By Michael Serra

Month after next, Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom outfit put on what many feel will be one of the most explosive of meetings to take place in a British ring in many a year!

Liverpool’s Tony Bellew whose the proud possessor of the WBC’s cruiserweight crown is moving up to heavy to take on former World cruiser and WBA heavy king David Haye in a battle of punchers.

Londoner Haye first boxed at heavy way back in 2006, though many will argue it was in 2008 when he stopped Monte Barret, his first win at heavy saw him stop West Ham’s Garry Delaney in emphatic fashion!
Bellew at the time was still boxing amateur and did indeed box himself as a heavy winning an ABA title, though as a pro, Bellew has never boxed at heavy, mainly campaigning in the light heavy and cruiser divisions, with mixed success.

Bellew’s first World title chance came at 175 against Welshman and fierce rival Nathan Cleverley, before succumbing to a points defeat, Bellew bounced back and had a crack at the WBC king Adonis Stevenson before getting stopped in a brave effort, with that the scouser moved up to cruiser where after a series of lukewarm performances got Bellew a crack at the vacant title, in which despite finding himself on the deck in the opener, came back to stop and win the WBC title, an impressive stoppage last time out of number 1 challenger BJ Flores in front of a certain ringside guest, no prizes for guessing!

Bellew after the destruction, made no secret of his dislike has he attempted to rush at Haye, whom calmly smiled at the rampaging champion! Screaming obscenities from the ring, Bellew kept calling the handsome Londoner Sponge Bob Square pants, a character from a children’s programme from over here in England.
There and then the fight had been has good as made, at the hastily arranged press conference, things got a little out of hand has the two giving the usual photo shoot with the typical staredown! Haye took a swing at Bellew, however it was more handbags than anything!

An interesting conversation took place has promoter Eddie Hearn and Haye began to trade insults, while Bellew just sat quietly….not for too much longer though!

This is a fight that many will deem as a fight that won’t see the final gong, both possess explosive power, though Bellew is if you like largely untested at heavy, some believe Bellew may have the proverbial punchers chance, while the general consensues and smart money lies with Haye!

Bellew is in a win win situation, if he loses, he will have cashed in on a massive payday, plus he will still be WBC cruiserweight champion, on the other hand Haye if he should lose has no where to go, if he wins then he possibly won’t get the credit and the school of thought will be that he only beat up a beefed up cruiser, yet again, he will get a payday and then the possibility of a World title chance may well loom! For ticket details please visit matchroom.com

By Bart Barry-

Twenty months after a fight that put boxing pay-per-view in a death spiral, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao – along with their handlers and hangerson – did not reflect in their own words on the way their match ruined boxing. But here’s imagining they did.

FLOYD MAYWEATHER: Blood, sweat and tears. Hardwork and dedication. Forty-nine tried, 49 failed. You wanna see the check I got? It’s over here (motioning to a 30-foot x 45-foot hanging print of himself showing the media a check at his postfight press conference).

LEONARD ELLERBE (CEO, Mayweather Promotions): I took that pic and we got it mounted by AllPosters.com.

BOB ARUM (CEO, Top Rank): We knew what Mayweather was. We promoted him for years. An exceptional talent and just a rotten human being. We had to watch his fight with Oscar (De La Hoya) and his fight with Canelo (Alvarez), and they made all this money. And we created Oscar too. And we get nothing? Something had to be done.

MANNY PACQUIAO: I fight for the people. Especially the poor people. Seriously. Manny Pacquiao loves everyone. The fight was not happy. My shoulder hurt.

FREDDIE ROACH (Pacquiao’s trainer): After Marquez nearly killed Manny, I thought there was no way the Floyd fight would happen. I talked to Bob (Arum) and asked him if he was going to fire me. Bob said, “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll get Manny a few heavy bags. We’ll put him in exotic places, maybe do a Bradley rematch. You just keep saying Floyd’s an easy fight. This could work.”

LA-Z THE SCRIBE (Editor in chief, FloydDaGOAT.com): Yeah, after Marquez obliterated him, I got a call from Money. He’s all, “That piss-drinker just cost me a billion!” I was the first to tweet it.

RICHARD SCHAEFER (former CEO, Golden Boy Promotions): You know, when I hear people saying Mayweather-Pacquiao ruined pay-per-view, it actually makes me kind of mad. I had a big part in ruining boxing, and a big part of that success was pay-per-view. We also got Andre Berto overpaid, over and over. It’s easy to give Ken (Hershman) and Stephen (Espinoza) all the credit today. But I’m proud of the work Ross (Greenburg) and I did to make most of that possible.

KEN HERSHMAN (former President, HBO Sports): I wish I hadn’t left Showtime. We did some really good things over there on a shoestring.

ROSS GREENBERG (former President, HBO Sports): I don’t miss anything about boxing.

STEPHEN ESPINOZA (General Manager, Showtime Sports): I miss working with Richard.

SCHAEFER: Please tell Stephen I’m back in boxing!

FLOYD MAYWEATHER SR. (Mayweather’s trainer): Listen, man, I told you I don’t know. Floyd and I allegedly wasn’t on speaking terms at that moment.

ROGER MAYWEATHER (Floyd’s former trainer): I told them motherf–kers it was a dumb idea. Shopping for a turkey? My nephew told me to do it. Them charges got dropped, OK?

PACQUIAO: They make me give the blood too much. If my shoulder happy, I win. Give me a rematch, Floyd. And half.

MAYWEATHER: VADA, ADA, USADA, DABA, DABA. All’s I know is when my dad says that power-pellet stuff all them years ago, some of you thought Manny could beat me. Then the fight happens, and it ain’t close – you tell me, ya dummies.

BRUCE TRAMPLER (Matchmaker, Top Rank): Was I surprised by the result? What do you think?

JAY Z (Founder, ROC NATION Sports): Floyd can’t read. Fifty can’t flow. Arum’s getting old. Al (Haymon) doesn’t answer calls. I’m a hustler. I told my people to find the biggest draws and sign them. Well, Dre (Andre Ward) got no charisma, and Miguel (Cotto) is ancient. I’m leaking a fortune in the fight game already. I need a word that rhymes with ‘divestiture’.

ARUM: Look, Manny’s a pragmatist. He knows there needs to be a chance of his getting killed at this point to sell his fights anywhere but the Phillipines, or he can take less money. He doesn’t want to get killed, right? The silver lining in all this is it led to our finding a continent where he hasn’t fought yet – Australia! Right now, we’re saying there’s interest on all the networks, but in a few months we’re going to decide to put it on our website again.

ELLERBE: We’re back on pay-per-view. We’re doing a three-rounder soon between two of the largest stars in the hip-hop universe. Our production company did that video of Girl Collection already. It broke the internet. Floyd’s the smartest businessman in the world.

ESPINOZA: I can’t believe we won an Emmy for a commercial either. But that’s Floyd!

AL HAYMON (Mayweather’s adviser): …

SAM WATSON (Haymon’s assistant): Be sure and thank Al Haymon for this interview opportunity.

ARUM: We knew things were going sideways when Floyd had to announce the fight with his cell phone. We covered our bases by leaking the imminent announcement to a number of journalists in case Floyd’s battery died. That kickoff press conference looked like a junior-high dance. And Machiavelli (Al Haymon) didn’t help anything by doing what he did.

ROACH: I’d never seen anything like that fight week in Vegas. I hope Manny gets the rematch (grinning widely); I think we’ll win easily next time.

OSCAR DE LA HOYA (Founder, Golden Boy Promotions): Everything I built in all my pay-per-view fights? They ruined it. We didn’t make a dime. Now K2 (Gennady Golovkin’s promoter) wants us to get Canelo knocked-out for less than I made fighting Felix Sturm. ¡Felix pinche Sturm, imagínate! We’re rebuilding right now, old school. But we need Canelo. Maybe a rematch with Floyd would sell? We’d take a fight with Manny too. Let’s stop talking about GGG.

MIGUEL COTTO (former middleweight world champion): Miguel Cotto fight next month against somebody. Pay-per-view. Miguel Cotto no promote fight because Miguel Cotto has guarantee purse.

MAYWEATHER: I killed boxing (laughing). Told ya!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

Andre Ward has talked retirement not just once, but at least twice, since his controversial victory over Sergey Kovalev. It sounds like some early posturing in negotiations that began the moment the news conference commenced in the wake of the 114-113 scores that favored Ward in November.

This time, Ward dropped the possibility in an interview with Rolling Stone. Never take anything off the table. Ward hasn’t. Retirement represents the nuclear option. Push that button and there’s no rematch.

It puts pressure on Kovalev, who was predictably unhappy with the decision and wasted no time in exercising the rematch clause in his side of the contract. That clause gives Kovalev some legal and financial leverage, but only if Ward continues to fight.

If he retires, that rematch clause wouldn’t buy that proverbial cup of coffee, much less a refill.

“I really just got to take my time right now because I really don’t have to fight anymore,” Ward told Rolling Stone.

He went on to say that he wanted to be “sure that every decision that I make and every fight that I take is the right situation because if it’s not, I don’t know if it makes sense to continue on.’’

Translation: Back off Kovalev.

Ward repeatedly suggested that he would continue to fight and even said there he had personal reasons to consider a rematch with the smart and dangerous Kovalev, who must have spent the Holidays wondering why he let Ward off the hook after knocking him down in the second round.

“You have to entertain [a rematch] and I would love to put my stats on in such a way that there isn’t a conversation about who won and who lost,” Ward said.

Then, he added: “Proving something to people is a tricky thing to get involved in. If we did the rematch it would be more just to silence Kovalev and silence his team and to just put a stamp on the rivalry we had.’’

There’s a strong suggestion in those words that Ward would like to silence more than just Kovalev and the Russian’s corner. There are also the fans and media who argued that Ward got an early Christmas gift.

His immense pride compels him to prove his critics wrong. It always has. I was there, at the Athens Games in 2004, when he was the last American man to win Olympic boxing gold on a day when nobody gave him a chance.

The U.S. men’s Olympic program was a mess then and has been ever since. But Ward rose above it all, the last American man to stand stop the medal stand’s summit. He didn’t lose in Athens and he hasn’t lost as an amateur or a pro since 1997.

To this day, Ward and his trainer, Virgil Hunter, talk about losing to Ernie Gonzales and John Revish as if it happened yesterday. He was 13 or 14 years old, yet he remembers the scorecards, the judges and the lessons. Those long-ago defeats are at the heart, the beginning, of what still drives Ward.

He finds a way. There’s an ongoing debate – as reasonable as it is noisy – about whether Ward’s way was good enough for a victory over Kovalev. Only a rematch for the light-heavyweight title and perhaps pound-for supremacy will settle that. The good news is that Ward knows that, mostly because nobody will let him forget about it. A rematch gives him another chance to say he was right the first time around.

Still, the negotiations are problematic for a couple of reasons. Above all, the money just doesn’t appear to be there anymore. Ward-Kovalev was a pay-per-view loser, generating a reported 160,000 buys, or nearly half of modest expectations.

Would promoters even try to go the pay-per-view route again? In boxing’s current business climate, can either Ward or Kovalev get a raise in a rematch? Ward collected a $5 million purse. Kovalev was guaranteed $2 million. How much money would be in the total purse for a rematch? How would it be split?

Ward told Rolling Stone that “it’s not about the money anymore.’’

I’m not sure it ever has been. It’s been about that pride. It motivates him to fight again in an answer to his critics. In part, it’s measured by his percentage of the total purse.

Offend that pride, however, and he’s shown that he’s willing to walk. He fought only once over nearly three years at the peak of his prime in large part because of a legal dispute with late promoter Dan Goossen.

Retirement? Not likely. Not at 32 and not with a chance to extend his unbeaten record, including a shot at an undisputed claim on the top spot in the pound-for-pound debate. Then, of course, there are all of those critics. Ward has another chance to do what he’s been doing all of his life:

Answer them.

By Bart Barry-

Apropos of an article about Western languages’ overuse of nouns when compared to Eastern languages’ preference for verbs I dove in the archives last week and happened on my younger, more-optimistic self (while undeciding the matter of nouns and verbs as inconclusive). Bubbling with sincerity and enthusiasm in 2007 I wrote this column about where I imagined we should be sometime between Sunday and Dec. 31.

I still like that guy. I like this guy better, but far as 10-years-past selves go, that Bart Barry wasn’t bad if a bit too eager to please. We’ll get round to what happened to him and all of us, but first a personal-finance riddle:

Q: What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire?

A: Start as a billionaire and invest in strip clubs.

Some Money May levity to kick-off 2017 because he’s still retired and, one hopes, will remain that way for another year – as each year of retirement increases substantially the probability of his remaining retired into perpetuity. He’s still one of the world’s two best fighters, too, which is a counterintuitively good thing: So long as Money May believes people like me believe he can beat anyone between 135 and 155 pounds he will remain retired because he is our beloved sport’s predominant hypothetical predator – the one prizefighter no man in history would wish to confront in imaginary combat. The great ones make it look easy and not only did Money May hypothetically beat prime versions of everyone from Sugar Ray Leonard to Muhammad Ali but he taught a generation of messageboard aficionados how to dominate vicariously Money May’s hypothetical matches:

Im the GOAT cuz Floyds GOAT cuz you dont now bout SRR but i KNOW bout Floyd, lol

All this is a meandering and surprisingly bitter – it should be noted – explanation for my 2007 prediction being so terrible, and looking back those radio bits were fun too because answering questions is very much easier than crafting them. What seemed to derail things catastrophically for our sport was the event that happened a couple months before I wrote that cursed column, and I might have guessed better. The advent of HBO’s “24/7” program as a promotional vehicle for Mayweather-De La Hoya marked a shift for premium cable from selfinterested broadcaster to promoter. It was shortsighted greed – the first and obvious answer any time someone asks “What happened to America?”; the novelty of what appeared to be unscripted happenings in the lives of Oscar and Floyd generated tens of millions of additional dollars in PPV revenue, and whenever windfalls like that happen rest assured the television industry will celebrate them with awards and critical acclaim, and it did.

As a buyer of content television is reliably more interested in outcomes than print media, which is why broadcasters’ friends and familiars get credentialed nearer ringside than writers do – HBO or Showtime may risk $1 million in licensing fees while a newspaper risks a reporter’s plane ticket and per diem. Television probably wasn’t destined for objectivity regardless but buying content ensures a conflict of interest television neverminds as it borrows print media’s sheen of objectivity and predominantly makes infomercials to show between commercials. Premium cable once was different for having subscribers and not having commercials, and while television was still an entertainment medium, not a journalistic one, premium cable felt more serious. Parking its cameras in the Big Boy Mansion for Money May’s many many takes of his many many renditions of his wholly wholly unoriginal speech about blood and sweat and hard work and young lions began premium cable down a cannibalizing eight-year path to Mayweather-Pacquiao and the end of interest in boxing for a generation.

