By Norm Frauenheim-

The hyperbole is already underway. Insults, expletives and exaggerations were delivered, exchanged and countered this week in downtown Los Angeles, just across the street from where Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury fought to a controversial draw more than 13 months ago at Staples Center.

More words, a lot more, are inevitable throughout the five-plus weeks before the rematch on Feb. 22 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. It’s show biz, entertaining and redundant all at once.

But it’s also boxing, unpredictable on any scale but never more so than at heavyweight. That unpredictability, of course, is a double-edged dynamic. Dangerous and dramatic. It can end faster than an accident, a violent collision created more by power than skill.

The Fury-Wilder sequel figures to get more interesting as the opening bell gets closer, mostly because both like the bully pulpit.

Wilder is over-the-top noisy. Bomb Squad, he screams at a window-rattling volume.

Fury is quick-witted. Jokes are as much a part of the Fury skillset as the jab.

Both are profane.

If you’re scoring the early rounds of press conferences, these two are exactly where they were after 12 rounds at Staples. It’s a draw, Wilder scoring with energy and Fury scoring with stinging counters. From this corner, the guess is that the exchange will continue without either getting much of a psychological edge before the first punch.

A fight of many words and promotional angles, however, might hang on a thread. Forty-seven of them, to be exact. That’s how many surgical threads Fury needed to sew up a wound above Fury’s right eye after Otto Wallin cut him during a Fury victory by decision on Sept. 14 at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena.

The stitches are gone, removed just a few weeks after the bloody bout. But a question remains about whether the wound has healed enough to withstand a punch, or punches, delivered with Wilder’s kind of power.

The scar is evident.

For Wilder, it’s a target.

For Fury, it’s a risk.

Fury conceded the risk when asked about the scar this week at LA Live. He said he would be careful not to rupture it in sparring at his Las Vegas’ training camp.

“If I’m going to get cut, it’s going to be in the fight,’’ Fury said.

He was also asked how it felt when a punch landed on the scar. Fury made it sound as though he would not take any test blows on the scarred tissue.

“I can’t risk it,’’ he said.

Neither Fury nor Wilder wants a postponement. Nobody does, especially the promoters and networks, ESPN and Fox, which have joined together in rare cooperation for a pay-per-view telecast expected to do big business.

For Wilder, news of Fury’s caution must be welcome. Wilder is also happy that the Sept. 14 fight wasn’t stopped because of blood that poured down the right side of Fury’s face and into his eye. In just about any other fight, Wilder believes it would have been stopped. But the prospect of a rich rematch made this one different. The stakes were big enough, Wilder said, to let it go on.

It went on — and on – leaving Wilder with an opportunity to finish the bloody job. Maybe, that’s why he’s so confident. In a fight full of unpredictable factors, one thing is certain: Wilder won’t exercise Fury’s caution. He’ll go after that scar, targeting it early and often, in a simple tactic that might say it all.

By Bart Barry-

CHARLOTTE – This city is its state’s largest by
quite a bit, and some years ago the Associated Press offended Charlotteans, if
not all Carolinians, by not-allowing this city to stand without its state’s
abbreviation, “N.C”, so today we’ll remedy that if only because Charlotteans,
if not all Carolinians, seem an increasingly prickly lot.  This has naught to do with prizefighting but
an explanation for why this column isn’t being written with its home byline on
the first week in many it might’ve been.

Because Saturday in San Antonio the weekend’s
biggest match happened at Alamodome – Tijuana’s Jaime Munguia stopping County
Cork’s Gary “Spike” O’Sullivan – and I wasn’t there.  But I was here, in North Carolina, and
haven’t regrets about it, which is odd not because of Munguia-O’Sullivan but
because of missing a chance to converse with Munguia’s chief second, Erik “El
Terrible” Morales, who might well hold a fortuneteller’s insights for Munguia.  As I once wrote quite a bit but stopped doing
years ago, El Terrible is half the reason I began writing about our beloved
sport 15 years ago, and his nemesis, Marco Antonio Barrera, is the other.

As El Terrible’s softened, rounded face flashed
across DAZN’s broadcast I felt a quick if small pang of regret at being
stationed 1,200 miles eastwards, a pang assuaged by a question like: What,
actually, would you ask Morales?  Not
much.  The last thing an interview should
be is an exercise in thanking its subject for the joy he brought the
interviewer, and so there are no regrets at missing a chance to converse with
El Terrible.

What, then, might El Terrible fortunetell for
Munguia?

“Just because you can no longer make junior-[weightclass]
does not mean you are now a proper [weightclass].”

Munguia got the stoppage Saturday when an attritioned
O’Sullivan relented too much and fell to the wrong side of the decisive point,
yes, in a match well officiated by local referee Mark Calo-oy, but a quick
glance at O’Sullivan’s face after being struck regularly by Munguia’s hooks and
crosses for a halfhour and change tells you Munguia hasn’t brought the sum of
his powers from 154 pounds to 160.

About 15 years ago, after losing a controversial
decision to Barrera and winning an extraordinary fight with Manny Pacquiao (it
would take seven years and 15 fights for anyone, much less Morales, to turn the
feat again), Morales ate his way directly out of the super featherweight division
and into a staybusy, vacant WBC International Light Title tilt with a featherfisted
Philadelphia cutie named Zahir Raheem, who conclusively denuded El Terriblemente
Gordo, stopped all his momentum and got him remanded to fatcamp by promoter Top
Rank to prepare for consecutive knockout losses to Pacquiao and a definitive
end to the serious part of Morales’ career.

Munguia is obviously in a different place in his
career than El Terrible was back then, and very much younger in years and
experience, but physical freaks who rely on freakish physicality do not age
well, which is why an inability to scale a lower weight is verily the end of
comparisons betwixt Munguia and his trainer – who was roughly thrice the boxer
Munguia is.

Munguia has improved, though.  His head movement is worth noting because
head movement of any kind influences opponents disproportionately more than it
looks to onlookers.  Any head movement at
all is multiples more effective than no head movement because it can stay an
opponent’s combination fractionally long enough to cancel it altogether.  At any level, but especially professional,
boxing is a sport of rhythm and timing, and if you can make your attacker pause
to reconsider, his reconsideration often as not becomes paralysis.

Coincidentally the way round this paralysis is an
offensive quality Munguia also possesses, something like a burn-the-boats
commitment to whatever combination one decided to throw before his opponent
started moving about.  When Munguia
decides the time has come for 3-2-3 (hook/cross/hook) he throws it and keeps
throwing it till he’s done.  Why is this
anything but stubborn and stupid? 
Because if you can start the third (or more-th) punch in a combination,
you generally can land it.  The reason
most guys do not land the hook in the 1-2-3 or the cross in the 1-3-2 or the second
hook in the (admittedly odd) 3-2-3 is because they abandon the combination
after its first two punches miss. 
Munguia does not.

That’s a winning quality when you are the much
larger man with the greater punch. 
Trouble is . . . well, you get the picture.

Let’s close with a few observations about what can
best be called deep-red states, like this one and Texas, and deep-blue ones,
like Massachusetts, these days.  The red
ones are moving at an accelerating pace towards unfriendliness.

I spent 10 days in North Carolina in 1995, and it
was the friendliest place I’d ever been. 
I grew up in Massachusetts, 1974-1992, and it was the unfriendliest place
I’ve ever lived.  I moved to San Antonio
in 2010, and it was the friendliest place I’ve ever lived.  In the last three months I’ve returned to
Massachusetts and North Carolina and found they’ve swapped places on the
friendliness spectrum.  And San Antonio
is at best 30-percent friendly in 2020 as it was a decade ago.

Some of that is migration: The Northeast has
exported its retirees to the taxfree South, flushing the toilet as it were, landing
population density on cities whose infrastructures and mentalities were
illprepared for it.  But more of it, I
suspect, is about what happens when a state goes halfassed libertarian, cutting
funding for every social service save “public safety” – the population becomes
fearful and tribal, regressing towards a downward spiral of selfjustifying
desperation, wherein a fearful and less-productive populace sees its fears confirmed,
over and over, and commits more and more of its dwindling budget to public-safety
measures that do little but make its populace more fearful and less productive.

Finally, you get what you pay for.

*

Editor’s note: The accompanying photograph is the
painting “Dance Around a Flower” by North Carolina artist Haywood Rivers – part
of an intriguing permanent collection at Mint Museum Uptown.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Top Rank’s roster got deeper and its reach grew farther with Thursday’s surprising announcement that it had signed Josh Taylor, the Scottish junior-welterweight whose imminent stardom was evident in his majority decision over Regis Prograis for two of the 140-pound belts in late October.

It was the second signing of worldwide significance for Top Rank, which signed bantamweight champion Naoya Inoue on the same day in November when he beat Nonito Donaire in a Fight of the Year performance.

From Japan to Scotland, the sun never sets on Top Rank’s promotional empire these days.

The top of the pound-for-pound debate provides a pretty good look at a promotional roster that is long on substance and name recognition. Among the top five, the order changes, but three are Top Rank fighters – Terence Crawford, Vasiliy Lomachenko and Inoue.  Canelo Alvarez of Golden Boy and Errol Spence Jr. of PBC complete the elite five.

There’s a chance, a good one, that more Top Rank fighters will begin to climb into pound-for-pound consideration on Top Rank’s ESPN schedule throughout 2020. There’s light-heavyweight Artur Beterbiev, junior-welterweight Jose Ramirez, lightweight Teofimo Lopez, featherweight Shakur Stevenson, junior-featherweight Emanuel Navarrete and now Taylor.

For Taylor, it all depends on how he does against Ramirez. Taylor’s new deal opened the door for a Taylor-Ramirez fight for all of the relevant pieces to the 140-pound puzzle. Look for that one later in year. First, Ramirez has a date against Viktor Postol on Feb. 2 in China.

On several levels, Taylor’s move is intriguing and controversial. It further stoked the fires of an already hot rivalry between Matchroom’s Eddie Hearn of the UK and Top Rank’s Bob Arum. Hearn in early 2020 is to Arum what Don King was to a younger Arum late in the last century. They just don’t like each other.

Arum is not shy about Hearn’s move into the United States. He threw verbal bombs at Hearn for Matchroom’s Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.-Danny Jacobs fight in Phoenix on Dec. 20 before fans threw beer bombs at Chavez when he decided not to continue after five rounds. Less than a month later, Arum moves into Hearn’s backyard and signs Taylor, who is Top Rank’s answer to Matchroom’s signing of Mikey Garcia last month.

The controversial side to Taylor’s move to Top Rank involves Barry McGuigan, who fired off a statement to UK media Thursday, saying Taylor was still under contract to Cyclone Promotions.

Taylor quickly countered with a statement of his own, saying he had ended the deal with Cyclone.

“I terminated my promotional agreement with Cyclone as a result of various breaches of contract including, in particular, breaches relating to a conflict of interest on the part of the promoter,” he said. “That allowed me to search for a new promoter, which I have found in Top Rank. I wanted to part ways amicably and without resorting to court proceedings [and] I thought and hoped the McGuigans would feel the same way given the litigation they are involved in with other fighters.’’

Cyclone Promotions has been in and out of court with Carl Frampton, a former featherweight champion from Belfast who is recovering from hand surgery in hopes of fighting junior-lightweight champion Jamel Herring in May.

The controversy figures to continue. But boxing wouldn’t be what it is without turmoil. On both sides of the ropes, the business is always fighting, yet always resilient enough to recreate itself with bouts worth watching. Taylor-Ramirez is one of them.

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.

*

Cowboys Stadium be an immense edifice and not
until you are suspended in its gravitational force, postevent, do you realize
the immensity of what inconvenience sportsfans endure to see their teams play –
an hourlong drive and wait to park, a 45-minute exit map, an hourlong drive and
wait to depart – and if you pay yourself only minimum wage that adds $20 or so
to the absurd price you pay for admission and the absurder-still
sustenance-n-libations tariff levied upon you, and it serves mostly to help a
nonfan experience etymology in realtime: “Fan” origin “fanatic”.

Errol won himself no new fans by slap-and-tickling
Mikey in March; those who were his fans already stayed positive, and nigh
everyone else exercised his own selfinterest in evaluating the man and his
performance.

I didn’t drive to the mediacenter hotel Saturday afternoon
and didn’t take the mediacenter bus to Cowboys Stadium (remembering what an
abortive episode that brought during my second time in Cowboys Stadium, after
Manny Pacquiao broke Antonio Margarito’s face, and the busdriver got lost in the
stadium’s catacombs and added an hour to the aforementioned hour) and didn’t
partake of what swill writers get fed – while television eats its a-list spread
– and after collecting a credential I assumed was auxiliary I went for lunch and
skipped much of the PBC undercard’s inevitably dull fare.

Everyone who gathered at Cowboys Stadium assumed
Mikey would fight till unconsciousness if pressed and likewise assumed Errol
was exactly the man to press anyone he faced to that choice, and all of us were
wrong and disappointed.

Saturday afternoon I pressed the Jag’s 510 horses
into action on a freeway onramp that had a seam of sorts, and the Jag hit that
seam a little wrong, and “stepped out” as they say of rearwheel-drive automobiles,
and in the 10 or so milliseconds it took for the car to fishtail and right
itself, I frightened the bejesus out of myself: Kid, this is a luxury racecar,
and you are not a racecar driver, luxury or otherwise.

We’d not read enough volition in The Truth’s
resume before his Mikey match in March, we’d sort’ve figured Spence knew only forwardpressing
destruction, and that lack of imagination told after Mikey landed some defensive,
retreating counters, and Errol performed an obvious calculus (Value of taking
Garcia’s consciousness = Reward for doing so – Personal cost) and relented
quite obviously during the championship rounds.

Time was, were I ever to attain a credential to attend
a prizefight and arrive later than the opening bell of the card’s very first
match, no matter how many halfdays before its mainevent, I’d’ve banished myself
from ringside a year or more, no joke, and yet, there I was in March,
sauntering in the arena four or so hours after my mediabus peers, wearing what
I assumed be a credential to sit in the attic of Cowboys Stadium (for
Pacquiao-Bradley 2, my back was to the wall; a few years after sitting near scorers’
tables round the land, I was remanded to the geometric end of MGM Grand Garden
Arena, a place so far from the action its participants danced below like
electrons in a microscope), and I was rather wrong.

Mikey was what we expected him to be, ultimately.

Nothing about Cowboys Stadium felt electric during
the mainevent, though in the comain David Benavidez stole the show, waltzing
through J’Leon Love way quicker than expected, and it made you wonder how good
Benavidez might be if he were under the same promotional banner as his older
brother, if he were being developed by matchmaking experts in lieu of publicity
ones, but then you thought about how Bud Crawford’s career stalled for want of
available competition and you thought about where Jose Benavidez’s career went
after an incredibly promising open, and you decided, as boxing writers are not
wont to do, you don’t know any better than anybody else where the hell anyone’s
career will go.

