has in decades. Maybe, there’s a little bit of both, meaning the face of the game is as fractured – and familiar — as ever.

The good, the bad and the bizarre have collected in a notebook full of opinions and not much else. If you want something definitive, go see a judge as long as his name isn’t Duane Ford.

Here are some of the news items and a reaction to each:

NEWS ITEM: Inmate Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Filipino Congressman Manny Pacquiao are first and second, respectively, on the Forbes’ list of the richest 100 athletes from June 2011 through June 2012. Mayweather, a guest of Nevada’s Clark County Detention Center for the next couple of months, earned $85 million. Pacquiao earned $62 million.

Reaction: The boxer-topped list is a 1-2 punch that makes a mockery out of the know-nothing tweeters and talk-show hosts, who argue that boxing is dying. But it’s not a sign of a healthy business, either. Only two other boxers are ranked – heavyweight Wladimir Klitschko tied at No. 24 with $28 million and junior-middleweight Miguel Cotto at No. 75 with $19 million. Contrast that with the NFL, which starts with Denver quarterback Peyton Manning at No. 10 with $42 million. Thirty NFL players are among the top 100. The depth of NFL wealth is the mark of sustainability. Boxing’s winner-take-all model is not.

News Item: In a video review, the World Boxing Organization announces that a panel of five judges scored unanimously in favor of Manny Pacquiao instead of Timothy Bradley, who got the official victory in a split-decision stunner on June 9 when Duane Ford and CJ Ross scored it for Bradley, 115-113, and Jerry Roth scored it for Pacquiao by the same score. The WBO disclosed the scores — 118-110, 117-111, 117-111, 116-112 and 115-113, all for Pacquiao – but not the judges’ names.

Reaction: No names? Come on. Since the controversy erupted, there has been a demand for transparency. For the sake of credibility, the WBO could at least identify the judges who were on that panel. For all anybody knows, it could have been Manny, Moe, Jack and a couple of shock absorbers.

News Item: Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and Harry Reid the Senate’s majority leader and a Democrat from Nevada, seize upon the Bradley-Pacquiao furor, questions the scoring and re-introduce an attempt to establish a federal commission.

Reaction: Reid owed Pacquiao favor. The Filipino politician campaigned for him in a tough run to retain his seat in 2010. Meanwhile, chances at a federal commission aren’t as good as an unlikely Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. It — the federal commission, not the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight — was proposed about a decade ago. It’ll still be there, the next time the good senators can’t resist a chance at grandstanding.

News Item: Bob Arum’s Top Rank and Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions each have fights scheduled on the same night, Sept. 15, with a couple of miles of each other in Las Vegas. If Victor Ortiz beats Josesito Lopez Saturday night at Staples Center in Los Angeles, Golden Boy plans to match him against Saul “Canelo’’ Alvarez at the MGM Grand on a Showtime pay-per-view card. On the same night, Arum plans to have Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. face Sergio Martinez at Thomas & Mack Center in an HBO pay-per-view event.

Reaction: This potential escalation in the feud between the game’s two biggest promoters is a lot more dangerous than controversy surrounding the Pacquiao-Bradley decision. The guess is that the networks, Showtime and HBO, will intervene and one of the bouts will be moved, perhaps to Oct. 6. A solution would be to have Chavez-versus-Canelo in a Mexican rivalry on a weekend celebrating Mexico’s Independence Day. But that would be too easy and not much has been lately.

AZ Notes
Popular Arizona super-bantamweight Emilio Garcia (6-0-1, 1 KO), who now has veteran trainer Chuck McGregor in his corner, expects his next fight to happen on Aug. 27 at Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix on an Iron Boy Promotions card, which put together a successful show on June 16.

Hoping to bring professional boxing back to his home area by staging the second ever such event at Albert Park Field in San Rafael, California this fall, longtime local favorite Paul Nave is reaching out to his community for support. Nave has promoted all five of his own fight cards since his ring return in March of 2009 under his Liberty Boxing Enterprises promotional banner. All five of the events, which have featured Nave himself as the main attraction, have gone on without incident.

Nave has released the following statement as he prepares to make his case to the San Rafael Park and Recreation Commission, which will decide if the event can take place at the park:

To Whom It May Concern:

Paul Nave
“The Marin County Assassin”

Mario Ortega Jr. can be reached at ortega15rds@lycos.com

EL PASO, Texas – Little more than a pitstop on I-10 or a piece of Fort Bliss infrastructure in the imagination of most Americans – lacking New Mexico’s enchantment or Arizona’s Grand Canyon – this city nevertheless must compete for tourist dollars with America’s better-known desert destinations. On the western edge of an enormous state and sister to what might be the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous city, El Paso, then, has made a significant choice, opting to invest in culture and history more than golf courses and resorts.

That’s the sort of investment that, were tourism a meritocracy, would thrust it to the front of Americans’ minds, well ahead of opulent but culturally barren places like Scottsdale, Ariz. The product of a multicultural history – Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, Texan, American – one the El Paso Museum of History euphemistically calls “complicated,” today this city finds itself in a struggle with misapprehensions about its class and fitness.

Which made it fine a host as any for Julio Cesar Chavez Jr’s latest middleweight title defense, a Saturday fight with “Irish” Andy Lee that Chavez won by cruel stoppage at 2:21 of round 7 in Sun Bowl Stadium.

Chavez has made a home for himself in Texas, maturing and improving as a professional in Lone Star State, where he has made four of his last six fights. If his fans are not yet all his, not yet cheering for “Junior” so much as a combination of Senior and the Mexican flag, they are more his today than ever before and no longer feel foolish admitting it.

Chavez beats men down. He started terribly against Lee on Saturday, looking befuddled and clubfooted in the match’s opening rounds, an awkwardness he later attributed to leg cramps, but used his early and abject ineffectiveness to proctor an examination of Lee’s power on UTEP’s campus. It was an exam Chavez’s southpaw challenger did not come close to passing. Fifteen minutes in their match, Lee, by now wide-eyed and disconcerted, watched with horror as Chavez took his best shots, laughed at them, talked about them, and pleaded for more of them.

Chavez hasn’t his father’s class or relentlessness, but he takes punches every bit as personally as dad did and uses physicality and resentment where his father used accuracy and pride. And Junior has physicality aplenty. With improved footwork and timing, he now locates men who box and move better than he does sooner than those men want to be found. And once he locates them, Chavez bodies them to the ropes, crouches, touches his head to theirs, and brutalizes them with fully leveraged punches – a product of his time with trainer Freddie Roach.

Attracting the Chavez-Lee fight, an event for which El Paso itself paid a $500,000 sponsorship, this city sought to thrust itself higher on American tourists’ credible-destinations list. And it did so eventually but not without a cold start of its own. In April, University of Texas System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa – from an Austin office that is far from this lovely town as the capital of Maine is from Washington D.C. – cancelled the fight, citing, in a cut unkindest of all, a “higher than normal” security concern.

Promoter Bob Arum mobilized his public-relations forces, and with help from the city’s mayor and other officials created outrage enough to make the chancellor reconsider. Arum’s bluster can be at turns entertaining and excruciating, but in this case of El Paso’s, Arum was exactly right. The city mobilized behind the fight; billboards, store-windows, free entertainment weeklies – wherever you went in the downtown area, there was evidence of Chavez-Lee. Even the delightful clerk at El Paso Museum of Art’s gift shop knew her way round the details of the controversy.

About EPMA: It is part of a collection of free-admission museums – 23 in all – that represent this city’s outstanding cultural commitment. You enter its lobby during extended Thursday-night hours expecting little and finding it then ascend directly to the second floor, where there is contemporary and modern fare that is pleasant but not sublime, then round a corner and come to “Mountain Landscape,” a large and complicated work by William Louis Sonntag, a champion of the 19th-century Hudson River School movement, and things take a surprising turn. You find works from the 1600s by Spanish Baroque masters like Jusepe De Ribera and Bartolome Esteban Murillo preceded by 18th-century masters of Venetian landscapes like Bellotto and Canaletto. Then a few meters away, you hear the museum’s only other visitor give voice to your exact sentiments, mumbling in a European accent, “Do they know what they have here?” Perhaps they do not.

The same may now be said of boxing and Chavez Jr. He deserves another, closer, more-thoughtful look than the cursory glance most American fight fans cast his way a few years back. He does a lot of things well – he picked up Lee’s left cross and countered it perfectly by round 6 of Saturday’s match – and he entertains the hell out of ticket-buyers. His punches stun more than they stop, which means each Chavez fight becomes about attrition, about taking the obstinate force across from him and rending it.

After Saturday’s postfight press conference, Top Rank’s Lee Samuels confirmed the following: Chavez will fight Sergio Martinez on Sept. 15 in UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center on a fight broadcast by HBO pay-per-view. If schedules hold, the card will go “mano a mano” – as Arum once put it – with a Golden Boy Promotions and Showtime pay-per-view event to feature Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Victor Ortiz, on Mexican Independence Day weekend.

Don’t be surprised if Chavez’s opponents in September, both Martinez and Showtime, join a growing list of men surprised and ruined by Junior’s size and strength.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

I did not score the Manny Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley Jr. fight two Saturdays ago. Having felt cheated out of a chance to be outraged like most everyone else last weekend, I decided to score the fight during its televised replay as part of HBO’s World Championship Boxing broadcast last night. In addition to tabulating my card for the first time, I decided to critique the cards of Duane Ford (115-113, Bradley), C.J. Ross (115-113, Bradley) and Jerry Roth (115-113, Pacquiao) on a round-by-round basis. My findings were somewhat unexpected.

Firstly, my scorecard read 117-111 for Pacquiao. I gave “the Pride of the Philippines” rounds one through nine, marking rounds three, seven, eight and nine as rounds that could be argued for Bradley. I gave rounds ten through twelve to Bradley inarguably.

My biggest issue with folks that take umbrage to a “controversially” scored fight, is that they rarely take into account how many rounds in a given bout which could be scored for either fighter. Even though I had it wide for Pacquiao on my card, if Bradley had been given the benefit of my four close rounds, I would have had it 115-113 for Bradley.

The folks at HBO made analyzing the three officials’ cards easy, as in typical fashion, they displayed each judge’s card after each round. Having had four arguable rounds, those are the rounds where the judges could have had it for either fighter and I would not take a demerit against their final score.

Of the rounds I found to be poorly scored, Duane Ford had three of them, but one was actually a Pacquiao round I found to be puzzling – round eleven. Ford also had rounds one and five for Bradley. Counting Ford’s highly questionable rounds, it would be a one-point swing for Pacquiao, meaning in my eyes he should have handed in a card that read 114-114.

C.J. Ross called two rounds for the wrong guy, giving rounds two and five to Bradley. The two-point swing in favor of Pacquiao means this card should have read 115-113 for Pacquiao, not Bradley.

Jerry Roth missed the ball just once in my estimation, as he scored the second round for Bradley. This means his score should have been one round wider for Pacquiao at 116-112.

Boxing is a sport where winners are decided based on human interpretation, which means there is plenty of room for error. The Manny Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley Jr. WBO Welterweight title bout was not the worst scored fight of the century, decade or even this year. Four out of the twelve rounds could have been scored for either fighter, a swing which makes several final scores acceptable.

I may be in the minority, but in breaking down the scoring round-by-round, I find little fault with the three judges currently being put under the microscope. Ford, the most outspoken of the three in recent days, had the worst night, which he may have even realized by the time round eleven came around. But in the end, Ford is human and boxing is boxing. We’ve seen computerized scoring, such as in the Olympics, and I’d take Ford over that any day of the week.

POSTSCRIPT

Speaking of human error, that applies to us the viewer as well. Many of us had an invested interest in the outcome of the June 9th bout. Whether it was our love for a national hero, our simple desire to see the two mega stars of the sport enter a ring against one another without a recent defeat on their record or financial – we watch fights with preconceived notions and emotions.

