By Bart Barry-

HOUSTON – In the good times there was a lameness to this city that didn’t make the brochures; places closed early, nothing opened Sundays, and when folks told you how proud they were of their city it felt strained. That lameness has been replaced by a sort of anger that happens to cities that once boomed then stopped booming then stopped telling others how much they were booming (salesmen necessarily being the most oblivious of rejection) and then resigned themselves to settling in, and whose transplants now look about and realize they didn’t want to live here in the first place.

We were gathered in this city, just the same, for an eight-match Top Rank card that featured the returns of hometowner Juan Diaz and Colorado’s Mike Alvarado, and both men won by knockout, but only one of them, Diaz, should continue fighting.

No one ever told me he moved to Houston and loved it. There was money here, though, and that money calmed the slight uneasiness one feels when he’s uprooted himself for something that isn’t quite-quite. Two years ago crude oil was trading over $100 per barrel. Today it is heaving to return to $40. This city’s humor rises and falls with those prices, and right now its humor is lower than it has been anytime in the last decade – except last month; oil is up $10 since then, and it’s springtime after all, so how about them green shoots?

The boom times are not reflective times, and what a city does with its wealth while it booms sets a floor of sorts for where it goes when it busts (except in prolonged cases like Detroit, the one ever-busting American city of the last halfcentury). This city did some Texas tackiness, big hair and sparkly things, sure, though nothing that approached Dallas’ scale, and its skyline remains alluring, but it neglected wholly its infrastructure. With all the money that sloshed about, one wonders, and did wonder, why are its surface streets barely fit for urban attack vehicles (ah, the Hummer – enduring symbol of a different bust: Phoenix housing market) and otherwise unfit for any sensible car?

Back when Austin, this state’s capital, was actually weird – not “keep Austin weird” weird – it got by with a hippy sensibility like: we’re all in this together, so yield the right of way when you know I can’t see round the tree at the intersection. Houston’s eroding infrastructure is making it weirder every day, though without any sensibility but greed to bind its citizenry; in Houston, now, you drive like a maniac because some primal intuition tells you you’re safer that way, and you are – because when you’re moving faster than the loons on either side, you regain half your attention by no longer needing a rearview mirror.

Arena Theatre was a fine, if well-hidden, venue to watch a fight Saturday, and only a sucker paid for better than the cheapest seat, since there wasn’t a distant view in the entire bowl, and the ring sat up shiny in the venue’s very center. Heard in the Top Rank section: “Small rings make for great matchmakers.” The ring was tiny; no one larger than a middleweight set foot in it during the card’s eight matches, and everyone looked large.

There’s a slapdash South American-mercado feel to much Spanish-language television, the don Francisco style of having the host perform commercials onstage during a show, and it interrupted the pleasure of Saturday’s card, some. Television owns boxing, of course, the programming director tells the commission when it may ring the opening bell, but the delays of a show performed for Spanish-language television are, even by the known standard, a touch gratuitous. Seated a few rows behind the UniMás commentary team with a clear view of their monitors, one sees the main event is being delayed by week-old commercials advertising the co-main event that already went off; it’s a sloppy, sales-blitz mentality wherein the host sees himself as an emcee, not a journalist, and his target demographic meanwhile slumps its shoulders and trudges back to the beerline.

Saturday’s crowd was the usual mix of hometown fight figures and familiars and friends and hangerson, and local businessmen reveling in others’ danger. A lawfirm gathered in the row behind me, and when they weren’t hellbent on outnamedropping one another, they were admonishing the fighters to “punch him in the neck” or “knock his head off” or “finish him”! And so.

Mile High Mike looked exactly the same Saturday as he did the last time you saw him, and that’s a problem, obviously, because the last time you saw him he was stopped by a limited fighter, albeit a former champion, and this time he plied his wares against a lighthitter with 10 knockouts and six losses in 25 matches. Eventually Alvarado bludgeoned him down with wild righthands, but Mile High Mike and his rehabby salespitch, “I’ve been fighting my demons as much as my opponents,” are through with major championship prizefighting.

The Baby Bull looked about the same, too, and that’s a really good thing. Never the bearer of a pinup physique, Juan Diaz still weighs and fights the exact same way at 32 as he did at 22. He does not set on any punch so he does not have concussive power, but he doesn’t need it: Because he’s somehow stayed in the same weightclass, where his chin is proven, and because he possesses more belief in his own conditioning than just about anyone in the game today, and because there’s exactly no chance of another Nate Campbell or Juan Manuel Marquez or even Paulie Malignaggi showing up at lightweight in the next five years, Diaz will make a competitive and fun title match with anyone he fights.

It was good to see Juan Diaz do so well in front of his friends and family.

The best sight of all, though, was Israel Vazquez, the color guy on the UniMás broadcast team, being as unassuming in retirement as ever he was vicious in the ring. The fans queued up for photos with him, and Izzy lost himself in their adoration, requiring several times the program director to scold him for nearly missing cues. Vazquez’s delta – violence in combat to gentleness in society – is the greatest I’ve seen in our sport that has so very few happy endings, and how properly joyful it makes me to think Israel might be one of them.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Timothy Bradley, a genuine personality in a business often defined by a feint, has a chance to eliminate any questions about an item on his record. He doesn’t have to correct it. A victory over Manny Pacquiao on June 9, 2012 is there and always will be.

No asterisk included.

No apology either.

But the questions, like echoes, are still there from the crazy controversy that raged for weeks after the scorecards awarded him a split decision over Pacquiao. To this day, there aren’t many people who think Bradley won. There are times when it sounds as though Bradley isn’t convinced either.

In a conference call this week, he dropped another hint that says he still has some doubts. In talking about his third fight with Pacquiao on April 9 at Las Vegas MGM Grand, he talked about the bout almost as though it was a chance to beat Pacquiao for the first time.

“It is an opportunity for my kids to talk about years from now with their classmates – that their father beat Manny Pacquiao,’’ he said.

Actually, his kids can say that to their classmates now, but probably not without most of the school shouting them down with the same heated argument that tormented Bradley and his family for too long.

Perhaps, his comment was just a slip. He was answering a question about whether he was weary of fighting Pacquiao.

No, he said, he welcomed a third chance. Then, he hinted at what virtually everyone has believed since those scorecards were announced nearly four years ago. Bradley has never been able to carry off a feint for too long. His genuine nature won’t let him. But it’s more than even that.

There’s a sense that he wants to eliminate some of the questions still in the public mind and perhaps in his own. A victory on April 9 might do that.

“Everyone has their own opinion regarding the first fight,’’ he said. “How ever way you want to look at it, it was a very close fight. The second fight, Pacquiao definitely won that fight hands down.’’

Bradley goes into the third fight with a different trainer in Teddy Atlas and his wife Monica as his manager. He promises Pacquiao will be encountering a much different fighter than the he saw in 2012 and again in a rematch decision over Bradley on April 12, 2014.