It made sense because it made dollars, etcetera, but the gyms were emptying while sundry revenue records were decimated and smashed and obliterated and and and. If my imaginary 12-year-old American heavyweight did make his way in a gymnasium in 2007 his trainer was elsewhere by 2010 or 2011 because his gym was empty, and if it was too late for my prospect to learn football or basketball it was a good time to find a part-time job. Nobody at school talked about boxing anyway unless Mayweather or Pacquiao was on SportsCenter promoting placeholder shams while they threatened one another until they finally did fight one another, and who that wanted to become a prizefighter in 2007 found his interest rekindled by that spectacle?

Boxing got back on terrestrial airwaves a year later but ratings indicate my prospective American heavyweight was anywhere but in front of a PBC broadcast when that day happened. Broadcasters transformed themselves so successfully to promoters it was no wonder a promoter decided to become a broadcaster, and still the ruse goes on though alongside the squareroot of its previous enthusiasm and promise. Eventually the heavyweight division did give us its surprise champion a little ahead of schedule, of course, but an obese gypsy from England was hardly the “kid’s hidden grace and power” I prescribed.

As we begin the fabled year of 2017, then, there are two tacks to take – honesty or something else. Honesty says: Nothing went right in the second half of my 10-year prediction and boxing engendered more welldeserved pessimism in 2016 than any year of its predecessor decade.

Something else says: I was exactly right, and his name is Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder!

Stop laughing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

One year ends and another begins in a couple of days amid regrets and grief from the last 12 months and a wellspring of hope for something better in 2017.

It’s been a year to mourn, remembered mostly for who and what boxing lost. Legends are gone. Goodbye, Muhammad Ali, Aaron Pryor and Howard Bingham.

Their deaths are powerful symbols of an era that has passed. The business long sustained itself on Ali, Bingham’s poignant photographs of him and great fighters who followed in a generation personified in part by Pryor.

Where does it go from here? Who knows? At 85, former Ali promoter Bob Arum is optimistic. Throughout the last year, Arum’s consistent theme was the sports’ international look and reach.

The business has always been international, of course. History’s great moments have played out all over the globe. There was Africa for Ali’s epic victory over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. There was Manila for Ali’s rematch in a triumph of courage, will and skill over the late Joe Frazier.

But the fighters were American. That’s what has changed. Today, they are from Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. Gennady Golovkin, Sergey Kovalev and Vasyl Lomachenko are as skilled as anyone in today’s generation.

But can they draw? Does anybody in the American audience care? Ratings and pay-per-view numbers from 2016 say no.

Home Box Office’s PPV number, a reported 160,000, for Andre Ward’s controversial scorecard victory over Kovalev in November was a disappointment, even in the face of modest expectations.

The light-heavyweight fight was thought to be the biggest in a year made barren by further, frustrating delays in a Canelo Alvarez-Golovkin showdown.

Ward was the American end of the marketing equation. He was the last American to win an Olympic gold medal. He’s unbeaten and he was moving up in weight after dominating the super-middleweight division. Yet, not even his resume moved the meter.

Perhaps, it will in 2017 in a rematch mandated by a contract clause already exercised by Kovalev. Perhaps, it’ll be the second step in a trilogy. Fundamentals for a rivalry are in place. Yet, questions about whether either Ward or Kovalev can ever draw an audience linger.

Maybe, the problem rests in the pay-per-view business model, which collapsed after Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao squeezed every last dollar out of it in their dud of a bout in May 2015.

Boxing isn’t dying, but pay-per-view might be. Junior-welterweight Terence Crawford, emerging welterweight Errol Spence and the return of lightweight Mikey Garcia are just three reasons to think there’s still some life in the American end of the business.

Meanwhile, most of next year’s business figures to get done in the UK.

From Belfast featherweight Carl Frampton and his Jan. 28 rematch of a victory over Leo Santa Cruz in Las Vegas to heavyweight future Anthony Joshua and his April 29 Wembley Stadium showdown with Wladimir Klitschko, the UK has the stars and an audience that wants to see them.
UK fans also travel.

They were there in Vegas, for Ricky Hatton, first against Mayweather and then Pacquiao. For Frampton-Santa Cruz II, they’ll be back, but this time with an unquenchable thirst for Guinness. Imagine the UK crowd that would follow Joshua to Vegas.

Arum is right. Potential for a huge rebound is there.

But a few things have to happen. First and foremost, there’s Golovkin-Canelo, which Canelo promoter Oscar De La Hoya promises will happen in September. Then, there’s Ward-Kovalev II, perhaps sometime in late spring or early summer. Above all, there has to be a way that GGG, Kovalev and Lomachenko can be transformed into names that fans know and personalities with whom they can identify.

Without all three, it’ll be hard to have a Happy New Year.

By Jimmy Tobin

Were Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour theory more true than useful, this year would have seen many of boxing’s devotees fall just a few days short of becoming world class negotiators. Falling short of being world class is something not uncommon in boxing these days, despite publicists, promoters, trainers, and networks doing their absolute best to convince you that being one of the best anything in 2016 is qualification for being one of the best ever, and so there is a nice, deserving symmetry there.

While this second, propagandistic component makes sense—people who profit from boxing are compelled, rather easily, to telling fractional truths and whole lies about it—the first is harder to understand. Why the preoccupation with boxing negotiations? The simple answer is that in recent years there have been fewer and fewer barriers to information and more platforms for bantering about it. Why wouldn’t someone presented with a free and accessible opportunity to pursue an interest avail himself of it?

Except that is not what happened over the past year, where the motives for immersing oneself in the ins-and-outs of inking fights had very little to do with learning. No, the motivation this year—assuming, perhaps generously, that what transpired was not born primarily of so many having so little else to do—was rooted in prosecution and defense.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the (inevitably) failed negotiations for a Gennady-Golovkin-Saul Alvarez fight (Oh, and is that order of names, okay? Because even such minutiae matter when held aloft by the swaying arms of acolytes). Whatever the reasons, Golovkin and Alvarez—who each fought twice in 2016, finding among their four hapless opponents two welterweights to ragdoll—could not make the fight Golovkin wanted more than any other, the fight Alvarez professed no fear of.

Apologists for Alvarez had their reasons at the ready, all complimentary of the Mexican fighter who professed to “not fuck around” before ditching the title Golovkin was the mandatory for and spending his year fucking around with the chin of a twice-flattened welterweight and the flanks of someone called “Beefy”. And yet to focus on Alvarez’ conduct, his supporters will tell you, is to take your eyes off the real culprit, off Golovkin, who, according to sources as credible as they need to be for the purpose of supporting a doctrine presented as an argument, declined the opportunity he professed to so deeply covet.

What truth there is to any of these accounts is, as with too many things in boxing, mostly a matter of opinion. Like Gladwell’s theory, much of this grist derives its value not from its veracity but from its usefulness in pushing forth an idea, perhaps that Team Alvarez is staying his execution, or that Team Golovkin’s difficulty securing fights is their own doing.

That the fight, the event actually worth talking about does not happen gets lost somehow in the discussion about who is more to blame for it not happening, with the answer to that question of guilt reflecting little more than allegiances pledged long ago. Some consolation that is.

It would be bad enough if people could find the negotiations of a fight more interesting than the fight itself. Except it’s not about interest at all, not in the eyes of those devoted to fighters, even to promoters. Instead, they interpret in boxing’s failure to make fights something other than failure, finding instead hypothetical victories for fighters whose meaningful victories are delivered only by their fists and promotional outfits who should be judged by their ability to deliver intriguing fights.

Strangely, the response to failed negotiations is not a collective shoulder turn on all parties involved. Granted this response is extreme, but at least it is sensical: why support entertainers who disregard your requests for entertainment? Isn’t responding in disgust better than making excuses and attributing blame and doing so with a fervor typically found in support of the action? That these excuses come adorned in whatever information and misinformation those in the know actually care to reveal hardly makes them any better. Given the traction this blaming and absolving gains, making the fights people actually want to see seems almost counter-intuitive: if people find satisfaction in arguing about why fights are not made, if they are going to direct their hostilities at differing opinion rather than at the people perpetually kicking the chair away, why make fights?

The trendy retort here is to say that boxing is a business and that understanding its complexities both allows and demands a more nuanced response to disappointment than turning away. And there is some truth to that, as boxing requires among other things a tolerance for rigmarole and an appreciation for peculiarities that fly in the face of competition (like the fact that, however odd it may sound, rarely is matching two men at the height of their powers a priority). That is hardly a justification, however: boxing can be both a business and entertaining and to simply lower the first characteristic like a gavel on the discussion is to justify the status quo.

It should come as little surprise that if those drawn to boxing for reasons beyond a violent spectacle were to determine the sport’s fate it would look very much like it did in 2016.

By Bart Barry

SAN ANTONIO – There’s a perfect park not far from the downtown area here, in fact it may well be considered the downtown area, and it’s called Walker Ranch Historic Landmark because something historic happened or was anyway commemorated here but it’s not entirely important this history – as we learn via immersion daily and will soon learn at an accelerating rate history is barely more factual than fiction and converges upon it for its first, say, 100 years and then the two become interchangeable in a euphemism like “legend” – not important, certainly, as the convergence in this park of a colorful new playground and airplanes passing overhead almost continually. There’s an urgency to the sound as these planes pass, and both adults and their children invariably toss their eyes upwards with each arrival, the children with wonder and the adults with longing and both with awe at the crafts’ immensity. No persuasion required.

What this has to do with boxing in 2016 as this year concludes is nothing in particular but perhaps something in general: The casualty of persuasiveness. It may never have existed and it may well be I just noticed it this year, eyes drawn to aircrafts floating noisily over a park, but the old rhetorical methods we learned in school’ve gone wanting officially. Perhaps none of us was ever persuasive and perhaps none of us was ever persuaded, perhaps most of us simply believed what our parents believed or its exact opposite, rarely anything in between, then went egghunting for corroborating events we converted from coincidences to facts through repetition and some loose consensus loosely perceived, but it became more obvious this year as publications and broadcasts played their congregations’ greatest hits for their congregations and those few who did try to persuade were so bad at it.

Fact-checkers became quite nearly annoying to me in 2016 as the liars they refuted, as the liars were sometimes creative while their opponents were as often torpid bullies – doing the same work of God or Truth or Morality as every other halfwrought loon (though none, thankfully, in this park on a Christmas afternoon). Or perhaps an awakening introspection brought more of us to saying “I don’t believe that” – a wonderful mechanism for disarming both liars and fact-checkers alike by making the liar reveal his sources and the fact-checker declare you an idiot and go away – in lieu of saying “That’s not true,” a bullfighter’s red cape of a phrase that makes both liars and fact-checkers charge.

There is a diminishing feedback mechanism to great fights and great fighters that requires a witness to share his experience sincerely with others who may not have witnessed them, and that feedback is akin to a mirrored sincerity wherein an audience measures the witness’s honesty and returns it as an interest the witness is free to mistake for conversion, while a performer’s dishonesty reveals itself in a moment and if others humor him because they are polite or drunk they are no nearer convinced and only the performer is fooled. This is broadcasters’ metronomic use of words like “great” and “unbelievable” to tell halfinterested and quartersober viewers they live in historic times. Conversely your great aunt probably doesn’t care how suspensefully the Martinez-Chavez fight ended but she finds your enthusiasm sincere and therefore attractive enough to share with her Wednesday bookclub whatever details she remembers from her nephew’s account of a trip to Las Vegas sometime in 2012.

Not this year, or at least not nearly so much this year. Boxing is further outside the public consciousness as 2016 concludes than it was as 2015 concluded than it was as 2014 concluded than it was as 2013 . . . and boxing budgets now reflect it mercilessly, with HBO effectively putting promoters on ESPN’s old pay-to-play model (under the auspices of pay-per-view), Showtime husbanding its resources, and Premier Boxing Champions – well, does PBC even still exist? An essential fight happened in the final quarter of 2016, the sort of who’s-number-one fare for which aficionados claimed to clamor from 2009-2015, when Andre Ward controversially decisioned Sergey Kovalev, and nearly no one cared and still fewer care today no matter how much we reiterate there was controversy.

What was the best fight of 2016? None springs to mind. Who was the best fighter in 2016? No one springs to mind. That’s a large part of the point: Wherever my interest in our oncebeloved sport has gone I still have to find a weekly subject to fashion 900 words about, and yet when I look back at 2016 and ask myself to which fights I cared enough to travel, for the first time in 11 years my answer is none, and when I ask myself what fights I regret I didn’t travel to my answer is still none.

Oh, but you see, so-n-so versus so-n-so was epic. I don’t believe that. But if you study his record you’ll see so-n-so is actually becoming a great fighter. I don’t believe that. We’re lucky to have Abel Sanchez. I really don’t believe that.

A resolution for 2017: Don’t talk yourself into doing the job of promotion or legacy for others – if the greatness of a fight or fighter doesn’t hit you with the bolt of a jet passing overhead, simply say “I don’t believe that” and proceed merrily along.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

Alexander Povetkin and everybody in his camp were scheduled to undergo a polygraph this week, according to promoter Andrei Ryabinksy, who in media reports from Russia insists he is determined to get the truth and nothing but the truth about the positive drug test that scuttled the WBC title fight with Bermane Stiverne in Ekaterinburg last Saturday.

No kidding.

I’m not sure who will be conducting the test. But to whoever is at the controls: A question or 15, please, about why Povetkin was allowed to fight Frenchman Johann Duhaupas, who was there as if the promotion knew that Povetkin would test positive and Stiverne would just say nyet.

The whole sequence of events is beyond believable. If not so dangerous, it would be laughable. Somewhere in media reports from Russia, it was reported that “regulators” allowed Povetkin to fight despite the Russian heavyweight’s positive test for Ostarine, a banned supplement reported to be a steroid.

There’s nothing – nada – on who the regulators might have been. Vladimir Putin’s relatives? Russian hackers freelancing after exposing Hillary Clinton’s E-mails? AA couple of hamsters? All week long, I’ve been waiting for the polygraph results. Maybe we’ll have to wait on something from Wiki-Leaks.

Ryabinsky was quoted as saying that Ostarine can come from tainted meat. Yeah, maybe, although the recent positive test were related to tainted meat were for clenbuterol from cattle injected with the substance in Mexico.