This past April I stood in a Las Vegas media room and heard Top Rank head Bob Arum tell his publicist he had Brandon Rios a winner on points over Richard Abril. I need no replay to tell me there is no way Rios should have left the Mandalay Bay with a decision win on that night. Giving Mr. Arum the benefit of the doubt, and let’s say his financial connection to a Rios win had no bearing on his card, than it must have been his preconceived expectation that Rios would win that swayed his opinion of the fight. Maybe that has a lot to do with his outrage this time too.

Photo by Chris Farina/Top Rank

Mario Ortega Jr. can be reached at ortega15rds@lycos.com.

Judges have been tough during the last week on the only two fighters the general public knows.

First, three judges score against Manny Pacquiao in a split decision met by unanimous outrage. Then, Melissa Saragosa, a Las Vegas justice of the peace, hands down a judgment denying Mayweather’s motion to finish his 87-day sentence at home instead of jail, the Big Boy Mansion instead of the Big House.

A controversial boxing decision and an attempt to escape jail time might be as comparable as Pacquiao’s suite at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay and Mayweather’s lonely cell at Nevada’s Clark County Detention Center. There weren’t any mints on Mayweather’s pillow to console him on the night after Saragosa said no Wednesday to his attorney’s emergency filing 10 days into his sentence for domestic abuse.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that the way each behaved in the face of recent adversity says something about how they are perceived — at least this week — by all of those judges in the court of public opinion.

Pacquiao won.

Mayweather lost.

Pacquiao exhibited Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage – grace under pressure. While saying he thought he won, Pacquiao also said he did his best. His best, he said Saturday night, just wasn’t good enough for the judges. Accept it, use it as motivation and move on.

A couple of days later, Mayweather’s attorney files a motion that makes him sound like Paris Hilton. He has to drink tap water instead of bottled water. The jailhouse menu doesn’t include any of the meals his personal chef prepares. What did Mayweather expect? Twenty-four-hour room service?

It’s impossible to really know how Mayweather would have reacted to the split-decision that went against Pacquiao in his loss to Timothy Bradley. But it’s fair to wonder. The guess in this corner is that he would have raged into the night with bursts of profanity and perhaps tears. We’ve seen both, especially in his up-and-down relationship with Larry Merchant of Home Box Office, which will replay the controversial fight Saturday night as part of a telecast featuring the Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.- Andy Lee bout in El Paso, Tex.

There’s a lot to like about Mayweather. In early May, it looked as if he was winning his fight with Pacquiao in the court of public opinion, which might be the only place we’ll ever see them fight.

He beat Miguel Cotto in an admirable, bruising confrontation. He apologized to Merchant and conducted a civil interview in the middle of the ring after the bout. Mayweather looked and acted like a grown-up. At the time, Pacquiao’s reputation was taking a beating for issues involving taxes and customs at home in the Philippines.

After the last week, however, it’s hard to know whether Pacquiao or Mayweather is the overall leader in the court of public opinion, which might be the only way to decide who deserves to be the pound-for-pound champ. You be the judge.

NOTES, QUOTES
For the record: In a freelance gig for the New York Times, I quit scoring Pacquiao-Bradley after seven rounds. I had Pacquiao leading, six rounds to one. I thought it was over. I started writing a story about a Pacquiao victory. Rookie mistake. After deleting the lead and re-writing in Usain Bolt time, I watched a replay. I scored it 116-112, — eight rounds to four – for Pacquiao.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all: Bradley, tough and admirable, has to be the first fighter to show up at a post-fight news conference as a winner in a wheelchair. He suffered injuries to both ankles in the early rounds while scrambling to get away from a lethal left thrown by Pacquiao, who emerged from the fight unmarked. Those Pacquiao lefts might be boxing’s version of basketball’s ankle-breaking moves.

AZ NOTES
Junior-welterweight Azriel Paez (2-0) is featured in the main event Saturday night at Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix against Michael Salcido (1-3) of Eloy, Ariz. Paez’ dad is the entertaining ex-featherweight champ Jorge Paez, who is expected to be at ringside. Roger Mayweather, Floyd’s trainer and uncle, also is expected to work the corner for fighters he trains in Las Vegas.

The card is scheduled for 10 fights, including David Benavidez — the younger brother of unbeaten Phoenix junior-welterweight prospect Jose Benavidez Jr. — in one of two amateur bouts. First bell is scheduled for 7 p.m.

LAS VEGAS – The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts, a short cab ride from the week’s poorly cooled and hastily erected media tent outside MGM Grand Garden Arena, currently features an exhibition called “Claude Monet: Impressions of Light.” It has its charms, featuring much of Monet’s early work – dash of orange here, square of blue there – but is for the most part unremarkable, save one quote from the Impressionist master: “I allow plenty of faults to show in order to fix my sensations.” Let that guide what follows.

Saturday at MGM Grand, Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao by split scores – 115-113, 115-113 and 113-115 – that infuriated most observers. Bradley, later wheeled into the media center with a foot he may have broken in round 2 and fought on anyway for a half hour, was gracious in victory, promising his vanquished foe an immediate rematch. Pacquiao, face unmarked, was gracious in defeat, reminding those gathered how many blessings boxing bestowed on him. Bradley’s and Pacquiao’s, though, were examples of graciousness ignored by most everyone else.

In a nod to what Monet was after above, there were faults aplenty in the impressions caused by the lights of our beloved sport, Saturday. The judges, unique among those at ringside for being paid to be competent at scoring, determined, collectively, the fight’s result was extraordinarily difficult to discern. Only five of the match’s 12 rounds were seen unanimously for one fighter or the other. If that formed a conspiracy, it was at least a conspiracy degrees more sophisticated than boxing’s usual antics.

My ringside scorecard had Bradley by a point, 116-115. I gave the new champion rounds 2, 6, 7, 11 and 12. I gave Pacquiao rounds 3, 4, 9 and 10. I scored rounds 1, 5 and 8 even. Am I entirely confident of my card’s accuracy? Actually, no. I marked with an asterisk five rounds as either/or affairs, and I scored another three even. But I am certain of my card’s truthfulness – another thing Monet was after. Despite sitting ringside for no fewer than 400 prizefights during my time as a boxing writer, I was not at all sure of what I was seeing Saturday night. Which raises a genuine suspicion for me about the origin of others’ loud certainty.

Three professional judges disagreed seven of 12 times. Reasonable writers at MGM Grand, intelligent men with proven cognitive aptitudes, colored a wide array with their opinions. The only ones sure of their infallibility were a few usual suspects at ringside, compensated for what they know more than what they discover, and the entire HBO pay-per-view audience.

Let that be a commentary on the viewing experience, not the reality, and know better than to demand of ringsiders a review of Saturday’s telecast to find the wrong of their ways. We were there, friends; we know what we saw, and what we saw was the real thing, unfiltered, thanks.

Timothy Bradley did not fight well as even his supporters believed he would need to fight to beat Pacquiao. Hobbled and often unexpectedly reluctant, Bradley followed a questionable counterpunching strategy designed in his camp to preclude him from being the Ricky Hatton-redux Pacquiao prepared for. And Pacquiao, to his credit, fought considerably better than most anticipated he would.

There was a tone of disbelief in the media center at the postfight press conference. Part resulted from having not seen Pacquiao lose in 15 highly visible fights. There was confusion, a product of the result’s unusualness. Pacquiao lost to Marquez by a much wider margin than this in November, the thinking went, and he got that decision. This, therefore, is an outrage.

To score a fight impartially, one must look at the neutral plane between the fighters and follow any punch that enters that plane to its destination. Does anyone do this? No. Scorers select a narrative, often not consciously – “Pacquiao will catch Bradley coming in with those wide punches and beat him down,” say – and look to see it disproved, if they’re scientific, or proved (if they’re human). With few exceptions, Saturday’s fight showed an observer whatever he was looking for. If a scorer believed that Pacquiao, returned to his wildman and free-hurling ways, could hurt Bradley with most any punch he landed, he saw that every time Bradley swung his upper body like a windshield wiper. If a scorer believed that Bradley, quicker of reflex and less relenting than Pacquiao’s recent opponents, could grind the underconditioned Congressman to exhaustion in the championship rounds, he saw that instead.

More observers looked for Pacquiao to win. More observers saw Pacquiao win.

Pacquiao did catch Bradley with left uppercuts, though not nearly as many as he should have with a guy who put his chin on a tee every time he ducked rightwards. And the only time Pacquiao had Bradley in distress was when he flurried crazily with 10 obtusely angled punches, and four or five landed.

Bradley kept his right hand high – no Hatton redux, he – fought Pacquiao off him, held when he had to, and closed stronger than Pacquiao, confirming many prefight worries about the Filipino’s once-vaunted conditioning. Bradley also landed several punches, like a right cross in the fight’s opening 90 seconds, the partisan-Pacquiao crowd took no account of.

Promoter Bob Arum donned his performance garb in the media center afterwards, took an oath – a few oaths really – to ensure a rematch on November 10, and protested mightily the fight’s official outcome. Were this Shakespeare, in fact, Hamlet’s mother would have said Arum protested a bit too much.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

LAS VEGAS – Timothy Bradley says he has worked hard to eliminate the head-butt from his attack Saturday night in bid to upset Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand.

Not to worry, says Manny Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach.

Roach said it won’t happen if Pacquiao remembers to do what he has practiced throughout endless hours of training for the welterweight bout.

“Lateral movement,’’ Roach said.

There’s a scenario that the fight will end in controversy if a Bradley head butt bloodies Pacquiao enough to force a stoppage. A scar is evident above Pacquiao’s right eye from a cut suffered in his last fight, a controversial decision over Juan Manuel Marquez in November. Pacquiao got 28 stitches for that one.

Bradley, who often leads with his head, vows to upset Pacquiao, about a 4-to-1 favorite. But he said he doesn’t want controversy to tarnish the victory. That’s why he says he has worked to eliminate the head butt, however unintentional.

Notes, Quotes, Anecdotes
· Bradley’s dad, Ray, recalls when he knew son was a fighter. It was 1998 in Los Angeles. His son was a 12-year-old amateur, fighting one of the best amateurs of that timer, Jesus Gonzales of Phoenix. Ray Bradley said his son bloodied the nose of Gonzales, who then as an amateur beat Andre Ward. Ward hasn’t lost since. Bradley saw the blood and continued to batter Gonzales nose, his dad said.

· Yuriorkis Gamboa is expected to be at the fight Saturday night, a Top Rank promotion. Gamboa is being sued by Top Rank for breach of contract. There were reports he would jump to Floyd Mayweather’s promotional company after his failure to appear at news conferences led to the cancellation of an April fight with Brandon Rios. It’s not clear whether Gamboa’s appearance at Pacquiao-Bradley means he’s back on good terms with Top Rank.

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

LAS VEGAS – Born-again Manny Pacquiao has been more of a diplomat than a preacher for the last few days. He played the peacemaker Wednesday in an attempt to ensure a unified front instead of civil strife in his corner Saturday night against Tim Bradley at the MGM Grand.

After a formal news conference, Pacquiao planned to talk with trainer Freddie Roach and conditioning coach Alex Ariza about their differences and how to get beyond them, at least for one night. It appeared that Ariza had been banished by Roach, who said Saturday on HBO’s 24/7 that he wouldn’t be in the corner. A few days after Roach’s comments signaled a significant shuffle and perhaps turmoil, Ariza was back.

“Manny’s call,’’ Roach said.

Pacquiao, who confirmed that it was his decision, made it clear that there won’t be any confusion. If you want democracy, go to a voting booth. In this corner, Pacquiao will listen to only one voice.

“Freddy’s,’’ he said.