After treating his first pay-per-viewers a bit
like rubes Errol turned from charming countryboy to rube himself by the end of
the year, rolling his own luxury racecar several times and being arrested for DWI
in an episode that implied nothing so much as an athlete whose body had
outpaced its mind.

The credential wasn’t auxiliary after all, and when
I was through Cowboys Stadium’s layers of security and riding an elevator downwards
to the floor, the vestigial remnants of professionalism still swimming in my dilletante’s
cells began to fire with horror: I’d not bothered even to bring a stageprop chromebook
to ringside with me, and so there was nothing to be done but lend Norm unneeded
moral support and tweet.

Mikey has done absolutely nothing since Keep Away
with Errol, though he’s scheduled to decision narrowly Jessie Rodriguez at the
Cowboys’ practice facility next month.

Jerry Jones is no rube, so if he keeps hosting
one-off prizefights in his stadiums there must be a larger strategy at work, or
more likely he’s just a gambler with resources to burn.

The Truth won’t fight Bud anytime soon, and it’ll be
a bigger shame than past-their-primes Money and Manny not fighting in 2010 (or
11 or 12 or 13 or 14), but it won’t receive fractionally so much coverage because:

I know we’re supposed to multiply the number of
boxing’s 2019 platforms by the purses fighters now win and declare how healthy
our sport is, but it ain’t so: Boxing’s disinterested media is worse than
decimated by an absence of access and remuneration, it no longer has even
2010’s infrastructure for attracting and uncovering young talent, and that
means its ecosystem is unhealthy – not an obituary but a warning.

Scorecards be already filled for Garcia-Vargas in
Frisco; unless Jessie shows more mettle than Errol, we’ll get a similar fight
with an opposite result and be told it’s all quite a statement.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Fights we want to see.
Fights we won’t see. It’s that time of the year. Old is supposed to give way to
the new. But boxing is a business that has seen it all, or almost all.  We still haven’t seen Terence
Crawford-versus-Errol Spence Jr. and I have a hunch we won’t see it in 2020
either. Hope springs eternal, but old habits make the world go ‘round.

Bob
Arum, who has seen it all, told The Athletic that boxing is poised for a terrific
year. All the fundamentals are there.

“It’s
going to be off the charts,’’ Arum said.

But
then there was the caveat. The if.

“If,’’
Arum said, “everybody doesn’t bleep it up.’’

Bleep
is a boxing habit. For whatever reason, it won’t stay in the spit bucket. It
always seems to be there just when you begin to think the battered game is
about to get up and off the canvas. Let’s face it, 2019 was forgettable.

Sure,
there were some moments. Canelo won at a fourth weight, winning a
light-heavyweight title in a 10^th-round knockout of Sergey Kovalev.
But did anybody really think that wasn’t going to happen?

It’ll
be a night remembered more for the delay in the opening bell. In a misguided
attempt to boost the DAZN audience, the logistics around a good Las Vegas fight
featuring boxing’s biggest draw waited until a UFC card in New York ended. It
was embarrassing and a sure sign that boxing’s place in the market and the
public imagination had further eroded.

That
slide will continue this year without a serious attempt at breaking out of the
same old bleep. The Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury rematch on Feb. 22 looks as if it
could be a pretty good beginning, a launching pad to what Arum hopes will be an
off-the-charts year. I’d settle for a year that puts 2019 in the rear view
mirror.

Here
are a few predictions, all with the caveat in mind and the tongue in cheek.

• Wilder knocks out Fury. Fury, already a
  betting favorite, promises that Wilder won’t touch him. But the real question
  is this: Can Fury hurt Wilder? Fury is clever, yet he lacks power. Wilder lacks
  skill, but he is tough. He can withstand punishment. The longer the fight, the
  more likely it is that Wilder’s lethal right lands. This time, Fury doesn’t get
  up.
• Canelo, who gave up his light-heavyweight
  belt, fights Gennadiy Golovkin for a third time. DAZN’s investment mandates the
  bout. Canelo agrees, knowing it will generate significant income. There’s no
  debate about the result this time. Canelo wins a dominant decision.
• Mikey Garcia is again reminded of why there
  are weight classes. Garcia faces welterweight Jessie Vargas on Feb. 28, nearly
  a year after Spence easily beat him in a performance that said –round-to-round
  – that Garcia should have stayed at 135. Vargas keeps it close. But Garcia wins
  a narrow decision in a performance that suggests he’s vulnerable. Manny
  Pacquiao sees the fight—and the vulnerability. Pacquiao and Garcia agree to fight
  later in the year.
• Gervonta Davis fights for the second time at 135
  pounds. Misses weight for a second time, too.
• Jose Ramirez blows away Viktor Postol in China
  on Feb. 2 in a junior-welterweight bout. That sets up a unification title fight
  with Josh Taylor in either the UK or Las Vegas. Ramirez shows he can win
  anywhere, unifying the title and then looking to move up the scale to
  welterweight in a fight with Crawford.
• Anthony Joshua talks, talks and talks about
  Wilder-Fury, yet struggles against Kubrat Pulev in a mandatory defense of one
  of his titles in a spring bout. A bout with Wilder gets delayed until early
  2021.
• Emanuel Navarrete defends his
  junior-featherweight title two more times and moves up the scale to 126 pounds.
  But none of the featherweights will fight him. They’re afraid of him.
• Naoya
  Inoue comes back from eye-socket fracture sustained in Fight of the Year
  victory over Nonito Donaire. Inoue re-asserts his pound-for-pound credentials
  and adds another bantamweight belt against either Nordine Oubaali of France or Filipino Johnriel Casimero sometime in
  mid-year in either Los Angeles or Las Vegas.

• Fury fights MMA,
  wrestles, writes another book and gets a television series, The Furys, A Kardashian Look at a Boxing
  Family.

• Floyd Mayweather Jr. says
  he’s coming back. Then says he’s not coming back. Throughout the next year,
  there will be as many rumors about Mayweather-Pacquiao 2 as there are pages in a
  calendar.

• Teofimo Lopez finally
  gets a shot at Vasiliy Lomachenko late in the year. He pulls off a stunner. He
  fights to a controversial draw with Lomachenko, the pound-for-pound No.1 in
  most ratings. But a rematch dictated by the draw never happens. Lomachenko is
  injured in the fight. Then, he decides to move back down the scale to a more
  natural eight, 130 or 126

• Bleep happens. That’s
  the only sure thing in this year or any other year.

By Bart Barry-

We were back at Cowboys Stadium in March to see two
of the world’s best prizefighters scrap with one another in a captivating match
if you overlooked weightclass disparity – if you did tequila shots then
backflips on a trampoline, donned promoter goggles and saw Sugar Ray Leonard outclassing
Marvelous Marvin Hagler on the thirtysomethingeth anniversary of that disappointment
– but I was there only to see colleague, mentor and friend, Norm Frauenheim.

Errol Spence, a countryboy raised a halfhour southeast
of Cowboys Stadium (or whatever they’re now calling it) and a halfhour southsoutheast
of Texas Stadium, looked to be the goods, the one special fighter from Team
USA’s none-too-special 2012 squad.

There is something immediately liberating about
declaring yourself a dilletante among writers – all pressures be eased, all
bylines be forgotten, any insights you make on craft be happy accidents;
barriers needn’t be felled for being never erected.

Mikey Garcia had long since proved himself a
special talent with a talent for selfsabotage, having lost 30 months from
exactly his prime, skwabbing with promoter Top Rank, unknown for losing such tiffs,
and was making battle with a much larger and dangerouser opponent than usual
because the casement window of Garcia’s legacy cranked steadily shut.

There’s a wonderful trust-economy app called Turo,
an Airbnb of cars as it were, that empowers you to rent cars from people, not faceless
and gouging agencies, and it helped me discover a proper travelbudget algorithm
– allocate 70-percent to car rental and 30-percent to accommodations – that arrivaled
me at Dallas Love Field to retrieve my 2010 Jaguar XKR (510-hp / 5.0-liter
supercharged V-8 / 21,000 miles on its odometer) and drive it to a Motel 6,
where the Jag was, ahem, out of place.

Whatever else we opined of Spence we saw The Truth
as a proper finisher, a southpaw who appreciated physicality and its effects
and went through smaller men easily and would go through Garcia, quite
probably, like he went through undefeated Carlos Ocampo nine months before,
when Spence aced his tryout at The Star, Cowboys’ practice facility, en route
to his League debut beneath the Jerrytron.

My first time at Cowboys Stadium, exactly nine
years before, when Manny Pacquiao punched Joshua Clottey on the gloves for 36
minutes, I’d’ve called myself anything but a dilletante: I’d recently cowritten
a book with another mentor and friend, Thomas Hauser, and moved to San Antonio
and joined its esteemed San Fernando gym, and arranged my life mostly round producing
words for a living: For a large bank I was a contract technical writer who was 250,000
words into his weekly column gig and about to begin work on his eighth novel.

Mikey was basic in the best sense of the term, heading
into his pay-per-view match with Spence: He threw the sorts of combinations one
learns his first week in a gym; he was in a way what you’d get if you took a
great athlete at age seven and made him constantly throw 1-2-3s at increasingly
larger men till he was 32 years-old.

Dallas is not enchanting, though it has fine a
skyline as our country boasts, but Fort Worth, its neighbor to the west, supplies
cultural highlights – like Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum, an architectural
masterpiece that nearly always outshines its contents, and Louis I. Kahn’s
Kimbell Art Museum, an architectural masterpiece that would outshine most any
collection in the world but the one it comprises (its endowment 40 years ago
was in oil stock, which is to write its budget effectively is infinite, and it
acquires whatever it wishes) – that make quarterly trips northwards worthwhile
in a way Dallas alone could not.

The Truth began “the main event of the first Premier
Boxing Champions on FOX Sports Pay-Per-View event” slowly stalking his much
smaller prey and then continued stalking his much smaller prey and then
continued to continue stalking his much smaller prey.

Friday night I found Norm alone in the media
center well before dark, and it portended institutional interest in
Spence-Garcia, as the same sort of media center in Las Vegas for a Pacquiao
fight, or in the same Metroplex for a Pacquiao fight nine years before, would
be boisterous and filled with folks you only know from television, but in March
was small and empty.

Mikey did what he must to keep Errol off him for
the match’s first half, and eyes began to wander towards Mikey’s corner and his
older brother, Robert, a man The Ring named 2011’s best trainer, and what
adjustments Robert might make as a tactical mastermind or not-make as just
another middling trainer mistaken for a mastermind during his lucky run.

Saturday I attended breakfast in Dallas with an
old friend and confidante and then drove to Fort Worth in the Jag to sample The
Modern’s forgettable collection, and when we walked from the forgettable
collection to the unforgettable automobile, she remarked quite astutely: “This
car is the greatest work of art on the property right now.”

The Truth made his professional debut in
California, 130 miles east of Los Angeles, in November of the same year Team
USA posted another 0-for in its medal count then made his way gradually
eastwards till making his first professional fight in Texas at a collegiate
gymnasium in San Antonio so small its university, Our Lady of the Lake, rents
an eastside rodeo coliseum for graduations.

Friday night Norm and I collected Dylan Hernandez,
a Los Angeles Times columnist who despite his penchant for penning boxing
obituaries is wonderful company, and made our way to a Mexican restaurant in
Arlington, where we sat at the bar and told enchanting stories about Michael
Carbajal and Andre Ward and especially Manny Ramirez, and if there’s any lingering
regret about the evening it’s that we took Norm’s dreary rental instead of the
Jag.

What happened in Mikey’s corner was very little
but a catalyst for considering the difference between Errol The Truth and Bud
Crawford: Errol comported himself as a gentleman should, endangering no one in
La Familia Garcia, when Bud would’ve looked Robert’s way at the end of every
round and promised him: I am going to torture your little brother till you use
that white towel, old man.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Gervonta Davis and Yuriorkis Gamboa vie for the vacant WBA Lightweight title.  The action kicks off at 6:45 ET with a four fight undercard that will be highlighted by Jean Pascal defending the WBA Light Heavyweight title against Badou Jack

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1 Left from Davis..Straight left..Hard left..Counter from Gamboa…

Round 2 Left from Davis…Jab..Right hook to the body..DOUBLE-JAB AND LEFT AND DOWN GOES GAMBOA..Gamboa seems to have hurt his leg..Gamboa complaining about his shoe

Round 3 Counter right and left from Gamboa..Left and right from Davis..Left to body

Round 4 Counter left from Davis…Jab..Good body shot..left

Round 5 Left from Davis..Another left..Hard uppercut and another..Big left..More big lefts.Another left and a right hook..

Round 6 Jab from Davis..Jab from Gamboa..Left from Davis..Right..Good body shots

Round 7 Good exchange..Combination from Gamboa..Right

Round 8 Right from Gamboa..Hard right..uppercut…LEFT AND DOWN GOES GAMBOA

Round 9 Jab from Davis..Counter right from Gamboa..Body shot..Sharp jab from Davis..Right Hook..Straight left..Counter left..Left uppercut..

Round 10 3 punch combination from Gamboa…2 lefts from Davis..Big left

Round 11 Good left from Davis

Round 12 Hard combination from Davis..Short right hook..HUGE UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES GAMBOA..AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Pascal working the jab..Good 1-2 from Jack..Body punches from Pascal..Good right from Jack

Round 2 Pascal lands a left hook and right

Round 3 Left hook from Pascal..Jab from Jack..Good right..Body shot from Pascal

Round 4 Right from Jack hurts Pascal..Right to the body..Good 1-2..Nice left hook and uppercut from Pascal..Right uppercut from Jack…HUGE COUNTER FROM PASCAL AND DOWN GOES JACK

Round 5  Good right from Jack..Counter right from Pascal..

Round 6 Good jab from Jack..Hard right from Pascal..Jack jabbing again..Double jab..Body shot..Double jab/Right..

Round 7 Pascal lands a right to the body..right uppercut..Right from Jack..Lefts from Pascal…Counter from Jack

Round 8 Jab and right to body ..left to body..left from Jack

Round 9  Combinations from Jack..Left hook from Pascal..Jab from Jack..Right uppercut from Pascal..Good combination from Jack..Pascal lands a double jab..Nice jab from Jack..Body shot from Pascal

Round 10 Right from Pascal..Right..Body…Jab from Jack…

Round 11 Double left from Pascal

Round 12 2 rights hurt Pascal..hUge upperCUT AND DOWN GOES PASCAL.Big right from Jack…Jack continues to unload..Big right..Body shot from Pascal,,Right from Jack

114-112 Jack…114-112 Pascal…114-112 for PASCAL

Round 1: Right from Uzcategui…Jab to body from Thompson..RIGHT HAND AND DOWN GOES UZCATEGUI..