Whatever the substance and its source, Povetkin should not have been allowed to fight, period. It was his second positive test for a banned performance-enhancer. He tested positive for meldonium, scuttling a fight with Doentay Wilder last May in Moscow. His ban was dropped because of a technicality and perhaps because of some influence from the case involving tennis star Maria Sharapova, whose two-year ban for the same drug was reduced to 15 months.

The substance and why he tested positive demands an investigation, which the World Boxing Council has promised. But the bigger issue is just why Povetkin went on to fight a stand-in. From here, there is no good answer. We don’t need a polygraph. We need a ban on title fights in Russia.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night, at The Forum in Inglewood, California, Bernard Hopkins tempted boxing’s unwritten rules for the last time. Inviolable as they are, those rules made an example of him. Hopkins’ farewell fight ended with the 51-year-old where he planned to be: beyond the ropes, surrounded by his supporters, the object of every fixed gaze in the arena. Except he reached that position courtesy of union construction worker, Joe Smith Jr., who hammered Hopkins through the ropes and onto the floor below, handing “The Executioner” his first stoppage loss in his very last fight.

Retrospectives aplenty are promised in the coming weeks, and Hopkins’ career is rich enough that sifting through his past for celebratory moments presents a unique challenge. Every fighter has such moments—Smith himself, despite being a relative unknown last year, now has two—but unlike so many of his contemporaries, with Hopkins it is selecting from abundance, not scarcity, that provides the challenge.

Reference to his protracted dismantling of Felix Trinidad—a flawless performance with few rivals since—will figure prominently, as will his humbling of self-proclaimed “Legend Killer” Antonio Tarver, so completely embarrassed by Hopkins that night he was reduced to asking trainer Buddy McGirt for ways to simply survive. Perhaps Hopkins’ one-armed destruction of Antwun Echols will also be romanticized and retold. More recently there is this: in 2014, Hopkins, at age 49, lost a unanimous decision to Sergey Kovalev in the fight that ratified the Russian. It speaks poorly of the division that a win over a man near fifty could serve such a purpose, though it is testament to Hopkins’ mystique that in his career’s third decade he remained a standard for more than longevity.

Even the version of him that fought Kovalev did not step through the ropes in Inglewood, however. And if Hopkins should choose to fight on he will do so knowing that the ring no longer welcomes him. Smith put Hopkins on borrowed time with a short right hand early, and what followed was all-too-inevitable. Hopkins lost the fight, his aura of indestructibility, and some of his dignity to a fighter who would not have ferreted a round from him in his prime.

The headbutt that opened a cut over Smith’s left eye seemed barely to register with the Long Island fighter, nor did the lead right hands that Hopkins bounced off his head once or twice a round. Kovalev suffered perplexing moments against Hopkins, Jean Pascal seemed to mentally unravel when Hopkins employed his intimidation tactics. Smith, however, perhaps because he knew there was but one path to victory for him, knew that, having interpreted the effect of his blows, that path was the only one he would need, betrayed not a tremor in his resolve. He simply followed the aged fighter around the ring, kept Hopkins at the end of his punches, and swung with the express purpose of bagging a trophy kill.

That says something about Smith, about how he will comport himself—if not fare—against the better opponents he has now earned the right to face. But it also speaks to how little Hopkins, his body softer, beard grayer, had left. Smith crossed his feet in pursuit, yet Hopkins had not the legs to escape him; Smith telegraphed his punches, yet all Hopkins could do was steel himself against their effect. Take nothing away from Smith, who did what a professional fighter should to an opponent who had little business sharing the ring with him. If Hopkins does not belong in the ring with Smith, however, he certainly does not belong in a ring in a prime television slot on a premium network. That has been the truth for years, given Hopkins’ spoiling tactics, his preservatory style, and there is no longer sufficient argument to suggest otherwise.

The image of Hopkins careening through the ropes, sent there by the fists of a man with “The Future” emblazoned on the front of his trunks is lasting. So too was Hopkins’ response. A survivor par excellence, Hopkins’ interpretation of his final departure from the ring is both untenable and predictable. Asked about the action that precipitated his trip through the ropes, Hopkins suggested Smith shoved him out of the ring, so frustrated was he by Hopkins’ right hand, elusiveness, and body work. No manipulation of the facts can support such an interpretation: Smith knocked Hopkins senseless with a right and did not stop punching until Hopkins had fallen out of reach. When Hopkins came to he was in no shape to continue, and he knew it; knew too that the insult visited upon him exceeded his injuries. So he fabricated a story absurd even by the standards of a man concussed. To witness how deeply wounded Hopkins was by the outcome of the fight is to understand that he will cling forever to this revisionist history—and do so knowing full well the truth.

The truth is Bernard Hopkins took a professional prizefight in his fifties, miscalculated, and was treated as any fighter in his fifties should be, less boxing become so talentless that even a man half a century old can mock its ranks with his presence. It was a humiliating defeat, one that will haunt Hopkins not only for its result but for what that result confirms: the even he must bend to the rules.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at a 1/3-full Forum in Inglewood, Calif., handpicked American light heavyweight opponent Joe Smith retired Bernard Hopkins just before Hopkins’ 52nd birthday, on HBO, by rendering Hopkins unfit to continue their match in the eighth round. Smith beat on Hopkins throughout the fight, regardless of what narrative twists HBO replays tried to impart, and even taunted “The Executioner” by switching to southpaw when he wasn’t otherwise winging righthands fearlessly – exactly the way a man should do against someone twice his age. Hopkins invented an alternate ending to his KO-by, of course, and HBO let him, of course, but the good news nevertheless was twofold: Smith won the right way, and Hopkins is now retired.

That Smith knocked Hopkins clean out the ring with a left hook brought from aficionados more gasps of relief than horror, knowing as we all did how many times Hopkins had used threats of retirement and elastic conceptions of ending his career his way – and who’s going to deny a legend that! – to promote fights no fan asked for, or at least didn’t ask for in any way measurable by boxoffice receipts. From his flattened spot on the concrete outside the ring Hopkins rose, in a show of indomitable will and tactical cunning and immortal somethingorother, and began to harangue nearby officials about an illegal push that injured his ankle and was nothing like either the left hook that put him through the ropes or the left hook that put him geometrically nearer to spectators than he was to Joe Smith, suing posterity (and any other eligible parties) for a palatable outcome.

“Bernard is a difficult person to deal with,” said the late-Bouie Fisher in 2005, after Hopkins fired him. “He wants all the glory, he wants all the credit, he wants all the money. It’s all about him, him, him.”

What few dared mention during his career and no one will mention now that it finally ended is how much more Hopkins frightened the boxing media than actual boxers, how much more writers and broadcasters discussed Hopkins’ predation than other fighters did. Hopkins was by no means a media creation, for he was a self-creation first and foremost, but he was a media confirmation, filibustering as he did every interview with very little lucidity but a whole lot of autobiography and portentously delivered cliches before closing his monologues with an allusion to Graterford Penitentiary, his nearly inevitable exclamation point. He intimidated the hell out of journalists. Exploiting in his subjects some combination of privilege-induced guilt and physical inferiority Hopkins discomfited his media opponents early in interviews then talked in circles about himself until he was certain “legend” or “one of a kind” or “unbelievable” would make its way in whatever his subject soon wrote or said about him.

But few actually liked being round the guy. Plenty of writers admired him and felt honored by his meandering answers to their stock questions – as if a quarterhour soliloquy from Hopkins somehow burnished with genius an inquiry like “Talk to me about training, Champ” – but none came away from an experience with Hopkins enduringly proud of the way he comported himself while in Hopkins’ presence. That was all part of the Hopkins schtick, er mystique, exploiting others’ fears – a task at which Hopkins never failed, except in his matches with Jermain Taylor, Joe Calzaghe, Chad Dawson and Joe Smith.

“(Hopkins) thinks he can intimidate me because he’s been to prison for robbery,” said Calzaghe before beating Hopkins in 2008. “So you burgled somebody, you brave boy. That makes you a thug, not a fighter. It makes you an idiot.”

Before anyone says there are too many incredibly good moments in Hopkins’ career to approach a summary of the great man in fewer than three volumes he might admit there were a historic number of insipid moments in that storied career as well. For every Felix Trinidad there was a Morrade Hakkar, for every Antonio Tarver there was a Carl Daniels, for every Kelly Pavlik there was an Enrique Ornelas; when Hopkins wasn’t neutralizing a much larger or younger opponent he was nigh unwatchable.

Honesty is ever more believable than even masterful insincerity, and so: I esteemed Hopkins highly as any fighter in the world the night he beat Tito till Papa Trinidad personally intervened and I was pleasantly surprised by his activity and effect against Tarver in the first “final” match of Hopkins’ career (lest we forget the retirement angle was used to hoodwink HBO into broadcasting Hopkins-Tarver in lieu of Cotto-Malignaggi, 10 1/2 years ago) and I was impressed if dismayed by how easily Hopkins unmanned Pavlik in 2008, but all that was done happening eight years ago and since then I’ve mostly felt exploited by the entire Hopkins hustle: danger / legend / Graterford / danger / legend / legend / danger / Graterford / Graterford / legend.

If there be a genius for confrontation Hopkins has it, the sort of exquisite intuition only to be found in one who hones his expertise by treating every single interaction in every day of his life as a confrontation, through four decades, but it’s not a pleasant place to visit even vicariously and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live there or have B-Hop as a neighbor. No, I will not miss Bernard Hopkins, but I’m glad in Joe Smith he’s given us a compelling opponent for Sergey Kovalev while Andre Ward avoids that rematch.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as the legendary Bernard Hopkins wraps up his Hall of Fame career when he takes on Joe Smith, Jr. in a light heavyweight bout from the Forum in Inglewood, California.  The action kicks off at 10PM ET / 7 PM PT with a cruiserweight title fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Thabiso Mchunu.  That will be followed by a featherweight contest between Joseph Diaz, Jr. and Horacio Garcia

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Right wobbles Hopkins…Left from Smith..Good body shot..

Round 2 Smith lands 2 body shot…Smith bleeding from the head (Headbutt)..Hopkins lands a right..

Round 3 Uppercut by Smith…Right from Hopkins..Good body shot..

Round 4 Good right from Hopkins..Left hook to the body and left from Smith..Left hook from Hopkins..Left hook and good right from Hopkins..(Smith outlanding Hopkins 38-29)

Round 5 2 hard rights from Hopkins..Big left hook to body from Smith..Good right from Hopkins..Left hook..Good body shot and big right from Smith..Good jab,,

Round 6 Smith lands a right

Round 7 Hopkins lands a combination

Round 8 RIGHT HAND KNOCKS HOPKINS OUT OF THE RING—FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1: Garcia landing early..Straight left from Diaz..Good body shot..

Round 2:  Diaz lands a body shot…Good counter combo

Round 3

Round 4 2 hard rights by Garcia..Good body shot by Diaz..Good left..Hard left..body shot..straight left..

Round 5 Straight left from Diaz

Round 6 Diaz landing combinations to the head

Round 7 2 lefts from Diaz..Good combination..Good left hand lead..left to the body..Good body shot

Round 8 Diaz landing combinations

Round 9 Diaz lands right to the body..Left to the head..Combination..Good left

Round 10 Garcia lands a right..Good right to the body…Hard body shot and straight left from Diaz..Overhand right from Garcia..

100-90 ON ALL CARDS FOR JOSEPH DIAZ, JR.

Round 1: Good hook from Mchunu..

Round 2 Jab from Mchunu..Mchunu landed 17 punches; Usyk 15 through 2 rounds

Round 3 Mchunu works the body..Hook from Usyk..Right from Mchunu..

Round 4 Usyk starting to open up…Counter left from Mchunu..

Round 5 Hard right from Usyk…Hard 1-2

Round 6 Right hook from Usyk..Hard 5 punch combination..Left hurts Mchunu..Left from Mchunu..COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES MCHUNU..

Round 7:  quick uppercut from Mchunu..Counter left

Round 8 Usyk lands a left and right to head…2 counters from Mchunu…Usyk lands a left…Mchunu lands a right (Usyk outlanding Mchunu 133-67)

Round 9 Good body work by Usyk…STRAIGHT LEFT AND DOWN GOES MCHUNU..2 good counters by Mchunu..Osyk lands a big left..Body shot from Mchunu…LEFT TO TOP OF HEAD AND DOWN GOES MCHUNU…FIGHT STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

Shtick is often strategy and sometimes dangerous. Bernard Hopkins knows that, perhaps better than anybody. He’s been using it like a survival skill throughout an uncommon career that has always been about being ready for fights waged in all of their various forms, from brutal to subtle.

Hopkins was at it, all over again, during a news conference Wednesday a few days before what he says will be his last bout within the ropes Saturday night against Joe Smith Jr. at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif.

Hopkins (55-7-2, 32 KOs) sat on one side of the dais, looking like a hawk searching for an opening – rhetorical prey – to appear. Sure enough, there it was.

Smith (22-1, 18 KOs), a laborer with an active union card from New York’s Local 66, was called the common man in an introduction from his promoter Joe DeGuardia. Smith is a good story. But this was Hopkins’ moment. His stage. Smith’s story was Hopkins’ opportunity.

The best fighters can turn a foe’s strength into a weakness and that’s what Hopkins tried to do nearly three days before opening bell to his planned finale in an HBO-televised light-heavyweight bout (10 p.m. ET/PT).

“I listen to what people say,’’ Hopkins said in his turn at the bully pulpit. “I listen to words, because words give you some kind of blueprint on what a person is thinking. What he’s about.

“How articulate, or whatever, it’s not fully judging, but it gives you some type of platform to work with. Joe DeGuardia said ‘common.’ ‘’

Hopkins went on to say he is not.

In a theatrical gesture, he looked directly at Smith and then delivered words that he has so often used as psychological blows – punches before the opening bell.

“Special,” Hopkins said as he pointed to himself.

Then, he paused, almost as if he had rehearsed it.

“Common,” he then said, pointing at Smith.

Smith, a common man with a common name, never blinked. He must of felt like a prop, albeit a dangerous one if the power he exhibited in his June stoppage of Andrzej Fonfara is any sign.

It wasn’t as if Smith could have done or said much. Hopkins was on a roll.

“Common man, special man,” Hopkins repeated. “Which one you want?

“I want the special.’’

He has been, in large part because of the defiance that has driven him since the day he walked out of Graterford Prison after serving five years on a robbery conviction. Then, he was going to follow the common path of an ex-con. When he was released, warden Buddy Rush told him he’d be back in six months. Hopkins promised he wouldn’t. Turns out, that was the first in a lifetime full of fulfilled promises. Rush heard what sportswriters, promoters, lawyers and fans have been hearing from him ever since.