Roach repeated his criticism of Ariza, who was seated on the stage for Wednesday’s news conference. The outspoken Ariza left Pacquiao’s training camp in the Philippines a few weeks ago to work with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who is in training for Andy Lee in El Paso, Tex.

“I thought it was a bad choice,’’ Roach said.

Another trainer was hired, Filipino Marvin Somodio, who was introduced Wednesday as Ariza’s assistant.

Pacquiao’s corner includes another subplot, also involving Ariza. Miguel Diaz will work as the cut man. Diaz and Ariza exchanged insults during a post-fight news conference following Amir Khan’s victory over Marcos Maidana in December, 2010. Diaz was Maidana’s trainer. Ariza, then Khan’s conditioning coach, called Diaz a “fraud.” Ariza repeatedly mocked Diaz, a former maître ’d at a Las Vegas restaurant, by yelling “table for four.’’

For Bradley, reports of potential discord in the corner represent just another distraction for Pacquiao.

“I knew, sooner or later, it would catch up to him’’ said Bradley, who was confident and relaxed despite being a 4-to-1 underdog just days before the biggest fight in his career.

Notes, Quotes, Anecdotes
· Bradley again said he has been working hard to eliminate the head-butt from his arsenal. “I definitely want to keep my head out of the mix,’’ said Bradley, who promises to win, yet doesn’t want a victory to be tarnished by controversy.

· Top Rank promoter Bob Arum introduced Bradley manager Cameron Dunkin as “Cameron Diaz” during the news conference. “I wish he looked like Cameron Diaz,’’ Arum in a quick comeback from his own misstep.

· Bradley is a practicing vegetarian, which he says gives him strength and endurance. He said he heard about the diet from a physician. “This doctor tells me, “You know, those 300-pound gorillas don’t eat meat,’ ‘’ he said. “That’s when I decided I’m going to go vegan. I’m going to eat grass, trees, bark, whatever.’’

· Roach is scheduled for induction to the International Boxing of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. Sunday, the day after Pacquiao-Bradley. “I rented a plane,’’ said Roach, whose overnight jet to nearby Syracuse will cost him $26,000. “I’m not happy about that.’’ Roach should be able to afford it after he collects his share of Pacquiao’s guarantee, $6 million, according to contracts filed with the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Bradley is guaranteed $5 million.

· And Pacquiao has shed at least one diversion. Basketball isn’t exactly a distraction. But Roach said he has quit playing pick-up games after training. “I asked him why he gave up basketball,’’ Roach said. “He told me, ‘After training all morning, maybe I shouldn’t play basketball.’’ Maybe without the basketball, Pacquiao won’t suffer from further cramps in his calves. The cramping bothered him in his last two fights – a controversial decision over Juan Manuel Marquez and a one-sided decision over Shane Mosley. After hearing Pacquiao’s answer, Roach said “Thanks, Manny, that’s the best answer you ever gave me.’

Photo by Chris Farina / Top rank

Manny Pacquiao can be beaten, but this is not news because any man who ties gloves on his fists and makes combat with large and good enough men will be beaten eventually. Manny Pacquiao can be beaten by the man he faces Saturday, and this is news. It is not an outcome aficionados have allowed-for in a Pacquiao fight since at least Miguel Cotto but probably Oscar De La Hoya – and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen in that fight.

Pacquiao was unofficially beaten by Juan Manuel Marquez in November, yes, but you couldn’t find three people to predict it aloud in the MGM Grand Media Center during fightweek. It will be different this week. Pacquiao has not looked sensational against another prime fighter since his second tilt with Marquez in 2008 – another fight he may have lost with every scorecard in an honest hand. None of his recent opponents, not even Marquez seven months ago, prepared him for what he’ll see Saturday, when he faces Timothy Bradley at MGM Grand for the WBO welterweight title.

Bradley, 7-0 in world title fights, is an undefeated 28-year-old volume puncher who leads with his head. That sentence comprises everything needed to beat a subprime Pacquiao.

It has been more than five years since Pacquiao faced someone who had no idea how to lose, and that was the overmatched Jorge Solis at Alamodome in a fight with more anxious moments than one infers today from its boxscore. Those moments came behind a collision of heads that caused a cut to drop blood in Pacquiao’s eye, much as had happened two years before in the last prizefight Pacquiao lost – when Erik Morales took notice of the queasy look Pacquiao showed him after a visit to the ringside doctor. The Solis cut, too, brought a queasy look, one followed immediately by Pacquiao thrice making the Sign of the Cross – forehead to breastbone, left shoulder to right – in rapid succession, before tearing into Solis with a savageness unpredicted by any previous act in the fight.

The Sign of the Cross is a thing young Catholics learn to make in anxious situations, an emergency petition of sorts: I could be in over my head, here, so please watch over me. Pacquiao learned to do it as a child, like millions of others, and has continued to do it through a career that, as discovered in this match’s promotion, saw him occasionally eschew the teachings of Rome. Pacquiao’s rededication to his Catholic faith is sincere, but like other sincere initiatives Pacquiao has launched – like eradicating world poverty with yellow gloves – this one looks flighty.

It should be a private matter, either way, Pacquiao’s born-again Catholicism during a prizefight promotion, but as a matter that exploits Americans’ dual fascinations with evangelism and salesmanship, it was too rich for HBO not to shine its documentary light on – as part of a “24/7” programming concept, once innovative in 2007, that now covers mostly itself and predicts storylines it once discovered.

Pacquiao’s unconventional conversion is a bit relevant, too, because a fighter is not supposed to “feel empty inside” during training camp. If he is not too physically exhausted and mentally obsessed with another man’s injury to partake of such flummery, he’s likely not throwing hard enough at the heavybag. Or is that too ungentle for this era? Well. Can you imagine Marvelous Marvin Hagler, cloistered at the Provincetown Inn – the better to marinate in hatred and rage – having a telegenic advisor to ensure his spirit felt fulfilled? Heavens.

Just another part of the Pacquiao mystique, we are told. The soap-operatic entourage, the constituents in Sarangani Province, record deals, lawsuits and countersuits, the feuding corner, training breaks for Bible study; none of these is a distraction because Pacquiao has preternatural focus in the prizefighting ring. Or he’s been well-matched.

Inherent in most aficionados’ Pacquiao fight predictions has been a wager like this: Too much money to be made in a Floyd Mayweather fight for promoter Top Rank to risk it with a miscue. This has been a well-placed bet on the legendary marriage of matchmaker Bruce Trampler’s prowess and promoter Bob Arum’s business acumen, and their continued assumption a superfight with Mayweather is still doable.

Timothy Bradley’s one other showing at welterweight, an unimpressive 2010 outing with Luis Carlos Abregu, also indicates a prime Pacquiao will have his hand raised Saturday. Bradley is special in his way, special in both style and character, but he is not quite special as a guy who went 4-1-1 (3 KOs) against the primest versions of his era’s three best Mexican champions, as Pacquiao did. When was that prime-Pacquiao last seen, though? Pacquiao is the variable, Saturday, not Bradley; if the Pacquiao who has been showing up since he decked Ricky Hatton makes a pre-concert appearance at MGM Grand later this week, he will get conclusively outworked.

We already know what a volume puncher like Bradley brings: a glorious sort of shamelessness. Bradley doesn’t care much where he hits you and cares even less if you stretch him; so long as he surrenders himself fully to his intensity and does what his corner tells him, he is contented. Bradley doesn’t have to worry about losing because he has never done so as a professional, and because a volume puncher knows quickly when someone is decisively better than he is, as Pacquiao will be, and finds euphoria in breaking that man’s spirit with a want of polish, an enchanting rudeness.

I’ll take Bradley, SD-12, then – with a dissenting 112-116 scorecard filled-out the day before.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Saturday night the Home Depot Center in nearby Carson hosts the highly anticipated four-fight Showtime-televised card headlined by the cruiserweight clash between Antonio Tarver and undefeated Lateef Kayode. Fighters for the mega event, which includes two world title bouts and the return of former champion Winky Wright, weighed-in Friday mostly at Nokia Plaza at L.A. Live.

In his last fight (a ninth-round stoppage over Danny Green in Australia last July) former world light heavyweight champion Tarver (29-6, 20 KOs) of Tampa, Florida reignited belief in his career. However, since that time Tarver has seemingly concentrated less on becoming the world’s top cruiserweight and more on his Showtime broadcast duties. It was during that role that the somewhat trumped up storyline for tomorrow’s fight was created. Broadcasting several of Kayode’s recent outings, Tarver has been less than complimentary of the Nigerian’s performances. Despite his many available options, Tarver, the WBO #6/IBF #10/WBC #12 ranked cruiserweight, opted to put his money where his mouth was and take on Kayode rather than pursue one of the numerous belt holders in the division.

Kayode (18-0. 14 KOs) of Hollywood, California by way of Lagos, Nigeria burst on the public scene with a string of knockouts against modest opposition in 2010, before promoter Gary Shaw upped his class of opponent last year. The result was three straight decision wins, including a horribly scored bout with unheralded Nicholas Iannuzzi that could have gone either way. The WBA #2/WBO #8/IBF #9 ranked Kayode aims to add the most significant name by far to his win column Saturday as he takes on the former world light heavyweight champion.

Tarver, who risks his IBO Cruiserweight title in the twelve-rounder, scaled 198-pounds. Kayode, who forwent a mandatory bid against WBA titleholder Guillermo Jones in order to make Saturday’s bout, scaled 199-pounds Friday.

In the intriguing co-feature, former unified light middleweight champion Winky Wright finally ends his three-year hibernation against up-and-coming middleweight contender Peter Quillin in a ten-round middleweight bout.

Wright (51-5-1, 25 KOs) of Saint Petersburg, Florida was last seen back in April of 2009, as he lost a clear-cut decision to Paul Williams. In the years since, Wright has turned down or backed out of several proposed bouts seemingly due to their low profile. However, recent quotes indicate that Wright senses his time is limited, and thus he agreed to fight Quillin.

For his part, Quillin (26-0, 20 KOs) of Hollywood, California capped a busy 2011 with one of his better victories – a sixth-round stoppage over prospect Craig McEwan last November. Quillin, often mentioned as a possible opponent for recognized middleweight kingpin Sergio Martinez, aims to stamp his ticket to a big money fight at the expense Wright on Saturday. Depending on how much the layoff hinders Wright, Quillin, the WBA #5/WBO #7 ranked middleweight, appears to be up against his toughest challenge to date.

After weighing less than one pound over the contracted 160-pound limit during his first and second attempts at Nokia Plaza, Quillin weighed-in officially at 159.6 during his third attempt, which took place at the Torrance Marriott South Bay in nearby Torrance, California. Wright weighed-in at 159-pounds.

In yet another intriguing bout, WBA Light Middleweight Champion Austin Trout (24-0, 14 KOs) of Las Cruces, New Mexico finally gets a chance at impress on a big stage as he aims to make the third defense of his title against the determined WBA #3 ranked Delvin Rodriguez (26-5-3, 14 KOs) of Danbury, Connecticut by way of Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic.

Trout claimed his belt with a twelve-round unanimous decision over Rigoberto Alvarez back in February of last year. Now with title defenses over dangerous David Lopez and an overmatched Frank LoPorto under his belt, Trout hopes to solidify his claim to the throne with an impressive premium cable victory Saturday. Standing in Trout’s way is Rodriguez, fresh off of his impressive schooling of Pawel Wolak in their rematch last November. Rodriguez, who came up just short in a welterweight title bid three years ago, scaled 151-pounds. Trout originally came in at 154.8-pounds, but reweighed-in at the Torrance Marriott at 152.8.

In the Showtime opener, Leo Santa Cruz (19-0-1, 11 KOs) of Lincoln Heights, California by way of Huetamo, Michoacan de Ocampo, Mexico vies for the vacant IBF Bantamweight title against Vusi Malinga (20-3-1, 12 KOs) of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa.