Round 2 Jab from Uzcategui….Right..Sweeping ;eft hook..Jab from Thompson..

Round 3 1-2 from Thompson..Good hook from Uzcategui..left hand..left hook to body..sharp jab from Thompson..Jab..Right to the body..Thompson cut over the right eye..Right..Counter right from Uzcategui..

Round 4 THOMPSON DEDUCTED A POINT FOR HOLDING..Right from Thompson

Round 5 Nice left hook to the body from Thompson..Jab..Right from Uzcategui..

Round 6 Hard left from Thompson..Good right..Lead right..right..

Round 7 Jab from Uzcategui..Left to thr body…2 jabs from Thompson..Nice right uppercut..left..Sharp right from Uzcategui..another right..Left to the body..Jab from Thompson

Round 8 Lead left hook from Thompson..Hard left..Uzcategui looks hurt..Good lead right from Uzcategui..Right uppercut from Thompson..Straight right from Uzcategui..Left to the body..right..Jab to body from Thompson..Jab from Uzcategui

Round 9 Sharp jab to body from Thompson..Combination from Uzcategui..

Round 10 Thompson boxing

Thompson outlands Uzcategui 124-75

95-94, 96-92 TWICE FOR THOMPSON

Round 1 Jab from Leo..Good left hook to body from Juarez..Right to body from Leo..Good right…Good right and left hook
Round 2 Combination from Leo
Round 3 Good right and left hook from Leo..Left and right
Round 4 Overhand right from Leo..Good body work..Good left hook..Blood from right nostril of Juarez
Round 5 Good left hook from Leo..Good jab..double left hook to the body
Round 6 Right from Leo..HUGE LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES JUAREZ..Uppercut rocks Juarez…COMBINATION AND JUAREZ DOWN AGAIN..Big left hook and a right..Big rights shakes up Juarez..Left hook from Juarez..Big left hook from Leo
Round 7 Overhand right by Leo..Right to the body..
Round 8 
Round 9 Right from Leo..Right to the body
Round 10 Left hook to head from Leo..Body shot..Right and left
Round 11 BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES JUAREZ…THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Jab from Price..Right..right from Hawkins
Round 2 Good right from Price..another right..Hawkins lands a big left hook to the body..Jab and right from Price..jab and right
Round 3 Double jab and right from Price..Jab and right..
Round 4 Good right from Hawkins..Big right from Price and another…chopping right..Big right hurts Price..Big right and left..
Round 5  Good right and Price is hurt…Hawkins all over Price..Price is complaining of a leg injury…FIGHT IS STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is No. 1 on the list that really matters to him. After all, he calls himself Money for a reason.

That reason turned up big – as in $915 million – on top of the Forbes’ list of the top-earning athletes of the decade. From this corner, at least, it is further confirmation of his place in boxing over the last 10 years.

There’s a reasonable argument for Canelo Alvarez and Manny Pacquiao. But he beat them both. There’s a better argument for Andre Ward, but it’s eroded by the controversy over the scoring in his decision over Sergey Kovalev in their first fight. Ward clearly won the rematch.

But there was really no argument about what Mayweather did in the ring for the last 10 years. There’s plenty of argument about what he did outside of those ropes. Within them, however, he won. He only won. There wasn’t much drama attached to any of the victories. But there was the money, suit cases full of it. Mayweather posed with the Benjamins more often than he did with opponents.

For 10 years, his defensive skill had no equal. But it was the money – all that money – that separated him from everybody else. It brought – and bought – drama often lacking in his bouts. It also brought – and bought – worldwide attention. Bottom-line, he is The Fighter of the Decade for not losing a fight while earning unprecedented money. Risk-to-Reward, he had no rivals in this decade or any other.

He has talked about coming back in the decade that will begin in a few days. Then again, he has also said, no, he won’t be back. Maybe, maybe not. Guess here: He’ll try. Remember, money is his motivation. Eighty-five more million and he’ll be billionaire.

I’m not sure he could earn $85 million in today’s market. It began to shrink in 2019, although Canelo was still earning $35 million-a-fight. In the Forbes annual list of top earners last June, Canelo was No. 4 at $92 million and Anthony Joshua No. 13 at $55 million.

I’m also not sure what Mayweather’s place a top the decade’s money list will mean to his place in boxing history. From jets to Ferraris, it’ll buy him a lot of toys. But it’ll only buy a Legacy if it’s made and named by a high-end car maker. His boxing legacy will be judged and re-judged throughout the forthcoming decades.

He has tried to influence that historical view with T-shirts and caps that are inscribed with his official record: 50-0. That includes the money-making show against a boxing novice, Conor McGregor, an MMA star who had about as much of a chance against a pound-for-pound best as an amateur would have had. History, it says here, won’t look kindly on that bout, or whatever it was.

Meanwhile, Mayweather risks his historical claim on the 50-0 milestone if he ventures back into the ring against just about anybody other than another MMA star or perhaps in an oft-rumored rematch with 41-year old Manny Pacquiao. Mayweather is 42. He’ll be 43 on Feb. 24. Mayweather’s dates with McGregor and Pacquaio paid him more than $500 million, according to Forbes.

He’ll be tempted. In fact, it sounds as if he’s wrestling with that temptation now. That’s why we’re hearing that, no, he’s coming back on one day. Then the next day, he reverses himself, saying, yeah, he’ll be back 2020.

Who knows? I’m not sure he knows. But know this: Mayweather caps and T-shirts proclaim him to be the best ever with the acronym TBE. But it really means: The Best Earner. Ever. If you don’t believe, read Forbes.  

By Bart Barry-

And our king returned on the final days of the
decade to save us.  Exiled 31 months since
a highpaying debacle of a battle for Mexico, Son of the Legend marched on
Phoenix with an army of 12,000 and merely 11 days to go in his decade, to restore
our kingdom with a panache none before him has brought. 

Son of the Legend (VADA ID#:
214371) fought 15 times in his decade, 15 times in 7 1/2 years, 50-percent
more frequently than Money May, mind you, and remained true to himself every
time he blessed a bluemat with his sacred boot. 
Highbrows can argue who was the decade’s best fighter (Roman Gonzalez is
the answer to that riddle), but no one can claim to have been a more apt
metaphor for our beloved sport.

A modern entity whose popularity is fully derived
from his predecessor’s accomplishments, Son of the Legend comported himself
always with an arrogance inexplicable to others.  The way the NHL looks at revenue from Mayweather-Pacquiao
is how 95-percent of the decade’s prizefighters looked at Junior: “Wait, how
much did he make for his pro debut?”

*

We interrupt this homage for some hard reporting.

When Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. faced Ireland’s John
Duddy in Alamodome to christen the new decade, June 26, 2010, some questioned
whether a suspended drug cheat had the necessary mettle to wrest from vacancy
the WBC’s prestigious middleweight Silver title.

For years, Chavez Jr. had waged a reign of terror
on Midwesterners – “kicking the Big Ten’s ass” as one scribe put it – and he
promised to do the same to Europeans if given a chance.

“They want to make money off my name and fame,”
Chavez Jr. said, without a hint of irony in his voice.

Chavez Jr. won impressively against Duddy and Lyell
and Zbik, Manfredo and Rubio and Lee – his record stood at an astounding 46-0-1
on Sept. 15, 2012 – and then he went for the real middleweight championship
against an Argentine named Maravilla.  He
lost every second of the fight’s first 34 1/2 minutes before delivering the
most exciting 30 seconds of boxing’s last 15 years.

Chavez Jr. was too exhausted to complete the
upset, of course, but by surprising everyone, he re-adorned his father’s name
with credibility for years to come.

Chavez Jr. collected a big gift decision against
Brian Vera then ratified it massively back at Alamodome a halfyear later before
stumbling a wee bit against somebody named Fonfara.  The people got displeased, failing universally
to credit his subsequent and huge wins against Reyes and Britsch, and demanded
Junior be fed to Canelo Alvarez, who subsequently refused to sit down, even,
between rounds of their sparring session.

Canelo went on to riches in the United States while
Chavez quietly gathered and perfected himself in their native Mexico.  After squaring off against another highly
regarded prospect in Evert Bravo, Chavez treated Las Vegas drug testers with a princely
contempt then commanded a princely sum to finish his decade in a fight with Daniel
Jacobs.

An influencer every step of the way, Chavez Jr. entered
Friday’s ring in Phoenix sporting a blue birthmark-like stain on his otherwise
platinum head.

After missing weight effortlessly at his Thursday
weighin, Chavez Jr. fought five rounds bravely till his nose got broken then
instructed his chief second to end the match. 
When that didn’t happen, Chavez Jr. made the sort of resounding decision
that separates champions from challengers, calling the referee over and stopping
the fight his own damn self.

An unappreciative Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. buried
his face in his hands.

As Chavez Jr. exited the ring Friday, his appreciative
if rambunctious fans in Arizona showered their returned king in gold.

Chavez Jr. departs his decade having defended
titles valiantly in the following divisions: 172 1/2, 171 1/2, 170 3/4, 164,
175 1/4 and 172 3/4.

*

As the decade in boxing draws to a close we are
right to reflect upon what metaphors Son of the Legend affords us.  Rumor was, Junior once cared about his craft,
whatever we opined of him.  His craft was
enriching himself and financially supporting his father’s retirement by doing
something he was not naturally endowed with a power to do.  He tried to escape boxing at nearly every
interval.

No truer moment in his career happened than when
he snapped at his ringside father’s advice from the stool of his Thomas &
Mack Center performance, yelling at him “¡Ya, Ya, Ya!” before collecting 100
more direct blows to the head from Sergio Martinez.

For beginning 2010 as a grifter, making whatever
promises were needed to keep the grift going, enduring massive and traumatic
abuse from his peers, lying to his fans over and again, cheating on drug tests before
simply failing them, scoffing at every traditional discipline, changing the
rules whenever convenient, and finally fleeing in 2019 his own paying customers
as they pelted him with beer and fought one another like savages, “Son of the
Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is boxing’s well-deserved Fighter of the Decade.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo By Ed Mulholland

Follow all the action as Tony Harrison defends the WBC Super Welterweight title against Jermell Charlo.  The action begins at 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT with US Olympian Karlos Balderos in action.  Also Undefeated Heavyweight Efe Ajagba will take on Iago Kiladze

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Round 1:  Right from Harrison

Round 2 Good left-right from Harrison..Charlo lands a right..Good body shot..BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES HARRISON..

Round 3 Charlo winging wild shots…3 hard shots from Charlo..Good uppercut from Harrison  and 2 rights..Hook..Hard right…Harrison bleeding from nose..Good body shot..Head and body..

Round 4 Hard shots on the inside..Hard hook from Charlo..body shots..2 hooks from Harrison..Uppercut and right hand.. Combination from Charlo

Round 5 Good body work from Charlo…Right from Harrison

Round 6 Good exchange…Body shot from Charlo…Right from Harrison..Right..2 great body shots..

Round 7 Good combination from Charlo…left hook..2 rights from Harrison..Right

Round 8 Right from Harrison..Jab..2 rights from Charlo..Hard right from Harrison..jab from Charlo..

Round 9 Good 3 punch combo from Harrison

Round 10 Popping jab from Harrison..Right..

Round 11 Charlo coming trying to land something big..Harrison showboating..Body shot from Charlo…HARD LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES HARRISON..HUGE LEFT HOOK…HARRISON GOES DOWN AGAIN…FLURRY ON THE ROPES…FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Jab from Ajagba..Hard right..Nice Right
Round 2 Right from Kiladze…Good right..Right and left..Right from Ajagba..HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KILADZE..Hard shots at the end of round
Round 3 Right from Ajagba..Jab..Hard right..Hard right wobbles Kiladze badly…WOW..KILADZE LANDS A RIGHT AND SEND AJAGBA DOWN
Round 4 Hard right from Ajagba
Round 5 Huge uppercut from Ajagba..Right from Kiladze..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KILADZE..Right from Kiladze…HARD COMBINATION ON ROPES..KILADZE IN TROUBLE AND FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Jab from Balderas..Good left hook..Good Jab..Nice 3 punch combination..Good right..Hook..Good body work
Round 2 Good left from Balderas..Good exchange..Giron lands a body/head combo..Right from Balderas
Round 3 Good right from Balderas..Body shot..Hook from Balderas..Wicked combination..GIRON LANDS A LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES BALDERAS..BALDERAS FALLS BACK IN THE CORNER BUT HE LETS BALDERAS CONTINUE
Round 4  2 hard hooks from Giron..Low blow from Balderas..Good uppercut by Giron
Round 5 Body shot from Giron..Good body shots..
Round 6 Good left hook from Balderas..Jab..Right hook and Jab from Giron…Balderas lands a hard right..Hook to body from Giron..BIG LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES BALDERAS…HE DOESNT BEAT THE COUNT

Follow all the action as former middleweight champions Daniel Jacobs and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. square off in a super middleweight clash.  The action kicks off at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT with bouts featuring former world champions Maurice Hooker and Liam Smith as well as the WBC Flyweight title bout between Julio Cesar Martinez and Cristofer Rosales.

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Round 1: Left to body from Chavez..Body shot from Jacobs..Right to the body..Right and hook from Chavez

Round 2 Hook fro Chavez..Jab from Jacobs..

Round 3 Body work from Jacobs..Jab..Right from Chavez..Uppercut from Jacobs..Double jab..

Round 4 Hook from Jacobs..Hard right from Jacobs

Round 5 Right from Chavez..Uppercut and right from Chavez…CHAVEZ QUITS IN THE CORNER

Round 1  Martinez lands a left..Right from Rosales..Good exchange.Good jab from Martinez..Combination..Body..exchanging of hooks..Rosales landsa hook

Round 2 Martinez lands hard hook..Big right from Rosales buckles Martinez..Good body shot..Combination from Martinez..Right from Rosales..Body shot and combination from Martinez..Martinez cut above the right eye..Caused by a headbutt

Round 3 Hook from Rosales..Good hook from Martinez..Winging hooks…hard right from Rosales..Right and jab from Martinez..Good jab from Rosales..

Round 4 Hook from Rosales..Uppercut from Martinez..Body shot and right hand from Rosales..Hard body shots from Martinez..Right and uppercut..Combination..Good uppercut from Rosales..

Round 5 Martinez lands an uppercut..Body shot..Hard body shot..Vicious body shots

Round 6 Good exchange..Combo buckles Rosales..3 hard shots

Round 7 Hard body shot from Martinez..Jab…Uppercut to the body..Right to the body..Hook to the head hurts Rosales..Right to the head..

Round 8 Hard barrage from Martinez…Uppercut..Good counter from Rosales..