“This time around I have a new guy — Teddy Atlas — a guy who analyzes fighters for a living,’’ Bradley said. “That’s what he does — he’s an analyst and a trainer. The approach this time is going to be a lot different and I will be looking to exploit Pacquiao’s weaknesses.’’

The weaknesses have been there, brought on by erosion in speed and perhaps a more cautious nature that is summed by Pacquiao’s failure to score a knockout since 2009.

Pacquiao isn’t the same guy. Then again, neither is Bradley.

In Bradley, however, the most intriguing change might simply be his health. He got injured in each of the first two bouts. In 2012, he won the fight. But the winner was in a wheelchair at the post-fight conference with a fractured left foot and a sprained right ankle. In 2014, the muscle mass in his right calf sustained tears in two places.

It begs a question: What would have happened in the first two if Bradley’s legs had not betrayed him? Of course, there’s another question: Is he just prone to leg injuries and about to suffer another one or three?

But Bradley is confident his legs will carry him to a victory that this nobody will question this time.

He says he was over-trained and under-fed for the first two fights. Under former trainer Joel Diaz, he say he did too much running when he wasn’t in the gym. He also was a vegan. Beans and no beef are a diet without a combo for a fighter in training.

Between the steaks, Bradley says “we don’t run on off days anymore. We don’t do any of that stuff. Everything now just feels like it’s all down to a science the way Teddy’s got this thing orchestrated.”

Orchestrated, perhaps, in a genuine attempt to remove some lingering doubts that are a matter of record.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Arena Theatre in Houston, Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz and “Mile High” Mike Alvarado will return to prizefighting on an UniMás telecast. Diaz will fight a Mexican lightweight named Fernando Garcia, and Alvarado will fight a Mexican welterweight named Saul Corral. Garcia and Corral appear to be statement-type opponents; Diaz and Alvarado will either use such men to make flattering statements about their futures by dominating them, or there will be statements made by others about overdue retirements.

I’ll be there because I did not expect to be ringside again for a fight featuring either man, let alone both, and I do not expect to have such a chance again, and I wish our sport comprised more men like Diaz and Alvarado once were.

I have been ringside for four of Juan Diaz’s last six fights, and while I did not realize it till time came to write this column, in retrospect, I’m glad it’s been that way. I knew little about the Baby Bull when I sat ringside for his 2006 match against Fernando Angulo at Chase Field, but his activity was infectious, and his selfbelief exceptional for a fluffy lightstriker. Volume punchers, men like Diaz and Timothy Bradley, are compelling fighters because of their limitations, because their offenses are more pesky than concussive, unlike sluggers’, and their defenses are steady applications of offense with a dusting of head movement, unlike boxers’.

There are few fighters whose style I enjoy more than Diaz’s – and one of those few is Juan Manuel Marquez, the man whose style ruined Diaz in one of the very best matches I’ve covered from ringside. That match happened in Houston more than seven years ago, a fact that dates this column sympathetically or ruthlessly whatever one’s philosophy of time, and it marked an apogee of sorts for Marquez, a moment of lightweight supremacy just before his own greed and his promoter’s greed and guilelessness got him humiliated in a sparring match with the world’s best welterweight, Floyd Mayweather. (The lesson from that match: Tossing boulders at altitude and drinking your own piss, training in the naturalest way possible in other words, is dimwitted; a year or so later, Juan Manuel contacted Memo and things got supernatural for his second campaign at welter.)

By the time Diaz fought Marquez the first time, in a Toyota Center that was full and loud, he was no longer undefeated, having been beaten by Nate Campbell in a Don King-special event conducted in a Quintana Roo bullring, the culmination of a weird promotional relationship initiated in 2006 when King, realizing he’d never sellout a Phoenix baseball stadium with a Belarusian and Shannon Briggs, heard a Latino ticketseller named Diaz might be about to sign a contract with Golden Boy Promotions, and finding Diaz’s pen dangled cautiously over his new Golden Boy contract, King slipped a King contract in its stead.

Diaz and King were not a sensible match, and eventually Diaz was with Golden Boy Promotions, and through fifteen minutes appeared ready to devour Marquez at Toyota Center. Those of us ringside fretted openly about the cost of Marquez’s pride; Diaz did not strike hard enough to unseam Marquez with one punch or 20, and as Marquez looked old and worn and Diaz appeared much the larger man, we verily worried something tragic might befall Marquez before the 12th round concluded.

Goodness, but we were wrong. Marquez made of Diaz his most gorgeous finish (until the Pacquiao icing years later), stubbornly wagering his straight punches would best Diaz’s crooked ones no matter their quantitative disparity. Diaz fell prey to the uppercut like every volume puncher must, tallying shots on Marquez so feverishly he neglected to notice his weight fully spilled overknee, and Marquez, his era’s master closer, brought Diaz’s unconsciousness with a customary precision and lack of ruth.

Their rematch was a dud fought in a soulless casino while the Vegas economy experienced gravity in a vacuum. And with that the Baby Bull was finished with boxing and ready to become a lawyer. Initially I didn’t care when he returned because it felt, like most of our sport’s comebacks, a fated mix of betrayal and desperation.

Writing of which, “Mile High” Mike will be in Saturday’s co-main, his first ringside sighting since the autohumiliation he perpetrated on himself and his fellow Coloradoans 14 months ago in his second rematch with Brandon Rios. The standard ploy, changing trainers and promising rededication, was not going to be enough for Alvarado to sell his return, and so he attended rehab and got married.

Promoter Top Rank forgives Alvarado his numerous transgressions because Alvarado atones properly; Alvarado has fought five times since 2012, when his career was reresurrected after legal issues aplenty, and what fights were not with Rios were with the aforementioned Marquez and Ruslan Provodnikov – five consecutive fights with any combination of Provodnikov and Rios and Marquez exceeds in peril the product of every 2015 PBC main event multiplied by 50, and so Alvarado gets forgiven. The beating Alvarado took from Provodnikov in 2013 was mansized and vigorous; it was the only time I recall seeing at ringside a defending champion wince in the first round of a title fight, as Alvarado did after several of Provodnikov’s facinorous blows befell him.

I’m an unapologetic fan of Diaz and Alvarado both; I’ve traveled to Nevada and Colorado to see prime versions of the men and consider those trips time and resources well-consumed. Neither is good enough, anymore, for me to leave the state of Texas to see, but either is worth the 200-mile drive to Houston, and the two of them together, a treat. This nostalgia tour continues along happily.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

Jose Benavidez Jr. is considering several options, including a move up in weight, in an attempt to re-ignite a career that has stalled since Top Rank thought about putting him in against Terence Crawford, yet decided on Hank Lundy.

Benavidez, unbeaten (24-0, 16 KOs) at 140 pounds, was considered a leading possibility for Crawford, who on Feb. 27 blew away Lundy in a fifth-round stoppage on HBO in The Theater at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

But Benavidez didn’t look good in scoring a unanimous decision on Dec. 12 over unknown Sidney Siqueira of Brazil on a Univision card in Tucson that featured emerging featherweight Oscar Valdez in a sensational victory.