The IBF #1 ranked Malinga, who like Santa Cruz comes from a fighting family, is the fighter that helped provoke Abner Mares’ move up to 122-pounds. Malinga was Mares’ mandatory challenger, but the rising star opted to vacate the belt rather than take on the little known South African. Santa Cruz, the IBF #4/WBO #14 ranked bantamweight, weighed in at 117-pounds, as did Malinga.

In a bout to be televised by sister network Showtime Extreme before “Showtime Championship Boxing” goes on the air, super middleweight contenders Sakio Bika and Dyah Davis will battle it out in a scheduled ten-round with two minor titles on the line.

Bika (29-5-2, 20 KOs) of Los Angeles by way of Douala, Cameroon is still looking to rebound from his one-sided defeat in a failed title bid against Andre Ward back in November of 2010. In his lone fight since, Bika moved past sub .500 Alfredo Contreras via cut-induced third-round stoppage last December.

Davis (21-2-1, 9 KOs) of Coconut Creek, Florida has worked his way to a three-fight win steak, which should really be a four-fight win streak, since his loss to Aaron Pryor Jr. in 2010. Should he move past Bika, the WBC #4/WBA #10/IBF #11 ranked Davis could be knocking at the door of a major title opportunity. Davis weighed 167.6-pounds, while Bika scaled 166.6, for their NABF and WBO Intercontinental Super Middleweight title bout.

Another face familiar to Showtime viewers, Sharif Bogere (22-0, 14 KOs) of Las Vegas, Nevada will take on journeyman Manuel Leyva (21-6, 12 KOs) of Downey, California by way of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico in a ten-round light welterweight bout. Bogere, a lightweight by trade, scaled 137.2-pounds, while Leyva came in at 137.4.

Another lightweight prospect Omar Figueroa (16-0-1, 13 KOs) of Weslaco, Texas was not forced to sweat down to his fighting weight as he stays busy against journeyman Tyler Ziolkowski (14-15, 8 KOs) of Saint Joseph, Missouri in a six-round light welterweight bout. Figueroa, who is already scheduled to fight another journeyman on June 23rd at the Staples Center across the street, weighed-in at 138.4-pounds. Ziolkowski, who has the distinction of suffering second-round kayos at the hands of both Omar and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., came in at 137.6-pounds.

In the opener, debuting Juan Reynoso of Tampa, Florida will meet Beau Hamilton (0-1) of Montague, California in a four-round light middleweight bout. Reynoso, a part of the Antonio Tarver camp, weighed-in at a chiseled 152.2-pounds. Hamilton came in at 154-pounds, seven pounds north of where he was for his debut two months ago.

Tickets for the event, promoted Golden Boy Promotions, A.T. Entertainment and Gary Shaw Productions, are available online at AXS.com.

Quick Weigh-in Results:

IBO Cruiserweight Championship, 12 Rounds
Tarver 198
Kayode 199

Middleweights, 10 Rounds
Wright 159
Quillin 159.6

WBA Light Middleweight Championship, 12 Rounds
Trout 152.8
Rodriguez 151

IBF Bantamweight Championship, 12 Rounds
Santa Cruz 117
Malinga 117

NABF Super Middleweight Championship
WBO Intercontinental Super Middleweight Championship, 12 Rounds
Bika 166.6
Davis 167.6

Light Welterweights, 10 Rounds
Bogere 137.2
Leyva 137.4

Light Welterweights, 6 Rounds
Figueroa 138.4
Ziolkowski 137.6

Light Middleweights, 4 Rounds
Reynoso 153.2
Hamilton 154

Mario Ortega Jr. can be reached at ortega15rds@lycos.com.

If defiance is an art form, Winky Wright is an artist. He might not practice it in quite the style of a Bernard Hopkins, who has applied it in broad strokes for an identity all his own. But Wright uses it in a careful, almost subdued tone that has made fools of many who didn’t see it or doubted it was even there.

Whether it can still help him is either a question of time — he’s 40 – or Peter Quillin (26-0, 20 KOs), who Saturday night on a Showtime-televised card in Carson, Calif. will attempt to do what Felix Trinidad and Shane Mosley couldn’t.

Wright’s initial challenge rests in whether he can overcome a problematic combination. There’s his age, although Wright (51-5-1, 25 KOs) won’t even be the oldest on a card labeled “Four Warned.’’ The senior citizen on this one is Antonio Tarver (29-6, 20 KOs), who at 43 faces Lateef Kayode (18-0, 14 KOs) in a cruiserweight fight. Wright’s biggest problem might be a long layoff. He’s had only one fight in the last five years and only two in the last six-and-a-half. His last victory was over Ike Quartey in 2006.

But, Wright said in a conference call, he never retired. OK, maybe he was on an extended vacation or gone on a long recess. Whatever it was, Wright says he never planned to quit. That, he says, is why he’s coming back.

But, he said, “If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now.’’

If not retirement, inactivity often erodes reflexes and dulls muscle memory. Wright played a lot of golf. But a tee time isn’t opening bell. In perhaps a concession to that possibility, Wright trained in Phoenix at the Athletes Performance institute where the best from all sports often go to rehab from injuries or to resurrect old skills.

Wright, who is back with trainer Dan Birmingham, conceded that it took him a while to re-adapt to the Spartan-like regimen that dictates a fighter’s lifestyle in the weeks before a bout.

“I’m not going to say I stayed in boxing shape,’’ said Wright, who got up to 185 pounds and will fight Quillin at 160. “I wasn’t fat. But I wasn’t in boxing shape.’’

The layoff, he said, was a result of not getting the kind of fights he wanted.

“No one significant wanted to fight me,’’ he said.

Significant fights eluded him for years. In large part, that was his story before he emerged as the first undisputed junior-middleweight champion in nearly three decades. Wright fought in Europe, winning yet ignored in the United States during the late 1990s. In the U.S., Wright, the American expatriate, got little respect for a record perceived to be built on opponents who – the joke went – could only get licensed to drive a cab in Las Vegas.

Wright filed it away, used it as motivational chip and as a weapon for those who laughed at the jokes, yet looked like the punch line once they got into the ring against the lefthander with a precise jab and defensive knowhow. In 2004, he beat Shane Mosley twice, the first time after Mosley was coming off his second victory over Oscar De La Hoya. Yet, Wright was still the underdog in 2005 when he met Felix Trinidad at middleweight. Trinidad had no chance in losing a one-sided decision in what was Wright’s finest performance.

But victory didn’t temper the defiance, which was sometimes reflected in failed negotiations. In 2006, Wright and Jermain Taylor fought to controversial draw. Taylor has the middleweight title, but balked at giving Wright financial parity, a 50-50 split, because Wright didn’t have a title. The rematch never happened.

Wright is often asked about the fights he turned down, including one with Oscar De La Hoya proposed in 2003. He was asked about it again in the conference call that included Quillin.

“All these idiots always talk about what I turned down,’’ Wright said in a flash of anger that said time hasn’t tempered that defiance either.

It’s a sign that Wright has a chance on a night when few give him any at all against the 28-year-old Quillin. From the beginning, it’s why he’s always had a chance.

Notes, Quotes
· The sad death Sunday of Johnny Tapia marks the passing of a star-crossed personality and a character as colorful as any in a sport full of them. He was as ferocious a fighter as there ever was. In the end, he will be remembered more for his story outside of the ropes – Mi Vida Loca – than for what he did within them.

· Say a few prayers for Paul Williams. His fight is just beginning after a motorcycle accident Sunday in Atlanta that will likely leave him paralyzed from waist down. He was scheduled to undergo surgery Friday.

· Wright’s last opponent was Williams, who beat him by unanimous decision in April 2009 at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay.

AZ Notes
Phoenix junior-welterweight prospect Jose Benavidez Jr. is thinking about a different model of Everlast gloves after extending his unbeaten record to 15-0 last Saturday in Tucson in his first bout since surgery on his right wrist in January. He emerged from the six-rounder over Josh Sosa without pain in the wrist. But there was a swollen knot on the middle knuckle of the left hand. It’s a problem he’s had over the last three-to-four fights. Benavidez’ bone structure might not be able to withstand power from his own punches. One solution might be an Everlast model with more padding above the knuckles.

NEWARK , NJ (May 31, 2012)–—On Wednesday night June 13th, The Robert Treat Hotel in Newark will play host to a night of championship boxing which will feature Richard Pierson boxing Gary “Fast Hands “Jones for the WBC Fecarbox Super Middleweight Title

That fight will be the main event of a boxing night of boxing promoted by Gabe LaConte’s First Round Promotions and Greg Cohen Promotions.

An outstanding undercard has been assembled that will feature some of the best talent in The New York/New Jersey area.

Taking part in a six round Bantamweight bout will be Qa’id “Kid Dynamite” Muhammad.

Muhammad of Atlantic City has a perfect mark of 7-0 with six knockouts and is coming off a third round stoppage over Steven Johnson on April 18th at The Robert Treat Hotel. Muhammad’s opponent will be named shortly.

In a six round Jr. Middleweight bout, Tommy Rainone (17-4, 4 KO’s) of New York takes on Keenan Collins (14-7-3, 9 KO’s) of York, PA

John Lennox (10-1, 5 KO’s) of Carteret, NJ will take on Rodricka Ray (3-5-1, 1 KO) of Jackson, TN in a six round Heavyweight bout

Anthony “Juice” Young (4-0, 2 KO) of Atlantic City battles Christian Steele (2-3, 1 KO) of Staunton, VA in a four round Welterweight bout.

Aaron Kinch (3-0-1, 1 KO) of Newark, NJ will get it on with Khuzaymah Al Nubu (0-2) Fostoria, OH in a four round Heavyweight bout

Thomas Baldwin (2-0-2, 1 KO) of Newark will fight Fotzgerald Johnson (2-6,1 KO) Asheboro, NC in a four round Jr. Middleweight bout

Heavyweight Dan Mayfield of Dover, NJ will make his pro debut against an opponent to be named.

Tickets for this outstanding night of boxing are $1500 for Tables; $100 (Front Row); $75 VIP
and $50 for General Admission and can be purchased at:

Boardwalk Saloon
206 Bloomfield Ave
Newark, NJ
973-483-8766

Elite Heat Gym
130 Mt. Pleasant Ave
Newark, NJ
862-772-2532

Final Round Boxing
156 Algonquin PKWY
Whippany, NJ
973-515-0704

Greg Cohen Promotions
(212) 851-6425

NEW YORK (May 29, 2012) – A light heavyweight world championship showdown—potentially the division’s best matchup in years between two young fighters in their prime—has been confirmed for Saturday, Aug. 11, at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada, when undefeated International Boxing Federation (IBF) light heavyweight champion Tavoris Cloud (24-0, 19 KOs), of Tallahassee, Fla., defends his title against popular hometown favorite and former World Boxing Council (WBC) light heavyweight titleholder Jean Pascal (26-2-1, 16 KOs) on SHOWTIME CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING live on SHOWTIME®.

The co-feature will match budding Canadian knockout artist Adonis “Superman” Stevenson, (18-1, 15 KOs) of Montreal (Canada), against an opponent to be announced in a super middleweight bout.

Cloud is known as a no-nonsense power puncher, who comes right at his opponents with few frills. Pascal may not equal Cloud in work rate, but his footwork and explosive combinations make for a compelling matchup between ferocious punchers. Both men will be coming in to not only win, but to make a statement as the best puncher in one of boxing’s glamor divisions.