Round 9 Nice combo from Rosales….Hard BODY SHOT…BIG COMBO BY MARTINEZ AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1: Hooker Jabbing..Perez hooks to the body…BIG FLURRY DROPS PEREZ IN THE CORNER…HE GETS TO HIS FEET AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 HUGE BODY SHOT AND DOWN GOES JOHNSON..RIGHT TO HEAD AND DOWN GOES JOHNSON AGAIN…RIGHT TO HEAD AND HOOK TO BODY AND DOWN GOES JOHNSON...RIGHT DROPS JOHNSON FOR A 4TH TIME AND FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1:  Good Body shot from Smith..Left hook..Uppercut..Left Hook..right to body
Round 2  Good left hook from Smith..2 lefts to the body
Round 3 Smith jabs to the body..Good counter from Garcia..Right to the head..2 jabs from Smith..Good body shot from Smith..Left to the body
Round 4 2 Lefts from Smith…another
Round 5 Garcia landing combinations…Body shot from Smith.Combination from Garcia
Round 6 Good body shot from Smith..Left hook
Round 7 Garcia swelling under the right eye..Right/left jab from Smith..Body shot
Round 8 Right to body..left to body. from Smith..Good uppercut from Garcia
Round 9 2 good shots from Garcia..Right from Smith..
Round 10 Good action…Smith pressing the action

99-91 TWICE AND 98-92 FOR SMITH

Round 1 Kelly Cut over the right eye.. Cut caused from a punch
Round 2 Left and right from Kelly..Nice uppercut
Round 3 Left from Kelly..Good action as they are trading
Round 4 Right from Kelly
Round 5 Good body shots from Kelly..Good exchange..Good body punching from Campos
Round 6 Hard Combination from Campos
Round 7 2 rights from Kelly..Good left from Campos
Round 8..Kelly Landing
Round 9 Good right hook from Campos..Good left hook from Kelly..Uppercut
Round 10 RIGHT AND DOWN GOES CAMPOS

99-91 TWICE AND 98-91 FOR KELLY

By Norm Frauenheim-

PHOENIX – Danny Jacobs is moving up. But not on.

Jacobs will wear his feelings for an absent friend Friday night when he enters the ring for his first fight at a heavier weight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. at Talking Stick Arena. You’ll see them on his robe. You’ll see them on his trunks.

All Day

Patrick Day

Those are the words, inscribed near the top and near  the bottom of a robe that Jacobs had specially made for his first bout since Day died four days after suffering brain trauma during a fight in Chicago on Oct. 12.

“The robe is symbolic of what he meant to me,” Jacobs said when he introduced the robe and trunks he plans to give to Day’s family after the DAZN-streamed bout.

In addition to All Day, Patrick Day, the white robe with blue stitching includes a picture of the middleweight, a Rest in Paradise inscription and the dates, 1992-2019, of a life that ended too early.

For a while, his grief for Day was more than just a symbol. It hurt. It made him wonder.

“Boxing is not the same,’’ Jacobs said when the fight against Chavez Jr. was announced.

Grief lingers. Perhaps, it always will. But Jacobs is also prepared to re-enter the ring and confront the dangers that killed a friend. In part, the robe helps him remember a fighter and friend who did what he loved despite the risk.

“I know he would want me to not be sad, to be an inspiration in the ring,’’ Jacobs said. “That’s who he was. We sparred numerous times in the ring, spent countless hours together.

“He was a beautiful person, and I know he would want me to keep moving forward.”

Moving forward every day, All Day.

Notes: Jacobs (35-3, 29 KOs) and Chavez (51-3-1, 33 KOs) had agreed to a super-middleweight fight. However, the contract was re-negotiated Thursday morning when Chavez realized he couldn’t make the mandated weight. He was nearly five over the 168-limit at 272.7. Jacobs weighed 167.9.

In the re-done deal, they agreed to a catch-weight, a 173-pound fight. But it cost Chavez plenty. According to multiple sources at the morning weigh-in, Chavez agreed to pay Jacobs $1 million.

According to contracts filed with the Arizona Boxing & MMA Commission, Jacobs and Chavez had equal purses, $2 million each. With the redone deal, however, Jacobs will walk away with $3 million and Chavez Jr. $1 million.  

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a fight for the ESPN welterweight title Nebraska’s Terence “Bud” Crawford stopped Lithuania’s Egidijus “Mean Machine” Kavaliauskas in round 9, defending his ESPN-pound-for-pound rating and further burnishing credentials Crawford insists are already hall-of-fame quality. Too, ESPN’s Joe Tessitore called the last minutes of Crawford’s ringwalk “precious”?

Bud Crawford is bored. You are bored. Bud Crawford knows you are bored. (And now, humorously enough, he knows you know he’s bored.) That mutual boredom leads a proud man like Bud to do imprudent things for his own amusement and to a lesser extent your amusement. That’s half the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday but not the bad half. Boredom can be remedied, after all.

The bad part of the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday is that his skills are gradually eroding in the acid rain of average competition.

Boxing is unique among professional sports in its ability to waste a healthy participant’s prime years. By any measure Crawford’s prime is being wasted. That’s boxing’s fault, the system’s fault, much more than any one person’s or organization’s or broadcast network’s.

Boxing does this to many of its participants, but you rarely notice because the case is never obvious as Crawford’s is right now. Generally these things happen to a 29-year-old stuck in a small market and affiliated with the wrong manager, some fighter either too good or too loyal to get the fights a bigger handler might get him. If ever he breaks-through his story becomes an inspirational one of perseverance and seizing one’s chance on the odd chance it is presented and almost never about bad luck and a system that squanders its participants’ primes.

Bud already did his b-side breaking-through years ago. Now his staybusy mandatory defenses illuminate fundamental flaws in our beloved sport’s meritocracy.

Bud’s promoter, Top Rank, knows all this much better than even Bud does, and so it gives him a semiannual pulpit from which to vent on America’s mostwatched sports network. Bud gets the relief of telling ESPN viewers what he opines of PBC’s keepaway game, and the honor of being called boxing’s best prizefighter despite years of middling competition, and Top Rank and ESPN get promotional rights to the world’s best prizefighter. And everybody gets money enough to endure the arrangement another year longer.

But a crossroads approaches for Bud and his promoter, if not his network. Another couple years like 2019 and age and poor competition’ll’ve eroded Bud’s skills to a point Top Rank’s matchmakers’ll know Bud is no longer great enough to justify the risk of putting him in with the world’s best welterweights – not when another two years of revenues can be milked from the ESPN cow, fighting unification matches with Julius Indongo or title defenses with Jeff Horn.

Annual interviews with the perennially aggrieved Dre Ward will feature a tasting menu of early-retirement threats, PBC callouts, legal misunderstandings explained, and commiserating about what untrustworthy media rated both men world’s best, both before and after they deserved it. In between there will be more close calls explained away by Bo Mack – Bud’s charismatic trainer now enjoying his own synergistic relationship with ESPN – and surliness and sadism. At the end of the run there will be 10 impressionable kids saying Crawford is an alltime great for every one of the rest of us lamenting the career Crawford might’ve had were boxing run like football or hockey. Boxing writers’ll selforganize around Bud’s already B-Hop-like autohagiography and bully themselves into putting Bud in Canastota.

There are some risks inherent in Bud’s early retirement threats, though, especially now that he’s spoken them to the aforementioned and early retired Andre Ward: Sometime in the next few years Manny Pacquiao is going to retire, and the very last thing Bud wants is historians placing those two resumes side-by-side.

Again, little to none of this is Crawford’s fault. But again-again, absolutely none of it is our faults as aficionados.

Crawford is neither talented nor lucky as Pacquiao. Were he as talented he’d be fighting Canelo at 168 pounds in May, and were he as lucky he’d have had a trilogy with Yuriorkis Gamboa and a pair of fights with Vasyl Lomachenko and a tetralogy with Errol Spence. Instead he’s stuck reminding viewers Egidijus Kavaliauskas was still undefeated on Saturday afternoon and reviving Money May’s canard about the boxing media not knowing anything about boxing.

We know enough to know Crawford ate righthands Saturday night he’s not proud of this morning. We know that if he tried to race forward willfully against any of PBC’s top four welterweights the way he did against Kavaliauskas he’d have spent more than a flashing moment on the canvas. We know three years comprising John Molina, Felix Diaz, Julius Indongo, Jeff Horn, Jose Benavidez (on one good leg) and Amir Khan is no one’s idea of a path to enlightenment.

And we know Bud knows we know these things, and all of it pisses him off. He’s a great talent and a true fighter, nevertheless. It’s a stain on our sport he’ll unlikely get his chance to be remembered as more than that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Terence Crawford defends the WBO Welterweight Title against mandatory contender Egidijust Kavaliauskas.  The show kicks off at 9 PM ET with Michael Conlan trying to extract revenge on Vladimir Nikitin and Richard Commey defending the IBF Lightweight title against Teofimo Lopez.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED…THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.

Round 1: Jab from Kavaliauskas

Round 2 Right to body from Crawford..Left..Good right from Kavaliauskas..

Round 3 HARD RIGHT BY KAVALIAUSKAS…Crawford went down…Not ruled a knockdown..Jab..Right

Round 4 Jab from Crawford..Right from Kavaliauskas..Right..Left from Crawford..Ripping right to body by Crawford..Big right by Kavaliauskas

Round 5 Right from Kavaliauskas..Good right hook from Crawford…Left..Right from Kavaliauskas..2 punch combo from Crawford..Hard right hook..another..Jab..Good right hook..Left hook from Kavaliauskas

Round 6 Left from Crawford….Right from Kavaliauskas..Uppercut from Crawford..

Round 7 Right from Kavaliauskas..Left and right from Crawford..Right to body from Kavaliauskas..Jab from Crawford..Hard 4 punch combo..Ripping 3 punch combination…right AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…Crawford landing hard power shots….Kavaliauskas fires back at the bell

Round 8 Right from Kavaliauskas..Right..2 more rights..Left hook..Hard right..Left from Kavaliauskas..3 punch combo from Crawford..Hard right..Left on ropes..

Round 9 Hard 3 punch combination from Crawford...Ripping LEFT AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES KAVALIAUSKAS…FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Counter right from Commey..Right..Left from Lopez..Right…Counter right

Round 2 Right Buckles Commey…HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES COMMEY,,,HE IS HURT BAD…HE STUMBLES UP…LOPEZ ALL OVER COMMEY JUST WAILING AWAY AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED!!!

[/su_table]

Round 1: Body shot from Conlan…Left from Nikitin..Left to body from Conlan…

Round 2 Left from Conlan..right/left from Nikitin..Hard left in the corner..Right hook from Conlan..Right from Nikitin

Round 3 Left and right from Conlan..Left to the body..Counter left

Round 4 Left to body from Conlan…right hook..

Round 5 Right Hook from Conlan…Right from Nikitin..Left to body from Conlan..Jab..Right..

Round 6 Right hook from Conlan..

Round 7 Right hook from Conlan…Good toe to toe action with Conlan getting the better

Round 8 Conlan hits Nikitin low…Left and right from Nikitin..Left from Conlan,,Left from Nikitin..Good exchange

Round 9 Left to body from Conlan..Right from Nikitin

Round 10 Left from Conlan..Combination from Nikitin..

98-92, 99-91 and 100-90 for Conlan

By Norm Frauenheim-

The pound-for-pound debate is nothing more than an argument. It has no promoter. It offers no belt. Win it, and you won’t get a dime. Just another argument. Terence Crawford knows that, of course.

He’s been the argument, front and center, for a couple of years now. By now, Crawford (35-0, 26 KOs) has heard it all, or at least enough of it to understand that the only fight he can win is the one within the ropes. He’s been doing that and doing it masterfully throughout his career.

That figures to continue with efficiency as seamless as it is deadly Saturday (ESPN) against Lithuanian Egidijus Kavaliauskas (21-0-1, 17 KOs) at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Crawford will win. The argument will resume. Only the argument won’t be decisive. Bet on it.

The argument against Crawford at No. 1 is fair enough. It falls under a time-tested category: Beat The Best To Be The Best. In a balkanized business, however, that’s problematic. The game’s promotional entities are like rival kingdoms. They are divided by their ties to different networks and ego. Crawford is aligned with Top Rank. Shawn Porter, Keith Thurman, Errol Spence and Manny Pacquiao are with PBC. A virtual no-man’s land seems to separate the two.

A deal is not impossible, of course. Example: The Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury rematch on Feb. 22. Wilder is tied to PBC. Fury signed with Top Rank after their dramatic draw a year ago. Business is possible. Top Rank’s Bob Arum is already thinking about Porter as a Crawford possibility in 2020. It’s still not clear what Spence’s plans are since he was thrown from his Ferrari on Oct. 10 in a scary crash in Dallas.

“Spence had that accident and he’s not, I think, going to be around for a while,’’ Arum told Fight Hub TV this week.

So, Arum is considering Porter, who lost a narrow decision to Spence in late September at Los Angeles’ Staples Center.

“The guys who will tell you if a fight will sell are the bookmakers,’’ Arum said. “If they make a fight 50-50, 6-5, 7-5, then you know you got something.

“Now, I think Porter and Crawford will be in that margin, 8-5 or something like that. So that would be interesting. Danny Garcia with Terence Crawford is about 5-1, so that’s not as interesting to me as a Porter fight.”

Porter, tough and smart, would be interesting and might mute some of the Crawford critics. If Crawford beat Porter – and it says here he would – maybe the critics would stop saying that the Omaha welterweight is from the “wrong side of the street.”

It’s a lousy line.

“Deontay Wilder is about to fight Tyson Fury and you never hear about any ‘sides of the street,’ ‘’ Crawford said this week. “It’s just something people say when it comes to Terence Crawford.

“You don’t hear ‘wrong side of the street’ with any other fighter but Terence Crawford. Why do all these other fights get made, but when it’s Terence Crawford, it’s about the ‘wrong side of the street.”

From this corner, Crawford is No. 1 on any side of the pound-for-pound street. His instincts, timing and overall ring IQ are unequalled in today’s generation.

Enough has already been said about his ability to switch from right-handed to southpaw. But it’s still eye-catching. Switch-hitting is often seen as liability. It’s a sign a fighter has no power in either hand. But Crawford has turned a perceived weakness into a strength. Either hand is potent. For Crawford, there’s no wrong side of the street. No wrong hand either.

Only time can beat him. He’s 32. In an interesting radio interview on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show on ESPN, Crawford was asked about Sergey Kovalev. Kovalev, stopped by Canelo Alvarez in early November, is 36.

“Really, I don’t see myself fighting at 36,’’ Crawford said. “I want to retire from boxing before boxing retires me.’’