The crowd booed Benavidez, whose rope-a-dope tactics are not popular. He said he had the flu. At the weigh-in, he was 152.4 pounds, 4.4 heavier than the contracted 148 for a non-title fight. Between rounds, he struggled to breathe.

It’s not clear whether that performance knocked the Phoenix fighter out of consideration for Crawford, whom he called out repeatedly before the Tucson card. But Benavidez didn’t regret the decision to fight, despite the flu.

“No, not at all’’ his father, trainer and manager, Jose Benavidez Sr. said from Hill Street Boxing in Los Angeles where he is training his younger son, David Benavidez, for an appearance on the Chris Algieri-Errol Spence Jr. card on April 16 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. “I mean, he was in the co-main event. In that kind of situation, you’re never right. Imagine the reaction if we had canceled out.

“At the same time, I knew he could beat the guy. It was a big risk. We knew he’d win. But we also knew he wouldn’t look good. But the crowd thought he should of stopped him. I thought he should have stopped, too. But he was sick.’’

The best that can be said is that Benavidez emerged from difficult night with his unbeaten record intact. Still, one of boxing’s brightest prospects six years ago faces an uncertain future. He no longer has the WBA’s interim 140-pound belt, according to his father. He took it from Mauricio Herrera about sixteen months ago in a decision as controversial as any in 2014.

After defending it once in a 12th-round stoppage of Jorge Paez Jr. last May, the WBA ordered a mandatory for the acronym’s regular belt against Italian Michele di Rocco (40-1-1, 18 KOs), an Italian. That’s when Benavidez found out what interim really means.

“They stripped him,’’ the senior Benavidez said. “It’s kind of ridiculous what they wanted. They wanted us to go fight over there. They wanted us to fight for very little money. Then, they wanted us to pay the sanctioning fee. It didn’t make sense.

“I mean, we were trying to fight Crawford, or Jessie Vargas, or Viktor Postol. Those fights make sense.’’

Dollars, too.

Now, common sense says it’s time for the 5-foot-11 Benavidez to move up to welterweight. He’ll be 24 years old on May 15.

“I think we go to 147 and stay there, unless something big breaks like Crawford, or Postol, or something like that,’’ Benavidez Sr. said. “He’s still young. The body hasn’t really changed much. He could definitely make 140 for a big opportunity. If not, we’ll just stay at 147.

“But I do think he needs big fights. So many of these guys he’s been fighting, there’s just no motivation.’’

Nothing has been scheduled, yet. However, Benavidez is expected to resume training with brother David next week in Los Angeles.

“We want to fight, but I don’t what’s going to happen,’’ his father said. “We’re just going to stay focused and try to regroup. Hopefully something comes up. You never know.’’

By Bart Barry

Wednesday HBO released a statement about Manny Pacquiao’s weeks-old statement about the prizefighter’s interpretation of the Bible’s anticipation of the current LGBTQ platform. There is rarely a reason to interrogate press releases from cable networks, but this one seemed portentous: One opened the email thinking HBO, in an incredible expression of solidarity with oppressed persons everywhere, had announced its refusal to condone Pacquiao’s hate speech by cancelling its distribution of the Filipino’s match with Timothy Bradley in April.

Well, no, actually – of course not. Instead, in a manifestation of what groupthink imbecility corporations reduce themselves to whenever trying to accomplish anything different from revenue (like moral judgements), the network decided to condemn Pacquiao’s sincerely held, sincerely stated and sincerely reiterated beliefs by implying, in the insincerest way possible, the network’s endorsement of Pacquiao would continue unabated because of its “obligation to both fighters” – only a network far less scrupulous than HBO, in other words, might punish Bradley for Pacquiao’s ignorance.

But why bother? why now? what could this accomplish? Answer: To illustrate tidily how Donald Trump is, in March, nearer to becoming our 45th President in November than any contemplative person in January imagined he would be.

It’s the insincerity of the HBO statement that rankles, and since HBO is a media company, it should be instructive for us, the large percentage of the country that cannot grasp whence Donald Trump’s popularity derives, to contrast the event of HBO’s statement with the event of Trump’s ascent. Trump embellishes most everything, exaggerates his own record, obfuscates, and often says things he knows are not true, but he never appears insincere. His appeal is his sincerity – his zealous belief in his own greatness; anything might be said in service to it – and his supporters are not the idiots we think they are.

For a few presidential cycles now, the dog-whistle metaphor has been fashionable, likening the insincere and euphemistic bits politicians say to a sound humans cannot hear but puppies can. Probably this sort of analogy first achieved acclaim with Ronald Reagan’s laudable/infamous (depending on one’s region and political bent) States’ Rights speech in Mississippi 36 years ago, a speech that winked at Southern segregationists while giving its speaker all sorts of deniability.

If employing rhetorical irony is saying something that means more than merely the denotative sum of its words, being cynical often is saying something that means nearly the opposite of its literal contents – “all natural ingredients” for instance – and cynicism is inferring from another’s rhetoric its opposite. While the crafters of dog-whistle statements would defend them as irony, Shakespeare’s own mechanics, they rely on the cynicism of their audiences, which in its own tawdry way attributes more talent and imagination to these audiences’ members than outsiders generally do.

What Trump practices is not dog-whistle so much as dog-tail; in all of nature, there are few things as decisively honest as a dog’s tail. A dog does not wag its tail ironically, a dog does not eat food it dislikes then whip its tail sarcastically about, a dog may misunderstand, and a dog may stand bemused by human indecision, but a dog’s tail ever tells the truth. What Trump’s supporters watch is his tail; when he is speaking in circles, when he is contradicting himself, when he is insulting his opponents, when he is effusively praising himself, his supporters ask only one question: Does he believe this? Their support for him as a candidate, not his platform or ideas that are alternately threadbare and frightening and frighteningly threadbare, are proportionate to how enthusiastically his supporters see his tail wagging and subsequently how enthusiastically their own tails wag back.

Well what have we here? This column has now done the unthinkable, likening humans to animals, the sort of ruse that got the congressman from Sarangani Province summarily scolded by blogs across the fruited plane, disowned by an apparel manufacturer notorious for its international labor practices, and called “insensitive, offensive and deplorable” by HBO.

Really, you say, your own tail beginning to stir, a broadcaster stated something that honestly about one of its assets?

Well, no, actually – of course not. Manny is none of these things to HBO on the eve of a broadcasting event with revenue expectations in the millions of dollars; his “recent comments”, you see, those are the insensitive and offensive and deplorable things, not the beloved lad nicknamed Pacman who once eradicated world poverty with yellow gloves (to pick the one ludicrous Pacquiao prefight storyline for which HBO is not responsible).

Saturday after results from the Republican primaries came in, Trump opened the floor to media inquiries by saying, “I would love to take a couple questions from these dishonest people.” It’s no wonder his supporters howled and cheered; much as members of the media may hold them in contempt, much as they may coin ironical terms like “low information” and “poorly educated” as descriptors, Trump supporters hate members of the media all the more, and their surging hatred now sloshes over every abstract and arbitrary barrier, from decency to integrity to education to partisanship.