The 5-foot-10, 30-year-old Cloud will be making the fifth defense of the then-vacant 175-pound title he won via 12-round unanimous decision over Clinton Woods on Aug. 28, 2009. The hard-hitting, 29-year-old successfully defended against Glen Johnson (unanimous decision, June 7, 2010), Fulgencio Zuniga (unanimous decision, Dec. 17, 2010) and Yusaf Mack (TKO 8, June 28, 2011) before winning a controversial split decision over Gabriel Campillo in February.

“This fight with Jean Pascal is a bout I’m looking forward to,” said Cloud. “It’s going to be what I call a ‘Release the Kraken’ match. Everybody knows I come to fight. What I like about Pascal is that he doesn’t fool around either. When I look for him, he will be there, and the same goes for me.

“Fans like to see leather thrown with bad intentions, and that’s what they are going to get in Montreal on August 11.”

The 5-foot-10 ½-inch, 29-year-old Pascal is currently ranked No. 2 by” The Ring” and in the top 10 in three of the four major organizations. Since his first world title fight in 2009, Pascal has defeated Chad Dawson (via 11th-round technical decision in 2010), Adrian Diaconu twice and fought the legendary Bernard Hopkins to a thrilling draw in December 2010. In the second of back-to-back meetings with Hopkins last May, Pascal lost his title by a very close decision.

“First, I want to thank Tavoris Cloud for giving me the opportunity to fight for his IBF light heavyweight belt and to prove who I really am in the ring,” said Pascal. “He has shown true class seeking out the best challenger in the division and for this he has my full respect. Our styles make for the best, most explosive and spectacular fight possible in boxing. Having been away from the ring for more than a year, I am hungrier and more determined than ever to get back on top. Don’t miss it August 11 in Montreal. I am going to get back on the throne for good.”

Throughout a career that began in August 2004, Cloud has been a road warrior. He’s fought only three times in his native Florida. Pascal, conversely, has had all but two of his fights in Canada.

Stevenson has notched 15 knockouts in 19 professional fights in his climb up the rankings. The Canadian southpaw super middleweight is currently No. 2 in IBF, No. 3 in WBC and No. 7 in the World Boxing Association (WBA) and World Boxing Organization (WBO).

“I am so proud to be making my SHOWTIME debut fighting in this major event in Montreal,” said Stevenson. “I am on a mission to destroy anybody that has the courage to get in the ring with me. I am not looking for any favors or compassion. My goal is to show the world that I truly deserve to be on a major network fighting Carl Froch for his IBF belt. Watch me make a major statement August 11 on SHOWTIME.”

Trained by the renowned Emmanuel Steward, Stevenson got a late start in the professional ranks with a 2006 debut at the age of 29. Now a six year pro, Stevenson has maintained his penchant for knockouts as he’s stepped up the class of competition. In his last five starts, against opponents with a combined record of 107-8, he has overwhelmed them all, winning four of five inside three rounds. The lone exception is a ninth-round KO of Aaron Pryor Jr.

In all, 12 of his 15 knockouts have come inside three rounds.

The 5-foot-11, 34-year-old Stevenson won a WBC Silver belt with a second-round TKO over Noe Gonzalez (27-1 going in) in his most recent outing last April 20 at Bell Centre.

For information on SHOWTIME Sports, including exclusive behind-the-scenes video and photo galleries, complete telecast information and more, visit the website at http://sports.SHO.com.

About Showtime Networks Inc.:

Showtime Networks Inc. (SNI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS Corporation, owns and operates the premium television networks SHOWTIME®, THE MOVIE CHANNEL™ and FLIX®, as well as the multiplex channels SHOWTIME 2™, SHOWTIME® SHOWCASE, SHOWTIME EXTREME®, SHOWTIME BEYOND®, SHOWTIME NEXT®, SHOWTIME WOMEN®, SHOWTIME FAMILY ZONE® and THE MOVIE CHANNEL™ XTRA. SNI also offers SHOWTIME HD™, THE MOVIE CHANNEL™ HD, SHOWTIME ON DEMAND® and THE MOVIE CHANNEL™ ON DEMAND, and the network’s authentication service SHOWTIME ANYTIME®. SNI also manages Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture between SNI and the Smithsonian Institution, which offers Smithsonian Channel™. All SNI feeds provide enhanced sound using Dolby Digital 5.1. SNI markets and distributes sports and entertainment events for exhibition to subscribers on a pay-per-view basis through SHOWTIME PPV®.

“I’m very tough, you know,” Carl Froch said Saturday, after he ruined Lucian Bute. “I’m a bit of an animal.”

It was the sort of self-assessment that, when unleavened by criticism, comes off as boorish and predictable sales-speak intended to preclude fisticuffs more than promote them. But from Froch’s mouth, which bears a frank tongue that quickly, and consistently, conceded the man who decisioned him in December, Andre Ward, was, is, the better man, the statement had exactly the right panache. In Froch’s Nottinghamshire, that is, in a place Ward has not been and will not be seen, Froch is the world’s most ferocious 168-pound man.

He proved that by tearing through IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute, Saturday, in England’s Capital FM Arena, and stopping the undefeated Romanian-born Canadian southpaw at 1:05 of the fifth round, when American referee Earl Brown, shaken by the sight of Bute’s head nearly touching his shoulder blades, waved-off the fight, restarted the fight, and had his authority usurped entirely (and appropriately).

There is plenty to be said for making fights to please fans, to fill arenas, to ensure future generations’ writers shake their heads at modifiers’ inadequacies as they happen off the fingers. But there’s one other thing to be said for making fights, and it is a thing that is occasionally lost for good reason. Because prizefights weaken their participants – alter their motor skills, shorten their lives, reduce their abilities to associate thoughts that aren’t immediate familiars – it is intuitively advisable to have an athlete make few of them as possible en route to comfortable a retirement as possible, with comfort defined in realms both physical and financial. This is truer the older a fighter gets; who would begrudge Evander Holyfield or Roy Jones Jr. a retirement party now?

But when an athlete is still prime, there’s a different strategy to consider: Fight more because you will fight better. Most arguments for increased volume are made by aficionados for self-interested reasons. We wish to see better spectacles more often while enjoying an ancillary chance at converting laymen to devotees. Nothing wrong with a little self-interest, of course, but in Carl Froch’s case, it misses the point – as Froch reminded us while uttering this clause at the end of a postfight answer, Saturday: “Most importantly, that’s what I want.”

What Froch wants is to be a great prizefighter, an international item, an immortal – a thing over which he has almost no control. Barring that, he wants to be an improving prizefighter, and in a twist that is proper, not ironical, Froch’s activity has brought that very effect. He has matched himself as a prime fighter against other prime fighters, and he is a better fighter right now, this very moment, than he was before he did. All clichés about styles aside, there is a very good chance the Carl Froch who engaged in that aesthetic disaster of a Super Six opener with Andre Dirrell 31 months ago would not have done to Lucian Bute what Froch just did.

The lesson of that fight with Dirrell, that some men who place a premium on trap-setting and reflexes are athletes not fighters and need to be gone-through not abided, changed the way Froch approached his opening minutes with Bute – a man superior in both reflex and athleticism. And the fight that came after Froch-Dirrell, the close decision loss to Mikkel Kessler that put a first blemish on Froch’s record and saw Froch, in its fifth round, land a buckling right hand then do a moment’s showboating with his right glove, taught Froch a hurt man is more interested in his continued consciousness than you are, and must be treated accordingly.

At a fundamental level that stylists often shun, a choice must be made in a prizefight that is otherwise even. It is a calculation of what a man will sacrifice – what percentage of his dignity and health – to undo an opponent. From the opening round, when Froch swam at Bute, throwing the right hook then crossing his feet over and crunching misplaced limbs one against the other, Froch proclaimed: All of it; I will sacrifice all of it in my hometown, right now, in the next instant even.

It has been written of Froch that he badly wants to fight even if sometimes he does not appear to know how. There were moments of that, too, in Saturday’s match. But the hardiness of his offense and the thrill Froch evinced in round 1 when Bute caught him with what Froch might call “something sweet” and both men paused to mark how comparatively little it affected the Brit, those were things for which Bute, whatever his class, was unprepared. Or so he looked – unprepared, uncomfortable, overwhelmed.

We must honor Froch as a bulwark against the rising and increasingly persuasive tide of the hypothetical. Had Froch not swapped blows unsuccessfully with Andre Ward six months ago, right now, on the virtue of what Froch did to Bute – widely considered no worse than the world’s second-best super middleweight – we’d be making a hypothetical Froch-Ward match in which even Ward’s supporters would concede that, if in the unlikely event their man could steal a decision from Froch, Ward would be hurt worse by Froch than any opponent before or after.

Instead we know exactly where we stand. Froch, to his resounding credit, fought both Ward and Bute and stated rather plainly before and after both occasions he was at his very best. Ward is definitively better than Froch, and he will be tomorrow. Froch is definitively better than Bute, and he will be until the men retire.

We do not believe that, or present persuasive arguments about its likelihood – silly rhetorical exercises that disintegrate into ad-hominem suspicions if not attacks – rather, we know it. Bless Carl Froch for providing that knowledge.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Jose Benavidez Jr.’s apprenticeship will move on to another stage, from patient prospect to potential contender, if he can get through a test Saturday at Tucson’s Casino del Sol that is critical and perhaps necessary in the development of the 20-year-old junior-welterweight.

Benavidez (14-0, 12 KOs) is coming off surgery for a troublesome right wrist that forced him out of a couple of fights and gave him a hint at what he can expect. The Phoenix fighter has yet to encounter much adversity from the opposite corner, although that surely awaits him if he fulfills all that has been forecast. But surgery creates its own adversity. It leaves a scar and sometimes questions.

Questions might be there are at opening bell at Casino del Sol’s outdoor area on TV Azteca against Joshua Sosa (10-2, 5 KOs) of Leavenworth, Kan., on an eight-fight card (6 p.m. first bell) featuring junior-middleweight Jesus Soto Karass (24-7, 16 KOs) of Mexico against Said El Harrack (10-1-1, 5 KOs) of Henderson, Nev. Benavidez father and trainer, Jose Benavidez Sr., is confident his son will answer in a fashion that will leave only the scar.

The wrist, he says, has withstood long hours of pounding mitts, speed bags, heavy bags and sparring partners at trainer Freddie Roach’s Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, Calif., and Central Boxing in Phoenix.

There were some predictably tentative moments in the early going. The senior Benavidez could see it. His son would wince.

But five days before Benavidez’s first fight since a victory in November on the undercard of Manny Pacquiao’s controversial decision over Juan Manuel Marquez, that wince was gone, replaced by confidence.

“We were working the mitts,’’ Jose Sr. “The first time he hits the mitts with the right hand, I looked up into his face. There was no expression. He just kept on working. Then, he sparred eight, nine rounds. He’s ready to go. Everything is good.’’

Jose Benavidez Sr. works to balance the various, sometimes conflicting tasks that go into being a dad and his son’s trainer. It’s not easy. Many fail to separate emotions from business. But there have been dads and sons who have managed, including retired welterweight and middleweight champion Felix Trinidad and his father, Felix Trinidad Sr. The senior Benavidez has tried to learn by quietly watching others.

His son turned 20 on May 15. That’s the good news. Somebody who was 19 just a month ago has a short memory for surgery that happened in January. Concern is for old guys. That’s his dad, CEO of the family business.

Jose Benavidez Sr. looks at the rest of 2012 and sees a year in which his son is going to have to further prove himself to Top Rank, which signed him as a 17-year-old.

“I’m sure there are some doubts in a lot people’s minds,’’ said Jose Sr., who hopes a first or second-round stoppage without further trouble to the right wrist will put his son into a bout on the June 9 undercard of Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. “That’s just the way the business is. Over the next year, the level of competition will be stepped up. He’s ready for that. But we have to show improvement.

“Right now, it’s about how you win.’’