No argument there.Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a rematch of a wonderful June
title fight, Anthony “AJ” Joshua decisioned lopsidedly Andy “Destroyer” Ruiz by
scores nobody should care about. 
Whenever more than 500 pounds of flesh engages in gloved combat and no
one gets felled, the decision is an irrelevance because something much less
than combat has happened.

It was fat guy versus nervous one, Saturday, and
it failed all expectations.  Every last
one.  That includes Joshua’s and even his
handlers’.  As AJ worked the kettlebells
and scaffolding in camp, setting new personal bests on his wearables, everyone
must’ve assumed that at some point either he would tire from his running or his
opponent would, and AJ would return to proper prizefighting form and conclude
things violently enough for all his predecessor crossfitting to be recalled
like so much strategy.  The dope-a-rope,
as it were.

No one, save perhaps Amir Khan, imagined a
heavyweight of such pedigree as Joshua behaving so pathetically for 36 minutes.  Certainly Ruiz did not.  Had he an inkling it was a roadrace he’d
signed for on the dunes he’d’ve taken his obesity elsewhere for a year or two,
making paychecks as the king in exile rather than playing a jiggly game of whatever
it was he and Joshua did.

Not until the match’s final 10 seconds did Ruiz
give expression to every spectator’s every sentiment, when he dropped his
gloves and pleaded Joshua fight at center ring as a giant of a man should do.  Too late. 
Joshua’s conversion from boxing’s next great champion to Wlad
Klitschko’s soulmate was complete.

AJ: Hello.

WK: Hello, Joshua, it’s me, Wlad.

AJ: I am torn, buddy, do I fight Andy like you
fought Sam Peter the first time, or like you fought Tyson Fury?

WK: I have better template for you, Joshua.

AJ: Do tell.

WK: Sultan Ibragimov.  Some change are needed.  But that is template.

AJ: Aye, mate. 
Thank you.

In 2005 Samuel Peter was a better puncher than
Ruiz is and Wlad had fewer athletic tools at his disposal than AJ, but
otherwise the similarities hold – whatever advice Wlad gave AJ.  Anytime Peter got close enough to Klitschko
to make contact he scared the wits out of Dr. Steelhammer.  Wlad’s chest would heave and his eyes would
bug and he would move like a threelegged gazelle fleeing a lion.  Peter hadn’t conditioning enough to throw the
final punch to rid us of Klitschko once and for all, and 12 years later folks
talked of Wlad like the Babe Ruth of boxing.

Y’all can follow that template with AJ till the
cows come home, but count me the hell out. 
I won’t do it again.  I won’t go
through another decade of what contortions and squinting must be done to see a
musclebound man of 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds fleeing another man as anything but
weakness.  Save the talk of strategy;
jab-cross-hook is the only strategy any man, woman or child should expect from
a person Joshua’s size in a fight.  Foot
feints? sideways movement? impressing judges? Jesus God make it stop!

Trust yourself, dear aficionado, trust your gut on
this one.  Don’t let the highbrow set
pettifog you, expressing their sympathy for your ignorance, as they will: “If
you can’t see the craft and discipline it takes for a man like Joshua to run
away from men half-a-foot smaller, I feel sorry for you.”

They’re being paid to say it, every damn one of
them.  The older generation, the opinion
statesmen, they say and write these things because they believe in the
prizefighting ecosystem, were raised on a philosophy of the heavyweight
division as industry leader, and want boxing to stay popular enough to get them
paid.  The younger generation, the media
upstarts, simply don’t know any better; coming of age as young pundits their
mentors had auctioned themselves to the highest bidder – promoter, publicist, broadcaster
– and so the youngsters don’t know enough to feel bashful about their
affiliations anymore; it’s all in the game to them.

But hold no resentments.  A pundit writing or saying Saturday’s fight
was anything better than woeful does so with the same integrity as a waiter
embellishing the daily specials or a flight attendant thanking you for loyalty
to her airline.  The words are sincere
insomuch as their speakers and writers sincerely wish to make a living.

Saturday was just awful.  Take a deep breath and say it with me:
Saturday was just awful.  See that?  You didn’t hurt anyone.  No alarms went off.  Capitalism itself did not implode.  All you did was give a one-star Yelp review
to a substandard product.  The owner
won’t like it, he’ll post a comment under yours explaining your ignorance to
you and inviting you back for a free order of nachos next time, but you’ll feel
a little less dopey the rest of the week for being honest: I was excited about
Saturday’s fight – looked forward to it for about six months – and it was just
awful, and I feel dumb right now, and it’s boxing’s fault.

For if we don’t allow such moments of honesty, if
we shout them down in what faux intellectualism uses phrases like “sweet
science” or “hit and don’t get hit”, we alienate what few serious fans we have
left.  Boxing will not die in a blaze of
outrage about a hometown decision but in a collective shrug about a nervous
giant running away from a fat one.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action Live as Jermall Charlo defends the WBC Middleweight title against Dennis Hogan.  The action Kicks off at 7 PM ET with three world title bouts as Louisa Hawton & Lorraine Villalobos battle for the WBC Interim Atomweight Title…Marlon Taples and Ryosuke Iwasa fight foe the IBF Jr. Featherweight Title and Chris Eubank Jr. takes on Matt Korobov WBA Interim Middleweight Title.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1 Left hook from Hogan.Chopping right..double left..

Round 2 Hogan jabs to body.Hard Jab from Charlo..Right

Round 3 Left hook by Hogan..Left hook by Charlo..Jab from Hogan..Right to body from Charlo..Jab..head shots

Round 4  HUGE LEFT UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES HOGAN…Big right..left to body.right uppercut..Big right..Chopping right

Round 5 Good left hook from Charlo..Hogan lands a right..left from Charlo..Flush right..Right

Round 6 Right from Hogan..jab to body from Charlo..Right uppercut..Nice right..Sharp Jab..

Round 7…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES HOGAN AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Left from Korobov..Double left

Round 2 KOROBOV HURTS HIS SHOULDER..KOROBOV CANT CONTINUE

Round 2 Jab from Iwasa..Sharp right and nice left from Tapales..Lead left..Sweeping left from Iwasa

Round 3 Both landing power shots…right from Tapales..LEFT AND DOWN GOES TAPALES..Left from Tapales..Jab..Brusing around left eye of Tapales

Round 4 Jab from Iwasa..Straight left..Combination..Combination..1-2..Sweeping right hook

Round 5 Left to body from Tapales..right hook to body..Lead uppercut..straight left..Straight left..left

Round 6 Tapales lands a solid left..1-2 from Iwasa…right hook..left uppercut..

Round 7 Tapales lands a right..Lead left..Left from Iwasa…body..1-2..Short right hook from Tapales..Good left

Round 8 Good right from Tapales..Right hook to body from Iwasa..3 punch combination..Iwasa backing up Tapales..Left hook to the body…Sweeping right hook from Tapales..

Round 9  Sweeping right hook from Iwasa..Chopping right from Tapales..Right uppercut..

Round 10  Right hook from Tapales…Swelling under left eye of Iwasa/.Triple right from Tapales

Round 11 Iwasa lands a left…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES TAPALES..TAPALES STUMBLES AND FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Double Jab from Aleem..Jab
Round 2 Good right by Aleem..Good left from Ellis..Right to Body..Right
Round 3 Right from Ellis..Good right..Right..4 Punch combination
Round 4 Right from Ellis
Round 5 Right from Ellis..Good left hook from Aleem..1-2 from Ellis
Round 6 Ellis Body shot and right hand..left hook..left hook on the inside..Aleem coming back
Round 7 Ellis Jabbing
Round 8 Nice Right from Aleem..Right from Ellis..Right
Round 9 Combination from Ellis
Round 10 Body shot from Aleem..2 Good rights

95-95;  97-93;  98-92 ELLIS

Round 1
Round 2
Round 3 Combination from Villalobos..Left hook to Body from Hawton..Right uppercut..Left hook and right and left hook from Villalobos
Round 4 Left hook from Villalobos..Right..2 rights from Hawton
Round 5 Left hook from Villalobos..Triple left hook to body from Hawton..Left hook and right cross..Big Right from Villalobos
round 6 2 lefts and right from Hawton..Left hook and uppercut..Left from Villalobos..Left hook…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES HAWTON
Round 7 Left hook from Villalobos..Hawton bleeding from the nose..Right from Villalobos
Round 8  Right from Hawton..Left hook..Hawton lands a hard right to the body
Round 9 Body work from Hawton
Round 10 Left hook/Right cross from Villalobos

95-94 on all cards for Hawton

Andy Ruiz defends the IBF/WBA/WBO Heavyweight titles against former champion Anthony Joshua from Saudi Arabia.  The action kicks off at Noon ET / 8 PM in Saudi Arabia and 5 PM in the UK with Heavyweight bouts featuring Alexander Povetkin, Dillian Whyte, and Fillip Hrgovic

THE PAGE WILL REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY.  NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Right from Joshua..Joshua Boxing…Hard right..Ruiz Cut around the left eye

Round 2 2 Jabs from Ruiz..Hard right from Joshua..Hard jab..Quick left hook..Good Jab..Right to head..Joshua cut over his left eye..Hook from Joshua

Round 3 Jab from Joshua..Hook to the body

Round 4 Snapping jab from Joshua..Good jab from Ruiz..Hook from Joshua..Good Jab..Hard left hook..Joshua starting to put more behind his punches..Chopping right from Ruiz

Round 5 Nice Jab from Joshua..Counter right..Long jab..Jab

Round 6 Hard hook from Ruiz..Right from Joshua…Body shot..Quick Jab..Hard hook

Round 7 Hard hook from Joshua..They both miss with big shots..

Round 8 Chopping right by Ruiz..Right to body..Hard Right..Hard left hook

Round 9 Good jab from Joshua..Nice Jab..Good right to the body..Hard uppercut…Right from Joshua..

Round 10 Good right from Ruiz…

Round 11 Nice jab from Joshua..Good jab..Jab….another jab..

Round 12 Hard right hand from Joshua..

118-110 TWICE AND 119-109 FOR ANTHONY JOSHUA

Round 1  Huge flurry by Hunter…Going right after Povetkin..Hard right..Counter hook from Povetkin

Round 2 Hard right drives Povetkin back..Sharp right from Povetkin

Round 3 Good right from Povetkin..Good Body shot on the inside..Body shot..Good Body..Hook..

Round 4  Povetkin pushing action

Round 5  Hunter lands a jab and a right..Hard left hurts Hunter..Hard right

Round 6 Hard left from Hunter..jab..Hook from Povetkin

Round 7 Jab from Hunter…Jab to body..Hard right from Hunter..Body shot wobbles Hunter

Round 8 Left hook from Hunter..Good right from Hunter..

Round 9 

Round 10 Hard right from Povetkin..hard Body shots.Body shots on inside..Nice 1-2..

Round 11 Hard right wobbles Povetkin…Good right..Right drives Povetkin back

Round 12 Good right from Hunter..Nice right from Povetkin..Left to body

115-113 Povetkin…115-113 Hunter…114-114 Draw

Round 1 Hooks to body and head from Whyte..Hard right to body from Wach..Right to body from Whyte..Good right to the head

Round 2 Hard right to body from Whyte..2 Hooks..Body shot from Wach..Uppercut and Hook from Whyte..Hard right from Wach..Combo from Whyte

Round 3  Hooks to body by Whyte..Left…Good right from Wach

Round 4 Hard right from Wach..Good combination from Whyte..Jab

Round 5 Body shot from Whyte..2 Good rights from Wach..Left

Round 6  2 rights from Wach..Combination from Whyte..Good jabs from Wach..Combo from Whyte..another combo on the inside..Hard right from Wach..Body shot from Whyte..Right from Wach…1-2

Round 7  Good jabs from Whyte..Good Hook…Wach has some blood on his nose..Good jab from Whyte

Round 8 Big right from Wach

Round 9 Good body shots from Whyte…Hard right from Wach..Hard combo from Whyte…Right eye of Whyte swelling up…Right from Wach..Uppercut from Whyte..3 punch combo from Wach..jab..Right from Whyte..2 rights…Right from Wach..combo on the ropes at the bell

Round 10 Good right from Whyte…

98-93..97-93 TWICE FOR WHYTE

Round 1 Good straight right from Hrgovic..Right off the break..Right from Molina..BODY SHOT HURTS MOLINA AND THEN HE GOES DOWN…The did not rule a knockdown

Round 2 Chopping Right knocks Molina down again, and yet ruled no knockdown..Straight right from Hrgovic..Body shot..Overhand right from Molina..Right again..Jab..HaRD RIGHT FROM HRGOVIC AND DOWN GOES MOLINA (BODY SHOT)..Right to body…hard body shot and right at the bell

Round 3 Chopping right and hook to body from Hrgovic,,,Hook to body and right hand..RIGHT TO HEAD AND DOW GOES MOLINA…HE DOES NOT BEAT THE COUNT

Round 1 Majidov landing the jab..Right to the body..hooks landing

Round 2 HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES LITTLE..Little trying to fight back..Straight right drives little back..Jab snaps Little’s head back…CombinTION AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

Anthony Joshua promises not to celebrate. That’s just one of the many promises attached to Joshua.

First and foremost, there’s the promise to win Saturday, avenge the stunning defeat to Andy Ruiz Jr. in June. A failure to fulfill that one and you can toss the rest of Joshua’s advertised promise into the spit bucket.

A lot is at stake for him and promoter Eddie Hearn in a rematch aptly dubbed Clash On The Dunes. Lose it, and Joshua’s career won’t be worth much more than a handful of sand. Win it, and he can hit the re-set button on what had been boldly sold and sculpted as a sure thing.

We’ll see.

Doubts at all that’s been said and sold about Joshua will linger no matter what happens in a sequel (DAZN) in a ring near the Saudi oil fields. Joshua had been called a generational athlete. The media bought it. UK fans bought it. Yet, he was beaten in one of the biggest upsets of his generation. The heavyweight hype is gone, leaving him with only a burden of proof.

Has he shaken the psychological aftermath of his June 1 demise?

Will he have enough agility and speed in his feet and a reportedly leaner upper-body to elude and eventually counter Ruiz’ fast hands?

Answers are hard to find, in part because Ruiz’ upset – a seventh-round TKO – was so one-sided. Ruiz (33-1, 22 KOs), a late replacement for Jarrell Miller, was the stand-in. But Joshua (22-1, 21 KOs) fought like the stand-in, hitting the canvas four times.

Who was this guy?

Who is this guy?

A hint to the second question is forthcoming. For Joshua, the task Saturday is to restore some of the advertised identity he lost in New York. He’s right to say there’s no reason to celebrate.

“I was asked this – will it be a special moment?” Joshua said at a news conference Wednesday.  “I said, ‘no,’ because I know I belong there. So, it’s not special.