Hopkins’ life has been about doing what everybody says he can’t. There were 20 successful defenses of the middleweight title. There was the victory over Felix Trinidad. And another one over Kelly Pavlik. Nobody beats Father Time. Then again, no 49-year-old has ever held a world-title belt, either. Now 51, Hopkins will challenge Father Time once more against the 27-year-old Smith.

For anybody else in the post-50 crowd, the task would just be foolish. But Hopkins has made it special, because of his cunning and – also his clever mastery of every aspect of what it takes to be a fighter.

But there’s another element, too. He understands what it is to be common. His common touch is part of his charm. Writers who have been around him throughout his long career know he remembers names and faces. Then, he’ll always be remembered for carrying that Costco card, which is a lot more familiar to the common man than one of Floyd Mayweather’s Jr.’s Bugattis ever will be.

He keeps his common roots close to him, almost as if they were a touchstone of motivation. Hopkins’ identity as an inmate is a number he never forgets.

“He’s from the Union, I’m from the Union of the State Correctional Facility of Gratersford,” Hopkins said, talking to Smith. “I never bought silk underwear, but let me tell you what I did keep in my pocket. It’s called a Y-4145 prison I.D. card with my picture on it.’’

He went on to say that the prison I.D card reminds him of who he was, who he is and why he fights.

“You can always be common, it’s so easy to be common,” said a special fighter, who has taken the commonplace to a place never envisioned.

By Jimmy Tobin–

Saturday night, at the USC Galen Center in Los Angeles, California, Jermall Charlo defended his sliver of the super welterweight championship by fifth round TKO. The victory came at the expense of earnest but overmatched Julian Williams, who, provided the opportunity to make good on a year of bold proclamations, delivered a belligerent moment or two where it actually mattered, before leaving the ring with his head barely attached.

What Charlo-Williams offered, what aficionados are offered too infrequently, is an evenly matched prizefight on a premium network; a fight where the winner is in doubt both before the opening bell, and frequently enough during the fight to imbue not only the exchanges but those tense moments of inaction with a drama so often absent from the inevitable. Never mind that both fighters were undefeated—an undefeated record is as much a masking agent as an indicator of merit. And never mind that Charlo held a title, given that he won that belt over a man in his forties, and first defended it against someone named Wilky Campfort. What mattered is that within minutes of them keeping no company but each other, Charlo and Williams recognized the quality of opponent before them and were concerned but unbowed by that knowledge.

There is no moment in the fight more significant than the one that saw Charlo roll Williams’ right hand and counter it with an uppercut. That punch, the beginning of the end, set Williams’ head at an angle almost perpendicular to his neck and drove him so forcibly to the canvas he nearly bounced up to his knees and elbows. Williams played off its affect as best he could, bringing to mind fellow Philadelphian, Eric Harding, who, ruined by Antonio Tarver’s left hand, offered the utterance, “I’m from Philadelphia” as justification for fighting on. Fight on Williams would, but only until Charlo, swinging not to prompt the referee’s mercy but to leave Williams in a heap, tumbled him to the canvas once more.

Whatever blows they exchanged prior, including the Charlo jab that floored Williams with in the second round, and the counter crosses Williams chased Charlo’s jab back with, were evidence enough that both men understood what tools might serve them best against each other and that none of those tactics would come free of charge. It was a fight fought evenly until, in a flash, one man could fight no longer, and since what matters most always transpires between the ropes, Charlo’s landing his decapitator is the defining moment of the night.

And yet, it may not be what he is remembered for. At least not entirely.

In the aftermath, Charlo, still burning, refused to accept Williams’ congratulations, a move that drove the crowd to boo him for his lack of grace. Asked by foremost expert in classlessness, Jim Grey, whether his poor sportsmanship might detract from his victory, Charlo responded: “Detract from what? I knocked him out?”

It is a fair question to ask, however unpopular it may have been to a crowd that responded to Charlo’s asking it like it should have been issued a trigger warning.

Williams, who became Charlo’s mandatory in March, dogged him for nearly year, calling Charlo out and promising to take his title. His bandwagon—strangely full for a fighter who, beyond being accessible on social media and having an appealing moniker, had done little to justify many of the absurd claims made about his ability—also got in on the act from bathrooms, bus stops, and bar stools across the country. That ten-month keyboard assault fueled Charlo, who remained at 154 pounds only to shut Williams’ mouth. That he made good on that opportunity hardly means he need be friendly to his tormentor afterward, and if that does not fit into some romantic notion of how a man who is stripped near naked and sent out to leave another unconscious should act, so what?

The challenge the Charlo twins always faced, quite understandably, was that they were near indistinguishable from one another; a problem exacerbated by the absence of star power in their division and the fact that neither had a signature moment in the ring. But that is no longer the case. Jermall is now the Charlo brother who turned “J-Rock” to rubble and then reveled in it with zero regard for decorum.

Had Charlo responded more graciously people might have felt better about enjoying the spectacle of one man beating another to the ground with his fists. But if one of the goals a fighter has is to leave the crowd wanting to see him again, that approach would have done less for Charlo than his heel turn. And proof of that is that days later, people are not still talking about how Charlo planked Williams: they are talking about how Charlo planked Williams then acted like a goon, and whether such behavior did him a disservice or otherwise. True, Charlo will squander all that buzz if his next fight is unremarkable, but his behavior Saturday with fist and microphone in his face make that fight worthy of anticipation.

Sergey Kovalev can attribute much of his popularity to his maliciousness, so too can Terence Crawford, who interestingly enough, was considered a bore until his mean streak became an undeniable fixture in his performances. Perhaps Charlo too has this uncomfortable yet alluring quality about himself, and all that was needed was a night of genuine enmity to usher it forth. If so, may he harbor such ill will toward all of his coming opponents.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Omaha junior welterweight Nebraskan Terence “Bud” Crawford (29-0) spiralsnuffed Californian John Molina (29-6) in the eighth round of their match for Crawford’s 140-pound championship for which only Crawford was eligible. The fight happened on Crawford’s network, HBO, but not along his network’s pay-per-view branch because of how quickly receipts from Bud’s PPV debut got tallied in July – as HBO’s search for someone to rediscover its millionth (or 500,000th) buyer continues along: Not Gennady, nor Terence, nor Andre and Sergey.

Rarely do a prizefighter’s trunks do the work of premonition but Molina’s did with uncanny precision at CenturyLink Center. Molina and his cornermen all wore a garish ensemble covered in question marks of varying shapes and positions, like Halloween store runway models doing The Riddler. There were ?s and ¿s everywhere to ensure no semblance of certainty and that’s how Molina fought, outquestioned and unanswered from the opening bell till he hit the canvas in round 8. Every question about the fight’s quality, beginning with those raised at the Friday weighin when Molina missed weight aggressively, persisted and persist.

Everyone already knew Bud Crawford was special – after all, no one who wasn’t special’d be allowed to fight John Molina on HBO in Nebraska – and nothing Molina brought Saturday undermined anyone’s opinion of Crawford, even if it didn’t genuinely enhance it either. On the roster of happenings that make a fighter lessen in his prime, certainly, poor competition is well well below inactivity, but poor competition still makes the list, and a perusal of Crawford’s opponents since his signature win 30 months ago against Yuriorkis Gamboa should induce a tremor of concern to his handlers. He’s selling tickets in Omaha and that’s great and he’s staying active and that’s still better but he’s staying active against whomever his promoter can get at Black Friday rates and that’s not the same as improving: It’s brand management more than career management.

But there weren’t any cracks in Crawford’s game Saturday, were there?

There were a few, actually, yes.

The main one is his increasingly vaunted footwork, and having your footwork noticed by pundits and commentators and casual fans, come to think of it, might be an alarm every fighter should set going forward – though while we’re treating footwork referee Mark Nelson garners mention of his own as, in the busyness of his inexplicable but unceasing half orbits round the combatants, Nelson spends an absurd amount of time directly behind one fighter or the other, where he can see nothing just before he gets bumped into.

Fighter footwork fascinations go like this: The sort of hyperbolic character who fetishizes handspeed and footwork never praised Juan Manuel Marquez like he celebrated Erislandy Lara – while Marquez’s footwork, Marquez’s everything, was much much better; the type of fan who dizzied himself with glee as Amir Khan dizzied himself with jumping jacks from corner to corner to corner can’t often be found on Twitter hashtagging Roman Gonzalez’s footwork – which is, like everything else Chocolatito does in a prizefighting ring, nigh perfect. Once a fighter’s footwork becomes exaggerated enough for some people to start talking about it, in other words, it’s probably gone from a bit much to a mark of inefficiency to a cause for concern.

But you see Bud Crawford can switch from orthodox to southpaw!

Well gee golly.

Such switching is often a mark of anxiety, a means of stating loudly to one’s opponent you cannot figure him out, and Crawford knows this – which is why he began orthodox till he figured out Molina, which took about a round, and then Crawford went southpaw and stayed that way because Molina held no mysteries and Crawford sells tickets in the Midwest in some part by not being a frilly dude. Crawford used his footwork as a southpaw mostly to keep himself from getting hit by Molina until Molina figured this out, sort of, and started lead-hand corralling (clotheslining really) Crawford about the seventh round, at which point Bud came to a quick realization the show needed closing because however obviously confused Molina was he wasn’t so properly dissuaded as to stop whacking Crawford when given the chance.

Crawford is starting to take three steps where he need only take one, and it’s a mark of his recent competition more than carelessness: Against an equal you worry about fatigue and conserve motion by parrying a cross with your shoulder or ducking a hook, but when you haven’t a fear in the cornfields about what capacity for violence the man across from you bears, you get too cute by half and make disco circles in lieu of L-steps.

When he wants to be, Crawford is among the sport’s best closers, and his triple right hook – head, body, head – thrown after his initial hesitation brought Molina’s left glove off his cheek, was gorgeous a finish as any aficionado has a right to demand. Molina crumpled, and Mark Nelson crumpled on top of him, and one of Top Rank’s guys in a Cowboys jersey somehow decided he needed to be the first to congratulate the victor – which was both unseemly and uncharacteristic of a Top Rank employee. Alas.

Whosoever will Bud fight next? Preferably Manny Pacquiao before he retires again or at least someone whom Antonio DeMarco didn’t stop in 44 seconds 51 months ago.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

The end is near for another forgettable year, memorable mostly for fights that didn’t happen and a controversy still raging over the one that did.

Yeah, 2016 was lousy, yet the year’s final month is a sure sign of a heartbeat despite the usual obituaries. Year-end diagnosis: Boxing isn’t dead, but pay-per-view might be.

A sure sign that the scarred patient is still kicking unfolds throughout a Saturday with five cards on three networks from time zones on all sides of the international dateline.

There’s heavyweight contender Joseph Parker-versus-Andy Ruiz Jr. in Auckland on HBO, tape delay. Featherweights Abner Mares and Jesus Cuellar meet on Showtime in Los Angeles. Unbeaten junior-welterweight Terence Crawford is at home in Omaha against John Molina Jr. on HBO. Anthony Joshua, the projected face of a resurrected heavyweight division, faces Eric Molina in the UK on Showtime. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., now 30, is back, back all over again, against German Dominik Britsch on beIN in Mexico.

The sun never sets on the pro ring. Not yet, anyway.

Each of the cards helps set the table for a New Year, hopefully a better one. A year from now, however, it looks as if only two things will determine how we’ll look back at 2017:

· An immediate rematch of Andre Ward’s controversial decision over Sergey Kovalev for the light-heavyweight title.

· Gennady Golovkin-versus-Canelo Alvarez for the middleweight title.

Both have to happen. If they don’t, we may be hearing last rites instead of reading tired obits. Kathy Duva of Main Events, Kovalev’s promoter, exercised the rematch clause within minutes after Ward was declared the winner, 114-113, on all three scorecards on Nov. 19 at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena.

Meanwhile, Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy, Canelo’s promoter, has promised repeatedly that the long-awaited showdown with GGG will happen in September.

But this is boxing, which means caveat emptor is attached to every promise and rematch clause. With less than a month left in the year, we’ve yet to hear Ward’s management even acknowledge that the reported rematch clause is in place.

It’s clear that Ward’s management is keeping options open, perhaps for an immediate bout against somebody other than Kovalev. The Russian would have to agree, but only at a steep price. It’s called step-aside money.

In this case, it would be stepping all over public expectations for a quick sequel, if not an immediate resolution to the noisy debate over the scoring. The business — still reeling from 2015’s Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao dud — can’t afford a postponement. A 2016 full of frustration over no Canelo-GGG bout is symptomatic of an impatient fan base that won’t tolerate much more delay.

Canelo is working his way back from a right-thumb injury sustained in a stoppage of the UK’s Liam Smith in September. Projections are that Canelo will fight again, perhaps some time in early 2017. Will the junior-middleweight champion need one fight, or two, against a true 160-pounder before GGG? Will the thumb hold up?

In most years, small questions. But the answers loom large, larger than ever in a critical 2017.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Moscow Russian cruiserweight champion Denis Lebedev lost his title by split decision to Russian Murat Gassiev by scores that were at best wide and at worst wrong: 114-113, 112-116, 111-116. Gassiev dropped Lebedev in round 5 and fought ably in most every other but did not appear to punch enough to depart Khodynka Ice Palace with Gassiev’s jewelry.

It was an honest prizefight between two men who knew how to do it and went about the labor of bludgeoning one another quite a bit differently: the southpaw champion, shorter and thicker, moved at times nervously but generally effectively and squaredup to turn his left cross to a hook round Gassiev’s guard, and the orthodox challenger, tall and coiled, landed far fewer clean punches but absorbed his opponent’s blows more indifferently and benefitted from a bodyshot knockdown in the middle rounds that gave two ringside judges liberty to weigh his work generously. It was an honest viewing experience for American audiences, too, because it came effectively bereft of biography – though the cornermen, the once-quotable Coach Freddie and enduringly obnoxious Abel Sanchez, surely biased some American eyes somewhat.

But that doesn’t explain the judging and for once it’s good not to bother autopsying scorecards for improper interest. On the Russian broadcast it did not appear Gassiev did sufficient to unstrap the champion but the acoustics of a YouTube feature from the other side of the world might be suspect so one never errs giving ringside sounds and those who experience them benefits of scorekeeping doubts – for the sake of one’s own peace of mind or at least solace. Lebedev was indeed busier throughout and controlled no fewer than eight of the match’s opening nine minutes then got caught a while after that with a left hook to the liver, a quite odd thing for a southpaw to collect, and dropped without a standard halfsecond’s delay as if he knew how badly things’d go when the liver’s report reached his brain and wanted to get in position for it, and the tenor of the judging if not the action being judged shifted dramatically, or else Gassiev’s punches simply sounded that much more ferocious at ringside than they looked on video. The widest scorecard came from an American judge in Moscow watching two Russians trade hands, and one hopes therefore he didn’t bring a rooting interest to a card that otherwise felt lopsided, though the IBF sure flew him a long way to that ringside seat.