Bute might have to steal one in Nottingham
Lucian Bute might have to be a modern-day Robin Hood to steal a victory Saturday in Nottingham, England, from Carl Froch in an EPIX-televised super-middleweight bout.

Bute has the title — the International Boxing Federation’s version, but few advantages in going to Froch’s hometown. Bute, a Romanian living in Canada, tried to duplicate the expected atmosphere by even training while listening to a tape of crowd noise that included the voice of Froch’s wife.

Meanwhile Froch, who lost to Andre Ward in his last bout, has been predictably forthright and confident. Bute, he says, is out of his league.

“We’re going to find out if he’s good enough to fight at the next level,’’ Froch (28-2, 20 KOs) said in a shot at Bute’s unbeaten record (30-0, 24 KOs) during an international conference call. “Lucian Bute, on paper, is overrated.’’

Notes, Quotes
· During a conference call with Pacquiao, Top Rank’s Bob Arum said he doesn’t believe that Lamont Peterson and Andre Berto are drug cheats. Both have tested positive. Arum asked for further research before a rush to judgment. “Unless everybody sits down and works through this, we’ll have chaos,’’ he said.

· And Antonio Tarver started slowly and picked up steam in an angry rant directed at Lateef Kayode during a conference call for their Showtime-televised cruiserweight bout on June 2 in Carson, Calif. Apparently, Kayode is upset that Tarver criticized him while working as a TV analyst. “”He told me what’s he’s going to do me when he sees me in the street,’’ said Tarver, who promises to break down Kayode. “This man has threatened me.’’

Josesito Lopez will step in to face Victor Ortiz on June 23rd in Los Angeles after Andre Berto tested positive for a banned substance according to Dan Rafael of espn.com

“(Golden Boy) offered the fight to us on Friday afternoon. I got a call from (Goossen Tutor Promotions matchmaker) Tom Brown saying we got the offer and I said, ‘We’ll take it,'” Lopez’ trainer/manager Henry Ramirez said. “We’re excited. We’re ecstatic. Our job is to get the biggest fight out there for Josesito that we can for the best money we can get, and this is that fight.”

“We’ve explored a variety of potential opponents, and so far Lopez seems to be the best available opponent that will take the fight on short notice,” Showtime Sports general manager Stephen Espinoza told ESPN.com. “He is a strong, tough and experienced fighter, and he’s looked particularly good in his last few fights. I like this matchup, and I hope a deal can be worked out.”

Junior welterweight Humberto Soto (58-7-2, 34 KOs) and Lucas Matthysse (30-2, 28 KOs) will still meet in the Showtime co-featured bout, but Riverside, Calif., heavyweight contender Cristobal Arreola (35-2, 30 KOs), who is also trained by Ramirez, will be added to the card to make it into a televised tripleheader. The fight figures to be Arreola’s final bout before an anticipated heavyweight championship shot against Wladimir Klitschko in November.

“Pending approval of the opponent, the Arreola bout would be added to undercard on the Showtime broadcast,” Espinoza said

“My guy has been in the gym, so all we have to do is just change the date of the fight by one day and change our sparring partners,” said Ramirez, noting that Lopez was preparing for the right-handed Holt and now will be facing a left-hander in Ortiz.

“Holt pulls out on us and then this drops in our lap, so we’re excited,” Ramirez said. “The kid (Lopez) will make probably four or five times his biggest purse (which was $35,000) for this fight with Ortiz and a lot more than he would have gotten to fight Holt. So we are in a no-lose situation here because it’s a great opportunity, it’s a good payday and it’s a fight we believe that we can win.

“Lopez puts pressure on his opponents and we know Ortiz doesn’t like pressure and we also know he doesn’t have the biggest heart in the world. We’ve seen him quit before” in a sixth-round knockout loss to Marcos Maidana in a 2009 interim junior welterweight title bout.

Atlantic City, NJ—Two middleweight warriors with similar aggressive styles collide when Partick Majewski, of Atlantic City, NJ, and Chris Fitzpatrick, of Cleveland, OH, meet in a scheduled 10-round contest for the vacant North American Boxing Federation (NABF) middleweight championship on Saturday evening, July 7, at Bally’s Atlantic City.

The Majewski-Fitzpatrick contest tops a seven-bout card which begins at 7.30 pm. The show will be televised live by www.gofightlive.tv.

Majewski (right), 32, comes into the fight off a third-round knockout April 7 in Southaven, MS, over former world-title challenger Antwun Echols, of Davenport, IA.

The win over Echols was Majewski’s first fight back after losing for the only time in his career when Jose Miguel Torres, of Magangue, Colombia, stopped him in six rounds last Sept. 30 at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, CT.

A pro since 2006, Majewski is 18-1, 12 K0s. He has beaten Jimmy Lubash, of Pittsburgh, PA; Latif Mundy, of Philadelphia, PA; Joseph Gomez, of Bloomfield, NM; Marcus Upshaw, of Jacksonville, FL.

Majewski, nicknamed The Machine, originally is from Radom, Poland.

Fitzpatrick, 24, is known as The Irish Ghost.

A pro since 2008, Fitzpatrick (left) is 15-1-1, 6 K0s, losing only via 10-round decision to Jose Stinger Medina, of Tilton, NH, last Oct. 10 in Albany, NY. He rebounded with a sixth-round knockout over Ken Dunham, of Charlotte, NC, on Feb. 4 in Chapin, SC.

Fitzpatrick’s biggest win came last summer when he earned a 10-round decision over Scott Sigman, of Lynchburg, VA, in Greensboro, NC.

He also has beaten Bruce Rumbolz, of Sterling, IL.

Lightweight Osnel Charles, of Atantic City, a stable-mate of Majewski’s, will try to rebound from his April 14 loss to Derrick Finley, of Detroit, MI, when he returns in a six-round contest to top the six-fight preliminary card.

ABOUT JULY 7

The Majewski-Fitzpatrick fights tops top a seven-bout card at Bally’s Atlantic City. First fight is 7.30 pm. Tickets are priced at $50 and $75 and they are on sale at the offices of Peltz Boxing (215-765-0922) and all Ticketmaster outlets (800-745-3000). Tickets also are on sale at www.peltzboxing.com and www.ticketmaster.com. Gofightlive.tv will televise the card on the internet. The card is being promoted by Peltz Boxing Promotions, Inc., in association with Bally’s Atlantic City.

Inside the double blue doors, old wood with matte aluminum handles, the heater is off because with all the bodies inside and the humidity outside even the innocently sadistic traditions of the sport, ways for fighters to make weight by stretching them on a rack of dehydration, cannot find purchase in raising the temperature.

The stairs that descend from the entrance are rows of concrete, thick and soft with layered gray paint. Folding aluminum chairs, their legs scuffed by cheap polish off cheap brown and black shoes, line the stairs’ levels – a few dutiful mothers lying across them, bored by spectacle and tired from downtown-hotel housekeeping jobs, their phones in their right hands for emergencies or texting. A fibrous-patterned slip rope that sees little action in a gym with little head movement stretches wall to wall as a border to complement its handwritten sign: “Only registered fighters past this point.”

The walls sparkle with gold and black paint, oil on cinderblock, in a lost tribute to a crew of handymen boxers lost to a reduced schedule. Spongy black mats at the base of the sparkly walls float on stacked plywood that floats over the once-gleaming hardwood lanes of a collegiate bowling alley from the 1950s. Every so many meters, sporadically placed, stand borrowed trash receptacles, some tin and others blue plastic, one bearing partially a white recycling cartoon of circled arrows. The ring is elevated, four steps above the floor, its bungee-tightened canvas blue, its ropes taped red and white, and its new spit funnel crowned by a metal tray slick with petroleum jelly.

Two boys, grammar-school kids whose small heads take on alien, lopsided shapes under their red headgear, push 10-ounce gloves harmlessly at one another. Both have begun young enough to take punches on the nose impersonally. Ricky, the shorter, slower of the two, carries his lead hand low, mostly because he is tired but partly because his dad took him to see the Mayweather fight on a movie screen a few weeks back, and Mayweather made the low lead hand look more promising than Ricky’s trainers say it is. The boy will be fat someday – a fortune told in his chin and cheeks – but Dad will force the day out far as possible with strenuous hobbies like boxing, which despite their strenuousness are almost helpless to the boy’s fantastic aptitude for detecting, in every venture, the road most traveled.

Skipping rope before a wall-sized shadowboxing mirror is Temo, a youth champion, one of the gym’s best and necessarily cockiest kids, marking time till the yellow metal timer above the mirror makes its electronic enh-enh-enh sound. He floats a centimeter above the spot his leather rope slaps and may never be big enough to make a living at prizefighting, whatever others’ outsized and not-selfless hopes. Temo’s beauty and charisma will take him to an affluent place in 20 years, though his slight frame will doubtfully bear others’ piling on it.

Squared to the softest of the new 75-pound leather bags the gym got for Christmas is Clarence (everyone calls him “C”) tapping with hybrid left and right hooks the low part of the sack where red leather was stitched to black reinforcement and its inner sand is compacted tightest. C repeatedly puts his middle knuckles on the exact places where he can apply greatest force but make the bag swing least. His shirtless back, wet with exertion, is hard and dark and shiny like the wood of an oboe. The Christmas bag’s tight, noisy chain extends 10 feet in the air where it wraps round an exposed metal beam. Upstairs on the basketball courts, pickup games happen on one side and a women’s roller-derby practice on the other, and their exertions come through the gym’s ceiling like base thumps and zipping marbles.

Behind the double-end and heavy bags hangs an ovoid chunk of puke-yellow foam and crusted silver duct tape, its leather entirely shed. It glares resentfully across the floor at a new Everlast – heavier and harder, shapelier – into which boxers now drive their uppercuts and not this old bag, merely the X on a map where instead of buried treasure lies a broken board of floating floor that’d been twisting careless kids’ ankles.

On the second wooden bench, soft with layered gray paint in front of strewn dumbbells with rusted-over poundages and a heavy creaking Universal machine, copper with age and abuse, sits a pudgy kid named Victor. He’s in his twenties and 300s. Promised sparring, he’s been gloved-up and waiting, the toe of his right Ringside boot planted while its misshapen heel vibrates in the air just off the mat, hours now. His supposed partner, a thirtyish guy with a beard who wears a fat-burner belt under dark t-shirts and says he fought in a faraway place years ago and recently declared too loudly that he wanted sparring because he needed to say it to believe it, won’t be in. Tomorrow, there’ll be tendonitis or car problems or food poisoning to blame, and the day after that too.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Boxing and politics are impossible to separate. Proof rests in Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the Viet Nam war. But the ring and political office are an impossible mix. The furor surrounding Manny Pacquiao’s opposition to same-sex marriage in a misleading, examiner.com story is just another example of why the Filipino Congressman would have been better off if he had postponed his political career.

From this corner, it’s a mystery as to why Pacquiao would even comment about the issue. I’m a lot more interested in how he plans to deal with Tim Bradley’s head-butts on June 9. I also suspect the controversy will quickly subside, a forgotten tempest. An athlete’s opinion about anything outside of the arena is a little bit like going to the window at a Vegas book in March with wagers based on President Barack Obama’s NCAA bracket.

It’s foolish.

Pacquiao’s seat in Congress has always seemed to be something of a sideshow. It’s an intriguing element, just one among many in the make-up of a compelling story. Put it this way: Pacquiao is not going to be judged on what legislation he proposes, but only for whom he beats and how he beats them. If he loses to Bradley, he loses more votes than he would with an opinion about gay marriage.

The trouble with his political office is that he has become fair game, an easy target, for unseen shots he can’t counter when all of his time and energy are needed in the challenge posed by the dangerous Bradley. Politicians without enemies are ex-politicians.