Trump’s contempt is genuine; he considers his opponents beneath him, and he hates the dishonesty of an electoral/press cycle in which the candidates who purchase the most advertising traditionally receive the most coverage from a media that calls itself independent, unbiased, objective, and fair and balanced. The sole way to disabuse Trump’s supporters of their fervor is to prove in some playful and offhanded manner their man is inauthentic.

That feat, though, would require both authentic spokesmen and media outlets capable of recognizing and disseminating authentic commentary.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in New York City, undefeated Nebraska junior welterweight Terence “Bud” Crawford, an HBO fighter, put the sixth blemish on Philadelphian Hank Lundy’s ledger via TKO in round 5. Though Crawford’s assault did not take Lundy’s consciousness, it took his spirit, much as was anticipated by their records and all who watched. Crawford is aware there is an unseemly dearth of viable opponents for him, with the men who might’ve played challengers in bygone eras currently being overpaid by the PBC to behave like titlists, and he properly beats them to submission. If Crawford is not creating new aficionados, he is at least ensuring no more aficionados depart our sport on his watch.

Once televised boxing became predictable, we moved our commentaries to new subjects, and many concerned judges and their disagreeable tallies and referees and their improper stoppages, ever early or late, and point deductions, ever too much or too little, and if it isn’t an apt substitute for writing especially well about great spectacles, our unfortunate choice is partly palliated by the quality of the spectacles: It is no more possible to write greatly about a mediocre subject than stitch a great suit from burlap. Saturday’s match was not mediocre fabric, quite, it was in its punchcount and intent about good, though certainly not great, and what precluded its mediocrity, or eventual and desperately required salvation from mediocrity, was a choice its referee made in the closing moments of round 3.

Steve Willis, whose trademark enthusiasm is appearing ever more frequently during televised mainevents, chose not to act at the end of the third round, and it redeemed almost immediately a match that was strolling, and feinting and flexing, its way towards mediocrity. With a halfminute remaining in the round, Hank Lundy tried valiantly to close distance by swinging wildly and folding forward, and once Crawford began to set his weight on the back of Lundy’s neck in mammals’ universal manner of establishing dominance over another, Lundy flashed his torso leftwards then upwards, jamming the top of his head exactly where Crawford did not want it: against his chin. Crawford covered Lundy’s head with both blue gloves, and a leveraging match ensued with Lundy in the manifestly favorable position of having a lower center of gravity.

It has become an unspoken clause of sorts, call it the Mayweather Rule, that a fight’s promotional a-side shall not be discomfited by anything but a perfectly clean punch. While the b-side can be forearmed, elbowed, clinched, suffocated and occasionally butted, the a-side must not lose his title on anything but unspotted punching with the middle knuckle of his opponent’s fist – all other tactics must be treated as infractions and subjected to intense audiovisual scrutiny.

Referee Willis eschewed the Mayweather Rule, very much the way Tony Weeks got the Mayweather Rule ratified in 2014 (when, after allowing Marcos Maidana to strike Floyd Mayweather without Mayweather’s express permission a few too many times, in a fight, Weeks found himself quietly barred from officiating Mayweather matches evermore), and an actual fight began, allaying what fears aficionados developed after seeing the usually composed Crawford behave brashly during fightweek media events. Crawford is no one’s bitch, and he responded to Lundy’s aggression exactly as a champion should do: he clubbed his challenger nearly unconscious in the next five minutes.

Before that, though, Crawford found himself forced, via Lundy’s appropriate activity and Willis’ more appropriate inactivity, to grab hold of Lundy and wrestle him away. What was Willis doing meanwhile? HBO viewers will never know; blessedly Willis was removed enough from the combatants the frame did not contain him through much of it.

Crawford got Lundy off him and began to give Lundy what Lundy wanted and needed: less space to close. This is the sort of choice Crawford makes that makes him a better entertainer than his stylistically similar peers across the dial on the PBC. Crawford had the size and reflexes to discourage Lundy with space; however many inches taller Crawford actually is, he must’ve looked a foot taller and a meter farther away to Lundy than he was in Saturday’s first 2 1/2 rounds. Crawford, were he a PBC prospect, would have gone on feinting and flexing and scowling and leaping inrange long enough to pushoff a chest jab, and then leaping out of space, over and over, hoping Lundy might fatigue enough to make a sustained attack perfectly safe, and even then perhaps not chancing it. Crawford must know this; it would be impossible to watch boxing in the last decade, much less practice it at such a level, without noticing men of good reflexes no longer need to get struck in order to make their first million; so long as you purport to ferocity and make c-level opponents look bad, boxing needn’t be a fullcontact sport for you.

Crawford has the excellent fortune of being a Top Rank fighter, not a PBC asset; he is developed by the same experts who crafted Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao and Oscar De La Hoya, and they didn’t develop those men by tolerating a pacifistic approach to combat (unbeknownst to most of the Money Team, in his first eight fights young Mayweather was compared to Mike Tyson). Crawford is a finisher, the way Top Rank expects its fighters to be; the rare case of a Top Rank fighter not being a born finisher, Tim Bradley for instance, is marked by that man’s willingness to undergo hellacious tests regularly. Not every match must end in a knockout, but boxing’s dwindled fanbase is through with talented athletes moving cautiously for a halfhour then suing posterity for scorecard points – particularly after making fraudulent prefight promises during press conferences and other promotional perfunctories.

Crawford expects to knock his opponents rigid, and he knows his promoter expects the same. If there are moments in his matches Crawford wonders about his professional choice to practice his brutal profession quite so brutally, he draws reinforcement from pride and expectations. Crawford is a very proud man, and his corner and promoter have very high expectations.

A good bit of punching, a restrained ref, and a decisive ending; if Saturday was not boxing’s best, it was a pleasant distance from its worst.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

 

 

 

Follow all the action LIVE  from Ringside at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden as Terence Crawford defends the WBO Jr. Welterweight title against Hank Lundy.  The action begins at 10 PM ET /7 PM PT with a Lightweight contest between future star Fleix Verdejo taking on William Silva in a battle of undefeated Lightweights.

THE PAGE WILL REFRESH EVERY 60 SECONDS AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1 Lundy lands a left..Jab from Crawford..

Round 2

Round 3 Crawford lands a left from distance…Hard jab from Lundy…Left from Crawford..Jab..

Round 4 Crawford gets in a left..inside right..Lundy cut above right eye…

Round 5 Lundy gets in a right hook..Straight left hurts Lundy…BIG LEFT IN CORNER AND DOWN GOES LUNDY…crawford ALL OVER LUNDY AND ANOTHER STRAIGHT LEFT ROCKS LUNDY AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

 

Round 1 Silva gets in a left..

Round 2 Verdejo lands a right over the top…Left to body…1-2

Round 3 Combination from Verdejo

Round 4 Verdejo lands a jab

Round 5 Good left hook by Verdejo…Right over the top..