If Gassiev won fairly he did so by punching much harder than the champion because it sure as hell wasn’t Gassiev’s defense, pedestrian, or head movement, scarecrowlike, that brought his W and new title. The idea of that title is worth a revisit because it addresses the way fights are scored and the way aficionados think fights ought be scored, and they’re not the same.

Barring a decisive act the man being watched more by a judge during a round will win that round from that judge. None of us, that is, watches impartially enough to keep his eyes fixed on the floating cube of space between two combatants, following each fist across the cube’s threshold and judging its effect from there; each of us begins each round watching one of the two fighters and why we watch that fighter is a plethora of subjective things like identity and empathy and psychological goingson we couldn’t catalog exhaustively if we had unlimited time and inclination. Yet we dive headlong at the most obvious considerations when judging judges, which is fine actually because in large part it’s what judges sign up for.

Somewhere round here is the genesis of the idea a challenger must beat a champion more decisively than a champion must beat a challenger – not because any judge’s scorecard (that isn’t prefilled anyway) is prefilled with a handicap for the challenger but because, by virtue of the precious metal he wears round his waist when he steps through the ropes, a champion brings a presence scorekeepers’ eyes find irresistibly shiny – the champion is the default object on which a judge’s eyes fix. Nobody said it had to be like that in the beginning; it turned out like that often enough to become probable and then men who trained challengers decided it was an apt tool to tell their charges in camp the champ would be entitled to every close point, and soon enough those challengers became champs themselves and decided such entitlement, while unofficial, was a binding rule. One of them probably said that much in an interview once long ago, and drunken fanatics have been loudly quoting him ever since.

If members of the Sergey Kovalev camp didn’t cite this rule directly or publicly after their charge’s narrow loss to Andre Ward a few Saturdays back they surely alluded to it privately and attributed to bias an outcome decided by American judges’ susceptibility to a jingoism that overwhelmed the subconscious bias Kovalev’s waistwear should’ve brought. Perhaps. But Saturday a Russian champion did about as much to defend his title in Russia as Kovalev did in America and got the same sort of result though he lost by a greater margin in his home country than Kovalev did in Ward’s home country.

And that returns us ever and again to there being but one way to win a prizefight objectively and that is by knockout. The rest is noisy twaddle.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Talk, talk and more talk about Floyd Mayweather Jr.-versus-Conor McGregor continue to light up social media these days with no end – or relief – in sight.

Not sure who to blame, but the tirelessly talkative McGregor appears to be doing what Mayweather mastered in marketing himself and then landing a huge Showtime contract that led to about a $220-million payday against Manny Pacquiao.

McGregor could generate international attention for getting a driver’s license these days. Essentially, that’s what the UFC’s mega-mouth did in acquiring a boxing license in California. It cost him 60 bucks. He had to fill out a four-page form and pass a physical. It was quick, simple and nobody asked him to parallel-park.

In no time, Twitter, Facebook, websites and even mainstream media exploded all over again with speculation about a McGregor bout with Mayweather. Stock the shelves with antacid, because there’s going to be a lot more of this stuff.

Chances appear to be slim-to-none that the bout would — could — happen. McGregor is under contract to the UFC. Meanwhile, Mayweather continues to send out mixed messages about whether he wants to come back.

If McGregor tries to get out of his UFC contract in pursuit of a Mayweather bout, a long and tangled legal battle is likely. Mayweather, who is one victory short of 50-0, has a lot of things, but time isn’t one of them. He’ll be 40 on Feb. 24.

I doubt it will happen. But I’m old, more than old enough not be included in the emerging generation of MMA fans. I also suspect that my doubts reflect an opinion shared by many in the aging crowd of fellow boxing fans. To wit: I hope it doesn’t happen. Could it? In an era when a presidential campaign is won with tweetstorms, anything can.

There’s momentum in the internet fascination. Betting odds were even posted by Westgate in Las Vegas Thursday. If the bout went from mythical to fact, Mayweather would be a 25-1 favorite in what would be a boxing match against McGregor, who began as an amateur boxer as a 12-year-old in Dublin.

Translation: Nobody thinks McGregor would have any kind of chance at all. So why is social media still buzzing about it?

There are all kinds of reasons, including a compelling one offered by Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe. Ellerbe told ESPN’s Dan Rafael that people are talking about it because of race. McGregor is Irish and white, Mayweather is African-American and boxing has a long racial history defined by The Great White Hope.

If Ellerbe is right – and I think he is, the racial component will only fuel further talk about the bout. More talk means more of the one thing that could make it happen: Money, which also happens to be Mayweather’s nickname and motivation. Speculated numbers have been all over the place. They’ve also been uniformly big, anywhere from $800 million to a billion.

That would pay a lot of McGregor’s legal bills and might be enough to lure Mayweather back through the ropes. Then, however, the global bubble of anticipation would quickly deflate. Remember the mix of disappointment and outrage over Mayweather’s decision over Pacquiao in May, 2015? Multiply that, again and again.

There’s also precedence for what might happen. Classic boxing matches between a boxer and MMA fighter have been a mixed-martial-arts mess. I sat through one in Phoenix, Ariz., last March.

That’s when aging Roy Jones Jr. scored a second-round stoppage in a made-for-pay-per-view event over a guy named Vyron Phillips, who had been fighting MMA and had experience as an amateur boxer.

Phillips got a boxing license from the Arizona State Boxing and MMA Commission, but he had no business in a ring within punching range of a boxing legend way past his prime. The event was a joke, an embarrassment not worth repeating, especially on a global stage that could be a billion times more embarrassing.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night, at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, junior lightweight, Vasyl Lomachenko, made a quitter of Nicholas Walters in one of the most anticipated fights of last year. Walters found reasons enough in seven rounds of exposure to Lomachenko to suffer the fallout of an ignominious defeat rather than be further toyed with or worse.

Quietly ended a rivalry that would have provided greater drama had it played out at featherweight, where Walters—yet to lose a title on the scale, yet to suffer a draw a lightweight, still brimming with confidence from running roughshod over the worn and washed tributes offered to his mystique—was his most imposing. Perhaps too, had Walters not spent eleven months doing anything but fighting, doing whatever it was that made ominous the pictures of him as the weigh-in loomed, he would have mustered a better showing. Alas.

To conjure up a charitable narrative on Walter’s behalf seems like primarily the work of those embittered by the result (a Lomachenko victory even before a Walters loss). But what might they say?

Faced with a fighter near impossible to hit, it could be that Walters turned his back on his opponent, on his promoter, on a fight he never cared to participate in. Perhaps when Lomachenko unfurled his full arsenal, when he spun and struck Walters to dizzying effect in the seventh round, it was then that Walters decided that, while willing to endure 12 futile rounds he would not suffer another like the last. Maybe pride brought him to tell referee, Tony Weeks, he had no interest in fighting on, so humiliated was he by the prospect of being reduced to a sparring partner, a mere tool for practice.

Any one of these explanations is in keeping with a telling moment at the end of the fifth round. Lomachenko stood still in the center of the ring, and Walters, rather than seize the opportunity to walk Lomachenko down merely mirrored his opponent; when he did move, his first step was backward, away from Lomachenko, away, really, from any regard for the fight’s outcome. As the bell sounded to end the round, Walters simply shrugged his shoulders.

Walters had his reasons for quitting and so too will he have his consequences. The comeback trail for a fighter complicit in his defeat, a trail that already features less money and fewer television dates, is unlikely to be understanding let alone forgiving; nor, for that matter, is the collective pile-on that is the viewing public.

Underlying all of these interpretations of Walter’s conduct is Lomachenko, a generational talent, if not yet a great fighter. Fittingly, he went about his business last night in trunks and gloves patterned in a style resembling the work of pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, who once said, “Art doesn’t transform. It plain forms.” Lomachenko is not transforming, altering, or changing his legacy so much as forming it in accordance with the ambition and talent he is endowed with. He is not held to the standards of a fighter with eight professional bouts because that would be an insult to him. And yet, it is important to keep that number in mind, because in that short span of time he has already beaten Gary Russell Jr., Rocky Martinez, and now Walters, which, while not the stuff of legend, is a feat unrivalled by any of his peers when they had less than ten fights. Even Lomachenko’s loss to Orlando Salido, which despite Salido’s manipulation of sportsmanship ended with the iron-willed Mexican on the brink, looks good.

It is not always a question of whether you win but how you do that matters, however. And while Walters must own some of the blame for the lack of fireworks Saturday night, Lomachenko’s performance was less riveting than his unmaking of Russell or his destruction of Martinez. And yet it was vintage Lomachenko (for better or worse).

Again Lomachenko erased the line between defense and offense as only he does: where punches are followed by defensive maneuvers that position him for further offense and so forth, all at the expense of opponents who are spun like flies in a spider’s web as the fatal bite closes in. Walters cocked his vaunted right hand repeatedly in the early rounds, but rarely threw it, nor did he stalk Lomachenko as he had even the most dangerous fighters he’d faced. He did not have to. Instead, Lomachenko brought the fight to Walters—and when that fight become its most intense, Walters capitulated. Here then, is the transformative element in Lomachenko’s work, best found on the bodies—in their wounds, in their language—of his opponents. Still, there are further transformations that need to take place for Lomachenko to monetize his talent.

Lomachenko’s mastery leaves some wanting more. Perhaps it is the incremental and protracted way he works, starting first with range and defense before incorporating his more hurtful—and compelling—elements of his game. Indeed, there is at least a moment or two in most all of Lomachenko’s fights where it is fair to ask why he is still fighting. He looks near flawless when he is shifting on opponents, slashing at them from improbable angles, but perhaps a little less precision, and a little more recklessness and savagery, would help him better resonate with the public. He is not a defensive fighter—his defense is a conduit for his offense—but his calculated attack understandably leaves the bloodthirsty cold.

There is a solution to his problem that requires Lomachenko make no stylistic concessions, however, one that could entrench him in a collective consciousness that extends well beyond the dwindling ranks of those who still turn to the ring for entertainment: seek out those fighters who fight with a passion you reserve only for your preparation, those fighters who carry both the hopes of a nation and a cultural obligation—and cut those men to ribbons.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas the runnerup for 2016’s most-anticipated fight featured undefeated Jamaican Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters getting stripped bare in a super featherweight title match by once-defeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko. Walters decided quitting after seven rounds of being felled not once somehow blazed a nobler trail than absorbing a beating certain to multiply and deepen. Well. Unpleasant as things must’ve been for Walters he made the wrong decision and should expect in the future white feathers in lieu of television contracts.

Styles break fights, and if one compares the reality of Lomachenko-Walters to the fantasy so many aficionados entertained about it Saturday’s fare fairly well serves as the largest disappointment of 2016 – which, as disappointments go, is like being the captain of an all-star team. The boxer-slugger matchup, as Joe Frazier teaches us in “Boxing with the Pros”, ever favors the boxer, but even so, that was a bit much.

Anyone who’s not been ringside at a Walters fight before Saturday no doubt now entertains suspicions Walters was a Top Rank invention of (typically brilliant) matchmaking, a properly manufactured frame with which to hang the promoter’s latest masterpiece, but that’s inaccurate for once; Walters was special in an especially concussive way when he arrived in 2013. I was ringside for Walters’ American debut, a 3 1/2-round hatcheting of Mexican Alberto Garza in Corpus Christi, Texas, and it left a mark. I recall clearly but three emotions from the fights that night: Thankfulness San Antonio’s Steve Hall did not perish in his encounter with Alex Saucedo, amusement Vic Darchinyan outboxed Nonito Donaire for eight rounds, and holy mackerel that guy with the wooden axe can crack! Very few fighters at the championship level have gamechanging power not because very few guys at the championship level hit hard but because everyone at the championship level hits hard, and subsequently fighters don’t make it to the championship level without they can absorb stiff shots. Walters didn’t just hit his opponent with a stroke that shocked Garza but observed Garza’s fright with no shock of his own – Walters waded into what panic emanated from Garza without malevolence: “I’m supposed to cause that.”

Four months later I was ringside when Lomachenko’s debut in a championship fight did not go nearly so impressively against Mexican Orlando Salido in San Antonio’s Alamodome. Salido missed weight by a couple or three weightclasses, if memory serves, and fouled Lomachenko compulsively but as we’d been promised by Lomachenko’s promoters some combination of the greatest amateur in boxing history and the greatest professional to come in boxing history most of us succumbed to schadenfreude and were at least amused by the spectacle of a 12-loss grinder decisioning the future of boxing – not amused as we’d been 90 days before when Chino ravished About Billions, but still.

First impressions and all that: I fully expected Lomachenko-Walters to be intense and intensely memorable and wanted very much to see what the future of boxing did with his introduction to the Axe Man’s blade. We’ll never know, will we, as Lomachenko so wildly outclassed the Axe Man the few punches Walters nearly landed were thrown with so little resolve as to be pittypats had they landed and whiteflags otherwise.

Does that make Lomachenko the most skilled fighter in the world? Hell no, actually, it doesn’t; give the minimumweight equivalent of Siri Salido 10 extralegal pounds and all the fouls he can muster and he’d still not win three rounds against Roman Gonzalez in 100 minutes of trying, much less decision him on scorecards that are just. Lomachenko is an innovator and a supremely talented fighter, yes, but Chocolatito is perfect – and they’re not quite the same thing.

Watching Lomachenko dance and pepper, shake and grind Saturday recalled no one to mind so much as Sergio Martinez, another southpaw innovator who got beaten early in his career by a Mexican grinder. Lomachenko circles tighter and does everything a bit tighter than Maravilla did but he doesn’t hit so hard or he’d have copterforked the Jamaican long before Walters quit since there’s no confusing the Axe Man for the Punisher. While we’re on the subject of Walter’s stooljob, a couple lessons learned: First, when a guy attends a weighin with a marijuana leaf on his getup, no matter his nationality, don’t be shocked if he mills like a pothead; and second, remember always what makes sluggers vulnerable to boxers is the fragility of sluggers’ psyches – they get discouraged much quicker and more deeply than boxers or volume punchers do.