“I know I belong there. I know what I’m capable of doing. So, when I regain those belts, I’m probably just going keep cool and stay focused, because it’s not a time to celebrate.’’

He went on to say that he always fought as though he was destined to be great.

“When I came into boxing, I didn’t come to take part,’’ he said. “I came to take over.’’

His words are underlined by an unmistakable resolve. But words don’t win fights. Fast hands do. Ruiz can win the rematch with hands that move with a magician’s agility. What Ruiz is missing this time however, is the surprise factor. From this corner, that’s critical.

Ruiz has forever proven that he was underrated. In some ways, he still is. He’s 2-to-1 underdog despite his one-sided stoppage of Joshua in June. But the guess is that Joshua has no illusions about how good Ruiz is, or about how perilous his own future appears to be. Joshua knows about the fast hands. Knows about Ruiz’ resiliency, too.

It would be no surprise to anyone, including Joshua, if Ruiz is the first to hit the canvas. He was in June in a third-round knockdown. But Joshua let him off the hook. Maybe, Joshua got lazy. Or, perhaps, he was just unprepared. But expect Joshua to be vigilant and prepared for that moment when Ruiz does get back up all over again. For the Mexican-American, that will mark the time when the fight is just beginning.

For Joshua, however, it’s a chance to capitalize with superior strength and overall athleticism. That’s when Joshua can begin to punish Ruiz with his power, which is one element that wasn’t oversold. It’s real.

Prediction: Joshua might not be great heavyweight, but he’s good enough to win the rematch with a late-round TKO in a victory that will put him back in line for a day when he can really celebrate. 

By Bart Barry-

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – Sunday nights at Arena
Coliseo, downtown, are noches familiares (family nights) when the lucha libre
begins at 6:00 PM local time.  The masked
luchadores congregate in the lobby whilst ticketbuyers queue and mask vendors assemble
their displays.  If you spring for $10
ringside seats, in front of the chainlink fence, a selfemployed usher shows you
your spot for a small but assumed gratuity.

What follows is 150 minutes of theatrical, performative
violence done by acrobatic athletes. 
What thousand children gather wear smiles, every one.  It’s combat sans sadism, catharsis without
malice.  Most of all it is fun.  Rarely is our beloved sport fun.  Enough alcohol and friends, and our sport has
funny occasions.  But how often does
anyone review a prizefight and think it was a fun evening?  Now take that number and subtract the folks
who feel guilt shortly thereafter – a man could die in the ring, after all, we
remind ourselves tirelessly – and you’re left without a handful. 

With one blessed exception: Ruiz-Joshua 1 – the
rematch of which happens Saturday on DAZN somewhere far away from wherever
you’re reading this.  Ruiz-Joshua 1 was
boxing’s one night of delivering guiltfree jollity enough to be a beersoaked
family night of lucha libre.

That night a made-man got exposed indecently by what
looked like a bellyjiggling toughman. 
None of us gave Ruiz a shot, not necessarily because we didn’t know who
he was or what talent he had but because everything about Joshua’s ascent was
so preform scripted none of us imagined a happening so absurd might befall him;
any man with better than a 1-in-10 shot of beating Joshua, we assumed, had been
filtered before the Madison Square Garden contract collected its ink.

Yet there Joshua was, the prodigy – Olympic gold
medalist, sculpted giant, undefeated collector of men’s souls, unrivaled seller
of tickets – stankylegging his chiseled bulk about the bluemat and transferring
his disbelief to the rest of us, refusing to toe the line in round 7 after his
fourth knockdown.  Then Ruiz jumping in ecstasy,
his back shimmying everywhere like spilled glitter, and his unmanned foe
commandeered the microphone to call him the better man several times and
several more.  Well.

Here are some things that didn’t matter until
Joshua got stopped but matter in retrospect and preview.  Ruiz and Joshua are the same age, 30, but
Ruiz has been boxing twice as long. 
Joshua won a gold medal at London 2012, but Ruiz had more than twice as
many amateur bouts.  Joshua was 22-0 as a
professional before their June match, but Ruiz was 29-0 three years ago.  Joshua is the darling asset of his country’s
best promoter, but Ruiz spent nearly all his career under boxing’s best
promoter.  And as ace writer and editor
Matthew Swain tweeted last week, Joshua may be an athlete, but Ruiz is a
fighter.

That distinction is the one that mattered in their
first tilt and anticipates their rematch. 
Watch the men’s reactions whenever both land stiff shots.  Joshua admires his work and expects to be
left in a quiet, happy place while he does so. 
Ruiz leaps at his opponent with another combination and keeps punching
till the ref makes him stop.  Ruiz
expects to be struck and hard, and if he didn’t quite expect to be nearly decapitated
by Joshua’s round 3 combination, 6-3, uppercut-hook, boxing’s purest combo
according to Joe Frazier (if you land the 6 then you cannot miss with the 3),
he knew exactly how to behave after it came.

Meanwhile it was amateur (half)hour for Joshua thereafter.  He got inside his opponent’s comparatively
tiny range, got slapped silly by a balance shot, and never recovered at
all.  And when he pleaded with his corner
for a tip, he was told “lefts and rights” – which, as this column goes to
print, exhaust the options in boxing’s lexicon; all that was missing from that
show was a waterfilled latex glove playing enswell.

Today Joshua says all the right things, just like
yesterday and yesteryear – back to basics, trust his intuition, go with what
got him there, a brand new fitness regimen. 
None of these things fixes the technical flaws Ruiz brought to light,
much less the mental weakness Ruiz amplified by contrast, much less the experience
of Joshua’s public emasculation.

What hope does Joshua have in Saturday’s rematch?  He retains a ridiculous size advantage,
excellent power, and every sanctioning body’s and broadcaster’s rooting
interest.  Ruiz went for the money and
conceded most everything else, because why not? 
Ruiz’s former promoter, Bob Arum, in an interview with The Ring mischievously
alluded to Joshua’s preference for host countries with lax testing protocols, too,
and Saudi Arabia’s probably couldn’t be looser.

None of those things, though, makes a Joshua
rematch victory probable.  Joshua cannot
outbox Ruiz and would be foolish to try. 
He cannot throw more fluidly in combination than Ruiz.  A chin is not something one acquires in his 24th
professional fight.  And that’s before
one considers Joshua’s evident conditioning issues.  Well before spazzing hither and yon against
Ruiz, Joshua showed selfdoubt against under-40 athletes; he knew better than to
think carrying so much muscle in the ring makes for finessed, lateround
showings.

Jester or otherwise, Andy Ruiz knows exactly what
he is when he looks in the mirror.  Anthony
Joshua does not any longer, if he ever did. 
He knows his career’s greatest advocates either overestimated him or lied
about it.

If Joshua takes an honest inventory of what
mountains of selfdoubt now enclose him and uses that inventory to create
desperation enough to fuel a savage firstround blitzing of Ruiz, Joshua may
well prevail.  Or he may get stretched
again.  But if he cautiously wades in and
lets Ruiz warm, he’ll enroll himself in a game of keepaway he’s too robotic to
win.

I’ll take Ruiz, KO-6.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

BUENOS AIRES – This is a long way from Vegas where history is always just a bulldozer away. Vegas sells itself for all that is supposed to stay there. That’s the cliche anyway.

It’s not true, of course. Nobody much remembers what they did in Vegas. They lose. They go home. They forget.

But there’s no forgetting in Argentina’s capitol city. It’s full of monuments and surrounded by decaying elegance. Streets are named Eva or Evita. Take a left, take a right and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll wind up in Ciudad Evita.

One of the city’s leading tourist stops is a graveyard, Cementerio de la Recoleta. You can say hello to Eva Peron, there, too. Or at least you can say your last respects.

Her tomb is there, next to others, all done in a dizzy array of architectural styles. It’s a well-manicured piece of monumental real estate, the best in the city. Once there, it’s easy to understand why you might want to stay forever.

Among the many decorated graves of Argentine greats, there’s a boxer, Luis Firpo. Forgive the longwinded tour to the point in this column. Then again, nothing happens very quickly in Argentina. Trust me, I’ve stood in several interminably long lines to show my passport at the airport and to exchange currency. (More on this later.)

Firpo’s place in the cemetery is a symbol of what Buenos Aires has been and some ways still is. It was a great fight town. Firpo, one the great heavyweights in the 1920s, is remembered for a wild bout with Jack Dempsey. He knocked Dempsey out of the ring. But Dempsey won, knocking him down seven times.

I mention Firpo, because I was here, passing through Buenos Aires on my way to Patagonia’s glaciers, lakes and mountains on the same day that Deontay Wilder stopped Luis Ortiz last Saturday in a rematch at the MGM Grand. If not for the long-planned trip, I would’ve been in Vegas.

So, I figured that Wilder-Ortiz had to be a must-see event in a city that reveres Firpo and in a country that still celebrates Marcos Maidana and Sergio Martinez. Another heavyweight, Oscar Bonavena, is an Argentina native. He twice took Joe Frazier to the scorecards, losing both. He lost a 15^th-round TKO to Muhammad Ali.

Then, of course, there is Carlos Monzon. They still talk about the all-time middleweight in Buenos Aires. A local television station is planning a documentary series on the fighter, who died in an auto accident in 1995 on a furlough from prison. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend in 1988. Monzon still fascinates.

So, they had to know Wilder, right? No, no, nada. Then, they had to know Ortiz, right? After all, Ortiz is Cuban.  Che Guevara, a Cuban revolutionary, was born in Argentina. He went to school in Buenos Aires. Maybe there was a link, a reason to cheer for Ortiz? No, no, nada.

On the day of my arrival, I only heard some mild interest while standing in line at customs from three Americans, who were a lot more interested in partying in the endless parade of bars up-and-down so many of Buenos Aires’ streets.

So, I searched, first for a sports bar that might show the telecast. But no, no, nada. If there’s a television not showing soccer in Buenos Aires, it’s probably not on. It’s soccer, soccer and more soccer, all day long and all the time.

It was about then that I thought I would invest the $79.99 for the Fox pay-per-view telecast. At the moment I made that decision, the exchange rate, Argentine pesos-for-dollars, was at 56-to-1. Buster Douglas was given a better chance before his monumental upset of Mike Tyson in Tokyo.

Anyway, I’m not sure what the PPV price tag added up to in pesos. Besides, it doesn’t matter. The exchange rate changes, almost by the hour. As I write this, it’s 60-to-1. Whatever the PPV toll in Argentine currency was, it was in the thousands and I forgot to pack a wheelbarrow to carry them around.

Anyway, I headed back to my hotel room, thinking I’d follow the fight on twitter. First, I turned on the television, flipped my way through a few dozen soccer games and, suddenly, there it was Leo Santa Cruz beating Miguel Flores. Wilder-Ortiz was next. But the Fox telecast was carried by rival ESPN for its South American audience.

I didn’t have to shell out a dollar or a single peso. The fight, itself, played out the way I thought it would. Wilder’s right hand lands and it’s over, this time in the seventh round instead of the 10^th. Different timing, same scenario.

Yet, what struck me more than anything were the background shots at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.  Empty seats were everywhere. A crowd of 10,000-plus for heavyweight title fight was announced. Turns out, Wilder isn’t must-see TV in his own country either.

Pick the reason. Maybe, it was a date too close to the Thanksgiving holiday. Or, maybe, neither Wilder nor Ortiz has much appeal to fans. Or maybe the house was over-priced. Pick one, pick all.

But for one night, at least, Vegas and Buenos Aires weren’t as different as I had thought.  

Follow all the action as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight title against Luis Ortiz in a rematch.  The action gets underway at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT with a 3 fight undercard featuring title bouts with Leo Santa Cruz and Brandon Figueroa.

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Round 1: Good left from Ortiz,,Ortiz bleeding from forehead

Round 2 Straight left from Ortiz

Round 3 Left from Ortiz..left..Right from Wilder…

Round 4 Left from Ortiz..2 more lefts..

Round 5 Left from Wilder..Solid right from Wilder…

Round 6 Good hook from Wilder..left..

Round 7 Right from Wilder..Right to the body..Straight to body from Ortiz..HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ORTIZ...HE DOESNT BEAT THE COUNT AND ITS OVER

Round 1 Right from Santa Cruz…Counter right

Round 2 Flores lands a right and gets counter with a left

Round 3 Santa Cruz working on the ropes..Straight right..Uppercut from Flores

Round 4 Right to head from Santa Cruz..he is boxing well at distance

Round 5 Body shot from Flores..

Round 6 Santa Cruz pressuring…

Round 7 Santa Cruz working…Flores not landing anything significant

Round 8 FLORES DEDUCTED A POINT FOR HOLDING…Lead right from Santa Cruz..2 right hands..

Round 9 Good right from Santa Cruz..Hard counter right rocks Flores at the bell

Round 10 Santa Cruz cut around the left eye..

Round 11 Solid right from Santa Cruz

Round 12  Body shot from Santa Cruz..

115-112; 117-110 TWICE FOR LEO SANTA CRUZ

Round 2 Hard right from Figueroa…Right from Ceja…Right from Figueroa..

Round 3 Good combination on the inside from Ceja…Body shot from Figueroa..and another…left hook..4 lefts in a row

Round 4 6 lefts in a row from Figueroa….
Round 5 Both guys trading in the middle of the ring..Uppercut from Ceja..
Round 6 hard right and left from Ceja..Left to body from Figueroa..Good hook…Right from Ceja…
Round 7 Ceja landing body…Good hook from Figueroa..2 lefts from Figueroa..
Round 8 Good right from Figueroa..
Round 9 Ceja landed a body shot..Body shot from Figueroa.3 body shots from Ceja…
Round 10 Left from Ceja…body work..body/head combination…

Round 11 Short right from Ceja…Ceja lands a right on the inside
Round 12  Figueroa lands a combination…They are throwing lots of punches down the stretch

Figueroa landed 411-1338    Ceja Landed 373-1473

115-113 for Figueroa…116-112 for Ceja…114-114 a draw

Round 1 Combination from Ramirez..Nice right hook
Round 2 Right hook from Ramirez..
Round 3 Jab from Barthelemy…Straight left..2 lefts from Ramirez..hard right hook..
Round 4 2 lefts from Ramirez..Right hook..Hard left over the top..Hard left…BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES BARTHELEMY…FIGHT STOPPED

Round 1: Hard hook and BODY SHOT..DOWN GOES SHACKS..Hard body shot..Hook..left to body…CombinATION AND UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES SHACKS…Good right from Shacks..
Round 2 Combination from Juarez
Round 3
Round 4 Right from Juarez
Round 5 Right and combination
Round 6 RIGHT AND DOWN GOES SHACKS…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Hook to the body from Bailey..Soldi right from Mielnicki…Jab

Round 2 uppercut from Bailey..Body shot from Mielnicki..Hard right hurts Bailey..LefT HOOK ROCKS BAILEY AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1: Right from Wilder..
Round 2 Lead right from Long
Round 3 Good right from Wilder..Jab and right hand
Round 4 HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES WILDER…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Slavinskyi lands a jab…right hand

Round 2 Jab from Slavinskyi…Good left..Hook..left..Counter
Round 3 Hermosillo lands a left
Round 4 Right hook and left over the top from Slavinskyi..Good jab from Hermosillo…Good jab from Slavinskyi..Hlavinskyi was cut over his right eye due to an accidental hedbutt
Round 5  Good left from Hermosillo
Round 6 Sharp left from Slavinskyi…Body shot from Hermsillo

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

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder’s power, potentially a double-edged weapon, has yet to strike back at him. The theory, perhaps expectation, has long been that it will undo him and his heavyweight reign.