Round 6 Verdejo lands a right to the body…Verdejo warned for a low blow…right from Verdejo

Round 7 Verdejo jabbing

Round 8 Verdejo lands a right to the body…

Round 9 Right from Verdejo..Right from Silva…Left hook..

Round 10 Right from Verdejo…2 hard left hooks

100-90 twice and 99-91 for VERDEJO

By Norm Frauenheim-

A pound-for-pound debate without a mention of Terence Crawford isn’t much of a conversation. At least, he doesn’t think so. Does Crawford belong?

“Of course,’’ he said. “I feel like I’m already in that conversation.’’

Maybe.

Hank Lundy has some of his own ideas. Turns out, Crawford wouldn’t even make the top three on Lundy’s list.

“No, he’s not the best guy I’ve fight,’’ Lundy said.

Lundy went on to say a lot of things. On the Lundy list, Crawford would rank behind Viktor Postol, Ajose Olusegun, and maybe Dannie Williams.

Lundy might have found a few other names to rank ahead of Crawford if only he had had more time to hold court on his portion of a conference call this week

If he’s as good a fighter as he is a talker, Crawford (27-0, 19 KOs) is in trouble Saturday night (10 p.m. ET/PT) in an HBO-televised junior-welterweight bout in The Theater at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

But the guess in this corner is that Lundy has only managed to talk himself into trouble while also giving Crawford a big chance on a very big stage. An impressive victory over Lundy (26-5-1, 13 KOs) would get Crawford off the fringes of a debate currently dominated by flyweight Roman Gonzalez, middleweight Gennady Golovkin and light-heavyweight Sergey Kovalev.

“It’s hard to rank myself against guys who are in different weight classes,’’ Crawford said. “They would never be my opponent. They are either too big or too small. They do good in their weight division and I do good in mine.’’

So good, in fact, that you can make a pretty good argument that Manny Pacquiao bypassed him for Timothy Bradley for the same reasons that middleweight belt-holders have ducked Golovkin for so long. The risk is too big.

If true, the unbeaten Crawford is left with the motivation to be as impressive as possible. Wittingly or not, Lundy’s talk might have sparked some emotional flint not yet seen in the somewhat stoic fighter from the Midwest.

“I don’t know what’s going on in that boy’s head,’’ Crawford said. “Come Saturday there’s not going to be much talking to do.’’

Crawford conceded that there was some disappointment at not getting the chance to face Pacquiao, who says he’s retiring after the Bradley bout on April 9.

“I wouldn’t say it was a letdown but I wouldn’t say it was exciting,’’ Crawford said the Pacquiao decision. “When they told me the names, they then told me Lundy. He and I had been going back and forth on Twitter for a long time. Now I just want to shut him up.

“He has said a couple of things that upset me, but nothing that has made me change my game plan or fight different than I would normally fight. I am going to go in there and fight my fight. Do what I have to do to get the job done.’’

Then, maybe, Crawford can say thanks to Lundy and hello to a more accepted place in an ever-evolving argument.

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 12, please click here.

*

SAN ANTONIO – Very good artists inspire imitation – why so much boxing writing of the 1970s and 1980s looks like stepped-on Hemingway – but great artists inspire others to pursue their craft regardless where it leads. Thursday evening in this city’s irreplaceable McNay Art Museum, as part of a celebration of local artists, painter Stefani Job Spears gave a talk about her abstract paintings and the glorying in color complements and fractals that charges her process that creates them.

And layers – she spoke quite a lot about layers. Many of her watercolors have a hundred layers to them, each layer equal parts mathematically insignificant and aesthetically essential, and this layering effect was one she discovered, in part, by making colored paper, a process through which the fibers in pulp are blended by crushing. Layers consume Spears’ recent work as they consume every artist’s work, often in a proportionality with the artist’s seriousness.

What plagues Spears’ work, or would were she not adamantly opposed to such a plaguing, is what plagues all who obsessively pursue layers: a lack of tension, which resolves itself as muddiness in visual arts and noisiness in music and nervously linked anecdotes in writing. The most painful part: Artistic tension follows a balloon’s model – it is generally greatest, with metaphors stretched to shiny, the instant before it deflates with a pop. Artists abandon works eventually after this deflation happens though never soon enough; they set out to reconcile the sudden lack of tension by rebuilding, relayering, repiling, but such conscientiousness seldom wins the day because the composition grows only looser as the colors muddle, and all the while, crueler still, their memory of the gorgeous tension their works comprised, the wrenching into existence their creation celebrated, now overdyes each forwards gaze they cast at their suddenly unsatisfactory and worsening piece.

How does one know when to stop layering? There are two paths that both reduce, eventually, to luck – for the greatest works of art ever evince chance as much as another quality, and the greatest artists never evince any emotion more than gratitude, profound thankfulness for their fortune – and those paths are: 1. Luck, and 2. Feedback properly observed. The works that endure best, that receive the highest appraisals centuries after their births, are those that impress us as relying least on chance, though there’s a good chance this is our misperception more than any actuality their creators would recognize.

Miguel de Cervantes, we assume, had no chance of getting lucky for two books and 700 pages of Don Quijote, and this is close to true as we’re likely to come. But the genesis of his idea, to take histories purporting to nonfiction and have them drive a reader to a portrayal of delusion – and again, friends, this question is the reason the book endures: Was Quijote delusional, or by inventing a character publicly addled enough for others to play along with him, for their own amusement, did Quijote accomplish a life very near his ideal of one? – probably arrived in a seed owed to good fortune, and besides, anyone who has read or reread El Quijote in English or Spanish can attest to something nearly objective like: If Cervantes got unlucky on hundreds of those pages, so unlucky in his first book, in fact, he spent a couple lucky sentences in book two making fun of his own terrible writing, it is not untoward to suggest his best sentences, too, owed some to chance.

Enough with the tautologies; luck is luck, yes, and? – take us to feedback (which is the feedback). That is what Stefani Job Spears was about in her Thursday discussion when she said she did not allow a work to muddy itself beyond repair, and she did not allow her students to allow their works to muddy themselves beyond repair. She believes and teaches a work must be wrestled back from that muddy brink, and it’s a wonderful technique that saves future works while appearing to save present ones. Knowing one may not abandon a work whose canvas has popped, oozing its tension from electric orange to beige to mahogany, see, makes an artist err just to the restrained side of his next work; the anxiety that leads him to continue adding layers, to continue pursuing a beautiful truth, finds itself moderated by a cultivated anxiety about what destruction one last layer might bring, and here is where a tension begets another tension that amplifies the tension created by two other tensions, and these iterated tensions make a work that endures.

To those who might rebut “Works fail all the time – look at this column,” Spears’ process counterargues: Completed works fail, yes, but a work cannot be a failure till it is completed, and considering works incomplete until they succeed remedies that indeed (a spirally argument more than a circular one). And this brings us to the essence of the approach: Works must only be completed in order to achieve acclaim or revenue; an artist who finds his life’s highest fulfillment in creation’s very process needn’t ever declare a work completed, and therefore mustn’t ever concede failure, even while the ecstatic tension of his creating, feedback’s feedback, continues its accumulation.