For all his abundance of showcased skill Lomachenko’s not too exciting, alas, no matter how much one interrogates instant replays and immerses himself in the audio of whatever promotional lunacy Lomachenko’s American cable network now amplifies about any prizefighter from the former Soviet Union. Unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc fighters HBO has peddled aggressively at us seemingly since the Berlin Wall fell, though, Lomachenko is promoted by an outfit that knows how and occasionally asks its charges to take risks commensurate with the fortunes HBO is wont to invest in marketable personalities.

Saturday Lomachenko looked enormous at 130 pounds and shouldn’t have any trouble rising in weight to much bigger fights with Top Rank’s much bigger fighters, or they can give us a rematch with Salido on pay-per-view and see if that goes.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Vasyl Lomachenko defends the WBO Super Featherweight title against Nicholas Walters.  The action begins at 10:35 ET / 5:35 AM in Ukraine / 10:35 in Jamaica

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1: Lomachenko lands a left and right

Round 2 Jab and quick lefts from Lomachenko..Good right from Walters..Straight left from Lomachenko…2 good jabs from Walters…Good left from Lomanchenko and another..

Round 3 Quick left inside from Lomachenko..Body shot from Walters..4 punch combination from Lomachenko

Round 4 Walters lands a left hook…Lomachenko counters twice…Body shot…Good hook from Walters

Round 5 Left to body by Lomanchenko…

Round 6 Good body shot from Walters..Right hook from Lomanchemko..Good body shot from Walters..Combibation from Lomanchenko…Lomachenko outlanding Walters 84-44

Round 7 Good body shot from Walters..Good left..Good left hook from Walters….WALTERS QUITS ON THE STOOL

By Norm Frauenheim-

The evolution of boxing’s surprising new generation – fighters from the old Soviet Union – continues Saturday with Vasyl Lomachenko, who many believe will be the best of them, if not one of the best ever.

In the lead-up to the Lomachenko-Nicholas Walters bout at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, his promoter, Bob Arum, compares the Ukrainian to Muhammad Ali.

Being called the next anything can create some problematic expectations. To wit: There’s never been another John Wooden or Jack Nicklaus and the NBA is still looking for the next Michael Jordan.

But, it’s fair to argue, that there’s never been anyone in any sport quite like Ali. In the arena of history’s icons, Ali is the greatest ever. On the boxing canvas, he’s Michelangelo. Whether there’s a Sistine Chapel in Lomachenko’s creative hands is anybody’s guess. After all, the two-time Olympic gold medalist has only seven pro bouts (6-1, 4 KOs).

But Arum is absolutely right about one thing: Lomachenko is fascinating to watch. Arum has seen them all. First of all and above all, Ali.

The promoter, who turns 85 on Dec. 8, celebrates his 2,000th card Saturday night. That amounts to boxing every night for nearly five-and-half years. Arum thought he had seen all the angles until he saw Lomachenko, who has been creating some new dimensions in boxing’;s traditional geometry

He possesses a bewildering array of punching angles augmented by hand speed and clever footwork. Ali?

We’ll only know more about that one in the face of further adversity, perhaps in an HBO-televised bout (10:35 p.m. ET/PT) against a dangerous Walters (26-0-1, 21 KOs) who has frightening power.

Lomachenko has already encountered some of that in a loss to a stubborn and brawling Orlando Salido. Salido might have taught him a career-full of lessons during one long night in March 2014. Lomachenko is no dummy. The guess here is that he will be cautious early and creative late for a stoppage in the final couple of rounds over a tiring Walters.

A successful defense of his WBO junior-lightweight belt might propel him to an immediate jump in class, perhaps to a 2017 bout at 140 pounds against Manny Pacquaio. I would also like to see a bout with Mikey Garcia, although that one could be difficult to put together because of Garcia’s split with Top Rank.

Nevertheless, Lomachenko against the tactically skilled and always-poised Garcia would loom as an intriguing match-up and another test of what Arum foresees for the Ukrainian.

For now, Lomachenko ranks No. 3 on this list of fighters from the old Soviet bloc making an impact in the U.S. Middleweight Gennady Golovkin is still no. 1. Light-heavyweight Sergey Kovalev is No. 2, despite his controversial loss to Andre Ward last Saturday.

If fans angry at Ward’s one-point victory on each of the judges’ card had a vote, Kovalev might in fact be No. 1. Despite the noisy controversy, however, it still goes down as a loss for Kovalev, who seemed to let the clever Ward off the hook after the Russian scored a second-round knockdown.

For Lomachenko, that’s an opportunity to become No. 2 on what might just be an early list of all that Arum thinks he’ll achieve.

By Jimmy Tobin-

Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, light heavyweights Sergey Kovalev and Andre Ward provided a proper prizefight for those weary of a year blighted with fights of little consequence and even less intrigue, of diluted titles both real and fantastic. To the surprise of many—including Ward, if anything can be read into the expression he wore as the victor was announced—and the disgust of plenty, Ward was awarded the victory by the narrowest of margins: 114-113 on all three cards.

The outcome is likely to be debated long after Ward and Kovalev have put the fight behind them; and for the most tenaciously outraged, perhaps even after the rematch—which there almost certainly will be—has provided some vindication. Because the explanation for Ward sweeping the last six rounds on two judges’ cards and picking up five of those six on a third, is near impossible to find in what transpired in the ring. This is not to imply judging corruption, only a sort of laziness, the judge’s fallacy that reasons that since Fighter A is no longer having the same success he had in the early rounds Fighter B must be winning. While it is true that Ward adjusted to Kovalev, and those adjustments got Ward back in the fight, the case that they won it for him was made most forcefully by people other than the “Son of God.”

Of course, a Kovalev victory in the rematch would not retroactively correct any perceived error in the scoring of the first fight; a clear, decisive (deserved?) second victory for Ward would not make his first any less controversial; nor, for that matter, should anyone expect anything more definitive in the sequel. If this is unsatisfying it is perhaps helpful to remember that, whatever your feelings on the outcome, the only nemesis either fighter has managed to find he found in the ring Saturday; and the animus they showed each other was born of respect.

Respect is something grudgingly given to Ward, who can be supercilious beyond the ropes, tedious between them, and until last night, was so far removed from a win worthy of comment he might well have been forgotten had HBO not paid so dearly for his services. But he is a great fighter—to suggest otherwise is to concede that Kovalev could struggle with anything less. Are you willing to make that suggestion?

When Kovalev sent Ward to his knees with a right hand in the second round, it seemed very much like the whispers of Ward’s decline had been right. And yet over the next ten rounds, things became more difficult for Kovalev—not easier.

Proof of this shift bore out in the clinches. Unhinged by Kovalev’s power, Ward’s early wrestling was preservative, which was telling considering his ability to work inside the clinch—and outside the margins of sportsmanship—figured to be his most glaring advantage. But as he calibrated his own offense to that of Kovalev’s, Ward turned the clinches in his favor. Working with his head on Kovalev’s shoulder, hitting while Kovalev wrestled and always delivering the last punch, Ward taxed the monster before him. That Ward managed as much while brandishing zero threat of a right hand, that he ostensibly defused a bomb with only his left, warrants praise that should not be denied him.

The effect of this inside work was nevertheless exaggerated by Max Kellerman, who approached each round like a 49er panning through the action looking only for those bits of it that allowed him to preserve a set narrative about Ward’s greatness. Kellerman also tried to dismiss the effect of Kovalev’s punches, as if his ability to force Ward to repeatedly retreat and reset was somehow inferior to the punches Kovalev calmly walked through. The commentary team’s efforts to guide rather than describe reached its low point during an absurd discussion about winning moments, as if the winner of a round could be determined by dividing each round into 360 or so moments and tallying, without any regard for quality, who earned more.

For those disgusted by Kovalev suffering so unconvincing a first loss there is this: the fight revealed that people will never see in Ward what they do not want to see and confirmed that there is more to Kovalev than the rhetoric about him suggests. Prior to the fight, it seemed plausible that his inability to put away Bernard Hopkins, a much older, slower, version of Ward, boded poorly for Kovalev’s chances. But he was better against Ward than he was against Hopkins because the moment demanded as much. As he did against Hopkins, Kovalev scored an early knockdown, and again, that knockdown came because an opponent underestimated his quickness. Unlike Hopkins, however, Ward fought to win, not stay upright, and when the outcome of the fight was thrown into doubt Kovalev responded with the type of comportment he need never have shown against the likes of Cedric Agnew and Blake Caparello. He is more than his puncher’s reputation reflects, and he out-boxed the boxer even if he could not overcome the judges.

Prior to Saturday night, Kovalev and Ward occupied somewhat tenuous positions in a sport that in lieu of quality matchups, devolves further and further into a mere cult of personality. Ward was preserved by a reputation that persisted despite his not engaging in a fight worth mentioning since 2012. But his effort Saturday night, if not the way it was awarded, provides little reason to further a grudge against him. Kovalev’s best win was a decision over a man half a century old, but if Kovalev is for you an overhyped product of HBO’s infatuation with Eastern Europeans, his disputed loss to Ward undermines your claim. Perhaps any new animus directed at them too, will be born of respect.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas undefeated American light heavyweight Andre “SOG” Ward decisioned unanimously and narrowly undefeated Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev by three scores of 114-113. Kovalev hurt Ward in round 1, dropped him in round 2 and sent him racing backwards in round 12, but in between Ward may have, conceivably, possibly, theoretically, landed exactly the number of enough punches to prevail on a fair scorecard.

First things first: I picked Andre Ward to win by late TKO. I watched the fight with four other Americans, all of whom picked Ward to win, and the five of us composed three distinct ethnicities. None of us thought Ward won before the decision got read, but one of us, having suffered the card’s preposterous co-main, advised the group to gird itself for a questionable decision in the main. That’s what we got. And we all felt a touch queasy when the judges’ scores were read.

At some point during the match one of HBO’s prissy broadcasters calculated Ward’s margin for error was zero. True as that statement sounded those judges scoring for Ward enjoyed a still narrower margin, didn’t they? If you bulged your jaw and squinted you probably could get a Ward scorecard after 36 minutes but even a moment’s absentmindedness’d’ve skewed it all to hell. But the judges played fair and turned in varying rounds of favoritism, and frankly things ringside are demonstrably different from things triplefiltered by the HBO lens – and our own Norm Frauenheim, more credible than a combination of Nevada judges and Harold Lederman, multiplied by ten, scored it for Ward 114-113 from ringside, so acceptance is appropriate.

Such a wise course’d feel appreciably better, though, were it not for that left hook to the liver Kovalev placed in the final minutes of round 12, the one that dropped Ward’s right elbow and sent him retreating – not feinting, not trapsetting, not resting: retreating – during the moments he was scheduled by friend and foe alike to trade his life for a knockout.

Ward won the benefit of ringside scorekeepers’ doubts by enduring then overcoming more pain and humiliation in the opening six minutes of Saturday’s match than he collected in the whole of yesteryears’ Super Six tournament. In round 1 a Kovalev jab buckled Ward and made him do the eye dance of widenblink widenblink while Kovalev enjoyed the view. In round 2 Ward drove his face in a sawedoff cross that, had Kovalev had time and space to turn it over, likely would’ve stopped the show then and there.

Then the bell rang for round 3 and Krusher seemed to mistake Ward for Bernard Hopkins, deciding he might hurt Ward whenever the impulse struck him and anyway let’s save some feet and force for the championship rounds. From there Ward got better every round and Kovalev did not, and while that still didn’t win Ward the match necessarily it did create objective space enough in scorers’ minds to fill with subjective considerations of patriotism and activity and heroism and such.

The difference in physicality was pronounced as possible; for those of us who recognize the futility of battling interested audio and video elements in pursuit of an accurate home scorecard, for those of us who no longer bother, in other words, with scoring fights on television, there’s a subjective criterion that serves just as well and requires a fraction the effort: Who appears the larger man? In the final 30 seconds of round 2 Kovalev appeared several weightclasses larger than Ward the way a 150-pound man appears several weightclasses larger than a 135-pound eighth grader. However much one cheered Kovalev after the knockdown it was hard not to feel sympathy for Ward – that’s how much bigger and more effective Kovalev appeared. But then.

Recently director Oliver Stone’s series “The Untold History of the United States” landed on Netflix, and whatever it intends to do or fails to do and however much it may tend toward agitprop it succeeds in encouraging Americans raised during the cold war to imagine Soviets and their leaders like decent and selfinterested folks no different from Americans. That sentiment returned to mind again and again during Saturday’s fifth and sixth and seventh rounds; however much the Krusher marketing plan relied on menace, in a pitched confrontation Kovalev was much more athlete than psychopath; butted and tackled and scored against, Kovalev expressed betrayal, not rage – whither fairplay, comrades?

The damage Kovalev did Ward nevertheless shortened SOG’s career while it revealed the American’s profound willfulness, even if things didn’t conclude conclusively as aficionados hoped. The untenable space between Ward’s fights of the last four years coupled with their dismal lack of competitiveness did nothing to prepare Ward for what he saw in Saturday’s opening rounds. Ward did not improvise so much as endure and believe; he used his entire body to offset Kovalev’s physical advantages while investing fully in his corner’s faith Kovalev’s advantages would diminish with time. They did, too, reducing the Russian’s offensiveness while doing nothing to soften his beard; the few times Ward’s punches did more than dissuade or marginally disrupt Kovalev’s rhythm those punches were to various parts of Kovalev’s body and not his head.

There should be a rematch, and for once the party most likely to benefit from such a happening is the entity most empowered to make it happen: HBO. If the network shows continuing backbone with Ward and tells him there’ll be no victory lap till a decisive victory then tells him too to tell his people to go to Showtime and fight Adonis Stevenson if they think that’ll pay better and not come back, there’s a good chance aficionados can have the rematch we deserve. Or we can have another four years of explaining how complicated such things are and see if there’s anybody left to buy the rematch in 2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Sergey Kovalev defends the IBF/WBA/WBO Light Heavyweight championships against fellow undefeated Andre Ward.  The action kicks off at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT / 5 AM Sunday in Russia.  The action kicks off with a 3 fight undercard featuring Curtis Stevens taking on James De La Rosa in a middleweight bout; Isaac Chilemba fighting Oleksandr Gvozdyk in a light heavyweight bout and Maurice Hooker taking on former world champion Darleys Perez in a junior welterweight bout

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED…THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1 Quick right from Ward and left to body…Hard jab drives Ward back…Hard right..Jab

Round 2 Jab from Ward…Left from Kovalev and another..right..Hard right..HUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES WARD,.Big right from

Round 3 Good jab from Ward..quick left,,,

Round 4 Kovalev lands a jab

Round 5 Good body shot from Ward,,Hook from Kovalev..Good jab from Ward..body shots in the clinch..Jab from Kovalv..Good right from Ward and jab,,

Round 6 Jab to body from Ward…Good right from Kovalev..Another right..Right..Body shot from Ward and another..