Yet, his right hand, a weapon that is singular in every way, has always been there, a force of nature almost reliable as an incoming tide.

Nobody has ever been able to avoid it, not even Tyson Fury. Fury got up from it in a controversial draw. But not even the clever Fury could elude it.

Now, the many-skilled Luis Ortiz has a second chance Saturday night at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand in a Fox pay-per-view bout.

Ortiz, who learned the trade in Cuba’s exacting amateur ranks, vows to not let it happen again. Ortiz envisions a rematch without a repeat. He foresees only a reversal.

Perhaps, he figures he can exert his own power and finish what was left undone on March 3, 2018 when he had Wilder in big trouble in the seventh round before losing a 10^th-stoppage. Perhaps, he will re-assert a younger version of himself with some old tricks he learned in Cuba.

It’s hard not to like Ortiz. He has a compelling story that includes his flight in 2005 from Cuba in a desperate battle to help a daughter born with a skin condition.

He’s a quiet man in front of the media.

He’s a dangerous man in front of an opponent.

He also believes now — perhaps more so than ever – that his chances at a heavyweight title have never been better. It’s evident he’s done the work throughout training in Las Vegas, a long way from his home in Miami. If conditioning is any factor, there’s good reason for his confidence.

Physically, he has never looked better. For now, forget the jokes about his age. Forty or 50, he looked as if he were ready to fight a few weeks ago.

But appearances are misleading, if not an outright illusion. Ortiz’ good look doesn’t mean he has found any way to elude Wilder’s wild right hand. Who has?

In all of the attention on that one massive punch, however, Wilder’s durable chin is often overlooked. He can do more than throw a punch. He can take one, too.

That durability allows Wilder to take a fight into later rounds. It’s a factor that multiplies chances that his right hand will land, especially in moments when energy and focus begin to fade. He’s been durable enough to successfully defend his title nine times. Now, it’s time for No. 10 with no real reason to think anything has changed.

Prediction: In a repeat and rematch, Wilder wins another 10^th-round stoppage.

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder likes to talk about differences, what he believes separates him from Luis Ortiz, Tyson Fury and just about everybody else.

He’s different, no doubt, from the kid, who won a bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Even then, however, there was a singular difference, one that separated him from every other boxer on the U.S. team. He was the only American in Beijing to medal.

Since then, he’s grown older and louder by multiple decibels. Still, there are questions about how much better he is within the ropes. His right hand is the one thing that continues to make a powerful difference. It is a singular strike, scoring 40 knockouts in 42 fights. He throws it with Tommy Hearns-like leverage.

Fury got up from it in their celebrated draw nearly a year ago. But that was more about Fury and his inexhaustible resilience than Wilder. Yet, there’s a sense – even a fear among promoters planning on a Fury-Wilder rematch in February – that Ortiz has the wherewithal to beat him on Nov. 23 (Fox pay-per-view) in their sequel at Las Vegas MGM Grand.

“He can screw this whole thing up,’’ said promoter Leonard Ellerbe, who didn’t exactly say screw, but you get the idea. “He can screw it up.’’

He can, mostly because of a versatile skill set that makes him more capable of adjusting than Wilder. Longtime boxing observers and bettors have always believed a good boxer beats a power puncher. But Wilder has knocked out that formula while knocking out just about everybody he has faced.

Giving a good boxer a second chance, however, might enhance chances of an Ortiz upset, which also would put all of those plans for Wider-Fury II on hold.

At a media workout a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, Ortiz looked as though he was in good enough shape to make lots of adjustments throughout 12 rounds. He blamed fatigue for the loss in their first fight, which ended in a Wilder stoppage in the 10^th.

Ortiz’ confidence matched his well-conditioned appearance. He assured reporters that, yes, he was 40-years-old and not a day older.

Then in a conference call this week, he said the Wilder fight was not his last chance at a heavyweight title.

“No, absolutely not,’’ Ortiz said. “I’m going to win the title, so no need for another opportunity. I will be the champion.’

Wilder scoffed at that, of course.

“This might be his last at 40 years old,’’ Wilder said. “Coming in, we all know when you fight Deontay Wilder, I take something from you. I take years from your life. ‘’

An over the-top confidence has become a noisy trademark for Wilder, who is poised for a 10^th defense of a belt he won in his only decision over Bermane Stiverne on Jan. 17, 2015, also at the MGM Grand.

“I’m a totally different king,’’ Wilder said. “I’m a totally different beast. I’m the best in the world and I prove it each and every time I go in the ring. I’m not worried about going in and making any mistakes and stuff. And if I do make any mistake in the ring, rest assured, I will correct it as the fight goes on.

“I see this fight going one way, and that’s Deontay Wilder knocking out Luis Ortiz, point blank and period.

“You know it.

“He knows it.

“I know it.’’

By Bart Barry-

Thursday at Super Arena not far from Tokyo, Japan’s
Naoya “The Monster” Inoue decisioned “The Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire to win
WBSS’ bantamweight tournament in a fight that saw the loser dropped by a liver
shot and the winner later treated for a cracked face.

It was splendid, gorgeous, a Thanksgiving-month reminder
to be grateful.  One can leave
of-the-year superlatives to others and say this 2019 match is the one any
aficionado should rewatch first.  This
was the match to show kids who wonder if boxing retains qualities they’ve heard
grandfathers conspire about.

It had class, courage, class, drama, class,
suspense, class, blood, class, concussion, class, bonebreaking, class, violence,
class, violence and class.  It didn’t
make its predecessors or successors worth their suffering because it was an
island, a tribute unto itself of what prizefighting looks like at its very
best.  Notice: It wasn’t horrorflick gory
or WWE paced or Boardwalk Hall thunderstriking – it was proper prizefighting in
a way as recognizable to Benny Leonard as Floyd Mayweather.

Inoue sought and encountered his foil in a way
none of his peers has done.  We now know
he could’ve signed with Top Rank and fought ESPN prelims till 2021 but
self-entered a single-elimination tourney instead to test himself three
weightclasses higher than his debut scaling. 
That’s what a pursuit of greatness looks like.  No cherrypicking, no ask-my-managering, no thank-God-and-Al-Haymoning;
rather, I will fight whosoever draws me and I will annihilate him.

And at tourney start Nonito did not look that part,
as the bracket configuration appeared prohibitive to Filipino Flash.  Three rounds into WBSS’ first round Donaire
looked outclassed enough by Irishman Ryan Burnett to be involuntarily retired before
three, 120-108 scores got read in Scotland. 
Then Burnett suffered a freak back injury Donaire had nothing to do
with, and Nonito was on to the semifinals where he blasted an anonymous
shortnotice sub.  All the while Inoue
stomped to the finals in a series of exertions better captured by punches-needed
than minutes or rounds.

I was ringside for Inoue’s only American tilt, two
years ago, and I did not see anything to make me anticipate the ease with which
Inoue’d go through Juan Carlos Payano and Emmanuel Rodriguez.  This year I went from admiring Inoue’s
character for signing with WBSS to quietly ranking him above Bud, Hi-Tech and
Canelo.  I expected him to blitz Donaire
and bring a mercy stoppage early, definitely before the fight’s mid rounds.  Too fast, too strong, too technically sound
for a 37-year-old returned in 2018 to a division he outgrew in 2011.

But did I remember July 7, 2007, in my
assessment?  Damn right I did.

That extraordinary lefthook against an onrushing
and sadistic savant, Vic Darchinyan, who’d humiliated Nonito’s older brother, Glenn,
then put Victor Burgos in a coma in the two fights that preceded his intended
wasting of Nonito.  Darchinyan’s
signature charge embraced contemptuous entitlement more than strategy, fists not
just waistlow but cocked, when Nonito clipped him and changed both their careers.

True an eraser as exists in our beloved sport,
that Donaire lefthook.  It erased
everything we predicted on Thursday, no? 
It flew in round 1 but got outsped by Inoue’s own eraser, the same way
everything Donaire did most of the fight got outsped by what Inoue did, but in
round 2 it did something wicked.  It
gifted The Monster with a monstrous gash, concussion and facial fracture. 

We hadn’t before Thursday an inkling how Inoue
might react to such trauma and hadn’t much more of an inkling immediately after
it happened; Inoue’s composure revealed that his brow had been sliced, not that
his cheek had been cracked.  In
retrospect and upon review, what is most beautiful about the rounds that
followed is how close the men stood to one another without wasted motion.  No twitching, no hotfooting; Donaire and
Inoue stood inside their arms’ lengths and threw punches at one another.

Donaire knew how good Inoue was, and Donaire gave
him everything he had left.  Inoue did
not know how good Donaire’s chin was, none of us did, frankly, and went after
him imprudently on several occasions but none so predatorily as after blackmatting
Donaire with a precise buttonshot 90 seconds in the championship rounds.  Donaire circled desperately as any man with a
vital organ under direct attack.  Inoue
hunted him with punches fundamentally flawless and a defense that was not.

After 30 seconds of being a prey Donaire let sail
a lefthook that braked Inoue’s engine for their fight’s final four minutes.  If Inoue knew a man is never more dangerous
than when hurt he didn’t feel it till 1:54 of round 11 of the WBSS Final – a
punch he will not forget.  Done were
Inoue’s leads; nearly every punch he threw after that Donaire lefthook got
preceded by a jab, the way you learn your first week in a boxing gym.  If the match’s final round was anticlimactic
it was because the match climaxed four minutes before its closing bell when
both men realized they’d given enough of themselves and enough to one another.

I watched Thursday’s WBSS Final on short rest and 12
hours after an
unsettling adventure with stroboscopic LEDs, so I may be an unreliable narrator,
but Inoue-Donaire was complete a prizefight as I’ve seen in many years.  Bless them both.

*

Editor’s note: This column will return in December.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It was a defining fight for Naoya Inoue. It was also a reason for caution.

In watching Inoue’s courageous brilliance in a unanimous decision over Nonito Donaire early Thursday morning, it was hard not to be reminded that there is huge drama packed into boxing’s smallest weight classes.

From Ricardo Lopez to Michael Carbajal to Roman Gonzalez and now Inoue, there has always been this singular mastery of tactical skill, footwork, instinct and guts. All of those elements make them look bigger. But they’re not.

Inoue, a champion in all three flyweight classes, tested himself against an aging, yet bigger Donaire in a bantamweight bout. For 10-rounds, he fought with blood from a long, deep cut below his right eyebrow dripping into his eye and down his cheek like tears.

He said he suffered from double vision. Yet, he never lost sight of what he wanted. And wants.

“I’m not the greatest of all time, yet,’’ he said while standing in the middle of the ring in Saitama, Japan. “I think I have to go over the fight and get stronger. Next year and on, I’ll keeping fighting. I’ll be victorious.

“I want to be the strongest of all time.’’

Therein lurks the danger.

All-time, at least in this era, means moving up the scale. That’s what Canelo Alvarez was doing just a few days ago in his self-proclaimed pursuit of history in taking a fourth division title, light-heavyweight, in an 11^th-round stoppage of Sergey Kovalev.

For the smallest fighters in the business, moving up in weight is an even bigger hazard. Their smaller frames mean every single pound is a little bit bigger. Against Donaire, there were moments when that small difference in pounds was evident in multiples. Donaire, who has fought at featherweight, rocked him. Cut him.

Inoue fought through all of it, yet it was impossible not to think of an old line, as true now as ever.

To wit:

There are weight classes for a reason.

Now, the 26-year-old Inoue has a Top Rank contract and is expected to continue his career in the United States. Already, there’ s speculation of a fight with Mexican junior-featherweight Emanuel Navarrete, an emerging star after successive victories over Isaac Dogboe.

At 5-foot-7, the Top Rank-promoted Navarrete, 24, is more than two inches taller than Inoue, who is 5-5 ½. Navarrete’s reach is listed at 72 inches, five more than Inoue’s 67. He is rapidly growing into a full-fledged featherweight.

Would he fight Inoue? Of course. Inoue is really a flyweight, whose emerging stardom on different sides of the world is expected to generate heavyweight money.

Inoue might find himself in the same situation as Vasiliy Lomachenko, also a Top Rank fighter. Both are ranked among the top four pound-for-pound contenders in virtually every rating.

In the chase for bigger money and wider fame, Lomachenko has also been moving up the scale. He’s a featherweight campaigning at lightweight. He’s winning, but not without injuries that began with stoppage of Jorge Linares in May 2018. Lomachenko underweight shoulder surgery after that one.

Now, there’s talk that he wants to go back to his natural weight, 126 pounds.

“He wants to go down, because he’s getting touched up,’’ Gervonta Davis said last week while talking about his own move up to lightweight against Yuriorkis Gamboa on Dec. 28 in Atlanta.

Perhaps, that’s for any little guy in any era a lesson for any era. Inoue, the reigning Lord Of The Flies, doesn’t have to go anywhere, at least not in terms of weight.

Follow all the action as Naoya Inoue and Nonito Donaire meet for the IBF and WBA Bantamweight title.  The action begins at 5:15 am ET / 7:15 PM in Tokyo

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Round 1:  Good exchange..Stiff jab from Inoue..Right to the body…

Round 2 Right to body from Donaire…Hard left from Inoue..Left staggerd Donaire…1-2 from Donaire..Jab from Inoue…Hard left from Donaire..Inoue cut around the right eye..Replays show it was from a punch

Round 3 Left hook from Donaire..Counter right from Inoue..Left hook to the body..Left hook from Inoue…Left hook from Donaire

Round 4 Left from Inoue..Sneaky right..Right from Donaire…Counter right..Jab to the body

Round 5 Counter left hook staggers Donaire..Good right..Jab..Right from Donaire..Counter right..Counter right staggers Donaire..Hard right..2 more rights

Round 6 Left hook from Donaire..Straight right from Inoue..Counter right..Right..Check left hook

Round 7 Exchange of jabs..Left hook to body from Inoue..Right from Donaire..