Until this column ends, it does not fail.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

A blueprint of the next great fighter would look a lot like Felix Verdejo. Fast hands, agile feet, power and a long, lanky body that will easily grow into bigger weight classes and multi-division titles.

But there’s more.

“The it factor,’’ Top Rank President Todd duBoef says.

Assign whatever value you want to it. The intangible usually means charisma, which can’t be found on any tale of the tape. In this era of analytic-engineered major-league baseball rosters and NBA teams, an element without a reliable measurement might mean it can fool you just as surely as a fragile chin.

In Verdejo, however, it looks real. Feels real, so real that the young Puerto Rican moves into the next step of a process that Top Rank believes is bound for stardom.

Sometime in 2016, Verdejo hopes to fight for a world-title belt that is a symbol of a fighter moving on from prospect to world class.

“I don’t have a specific opponent in mind… I just want to fight for a championship,’’ Verdejo (19-0, 14 KOs) said Thursday through a translator during a conference call for his first appearance in the New Year on a HBO-televised card Feb. 27 against William Silva (23-0, 14 KOs) in The Theater at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Verdejo’s fight against Silva on the undercard of Terence Crawford-Hank Lundy is intriguing on several levels. Silva was an accomplished amateur and, like Verdejo, is unbeaten as a pro.

The Brazilian lightweight is also listed at 6 feet 1, which makes him the tallest foe Verdejo has faced since turning pro after the 2012 Olympics. More important, perhaps, it represents a further test of Verdejo’s left hand. He was sidelined for six months last year after undergoing surgery to have bone spurs removed.

There were no problems with the left in a mid-December wipeout of Josenilson Dos Santos in Puerto Rico. Then again, Verdejo didn’t really have to use the left. He landed a perfect right that resulted in a second-round stoppage.

“Everything, thanks to God, is fine with the hand,’’ he said Thursday.

Confidence that he’ll succeed against Silva is enough for Top Rank to think about the rest of 2016. He’s already scheduled for a bout on April 16, probably in Puerto Rico where he’s close with his mentor and hero, Felix Trinidad.

Trinidad, Verdejo says, “teaches me how to act inside and outside of the ring.’’

Depending on the champions and their willingness to fight him, duBoef estimates Verdejo might get a title shot in six to 10 months.

For now, the WBO lightweight title is the preferred target. The UK’s Terry Flanagan holds the belt sanctioned by an acronym based in Puerto Rico. Flanagan, ranked No. 5 by The Ring, is scheduled for a title defense against Derry Mathews on March 13 in Liverpool. The bout has already been postponed twice, first in December and then a few weeks ago. First Flanagan said he needed more time off. Then, he said suffered an injury to his left foot.

Somehow and at some point, a shot at a major belt will be there for the emerging Verdejo. Against Silva, he is making his sixth appearance in New York. He’s already popular in New York’s huge Puerto Rican community, which is looking for a star to succeed Miguel Cotto as a centerpiece to its Puerto Rican Day celebration in June.

“Fans in New York should look forward to seeing me fight for a long time,’’ said Verdejo, whose it factor also means he knows how to talk to the customers.

By Norm Frauenheim

A busy stretch for Arizona boxing continues this weekend with appearances on Showtime’s ShoBox in Atlantic City Friday and on UniMas’ Solo Boxeo at Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix Saturday.

Super-bantamweight Jesse Magdaleno (22-0, 16 KOs) of Las Vegas headlines the UniMas card (11 p.m. ET/PT) in a scheduled 10-rounder against Filipino Rey Perez (20-7, 5 KOs).

The seven-fight card, a Top Rank and Iron Boy co-promotion, also is scheduled to include light-heavyweight Trevor McCumby (21-0, 16 KOs) and super-bantamweight Carlos Castro (14-0, 6 KOs), both of Phoenix.

First bell is scheduled for 6 p.m. (MST).

On ShoBox (10 p.m. ET/PT) unbeaten Adam Lopez (14-0, 7 KOs), a former Phoenix fighter now of San Antonio, faces Mario Munoz (16-0-1, 10 KOs) at Adrian Phillips Ballroom in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall.

On Tuesday, Phoenix bantamweight Alexis Santiago (21-3-1, 8 KOs), of Mayweather Promotions, got things started on Fox Sports with a unanimous decision over Erik Ruiz (15-5, 6 KOs) of Mexico.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in California welterweight Oklahoman Alex “El Cholo” Saucedo decisioned Florida’s Clarence Booth by inappropriately wide scores of 79-73, 79-73, 78-74. I watched the 11th hour fight on a Univision app Googlecasted to a television; the stream split and spilled, the buffering was routinely inadequate, and Tecate’s black eagle unfailingly annoyed. The experience, however, was not just a pleasure on its own: it was a reminder of how much better boxing can be and not long ago was.

Back when I found our sport intriguing enough to cover many fightcards and travel a dozen times a year at personal expense, I sat ringside for eight of Alex Saucedo’s first 12 prizefights, and it was an undulatory ride that trended progressively upwards till it was hard-down by March 2014. Initially Saucedo seemed Top Rank’s exact replacement for Antonio Margarito, a rangy Mexican welterweight with a chin and joy for combat, though thrice as polished. And he was merely 17 years-old when we saw him begin his career in Houston (on a card that featured Son of the Legend’s unbuttoning Peter Manfredo).

Though a Chihuahuense by birth, Saucedo fought and still fights out of Oklahoma City, which is the sort of place you’re more likely to recruit a rehab opponent for Son of the Legend than find a future Mexican champion, but like other elements of the Saucedo story, that was an enchanting anomaly until it wasn’t – until it became painfully apparent Saucedo’s exposure to worldclass teaching, training and sparring was wanting in Sooner State. For Saucedo’s match two years ago at Alamodome, the last time I watched him from ringside, the card on which Son of the Legend decisioned Bryan Vera and Orlando Salido fouled Vasyl Lomachenko’s first title match, an old guy named Gilbert Venegas, four deep in the concluding 11-loss streak of a 12-20-4 career, found himself an imported sacrifice for El Cholo – who missed weight by more than a pound and set to clanging what alarms sound when a prodigy begins to disappoint those who’ve invested reputations in him.

That wasn’t me, quite – though I’d sneaked Saucedo on a 2012 list of The Ring’s best prospects after only his seventh prizefight – but it was Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler, an actual legend of his craft previously interested enough in Saucedo to journey all the way to Corpus Christi, Tex., to attend the Oklahoman’s second match. Trampler’s face is not an easy read at ringside, but he seemed duly underwhelmed by Saucedo’s decisioning of Venegas that night at Alamodome, and he might have said explicitly that were an HBO employee named Peter Nelson not in the immediate vicinity.