Round 7 Jab from Ward..hard jab ..another good jab…Kovalev lands a left..Right from Ward

Round 8 Good hook from Ward..Kovalev lands a jab..Right hand from ward..body from Ward

Round 9  Combo from Kovalev..Right from Ward,,,Hard right to body..Hard right..Straight right..Hard right from Kovalev..Combination from Kovalev…Hard right from Ward,

Round 10 Kovalev lands a hard counter..Hard right from Ward…Right from Kovalev..Hard right..Left from Ward..Kovalev belleding from nose…Hard right.

Round 11 Solid left hook from Ward..2 rights from Kovalev..Body and head from Ward..Kovalev lands a left..Good jab from Ward..

Round 12 Good left hook from Ward..Good hook from Kovalev..Body shot from Ward..Good body shot from Kovalev,..Jab..

114-113 on all cards…..FOR….WARD

PUNCHES:  Kovalev     Ward

Round 1 Right from Perez and left from Hooker…Left hook from Perez

Round 2 Good left from Hooker..Good right from Perez

Round 3 Hard right wobbles Hooker..

Round 4 Perez lands a right to the head

Round 5

Round 6 Looping right from Perez..

Round 7 Body shot from Perez…

Round 8 2 rights from Perez

Round 9 Good right from Perez…Left hook from Hooker..Left from Perez

Round 10 Hard right from Hooker…Left hook to the body..Good jab from Perez..2 shots from Perez..Right Hand.

97-93 PEREZ; 97-93 HOOKER…95-95 DRAW

PUNCHES:  Hooker 104-485    Perez 146-413

Round 1

Round 2 Body shot from Gvozdyk

Round 3 3 punch combo from Gvozdyk…quick left hook and another

Round 4 Quick left hook by Gvozdyk..Gvozdyl unloads a big combination on the ropes..Chilemba bleeding from the nose..Left hook from Chilemba..Good right hand to the body..Good right over the top..Gvozdyk lands a perfect uppercut..2 good body shots from Chilemba..

Round 5 Good right from Chilemba..uppercut..Good bidy shot..Gvozdyk lands a left to the head..

Round 6 Good left from Gvozdyk…Jab..left…Hard right to thehead..

Round 7 Gvozdyk pressuring

R0und 8 Right shakes Gvozdyk up..Hard right to head and body..CHILEMBA CANT CONTINUE AFTER THE ROUND IS COMPLETE

Round 1 Big lefts hurts De La Rosa..Right…Working in the corner..LEFT AND DOWN GOES DE LA ROSA…

Round 2 De La Rosa cut over left eye..Hard combination on the ropes By Stevens..De La Rosa pumping jab..

Round 3 Stevens landing hard body shots..Great exchange..Big left hook and hard right from Stevens..Big left hook..Good uppercut from De la Rosa..Left hook from Stevens..Hard left to body from De la Rosa..

Round 4 De La Rosa landing jabs in the corner…Body shot from Stevens…

Round 5 Stevens lands a body shot…De La Rosa lands some jabs a right

Round 6 Hard right from De La Rosa..

Round 7 Good Straight right from Stevens…

Round 8 1 POINT DEDUCTED FROM STEVENS FOR A LOW BLOW…Counter right from Stevens.

Round 9 Stevens has a hurt left hand…Right to body from Stevens

Round 10 Good right from Stevens..Right over the top…right to the body…

Punches:  Stevens  148-457   De La Rosa 123-672

98-90; 96-92 TWICE FOR CURTIS STEVENS

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS – On the scale, there was no difference. Not even a fraction of an ounce separated the two. It was 175 pounds even for each in a weigh-in that seems to reflect how tough it is to pick between Sergey Kovalev and Andre Ward.

The betting odds are almost as even as the scale was Friday for the light-heavyweight bout scheduled for Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena and HBO’s pay-per-view television. Talk in the press room tips one way, then another, favoring Kovalev at one moment and Ward the next.

It’s a fight that looks to be as close as possible. Each has 30 victories. Each has never lost. As advertised, it also should have a heavy impact on the pound-for-pound debate. The winner figures to get No. 1 recognition in the first bout between unbeaten fighters ranked among the top five in The Ring’s pound-for pound ratings since Felix Trinidad’s upset of Oscar De La Hoya in 1999.

The only real question is whether anybody really cares. Ticket sales have been slow. Seats at all prices were available Friday. Less than two years since Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao disappointed a record 4.6 million PPV customers, the boxing pay-per-view business has been in the toilet. Kovalev-Ward promoter would be happy – make that ecstatic – with 300,000 buys.

It’s anybody’s guess what a reasonable PPV expectation might have been in the heady days before Mayweather-Pacquiao. Kovalev-Ward has all the elements that would have made it a solid attraction. Maybe there would have been 500,000 PPV buys in the bout’s history, knockout power in Kovalev’s right hand and tactical skill in Ward’s overall ring IQ. It’s puncher versus boxer. It could be a classic.

For now, however, it might be fight that a lot of people wished they had had seen. That might represent a new beginning for a battered business. A great fight might lead to a rematch, a renewed appetite and perhaps a recovery. In the here and now, however, Kovalev (30-0-1, 26 KOs) and Ward (30-0, 15 KOs) can only take care of the immediate task that awaits them at opening bell.

The close nature of the bout has led to each camp trying to get an edge, which means there has been a lot of talk over the last few days.

“I think it’s simple,’’ Ward said moments after he stepped off the scale. “He doesn’t like me. I don’t like him. This will be my best performance of all time. I’m not leaving Las Vegas without those belts.’’

The belts – an acronym collection that includes the IBF, WBO and WBA light-heavyweight titles – belong to Kovalev, a Russian whom Ward has repeatedly called a bully.

“I’m not going to disappoint you,’’ said Kovalev, an unknown amateur in Russia whose steady rise began in North Carolina five years after Ward got big headlines for winning America’s last boxing gold medal at the 2004 Olympics.

In many ways, it’s an unusual fight. To wit: The purses are upside-down. Kovalev, the champion, is getting $2 million or less than half the challenger’s purse. Ward is getting $5 million.

“The challenger gets a boat load of money, but the champion don’t,’’ said Ward trainer Virgil Hunter, who has had a lot to say throughout press conferences and even weigh-ins. “I don’t understand it. Maybe, it’s not true. But it bothers me.’’

Over the last couple of weeks, Hunter has spent a lot of time confronting Kovalev trainer John David Jackson, questioning his credibility and even his readiness on the eve of the bout. As Kovalev and Ward posed after stepping off the scale, Hunter started in on Jackson in an exchange that proved to be the weigh-in’s only fireworks.

He told Jackson that Kovalev looked “a little dry,” suggesting that the Russian might have weakened himself in battle to make weight. Jackson replied, saying that Hunter isn’t taking the punches.

“Ward will,’’ Jackson told him.

Enough said.

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS – Andre Ward has done nothing but win for as long as just about anybody can remember. In fact, it’s been so long since a Ward loss that it takes a little research – or maybe an archaeologist – to figure out exactly when it happened. How it happened.

For a while, Ward’s loss happened he was 13 years old to Ernie Gonzales, who went on to fight to 29 pro bouts as Jesus. After some checking through amateur records, however, that has been corrected. The last loss, also as a 13-year-old, was in fact to John Revish, a former Louisiana junior-welterweight, Ward said.

Amateur records can sometimes as hard to verify as UFO sightings. But you get the idea. Ward’s combined record, pro and amateur, is otherworldly. Over almost two decades, the 32-year-old light-heavyweight hasn’t lost.

The 2004 Olympic gold medalist says he is 125-5 as an amateur. Add that to the 30-0 pro mark he’ll risk Saturday night against Sergey Kovalev at T-Mobil Arena in an HBO pay-per-view bout, and he is 155-5 as a fighter. Modern translation: He’s an adult who doesn’t lose, perhaps because of what he learned against Revish and Gonzalez. Lessons learned as a kid have stayed with Ward the mature fighter. To this day, he and his trainer, Virgil Hunter, recalls the defeats as though they happened yesterday.

“I remember how it felt and I remember telling myself that I won’t let it happen again,’’ Ward said Thursday before a formal news conference at the MGM Grand.

There’s an ongoing guessing game that Kovalev’s long powerful right will do enough damage to pound out a memory that Ward has so agilely, so smartly eluded for so very long. But don’t bet on it.

Gonzales, for one, wouldn’t. The former Phoenix fighter picks Ward to win by unanimous decision. These days, Gonzales, a one-time prospect who went 27-2 with 14 KOs as a middleweight, works with kids in a Houston gym when he isn’t driving a truck to support his family, which includes two sons, 9 and 5. He has watched Ward ever since he won a split decision over him in a controversial bout in Ontario, Calif., a few generations ago.

“I didn’t know who he was then, but I had begun to hear about him,’’ said Gonzales, who says the bout was fought at 139 pounds. “To get to Ward, I had to beat Timothy Bradley.’’

Yeah, that Timothy Bradley.

“Hey, I beat everybody,’’ said Gonzales, whose pro career ended in a crushing knockout loss to Adonis Stevenson in 2012 in Montreal.

Gonzales recalls winning a 3-2 decision. Instead of computer scoring, the bout he said was determined by five ringside judges. To this day, Ward and his trainer, Virgil Hunter, dispute the loss, almost as if it is as controversial today as it was a couple of decades ago.

“Ernie’s mom was one of the judges,’’ Hunter said Thursday.

But Gonzales remembers something else. He recalls a winning strategy. He said Ward was just learning how to use a counter punch.

“I kept my left hand out there and moved my back foot backwards, almost a full foot back,’’ Gonzales said. “He just couldn’t get to to me. But what I remember mostly is that he was a real nice guy. After the fight, we ran into each at the concession stand and he bought me a hot dog.’’

Gonzales looks at today’s Ward and sees a fighter who he believes can thoroughly frustrate Kovalev.

“To me, he’s a lot like Floyd Mayweather,’’ said Gonzales, who was a Mayweather sparring partner for Mayweather’s victory over Robert Guerrero in May, 2013. “It’s just really hard to predict what he’s going to do.’’

It’s only easy to predict that he won’t forget.

By Bart Barry–

Here’s what’s going to happen Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on HBO pay-per-view: American Andre “SOG” Ward will fight Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Ward will verb, Kovalev will verb, and adjective noun will fight adverb until Noun has won a bloody, brutal noun.

In our new postfactual world what matters indeed more than everything else is what one witnesses with his own senses and experiences with her own emotions, and that courts the most attractive element of this fight: Aficionados do not, for once in years and years, have any certainty who will win a pay-per-view main event and have a chance to experience catharsis. Let us rejoice in that before we project a myriad of unrelated grievances on this combat spectacle. It’s OK to rejoice for once, really it is, without fixating on what is known or insisted by others.

Here, I’ll go first: I didn’t see Andre Ward grow up in a biracial home, and therefore don’t much care that it happened; I did not experience the Nagasakis-worth of radiation dumped in Lake Karachay, 100 km northwest of Sergey Kovalev’s hometown, and therefore don’t care much that it happened; I care deeply about what each man will do to the other with his fists and very little about why.

Is that a loss of empathy? No it is not. Empathy is a connection with another creature one experiences genuinely and spontaneously in the presence of that other creature; one does not successfully plan empathy; whatever sadness one feels for a stranger on social media is sympathy, not empathy, and thus open to entire industries committed to its manufacture and monetization. Such pitches are all a way of gaming others’ emotions, and one of the many admirable things about both these men is how little they’ve sold autobiography and identity in lieu of violence. Recently we’ve got more identity from them than before but that is attributable to a couple things: 1. Dreadful competition – since a tremendous stoppage of Chad Dawson four years ago Ward’s resume is, in a word, embarrassing; since making a signature win of a 50-year-old in 2014 Kovalev mostly has marked time and cashed checks – and 2. Floyd Mayweather taught HBO and the rest of the boxing industry this is how fights are sold (some department at Time Warner, we can be sure, has metrics and models, polling in effect, that prove this – and we now know how much more trustworthy big data is than intuition, don’t we?).

No aficionado is going to buy Saturday’s match because of post-Soviet food shortages or drug addiction in Oakland but, one theory goes, if we can get enough sentimentality in the eyes of casual sportsfans perhaps we can flush from his burrow that millionth pay-per-viewer who went underground the morning of May 3, 2015, and anyway aficionados aren’t going anywhere – which is true so long as you don’t keep count or, better yet, don’t publish the count (expect those Pacquiao-Vargas numbers right about the time we get the Cotto-Malignaggi tally).

The best Ward beats the best Kovalev every time they fight from now till their 50th birthdays, but will the best Ward be there to swap hands with Kovalev or will Ward’s weightgain and aforementioned competition send somebody less in the ring? Not if Ward has any say about it, one assumes, and Ward does but perhaps not so much as he and his trainer believe. Ward fetishizes control the way Mayweather did, for much the same reasons, though Ward’s control appears more self-directed than Mayweather’s, which often manifested itself in the way he handicapped and selected opponents – there’s no way in this life or the next Mayweather, in Ward’s position, would have acquiesced to a prime Kovalev.

So long as Ward is in control of himself in the ring Saturday Kovalev has very little chance of doing enough to win this fight. And there just isn’t enough unpredictable in Kovalev to believe otherwise will happen; he outworked old Bernard in every round, sure, but he didn’t hurt him and didn’t surprise him and that’s a problem because while there is no reason to believe Hopkins is a better prizefighter than Ward – greater, yes, but not better – there’s plenty of reason to believe Ward is 19 years younger than Hopkins. That matter of age is important because it speaks to activity, and relentlessness is the reason most intelligently given by those intelligent folks who believe Kovalev may beat Ward.

There’s an argument to be made for Kovalev’s power, too, perhaps, but reports of Kovalev hitting proportionally harder at 175 pounds than Mikkel Kessler or Carl Froch or Allan Green or Arthur Abraham hit at 168 do not feel credible, and Ward took shots from each of those guys and didn’t buckle a bit, so this old adage will favor SOG: Fighters gain weight on their chins more than their fists. Kovalev is sound and mean but not particularly imaginative and he’ll need to show imagination when Ward gets on his chest and wrestles him and fouls him and puts him in an honest-to-goodness fight.

Does Kovalev have the means, the will and fortitude and energy, to react courageously and violently to Ward’s provocation? Yes, and then some. That reaction will be part of Ward’s plan, though, and what happens next is what makes this the most compelling fight of 2016.