From an issue with Filipino authorities to a controversy with customs about goods imported by his charitable foundation, Pacquiao’s office and his aspirations beyond Congress have created a complicated landscape full of fronts that will confront him all at once at a time when only one fight really matters.

From the Twitter front
Is anybody taking Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s latest tweet seriously? Mayweather tells his 2.8 million followers: “I stand behind President Obama & support gay marriage. I’m an American citizen & I believe people should live their life the way they want.’’

I guess that means few remember Mayweather’s internet video about Pacquiao a couple of years ago. Mayweather repeatedly used a homophobic slur to describe Pacquiao.

Dates, Quotes, Anecdotes
· Happy Birthday, Sugar Ray Leonard. He turned 56 Thursday.

· With a Chad Dawson-Andre Ward fight possible in September, Lucian Bute was asked for his pick Thursday in a conference call that included Carl Froch in the build-up for their EPIX-televised fight on May 26 in Nottingham, England. “A very good fight,’’ said Bute, who agreed to face Froch when Ward said no. “Probably 50-50. I would give a little edge to Dawson right now.’’ Leonard will work as an EPIX analyst for Bute-Froch.

· And Froch, on Bute’s contention that a succession of punches can crack his durable chin. “The best chin in the business is the one that doesn’t get hit.’’

AZ Notes
· Happy Birthday, Jose Benavidez, Jr. The Phoenix junior-welterweight prospect turned 20 Tuesday while training for May 26 at Tucson’s Casino del Sol in his first bout since surgery on his right wrist for an injury suffered in a November victory on the Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez undercard. “He looks good, looks strong,’’ said his dad and trainer, Jose Benavidez Sr., who said his son knocked out a sparring partner last week with a left hook.

· Tijuana super-flyweight Hanzel Martinez, Antonio Margarito’s brother-in-law, will get a shot at a minor title, the North American Boxing Federation’s version, on the May 26 card. Margarito had been scheduled for the main event, but his first fight since a December loss was postponed until July because of foot injury suffered a few days after it was formally announced.

Lawton, OK (May 17, 2012) – WBC Continental Americas Middleweight champion George “Comanche Boy” Tahdooahnippah is becoming increasingly impatient for a date with one of the world’s top 160 pound fighters.

The hard-hitting Tahdooahnippah, a huge draw in his native Oklahoma, has an outstanding professional record of 30-0-1 with 22 wins by knockout. All but two of his fights took place in the Sooner State, which kept him under the radar. Even though he’s yet to taste defeat and owns impressive knockouts against seasoned pros such as world title challenger Jonathan Corn, Jimmy Holmes and Tyrel Brown, the Lawton resident is yet to receive a career-defining opportunity.

“It’s time for me to face some big name fighters and show the world who I am,” said Tahdooahnippah, a member of the Comanche Nation. “When I fought Jimmy Holmes for the WBC belt, I had a torn bicep and still stopped him in the opening round. Whoever has been in my way thus far, I’ve got them out of there and I don’t plan on changing that, regardless of who is standing across the ring!”

Atop his wish list is former undisputed middleweight champion Jermain “Bad Intentions” Taylor. Once a fixture on the pound-for-pound list, Taylor, 30-4-1 (18 KO’s), is 2-0 since returning from a two-year layoff. In his most recent bout, the Little Rock, AR native survived a scary ninth round knockdown against Caleb Truax en-route to claiming a unanimous decision victory.

Tahdooahnippah, whose opposition is comparable to Truax’, called his fight with Taylor a major eye-opener.

“I’ve been watching Caleb Truax his whole career and we were promoted similarly. The only difference is he got the opportunity that I’ve been looking for. Jermain Taylor also isn’t the same fighter he once was and recent upset wins by fellow Oklahomans Carson Jones and Grady Brewer truly inspired me.”

“Caleb wasn’t able to close the show and I know that I have more power than him. I’m a different fighter than Caleb. I’m hungrier and have a more fan-friendly style. If he can go ten rounds with Jermain and put him on his back and I know that I can get Jermain out of there!”

Tahdooahnippah’s manager Bobby Dobbs also feels the fighter he helped build from the ground up is ready to face a top-notch foe.

“George is 30-0 and had a few big fights fall through,” said Dobbs. Fernando Guerrero backed out on us a few years ago and it’s been frustrating to get him a fight. We’ve been ready to take the next step and Jermain Taylor is the guy we want. He’s on the comeback trail and is looking for another opportunity. Comanche Boy has no problem taking him out of the equation!”

Fans can interact with George by going to facebook.com/comancheboygeorge.tahdooahnippah or HDboxing.net.

LAS VEGAS, NEV. (May 15, 2012) – Top Rank announced today the signing of amateur sensation TOKA KAHN-CLARY, from Providence, Rhode Island. Kahn-Clary, 20, who boasts speed, power and a “pro style of fighting” is trained by Peter Manfredo Sr. and managed by Mike Criscio, who discovered and managed light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson. Kahn-Cary will make his pro debut, as a junior lightweight, on Friday, June 8, at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, on a card headlined by the Kelly Pavlik vs. Scott Sigmon super middleweight bout.

“Everyone at Top Rank is excited and what a great way for Toka to start, fighting on the Kelly Pavlik card at the Hard Rock,” said Hall of Fame promoter Bob Arum.

“Toka is a top prospect who is the real deal. He throws a lot of punches and hits hard,” said Bruce Trampler, Top Rank’s Hall of Fame matchmaker.

Manfredo added, “Toka is the best I’ve seen at our gym in 35 years – and I’ve seen a lot of fighters. He has speed, skill, tremendous combinations and a big heart.”

A native of Liberia, Kahn-Cary moved to Philadelphia when he was six, where he was soon orphaned, losing his father in a shooting that same year. He made his way to Pawtucket, RI, where life was not any easier, but eventually he was taken under the wings of Andrea Watson, her husband Ron Clary and Manfredo. Those three and boxing proved to be Kahn-Clary’s salvation. As an amateur, Toka was a Gold medalist at the National Golden Gloves (2010), a Silver medalist at the U.S. Championships (2011), and a Bronze medalist at the U.S. National Championships (2012, 2010.)

We must learn to see in boxing’s story the energy and cruelty our rapturous drive demands, like the drum and swish and smack and scuff and grunt of a boxing gym. The faintest frown of fortune sends some boys back to well-paid labor, but those of us enraptured by the dulcet art, we who are beastly creatures in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, must overcome what dilettantism is rife in boxing, because an ox without a rope can lick himself just fine.

What’s above is a paragraph I wrote in November. It was part of a column that elevated me from a workaday boxing writer to a champion sportswriter. Before I attended any awards dinners to see the work honored, though, I voluntarily submitted my work to a readability test because I want to see the craft of sportswriting cleaned up. Last week, my column came under scrutiny after a writing laboratory at UCLA found the following:

WRITER: BART BARRY
RESULTS: PLAGIARISM; CONSISTENT WITH THE USE OF OTHERS’ WORDS.

The lab results, which I do not dispute, found in that paragraph elements of Philip Roth, Hugh McIlvanney, A. J. Liebling, Somerset Maugham and Miguel de Cervantes, a compound known in writing laboratories as “RMLMC-Identical Letters.”

I want to state unequivocally that I did not plagiarize. I look forward to the day when my side of the story, and its requisite obfuscation, overwhelms what information currently circulates about me. To that end, I am assembling a team of lawyers and publicists to ensure the actions I took are forever misunderstood. In the interim, though, I’d like to provide a self-serving and confidentiality-protected version of events:

After failing to meet my potential in a number of important columns over the years, I noticed, last November, while readying for the most important column of my career, that I was unable to form sentences with the speed or élan employed by a great writer. This concerned me deeply because I am unable to make money doing anything but writing. I spoke to my editor, and he recommended a writing workshop in Las Vegas called Desert Mirage. I submitted numerous samples of my work, and Desert Mirage returned with a diagnosis of Low Vocabulary, commonly known as “Low V,” and prescribed the RMLMC-Identical Letters treatment mentioned above.

(I would encourage you to visit the Desert Mirage website and read about this for yourself, but the page that describes the revolutionary treatment is coincidentally now under construction.)

My workshop leader, a “conventionally trained” linguist “who also has extensive knowledge and experience with less traditional yet highly effective approaches,” assured me he had worked with a vast number of student essays and ghostwritten white papers in the past. After reading a blog about the treatment, I was satisfied that RMLMC-Identical Letters is completely different from the “representing of another author’s work as one’s own” that readability tests were created to detect. Just to be on the safe side, though, my workshop leader injected others’ words in my column at a ratio about six percent below the threshold used in Nevada plagiarism tests.

I wish to reiterate that no part of this treatment made me a better writer. Instead, this was a treatment necessary to my regular employment in any professional field, not just writing. In fact, when my workshop leader reviewed the samples I submitted to Desert Mirage, he was “literally shocked” – not figuratively, mind you; a charge of electricity shot through his body – that my vocabulary was so low. In routinely treating both illiterates and folks who’ve not read a full-length book in 50 years, he had never seen a vocabulary low as mine.

This was not a case of writer’s block brought on by deadlines, as happens naturally to both writers and non-writers alike. This was an incidence of Low V and part of a trend my workshop leader has seen accelerate in the last few years, one he successfully cures with his literary-based treatment. Again, these words were taken from actual literary works. They were not words created by lexicographers manipulating letters into artificial patterns. Using others’ naturally occurring words to help reestablish my vocabulary at normal levels didn’t make me Shakespeare by any means; it merely allowed me to use my innate ability to write a championship column.

I applaud readability tests and all they are doing. I am, of course, sorry they so misunderstood what I was doing. I’m confident that once my side of this story is parsed, processed and repackaged by my legal and publicity team, there will be reasonable doubt enough in your mind about my culpability in this matter that further analysis of my previous work will represent for you such a needless loss of time that you will forget this happened and consider paying to read me in the future.

(To underscore the seriousness of my commitment to using my own words, I admit my legal team helped with that last sentence.)

*

That is satire, yes, but barely more absurd than the explanations athletes’ spokespersons now regularly feed us. Lamont Peterson’s case, of which we began to learn Tuesday, is but another lamentable example. How cognizant Peterson was about the legality of what “Bio-Identical Hormone” treatment he underwent in November is debatable.

This is not: Testosterone is a hormone that causes the development of male sex characteristics such as facial hair and musculature and when taken in excess leads to increased aggressiveness.

A person who suffers from low testosterone may be capable of many things, but professional fighting is not one of them. If today Lamont Peterson – fully bearded and rather muscular – does not have even normal levels of naturally occurring testosterone, that is life speaking to him in one word: Retire.

A prizefighter without testosterone, after all, makes no more sense than a writer without a vocabulary.

Author’s note: Special thanks to Lem Satterfield’s extensive reporting on the matter, and a special recommendation of Gabriel Montoya’s exhaustive “Floyd Mayweather and the new wave of drug testing in boxing.”

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Lamont Peterson’s camp must not have been reading websites, Twitter or Facebook when ESPN reported just two days after Peterson’s upset on Dec. 10 of Amir Khan that Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun had tested positive.

Either that or Peterson’s management was partying on a planet where there is no social media. Braun’s positive test was for elevated levels of testosterone. A second test showed that the testosterone was synthetic, meaning that Braun, the National League’s 2011 MVP, had either injected it or ingested it.

Braun’s positive test was a cautionary tale in what not to do. Peterson went ahead and did it anyway, setting off a fast-moving chain of events that led to the cancellation Wednesday of a May 19 rematch with Khan at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay. Peterson’s test samples also revealed a testosterone that had been injected as pellets into the junior-welterweight’s hip.

Expect lots of legalese in the argument about whether the testosterone in the Peterson sample was synthetic. His Las Vegas physician, Dr. John Thompson, said it was soy-based, calling it “bioidentical testosterone’’ administered after Peterson complained about fatigue brought on by what Thompson said were low levels of the natural stuff.