That year, 2014, became a lost year of sorts for Saucedo, and boxing itself – probably why few noticed one of Top Rank’s prospects, a kid who at age 18 had opened an HBO broadcast for Nonito Donaire, was gone almost entirely missing. Saucedo fought five opponents in 2014, sporting an aggregate record of 56-58-4, and showed little more than a granitic chin he allowed other men to test too often.

The way Top Rank handled Saucedo’s career in 2015 gives fine an example as any the difference between a professional outfit and whoever runs the PBC, an outfit with more money than talent that likely would have gone full-promotional with Saucedo, feeding him increasingly worse competition for increasingly more money till even Keith Thurman started to snicker at Saucedo’s announced opponents. Instead Top Rank put Saucedo in four 2015 matches against opponents with an aggregate record of 69-28-5 and without a losing tally among them, veterans who did not respect a 20-year-old, men who possessed power and craft and intent enough to ice Saucedo unless he improved his defense or demonstrated an incredible chin.

Based on Saturday’s episode, Saucedo did the latter more than the former; his defense is marginally better, yes, and his chin is really quite excellent. Clarence Booth was just the opponent for Saucedo, too, a man who, bursting with musculature and ferocity, looked considerably more menacing than opponents would report – Booth has only stopped two of the last seven men to test his power – and made Saucedo make decisions some of us stopped believing he was capable of making.

“Solo Boxeo Tecate” looked excellent, and it was wonderful to see Israel Vazquez (a rare prizefighter who, in honor of Valentine’s Day, was “one that got away” from Trampler and Top Rank), a man among the noblest of our beloved sport’s noble practitioners, offering commentary. The whole thing brought nostalgia of a sort: I remember this! I remember traveling to Tucson to cover fights like these! I remember Lupe Contreras’ goofy delivery of his “más macho” tagline! I remember Bernardo Osuno adlibbing through Friday night cards! I remember caring enough about boxing to find Spanish-language streams because there were actual consequences for the men who fought on Telefutura and for the sport itself!

Writing a fight report can be simple stuff, simpler even than a conference-call report; yes there are nonlinear elements to it, but the rounds do, after all, arrive in sequence, and few who read fight reports do so for any reason more than: They can’t help themselves. It said a lot to me about me I’d come to find things like PBC or UniMás dreary enough to go through the trouble of writing on subjects farfetched as Catalonian architects or Colombian sculptures, or rewriting entire columns from bygone years.

Well, the times have changed: I now live in Texas, where the main event of a UniMás card doesn’t happen till 11 PM, three hours later than “Solo Boxeo de Miller” sent its Friday mainevents off in Phoenix, and the roster of meaningful challengers for rising prospects is fractionally thick as it was even a decade ago, and current attendance in local gyms assures that situation will worsen. But Saturday’s card was good fun, for once, and that must be counted.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo By Chris Farina / Top Rank

By Norm Frauenheim-

Gennady Golovkin is the pound for-pound champion in waiting. Emphasis on the waiting.

No telling when that wait will end. But it got a predictable, yet tiresome extension with the announcement last week that Canelo Alvarez will fight Amir Khan on May 7.

Golovkin has little choice but to stay busy, prepared and hopeful for a shot at Canelo later in the year, perhaps September. GGG management looked up and down the list of options and was left with an April 23 bout against Dominic Wade, who landed the mandatory shot at GGG’s middleweight title when the IBF’s No. 1-rated Tureano Johnson withdrew because of a shoulder injury.

Never heard of Wade? Didn’t think so. Then again, Johnson, of the Bahamas, isn’t exactly a name that generates a buzz. More like: Who’s he?

It’s all-too-familiar and thoroughly unfair to GGG, who is spending his prime in the waiting room. He’ll be 34 on April 8, 15 days before his pound-for-pound skill figures to make a wreck out of Wade.

There’s nobody to blame but a business ruled by the so-called A-side, B-side equation that, in the end, often adds up to rubbish.

Canelo is making GGG wait because he can. Canelo is projected to be the sport’s next pay-per-view star. The evidence of that was in the 900,000 buys he generated in his victory over Miguel Cotto in November. GGG can only counter with the 150,000 PPV number he posted in his last outing, a stoppage of David Lemieux in October.

The difference gives Canelo 750,000 reasons he can tell GGG to wait, wait all over again. Publically, at least, each side of the promotional and management equation has assured a skeptical fan base that Canelo-GGG will happen. A possible date, Sept. 17, and even a place, the Dallas Cowboys NFL Stadium, have been reported.

But there are doubts. Canelo’s decision to face Khan raises questions about whether he really wants to fight a true 160 pounder. He’ll fight Khan, a junior-welterweight just a few years ago, at the familiar 155-pound catch-weight for the WBC title he took from Cotto.

Canelo is called the lineal middleweight champion. Trace the title from Sergio Martinez to Cotto and Canelo, and, yeah, it’s lineal. The catch, however, is how that line of succession has been corrupted by the weight. Canelo might be the lineal champ, but GGG is the real one.

The unresolved issue is whether Canelo will come off the 155-pound marker and agree to fight GGG at the traditional 160.

Even if he does the expected and overwhelms Khan, there still won’t be a fight against a true middleweight contender on Canelo’s resume. If Canelo struggles to beat Khan, then what? If he loses, GGG management might regret the day that Andre Ward decided to go up to light-heavy in anticipation of a potential pound-for-pound confrontation with Sergey Kovalev.

Canelo’s bargaining power has been met with some early moves from GGG’s K2 brain trust. In Wade, Tom Loeffler created potential leverage, which could lead to a very big middleweight fight in its own right if the Canelo possibility falls apart. Wade’s promoter is Al Haymon, who also happens to promote Daniel Jacobs.

Jacobs is coming off his stunning, first-round stoppage of Peter Quillin for a piece of the middleweight title.

“From our side, there wouldn’t be any obstacles to making that fight,” Loeffler told The Ring’s Mitch Abramson.

Call it a warning shot and an acknowledgement that GGG can’t wait much longer.

By Bart Barry-

About 5 1/2 years ago, I wrote a column that treated Oscar De La Hoya and Todd DuBoef’s tactical use of candor and celebration of the free market and called it “In celebration of Oscar’s candor.” Today I rewrite it.

*

When Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer revels in the free market’s amorality or Oscar De La Hoya discusses the defensive liabilities of any man he’s fought, put your smartphone down and immerse yourself in their wisdom. When they reverse roles, when De La Hoya gives you a stocktip or Schaefer talks combat, return to Facebook – unless you need a subject for your Monday column or a chance to opine generally about capitalism.

“We need to sign all the talent and get all the TV dates,” De La Hoya said last week to Broadcasting & Cable. “Then you can have your own agenda and have a schedule for the fans and the sport.”

While De La Hoya neglected to preclude that statement with a proper disclaimer – “as my friend Richard always tells me” – prizefighting’s most oleaginous figure was likely in the room with De La Hoya or else revising the interview’s first draft immediately afterward. In the few years since he began to conduct the orchestrations of Golden Boy Promotions, Schaefer has shown himself a shrewd strategist and singularly unlikable man. He thinks bigger than what small-potatoes promoters he occasionally mocks, seeing in their lack of national scope a want of desire, a want of ambition, a want, honestly put, of greed.