Round 8 Good right from Donaire..anther right..Inoue lands a body shot..Hard body shot..right from Donaire..Uppercut and left hook..Right..

Round 9 Good right from Donaire…Check left hook from Inoue..Hard jab from Donaire…big right and Inoue is hurt..Hard right

Round 10 Left from Inoue..1-2…Body shot from Donaire..Combination on inside from Inoue..Good right from Donaire…Hard combination hurts Donaire

Round 11  hard 1-2 from Inoue…head and body shots..BIG LEFT TO BODY AND DOWN GOES DONAIRE…Huge Barrage from Inoue…Big left from Donaire..4 more hard shots from Inoue..

Round 12 Inoue lands a left to the body..Right to the head..right and then a left to the body

116-111, 117-109, 114-113 FOR INOUE

Round 1 Left to body from Oubaali..Left and right from Inoue..Jab

Round 2 Left from Inoue..Uppercut to body..

Round 3 Counter right from Inoue..Good right hook from Oubaali..Left wobbles Inoue..Left from Inoe..Pot shots with right..Good right..

Round 4  Right to body from Inoue..Short right,,little check left hook..Jab..Good counter right…HUGE COUNTER LEFT AND DOWN GOES INOUE..Left to body…Oubaali up 40-35, 39-36 and 38-37

Round 5  Good right from Inoue..Good work from Oubaali on the ropes..Good left..Combination from Inoue..Mouse under the right eye of Inoue

Round 6 Right from Inoue..Nice Jab..

Round 7 Left from Oubaali

Round 8 Good left from Oubaali..Left from Inoue..Oubaali counters back..79-72, 80-71 and 77-75 for Oubaali on judges cards

Round 9 Left to body from Inoue…Body work

Round 10 Left uppercut on inside from Inoue..Good right..Right..

Round 11 Straight left from Oubaali..

Round 12 Straight left from Oubaali..Check right hook..Inoue lands a right that drives Oubaali into the ropes..Left hook..

120-107, 117-110, 115-112 FOR OUBAALI

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at MGM Grand in a light heavyweight title fight
broadcasted by DAZN, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez discombobulated Russian
Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev in the 11th round of a dull match staged sometime Sunday
morning.  It was an exclamation mark on
the end of a sentence banal as this!

Something artificial pervaded the spectacle
entire.  Nothing untoward, quite.  Nothing worth burning digital bridges
about.  But a weird sensation those who
made the Vegas trip deserved much more than they got for being much more
authentic than what they witnessed. 

Krusher, the psychopath-cum-kitten, fought like a
man worried he might offend his host, his benefactor, his employer.  That would be Canelo.  And Canelo put up with oh so much more from
his new employer, DAZN, than our beloved sport’s flagship man should.

Since when does the a-side glove-up an hour before
he walks?  Canelo ate it in a way Money
May would not have, and that is no compliment. 
To see Canelo’s face as a monitor showed him Krusher enjoying a prefight
siesta about 10 minutes after their opening bell should have sounded was to see
a professional processing how many promises his promoter made to get his
promoter paid so much for delivering him as a fighter.  What the hell else did that flake pledge in
my name?  Time will tell, Cinnamon, for
only time knows.

The match hewed suspicious close to its script.  But allay those suspicions.  No one had to be anything at all other than
exactly himself to end the match exactly when it did exactly as it did.  Referee Russell Mora’s spastic no-count was a
smidgen less than hoped, perhaps, but everyone else played his part perfectly,
right down to a wonderful scorekeeper so nervous his maths might fail him at the
decisive point he gave Canelo the first two rounds at the prefight buffet,
figuring Kovalev’s struggles with weight would bring a slow start and since
nothing much happens in the opening six minutes anyway if he launched his card at
20-18 he could score the rest straight and safely submit a tidy tally.

How about that spot in the middle rounds when
Krusher got himself tangled in a Canelo headlock and began tapping his
employer’s back pleadingly?  It was so
sweet and gentle and tender.  Near an
antonym for the word “fight” as anyone’s done with 10-ounce gloves in many a
moon.  An historic touch on an historic
night.

Not since Julio Cesar Chavez has a Mexican won a
title at 175 pounds, apparently, or else I misinterpreted some of DAZN’s 90
minutes of nonsequitur-filled filler, though not the part where B-Hop talked
nonsensically about himself.  I recall
thinking it odd they’d put one of the promoters beside the broadcasters so
close to the ringwalk.

Hah! 
Yup.  I’m an idiot.  It wasn’t till after the Metta World Peace
interview I realized some programming something was so wrong there was no
choice but to fold: I clicked the Roku to Amazon Prime, started a new episode
of “Jack Ryan” and fell gently asleep about the same moment Canelo reclined
into his own prefight torpor, symmetrically enough.

Here’s what happened when I awoke seven hours
later (and I impart this for your future reference, friends, as goodfolk who might
utilize DAZN’s replay): No sooner did I find the main-event selection on DAZN
than I began some maths of my own, noticing the opening bell was fewer than 48
minutes from the video’s end, instantly rendering all of the match’s scoring
drama an irrelevance.  Which made me
impatient.

Imagine, then, enduring those first two rounds en
route to a knockout.  Imagine listening
to witling chatter about Kovalev’s establishing his pittypat jab while knowing
someone would be stopped by real punches sometime before the closing bell.  Imagine listening to that tedious crew argue
with itself about the definition of a close round.  Imagine watching Kovalev’s fears about his
conditioning mount in the middle rounds while knowing he needn’t go all
12. 

By the end of round 7 here was my greatest
suspense as a DAZN subscriber: Should I continue to skip forward 30 seconds at
a time, at the risk of being bored unto longterm acrimony towards the eventual
winner, or should I pointer-skip ahead full minutes, at the risk of ruining the
grand finale? 

I fearlessly skipped forward and landed between
rounds 10 and 11.  Romance favors the
bold. 

Here’s where I should write a white lie about regretting
my course, something like: Great as the ending was, how much better would it
have been had I let the drama build properly through those 40 minutes!  Nah. 
The ending redeemed the match regardless of one’s investment in it; I
felt my 17 minutes well-spent the same way others felt their 117 minutes
well-spent. 

What I like best about Canelo is his treating this
era as it deserves.  After getting
stripped naked by a 150-pound Floyd Mayweather in 2013, four years later Canelo
knew after 12 rounds with GGG, world’s most-feared fighter, there was nothing
historic about today’s middleweight division. 
So he fought 36 rounds with its two best men, went 2-0-1, signed an
obscene contract, then decided to cherrypick from an equally weak light
heavyweight division.

Canelo can fight any man he wishes at any catchweight
he wishes, and no one will say no to him for the next few years because DAZN is
an infinity-plus-one financier.  Too, if
he fights the cruiserweight winner of WBSS next year, none of us is going to
doubt he could beat Callum Smith at super middleweight – even if he probably
couldn’t.

In flashfreezing Kovalev to win a light
heavyweight belt Canelo made history the way Manny Pacquiao did against Antonio
Margarito.  Canelo could be the next
Pacquiao, in fact, if only he’d had a Barrera, a Morales and a Marquez.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Canelo Alvarez tries to win a world title in his 4th weight division when he takes on WBO Light Heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev from the MGM in Las Vegas. The action kicks off at 6:30 PM and the undercard will feature Ryan Garcia

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Round 1 Kovalev jabbing..Continuing to jab,

Round 2 Jab from Kovalev…Good Jab.. Alvarez..Good combination..Counter right to the body….  16-129 for Kovalev….15-41 for Alvarez through 2 rounds

Round 3 Counter right from Alvarez..Jab….Good left..

Round 4 Left hook from Alvarez..Left to body from Kovalev..Body shot from Alvarez

Round 5 Jab from Alvarez…Hard body shot..Left hook..Good body shot from Kovalev..Jab to the head..Body shot

Round 6 Hook to head from Alvarez..right to body  64-56 punches landed for Canelo through round 6

Round 7 Jab from Kovalev

Round 8 Hard jab from Kovalev..Body shot..Hook from Alvarez.

Round 9 Good jab. from Kovalev..Straight right..Hook fro Canelo…Jab from Kovalev..Hard body shot from Alvarez..Double jab from Kovalev..

Round 10 Alvarez lands a right in the corner..left to the body..uppercut..Canelo up 113-111 in punches landed

Round 11 Canelo lands a right..Hook from Kovalev..Body shot from Alvarez…Good right..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KOVALEV…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Hook from Garcia..Hard right shakes Duno…HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES DUNO…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Good hook from Estrada..Body shot..Left hook..Thudding right from Esparza..Good jab..Right to body..Estrada lands a counter hook and body shot

Round 2 Estrada lands a straight right..Check hook from Esparza..Check hook from Estrada..Straight right from Esparza..Body shot from Estrada..

Round 3  Good right from Esparza..Estrada lands a left and right..Left hook from Esparza..Jab from Estrada

Round 4 Hard left from Estrada snaps Esparza’s head back

Round 5 Right from Esparza..Body shot..Body shot from Estrada…Straight right from Esparza…Esparza is cut bad on her forehead..The cut is deep..Bad Headbutt

Round 6 Big left hook from Estrada..Body shot..Hard right

Round 7 Left from Esparza..

Round 8 Hard right by Esparza..

Round 9 Estrada continuing to land…Esparaza lookes tired….ESPARZA SAYS SHE CAN’T SEE ANYMORE AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Left from Ortiz..Straight left..Left..LEFT HAND AND COBBS GLOVE HOTS THE CANVAS

Round 2 Combination from Cobbs…Power jab from Ortiz..Left from Cobbs..Jab..

Round 3  Jab from Cobbs..Counter left..Body shot

Round 4 Jab from Cobbs…Body shot from Ortiz..Body shot from Cobbs

Round 5 Good left from Cobbs..Combination to the body

Round 6 BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES ORTIZ..Good left…Let to top of head..Body from Ortiz..Blood from nose of Cobbs..Hard hook from Cobbs..FIGHT IS STOPPED IN THE CORNER..ORTIZ SAYS HIS RIBS ARE HURT

Round 1  HOLYFIELD COMES OUT STRONG AND DROPS WINSTEAD…FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Good right from Murtaaliev..Right from Fortea

Round 2  Right from Fortea..Big left hook..left to body..Body..Sharp counter combo from Murtazaliev

Round 3 Good body shot from Fortea

Round 4 Swelling and a cut around the left eye of Murtazaliev..Good counter from Fortea

Round 5 Combination from Murtazaliev..Right from Fortea

Round 6  Left from Murtazaliev..Good body shot..Nice right from Fortea..Body shot and overhand right from Fortea..Good right from Murtazaliev..

Round 7 Good right to the body from Murtazaliev..Nice left..left..Good right to the chest

Round 8 Counter right from Murtazaliev

Round 9 Chopping right from Murtazaliev..Right

Round 10 Good right from Fortea..Left hook from Murtazaliev

Round 11 Counter right from Murtazaliev..Hard jab and right hand..

Round 12 Good right to body from Fortea..Check left hook

120-108..119-109..118-110…Murtazaliev

Round 2 Kalkreuth lands a hard left and right

Round 3 Good shots from Smith..Right from Kalkreuth..Big right from Smith..

Round 4  Counter from Kalkreuth..Good right..Straight right from Smith

40-36 TWICE AND 39-37 FOR KALKREUTH

Round 1 Left from Nursultanov
Round 2 Combination from Nursultanov..Double jab to the body
Round 3 Good body shot from Olivas..Good counter left from Nursaltanov…Right and left from Olivas..Straight left from Nursaltanov..Body shot and straight right
Round 4 Quick right from Nursaltanov
Round 5 Body shot hurts Olivas..
Round 6  Right from Nursaltanov
Round 7   Body shot from Olivas..Another body shot
Round 8  Body shot from Nursaltanov
Round 9 Nursaltanov driving Olivas back
Round 10 Nice body shot backs Olivas up..Good right hand

100-90 on all cards for Nursaltanov

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS — The road team does win sometimes. Proof of that happened Wednesday night when the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros, winning a World Series in which only the road team won.

In more than a century of baseball, that’s never happened. In the 116^{th-version of the modern Series, it finally did. It was hard — make that impossible — not to} wonder whether Sergey Kovalev has any kind of chance against Canelo Alvarez Saturday night (DAZN) at the MGM Grand.

If anybody ever represented a road team, it’s Kovalev, who is the underdog in a bid to stop Canelo from making his own kind of history.

He’s moving up the scale, from middleweight to light-heavyweight, in his pursuit of a fourth division. A victory over Kovalev would put Canelo among the elite in Mexico storied boxing history.

It’s no coincidence that a chance at Mexican history would be played out in front of a Mexican crowd. It’s Canelo’s town. It’ll be his crowd, too. It’s hard to find an oddsmaker, or a fan, or a pundit who doesn’t think it’s his fight, too.

By now, there are familiar theories as to why.

Theory #1: Kovalev is vulnerable to body punches, Canelo’s best punch.

Theory #2: Canelo, 29, is younger and continue to improve. Age has begun to erode the 36-year-old Kovalev’s skill set.

Theory #3: Kovalev has never been the same since Andre Ward stopped him with succession of body punches in their 2017 rematch. Kovalev says the punches were low blows. Maybe, they were. But the damage to the Russian’s career looks to be irreversible.

Apply one theory or all three, and it looks as though  it’s not a matter of if, just when, Canelo adds a fourth division belt to the other three he already has in his personal history.

Throughout this week in Vegas, however, there were subtle signs that it might not be Canelo in blowout. There’s evident personal chemistry between Kovalev and his new trainer, Buddy McGirt, who has scaled back Kovalev’s training. There’s less sparring and more of an emphasis on restoring fundamental technique, especially the jab, Kovalev’s signature punch.

“I’ve told Sergey: ‘You’re an older person now which means you have to be a smarter person,’ ‘’ McGirt said.

Best guess is that smarts, the so-called ring IQ, will prove to be the decisive factor. Canelo appears to have an edge, but it’s to say how much smarter he will be throughout the scheduled 12 rounds. His intelligence, however, has been evident over the last few years. At each opening bell, he adds a new element to his skill set.

There more, a lot more, to what he can do, his trainer Eddy Reynoso says.

“People haven’t seen it all,’’ Reynoso said.

Much of his intelligence is rooted in reasonable caution. Don’t expect him to race at a bigger man with a bigger punch.

“It will be complicated, especially in the early rounds,’’ Canelo said.

It also might be complicated in the later rounds, especially if Kovalev hasn’t left the best of himself in the gym.

From this corner, Kovalev-Canelo figures to go to the scorecards. It’ll be close, but it looks as if Canelo is just a little bit smarter and has more in his ever-evolving skillset.

In this week, the real history belongs to the Nationals and Astros.

Pick: Canelo wins a close, yet unanimous decision.