Even if those pellets were veggie burgers, they had to be injected in a procedure not reported to VADA, the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association, which conducted the tests in an agreement with both camps. If there was in fact a legitimate medical reason for the testosterone treatment, VADA should have known about it. That it didn’t before a positive test on March 19 raises a red flag.

Peterson, a nice guy with a compelling story, said he was told that soy-based testosterone was not on the banned list. He said he researched on-line and decided it was natural. He said there no reason to worry. If not, why not report it on a VADA form that asked each fighter to disclose medications? Sorry, but to call its absence on the document an inadvertent slip just doesn’t explain it. Even his own camp says the treatment started about a month before his controversial decision over Khan in Washington D.C.

Questions raised by Braun’s positive test should have alerted Peterson to the peril of continuing it without disclosing it. Unlike Braun, the unfortunate Peterson doesn’t have a Player’s Union or an appeal process that can protect him and his livelihood. Braun’s 50-game suspension was overturned in February on an appeal that disputed only the process in which the sample was delivered and not the result itself.

Braun got off on a technicality.

Peterson didn’t.

He already has lost a payday in a cancellation also costly to Khan and Golden Boy Promotions. He’ll lose a few more if he can’t explain to various state commissions why he wasn’t more transparent about his use of a substance long controversial in other sports but just becoming an issue addressed by boxing.

In some ways, Peterson has become the personification what boxing must do: Pay attention, or else there will be cancellations in a business that can’t afford them.

AZ Notes
Phoenix junior-welterweight prospect Jose Benavidez Jr. (14-0, 12 KOs) is expected to test his surgically-repaired right wrist on May 26 at Casino Del Sol in Tucson against Josh Sosa (10-2, 5 KOs), a Leavenworth, Kan., fighter who has lost has last two. The fight will be Benavidez’s first since injuring the wrist during a victory in November on the undercard of Manny Pacquiao’s controversial decision over Juan Manuel Marquez.

Benavidez is scheduled for an undercard that will feature Mexican welterweight Jesus Soto Karass (24-7-3, 16 KOs) against Said El Harrack (10-1-1, 5 KOs) of Henderson, Nev. Karass-El Harrack replaces the Antonio Margarito-Abel Perry bout, which was moved to July 7, also at Casino Del Sol, because of an Achilles tendon injury suffered by Margarito last week while training in Tijuana for his first bout since a loss in December to Miguel Cotto.

SAN ANTONIO – Suspended above a bullring on a wire-mesh floor below a cinema-size screen, one story and 50 yards from where Cowboys Dancehall’s dancers danced, 75 or so aficionados gathered to look up to a gigantic image of Floyd Mayweather looping right crosses off Miguel Cotto’s left temple. They had arrived round 6:00 PM and sat through seven local-talent fights co-promoted by Jesse James Leija, and a pay-per-view co-main as well.

Although their view was front row of a movie theater that made customers stand, these aficionados enjoyed certain uncommon benefits: they were in a lively if respectful group comprising more serious observers than the folks downstairs keeping one eye on the Spurs game, there was instead of HBO’s audio feed the odd musical assortment that explodes from cowboy-bar speakers – Sir Mix-A-Lot opening for Garth Brooks – and there was the unexpectedly good event that went off above them.

Floyd Mayweather decisioned Miguel Cotto by unanimous scores, Saturday, in MGM Grand. The scorecards, while wide, were about what prognosticators expected, when in a reflection of bookmakers’ opinions, they favored Mayweather nine or so to one – with the one in that ratio usually having an ethnic or financial stake in picking the loser. Writers at ringside had the fight closer than the official judges, and ringside writers and official judges composed the matter’s sole authorities.

Nobody sincerely believed Cotto would win Saturday’s fight, and he did not. But Cotto made a fight more satisfying for spectators than any he had made since Manny Pacquiao stopped him 30 months ago. And make no mistake, it was Cotto who made Saturday’s fight. In round 2, he put Mayweather on the ropes – and Referee Tony Weeks left him there – and it led to a heap more abuse than Mayweather expected, all postfight protestations to the contrary.

In implying afterwards that his initial trip to the ropes was voluntary, that allowing Cotto to whale on his arms and sternum was plan A, Mayweather struck a curiously familiar note; those were Roy Jones’ words immediately after he sneaked past Antonio Tarver in 2003: I went to the ropes to entertain my fans. But in actuality, as the world soon learned, Jones went to the ropes because his diminishing reflexes and footwork allowed Tarver to put him there.

A similar hollowness accompanied Mayweather’s words because his fans, like Jones’ before them, generally want no part in a competitive spectacle. They do not watch a Mayweather fight to see their guy endangered or struck on the face a hundred times. They watch for a transcendent display, for proof that super heroes happen off the pages of their comic books.

What little vocal reaction happened above the bullring at Cowboys Dancehall, Saturday, came just as the bell rang to end round 8, Cotto’s best.

“He ain’t doing nothing!” somebody barked.

“He ain’t nothing!” agreed a second voice, its volume proportionate to its nervousness.

Then Mayweather gave them a rebuttal that was articulate (since that word has come out of hiding): I am a fighter, not an entertainer. It was what Mayweather said in the third round of his match with Shane Mosley, when he put his hands in a classic, high position and attacked the older man. It was a phrase he spoke in his fourth round with Victor Ortiz when he exploited the younger man’s weakness to cut his consciousness. And it was what he said for 30 of Saturday’s 36 minutes with Miguel Cotto. I am this, primarily this, and not what most of you think I am.

Something often missed by Mayweather’s detractors and ever missed by his devotees: Before he was “Money May,” master of the era’s race-baiting nuances, before he made pundits who should know better assign unprecedented import to his undefeated record, he was a fighter – a man who collected blows for a living.

There was a touch of requited love in the way Mayweather handled Cotto’s head on a break in round 4, something almost tender about it. Another man was speaking to him fluently in their first language – not hip hop’s Ali-copycat speak, not the cloyed and serenaded words the mercenaries sing to Money, not those adverbial clauses everyone spits at video cameras – but the language of professional combat in a proper tongue. It betrayed for a moment what most observers do not realize: Other fighters genuinely adore Floyd Mayweather because he is, at root, exactly as they are.

But other fighters also know what historians will uncover: There is a reason you must fight the fights. Mayweather beat Cotto, yes, but does any knowledgeable observer think he is, today, a stronger man for doing it? He is not. Mayweather was brutalized, softened, his health compromised, his life likely shortened some, in those 12 rounds with another professional puncher. It was what both men signed up for, of course, and if Mayweather was not enthusiastic about paying the tariff, he was still, and absolutely, good for it.

Historians, those plodding, careful men who assess records not hand speed, will note Mayweather never fought or beat, in his prime, a man who was favored over him. It’s too late to change that, and subsequently Mayweather’s legacy is for the most part settled. But then, respectfully, so is this: Floyd Mayweather was and is more of a fighter than he was or ever will be anything else.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Demetrius Andrade scored a highlight reel first round knockout over Rudy Cisneros in a scheduled ten round Jr.Middleweight bout at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut.

Just before the bell rang to signal the end of round one, Andrade landed a flush left followed by a sharp right to the chin that put Cisneros down and out and the fight was over.

Cisneros left the ring on a stretcher

Andrade, 157 3/4 lbs of Providence, Rhode Island is now 17-0 with twelve knockouts. Cisneros, 158 lbs of Chicago is now 12-4.

Joseph Perez scored a six round unanimous decision over Juan Jaramillo in a Jr, Lightweight bout.

Scores were 59-55 on all cards for Perez, 131 lbs of Hartford, CT and is now 8-1. Jaramillo, 129 1/2 lbs of Salam, OR and is now 8-10-2.

LAS VEGAS (May 4, 2012) – World Boxing Association (“WBA”) Light Heavyweight World Champion Beibut Shumenov returns on June 2 to make his fourth title defense against former super middleweight world title challenger Enrique Ornelas at The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nev. in a fight that will be televised live on FOX Sports Net and FOX Deportes.

Shumenov vs. Ornelas is promoted by Golden Boy Promotions and KZ Event Productions and sponsored by Corona. The FOX Sports Net and FOX Deportes bilingual simulcast will air live at 10:00 p.m. ET/7:00 p.m. PT.

Tickets, priced at $100, $60, $30, $25, along with a limited number of VIP suite seats priced at $125, may be purchased at the Hard Rock Hotel Box Office, all Ticketmaster locations, online at www.ticketmaster.com or by phone at (800) 745-3000.

The fight will mark Shumenov’s return to same venue in which he first captured the WBA title in his 10th professional bout on January 29, 2010 with a 12-round unanimous decision over Gabriel Campillo, establishing the record for a fighter winning a major world light heavyweight championship in the fewest professional fights. The 2004 Kazakhstan Olympian has successfully defended against Vyacheslav Uzelkov (DEC 12), William Joppy (KO 6) and most recently against Danny Santiago (TKO 9) this past July. In only 13 professional fights, the 28-year-old Shumenov has defeated four world champions – Campillo, Byron Mitchell, Joppy and Montell Griffin – as well as former world title challengers Epifanio Mendoza, Uzelkov and Santiago.

An all-action warrior who always gives fans their money’s worth in the ring, La Habra, California’s Enrique Ornelas (33-7, 21 KO’s) has been showing off the best form of his career since a permanent move to the light heavyweight division in 2011. He is riding a three-fight winning streak which includes a first round body shot knockout over Heriberto Gutierrez last December. Just hitting his prime at 31, Ornelas came to the 175-pound weight class after an impressive run at 168 pounds, where he owned the NABF title and gave a stellar effort in a challenge for Robert Stieglitz’ WBO title in 2010.

For more information on Golden Boy Promotions, visit www.goldenboypromotions.com, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GoldenBoyBoxing or visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GoldenBoyBoxing.

For more information on KZ Event Productions and Shumenov, visitwww.kzeventproductions.com or visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KZEventProductions.

About Golden Boy Promotions

Los Angeles-based Golden Boy Promotions was established in 2002 by Oscar de la Hoya, the first Hispanic to own a national boxing promotional company. In 2007, in its fifth year of promoting, Golden Boy Promotions set a record by selling over 2.5 million in pay-per-view homes in a single night. Also in 2007, Golden Boy Promotions established the record for highest grossing pay-per-view homes in a single year with more than 4 million total. Golden Boy Promotions is one of boxing’s most active and respected promoters, presenting shows in packed venues around the United States on networks such as HBO, SHOWTIME, TeleFutura, FOX Sports Net and FOX Deportes.

Golden Boy Promotions currently has over 70 fighters under contract, from future Hall of Famers Bernard Hopkins and Erik Morales to current world champions and superstars Devon Alexander, Canelo Alvarez, Adrien Broner, Danny Garcia, Robert Guerrero, Chris John, Amir Khan, Marcos Maidana, Abner Mares, Anselmo Moreno, Victor Ortiz and Humberto Soto. Also included on the company’s roster are top contenders Librado Andrade, Alfredo Angulo, Erislandy Lara, Daniel Ponce De Leon, James Kirkland, Paulie Malignaggi, Seth Mitchell and Peter Quillin as well as highly regarded prospects Randy Caballero, Eddie Gomez, Frankie Gomez, Antonio Orozco and Deontay Wilder.

About KZ Event Productions, Inc.

KZ Event Productions is a full service, international boxing promotional company in Las Vegas, Nevada. Owned and operated by Beibut and Chingis Shumenov, its growing stable of champions include WBA/IBA Light Heavyweight World Champion Beibut Shumenov, WBA FEDALATIN welterweight champion Ravshan Hudaynazarov, WBA International light heavyweight champion Gayrat Ahmedov and WBA International light welterweight champion Alexandr Zhuravskiy.