I think Ward pieces him up, KO-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Only the records are similar, almost identical. Unbeaten on one resume. Unbeaten on the other. But that’s where the similarities end.

Sergey Kovalev (30-0-1, 26 KOs) and Andre Ward (30-0, 15 KOs) come from different sides of the globe, grew up speaking different languages and eating different foods.

Then, there are their respective career paths. They began at opposite ends of the professional spectrum in a journey that will put them in the same dangerous place, a ring at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena on Nov. 19, in a fight more intriguing than any over the last year-and-a-half.

Ward has the Olympic pedigree, gold in 2004 and the last American man to fight his way on to the medal stand’s top pedestal. When Ward was winning gold, Kovalev was virtually unknown, even at home in Russia.

Ward had fame before he answered his first bell as a pro. Kovalev toiled in anonymity, first in Russia, then North Carolina before anybody in the U.S. could pronounce his name. Now, these light-heavyweights are fighting on equal terms for perhaps the top spot in the pound-for pound debate.

“There’s no A-side and no B-side,’’ Kovalev promoter Kathy Duva of Main Events said this week during a conference call. “It’s two great fighters fighting each other. Sergey holds the titles right now, Ward has held titles in the past. Ward is a legendary fighter; Sergey is trying to become one. …There are certain fights that defy that A-side/B-side description and I think this is one of them.”

Ward, a slight favorite when the bout was announced, is considered the boxer. Kovalev is seen as the puncher. But their assigned roles in an anticipated classic are too simplistic. Both are blessed with ring intelligence as well as an ability to know when and how to adjust.

Kovalev gets the edge in power because he has the better knockout ratio and long, precise right hand as lethal as any in the business. Ward has the edge in boxing skill, in part because he a switch-hitter who seamlessly switches from left to right and back again. Show Ward a style, and he’ll adjust quickly and with chameleon-like subtlety.

The fight is fascinating, because of the psychology. It’s a thinking man’s fight and Kovalev thinks he has the edge.

“For me this is a mental fight,’’ he said. “It’s not who is stronger, but who is smarter and brings best skills into the ring and who is mentally stronger.’’

It’s an old game, one that Ward has played often.

“Mentally, it’s honestly the same to me,’’ he said. “Obviously, there’s a lot at stake and it’s a different challenge moving up in weight, pay-per-view, all of those things make it a little bit different. Whether it’s Alexander Brand or Sergey Kovalev, I approach every situation the same way. I wouldn’t be able to get to this level and stay at this level if I checked in and checked out.

“It’s the same dedication and it’s the same work. For me it’s about trying to be the best in sport where there’s little room for error. I understand that every time I step into the ring and leads to me making sure I prepare accordingly.’’

But the HBO pay-per-view bout ranks as a potential favorite among thinking fight fans because of that anticipated moment, or moments full adjustments and counter adjustments. To wit: Puncher becomes boxer; boxer becomes puncher.

Duva suggests that Kovalev might have an edge because of his life experience in an industrial corner of Russia

“I’ve seen Sergey demonstrate his mental toughness time and time again,’’ she said. “He’s been through more adversity in his life than most fighters have ever even contemplated. I’m aware that Ward has faced adversity, but I never heard Sergey talk about how boxing is a sacrifice, where we frequently hear from Ward about how it is. Sergey’s attitude towards boxing has always been, ‘Oh wow, this is a great opportunity and I’m so happy I’m doing it.’

“I know he has tough times and there’s days at the gym where he probably doesn’t feel that way. But his attitude has always been about loving his work, and loving what he’s doing. He can’t wait for the fight to start. He works hard because he wants to be the best. It’s not just his mental toughness, it’s his mental attitude, I think it’s very positive and I think that’s the thing that carries him.

“That and the chip on his shoulder. That has been there forever. Just wanting to prove he’s the best. You take that combination of work ethic, and chip on his shoulder and focus like a laser, and then loving what he’s doing. Sometimes, when he gets in the ring, he looks like he’s about to have a steak. That’s the kind of look on his face. I think that’s part of what makes it so much fun to watch him.”

The counter is Ward’s life experience, told for the first time in a poignant HBO documentary. Ward lost his dad.

“This is the first time that I really, really opened up,’’ he said. “From my standpoint, I’m a private person, Number One. Number Two, I’ve always wanted to respect my mom and dad. My dad was a dying addict. My mother is doing well right now and I’ve always seen the rags to riches, the kids that come from the ghetto, and I didn’t want to come into the game with that type of story preceding me.

“I wanted it to be about who I was as a person, about my talent, my ability. Then I felt like at the right time I’ll start to open up about it. It took twelve years. I’ve been a professional for almost twelve years now and it kind of got me going, where I just started to feel content with myself. I feel like my supporters and my fans know me and know part of my story. But I felt it was important to open up and pull back the curtain and let them know it hasn’t always been easy.’’

No, it hasn’t. Not for either fighter. Both have been tested and tempered by different kinds of adversity that has brought them to a time and place that might be defining.
Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on UNLV’s campus or thereabouts Filipino senator Manny Pacquiao unanimously decisioned American welterweight titlist Jessie Vargas in a good match that proved Pacquiao’s fighting class has not dissipated fast as the welterweight division’s. Vargas was a top-10 guy at 147 pounds whom Pacquiao beat conclusively without exerting more than 45 seconds of any round, the same way Pacquiao conclusively beat Timothy Bradley, a top-5 guy at 147 pounds, in April.

Pacman’s fighting capacities have not diminished nearly quick as American interest in his capacities – as represented by purse guarantees – have: His reflexes and savagery are down about 20-percent from where they were before Mayweather while his Saturday purse guarantee was about 20-percent of what it was before Mayweather. Of course an 80-percent paycut from $20 million still makes Pacquiao what American conservatives call a “job creator” and Pacquiao at 80-percent remains very much better than other titlists in the welterweight division though nothing close to enough to beat Floyd Mayweather till Money’s 45th birthday.

Pity that Manny cannot be remanded to a cryogenic lab till 2021, then, especially if greed and desperation force a rematch of the Fight to Ruin Boxing which they will if Manny and his promoter have any say because Manny’s promoter has nary a better option – whatever talent Bud Crawford has, whatever doggedness Timothy Bradley maintains, neither guy has more than a city much less a state much less a country much less a global region he captivates or might monetize.

The preamble of the moment, the consensus throatclearing, goes something like: Pacquiao, while not nearly the man he was in his prime, is still very good. That’s about half right. Pacquiao actually is much nearer the man he was in his prime than we say he is; what has changed is our perception – our memories and our expectations and our tolerance and ourselves generally.

That’s a bold statement, Mr. Barry, are you being dumbly controversial to court traffic in the spirit of contemporary politics?

Yes! actually no. I watched the Russian rebroadcast of Pacquiao-Vargas on Sunday morning (pro tip: putting the words ““???? ???” in front of your YouTube search criteria for most any match gets you an early rebroadcast without perception-skewing commentary to suffer) and then, ready for a mindbending trip through the fourth dimension, I called up Pacquiao-Morales 1, a match Pacquiao lost, sure, but a Pacquiao 11 1/2 years younger and 15 pounds smaller and presumably quicker than today’s iteration. What I expected was the nonlinear thing that happens when you juxtapose any heavyweight title match of the 1990s with a Wlad Klitschko fight – wait, you mean heavyweights once fought with bent knees and courage? (OK, that’s not fair: Klitschko fought his courage most every title defense) – but that’s not what I got.

Pacquiao was more explosive and frankly weirder back in 2005 but he didn’t have fractionally the wiles he has today, and yes, that’s allowing for the feral qualitative disparity between Erik Morales and Jessie Vargas. Pacquiao’s head movement is perhaps the largest difference between then and now and that’s a tribute to Pacquiao’s latterday conditioning. Head movement is rarely a matter of moving one’s head; effective head movement is at least pendulous upperbody movement but best when born of the feet and knees and thighs. Eleven years ago Pacquiao windshield-wipered his hands back and forth in lieu of moving his head and Morales hit him often and hard with the Mexican’s worldclass jab.

Part of what doomed Vargas, aside from trying to do what Juan Manuel Marquez did without understanding why Marquez thought to do it and therefore a hundred microscopic adjustments of both physique and character Marquez learned to make (ain’t nothing like the real thing, Jes-sie) was Vargas’ inability to jab at uncertainty after Pacquiao snatched his confidence in round 2. Nearly no one can jab confidently at uncertainty – if there were anything natural about it the double-end bag’d not exist – and Pacquiao’s creation and maintenance of defensive uncertainty (offensively he’s been a wildcard his whole life) is one sure source of his longevity.

And even at 80-percent Pacquiao is fast in an elite way today’s fighters are not. There are quick hands aplenty out there, Showtime Sports, formerly known as The PBC, now bursts with them, but that’s different from being fast in a way that instantly closes space as Pacquiao does in yards, not inches. While Pacquiao had seen a few dozen Vargases in his career, Saturday it was clear in the match’s second half Vargas’d not before seen a Pacquiao, and some combination of fatigue and inactive offensive imagination and hyperactive defensive imagination (anxiety about consequences) kept Vargas’ hands at home while Senator Pacquiao, ever a vote-counter, did barely more than he needed do to win each round.

Never again will Pacquiao be quick to the breach as he was the night Marquez pistonstroked him, in part because every opponent now chants “jab-feint / leapback / jab / cross” through every trainingcamp, in part because Pacquiao no longer thrills quite so much at the fray, and in part because there’s no need. Today Senator Pacquiao resides in a curious yet lucrative space: He’s good enough, still, to unify the welterweight division and not nearly good enough to win more than two rounds against Mayweather.

At least it’s lucrative.

Bart Barry can be reach via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Manny Pacquiao tries to regain the WBO Welterweight title from Jessie Vargas.  The action kicks off at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT / 9 AM Sunday in General Santos City, Philippines.  The action kicks off with 3 more world title bouts as Nonito Dnaire takes on Jessie Magdaleno for the WBO Super Bantamweight title; Oscar Valdez battles Hiroshige Osawa for the WBO Featherweight title and Zou Shiming battles Pratisak Phaprom in a rematch for the WBO Flyweight title

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED…THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1 Jab, right and jab from Vargas..right…Left from Pacquiao …Short uppercut

Round 2 Straight left from Pacquiao ..Combination..Left from Vargas…HARD STRAIGHT LEFT AND DOWN GOES VARGAS…

Round 3 Body and head from Vargas..Staright left from Pacquiao and and another..Hard jab..straight left..Right from Vargas,,

Round 4 Stleft…raight left..lead left..Counter left..

Round 5 Pacquiao lands to a straight left

Round 6 Staright right from Vargas…Vargas right eye swelling..lead left from Pacquiao…Right

Round 7 Jab from Pacquiao …Nice right from Vargas…Jab from Pacquiao..

Round 8 Jab from Pacquiao..Hard right from Vragas…left hook..Vargas bleeding above his nose..right from Vragas..Jabs from Pacquiao..left…left..

Round 9 Good right from Vargas..Left from Pacquiao

Round 10 Combination from Pacquiao…left…good right hook…Jab..right from Vargas..

Round 11 Pacquiao lands a jab..Straight right from Vargas..Left hook…

Round 12 lead left from Pacquiao..Body shot from Vargas..counter left from Pacquiao..

Vargas landed 147 of 662   Pacquiao landed  147 of 409

114-113; 118-109; 118-109 for MANNY PACQUIAO 

Round 1 Jab from Magdaleno..

Round 2 Body shot from Magdaleno..Left hook from Donaire…Staright left from Magdaleno..Good right from Donaire..

Round 3 Right from Magdaleno..Body shot…head shot..Body shot..Left to body from Donaire..

Round 4 Left from Donaire..Right hook from Magdaleno…Magdaleno bleeding over the left eye…Straight right from Donaire..

Round 5 Left from Donaire…Right..doube jab..Body shot from Magdaleno..

Round 6: 3 jabs and right hook from Mgdaleno..Body shot

Round 7 Hook from Donaire..right from Magdaleno..Good right to body from Donaire..

Round 8 2 lefts to body from Magdaleno..Counter jab from Donaire..Good right hook from Magdaleno..Body shot..Right from Dinaire..right hook from Magdaleno..Body shoot..Uppercut from Donaire..

Round 9 Blood over right eye of Donaire..Big left from Magdaleno…ripping shots on the ropes..

Round 10 Right rocks Magdaleno..Swelling under left eye of Donaire..right from Magdaleno..Good right from Donaire..Left from Magdaleno

Round 11  Counter right from Donaire..Counter right from Magdaleno..Right from Donaire..Hook from Magdaleno..Good body shot..

Round 12 Good body shot and hook from Magdaleno..Good right from Donaire..Right hook from Magdaleno…Hard right from Donaire..right..Left hook from Magdaleno

Magdaleno 154-500  Donaire  132-404–Punches

116-112 twice and 118-110 FOR NEW CHAMPION..JESSIE MAGDALENO

Round 1 Valdez lands a left hook to the body..Good left hook..Jab..

Round 2 Hard right from Valdez

Round 3 Big right and left hook from Valdez..left hook and right..Hard jab

Round 4 BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES OSAWA…Huge right hands from Valdez…Jab from Osawa…Uppercut from Valdez..Right from Osawa…Hook from Valdez

Round 5 Hook and right from Valdez

Round 6 2 right hooks from Valdez from the southpaw stance

Round 7 HUGE FLURRY ON THE ROPES..VALDEZ RIPPING SHOTS TO THE HEAD AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Combination from Shiming..Hard combination…Right from Phaprom…Body from Shiming..

ROUND 2 HARD RIGHT AND DOWN GOES PHAPROM

Round 3 Good right from Shiming..Nice right and left hook..

Round 4:  Right from Phaprom..Hard right…Right..Body shot from Shiming…Jab..

Round 5: 3 punch combo from Shiming…Uppercut..Body from Phapron..Left hook from Shiming….Left hook

Round 6 Shiming lands a body shot..Right …Hard 1-2…Flush right..Phapron saying come on…

Round 7 Shiming lands a right…Crisp right

Round 8 Blood over left eye of Phapron..Jab from Shiming..Good exchange with Shiming landing hard head shots…Big left hook from Phapron…left hook..

Round 9 Good right from Shiming…Shiming shuffling and lands a combination..

Round 10 Phapron lands a right to the body…1-2 from Shimimg

Round 11 Body combination from Shiming

Round 12  

PUNCH STATS  107-503 for Phapron…Shiming was   347-778

120-107  twice and 119-108 for ZOU SHIMING