American English differs from Romance languages in its celebration of the word ambition – where a Peruvian called ambicioso would be properly insulted, inferring from the adjective he is naturally endowed with talents befitting a lower station than his aspirations’, any American called ambitious by a guidance counselor or prospective mate feels a burst of affirmation. Schaefer comes from a Swiss tradition that is neither American English nor Romance language, but he sees his success and others’ failures through a very American lens.

It is fair to imagine De La Hoya, a product of East Los Angeles and son of Mexican immigrants, enjoyed in his youth the company of exactly as many successful businessmen as young Schaefer befriended prospective prizefighters. They are anomalies to one another, then, and this benefits Schaefer more than De La Hoya.

De La Hoya’s path to success evinces an incredible combination of talent and luck. Fighters talented as De La Hoya are uncommon but do exist. None of them became the Golden Boy, though; to begin where De La Hoya began and arrive where De La Hoya arrived is probable as lightning hitting a lottery winner. To begin as a banker in Switzerland and arrive where De La Hoya found Schaefer is no rarity whatever. But De La Hoya probably doesn’t know this, and Schaefer, like all ambitious finance folks, is great with autobiographical musings of catastrophes overcome, extraordinary individual know-how, and foilings of what plotters would otherwise foil him.

It must rile Top Rank’s Todd DuBoef here and there to consider how insincere Schaefer is and how much money DuBoef’s stepdad, Bob Arum, failed to reap from De La Hoya’s 2007 match with Floyd Mayweather (another former Top Rank fighter). Not long ago, DuBoef floated an idea he called “brand of boxing” – a postmodern construct that celebrated postcompetitiveness. Unlike his stepdad, who wagers his credibility on three or four different fightcards annually and excavates rough jewels from mines in bad neighborhoods to present matchmaker Bruce Trampler for inspection, cutting and polishing, DuBoef occupies a time and land where prizefighting makes lots of money for the fortunate few who steer its enormous cash barge down an extraordinarily wide revenue river.

DuBoef prefers to maneuver round competitor islands and other nuisances, creating a television-production crew and handling pay-per-view cards in-house, where his stepdad prefers to go through them or over them or in any event at them.

“In boxing, virtually all of the publicity is keyed to a specific fight and, on a few occasions, to a specific fighter,” DuBoef said in June, lamenting boxing’s enduring competitive zealotry.

DuBoef’s model is nearer Schaefer’s model than Arum’s, and both Schaefer and DuBoef, faithful disciples of a system that coincidentally enriched them and assured them their riches evinced merit, not the luck of birthplace or parentage, likely wonder why Arum must do everything with such redness of tooth and claw, why he must be in constant and violent rivalry with some unfortunate or other to do his job effectively.

Bet De La Hoya understands.

While Arum’s success in life was perhaps more preordained than De La Hoya’s, the success of Arum as a boxing promoter was not. De La Hoya made combat with his athletic equals, men both interested in and capable of rendering him unconscious. Arum matched intellect, legal acumen and energy with his promotional equals, men both interested in and capable of his company’s ruination – including a once-a-century hustler like Don King. De La Hoya and Arum know lack and reflexivity; both men know the extraordinary effort, risktaking and luck required to attain momentum from a standing start, and they know how momentum feeds upon itself and moves money in hyperactive ways. Schaefer and DuBoef know a history of the modern free market and take as an article of faith it will reward those who respect it or love it praise it or whatever.

Schaefer’s future in boxing without De La Hoya, if ever they parted, would be but marginally less certain than DuBoef’s without Arum.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

The Canelo Alvarez -Amir Khan bout on May 7 has been cheered, booed, hyped, ridiculed, praised and trashed in the days since Oscar De La Hoya announced the stunning deal this week.

Reactions pretty much cover the proverbial waterfront. For the promoter, that qualifies as a promotional triumph. Lots of opinions generate a lively debate. The bigger the argument, the bigger the box office.

In large part, De La Hoya was able to create so much attention on the bout because he had kept it quiet. There wasn’t a peep from the twitter crowd about whether it might, should or could happen. Not a whisper. Nada.

The absence of even a single rumor already ranks as the Upset of the Year. It’s a bigger upset than a Khan victory would be.

For now, surprise is the only consensus about a bout that matches the bigger Canelo against the smaller, yet faster Khan. If boxing is the circus everybody says it is, there has to be an unpredictable twist, a wild ride, somewhere along the midway.

At its bottom line, however, Canelo-Khan is more than that. For Canelo, it’s a concession that he’s still not a true middleweight, despite his WBC version of the 160-pound title he took in a decision over an undersized Miguel Cotto in September.

In the wake of his victory over Cotto, there was some thinking that Canelo would face a legit middleweight, instead of another blow-up welterweight and/or junior-welter, in his attempt to get ready for Gennady Golovkin.

Against Khan, however, the 25-yar-old Canelo will again be at his favorite catch-weight, 155 pounds, at the formal weigh-in. Those close to him in Mexico say that weight is his comfort zone. It represents a milestone in training. It’s a sign that his conditioning is right. At 155, he knows he’s ready

It also means GGG, the consensus middleweight champ, will have to wait, perhaps until early 2017 for a showdown with Canelo, who in the meantime figures get a big payday while heightening his international celebrity against a name fighter from the UK, boxing’s liveliest market.

Is it fair to argue that Canelo blows away Khan in short order? Of course. Canelo, who opened as nearly a 4-to-1 favorite, might out-weigh Khan, a junior-welterweight just a few years ago, by twenty pounds at opening bell. By now, the fragility of Khan’s chin isn’t exactly a secret. Neither is his willingness to trade punches.

When the first big one lands, Khan’s caution has often been the first thing to go. That leaves him with only his instinct, which is to brawl. Next to go, his consciousness. The heavy-handed Canelo is at his lethal best against a fighter willing to stand in front of him.

At 29, however, the intriguing question is whether Khan has matured enough to know his weaknesses. He’s no dummy. He has the foot speed to stay out of range of Canelo’s power, especially over the first six rounds. If he can retain his wits and adhere to his fight plan, he might be able to pull off a stunner on the scorecards.

It’s hard to imagine Canelo chasing an agile Khan around the ring. Canelo has the clop-clop-clop footwork of a Clydesdale. Khan’s fast feet and faster hands could leave Canelo looking as confused as he did in a 2013 loss to Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

Can it happen? Could Khan actually win? Probably not. Then again, did anybody think a week ago that there was any chance he’d ever fight Canelo?

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Montreal’s Bell Centre, Russian light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev beat Haitian-Canadian Jean Pascal till Pascal’s corner told its charge to remain seated at the end of round 7. While the match was at no point competitive, while it was the rematch of a 2015 match that was not competitive, it was not that much less competitive in the seventh round than the sixth or the fifth or the fourth. The reason for the stoppage, apparently, was what disproportionate pleasure Kovalev began to derive from wounding the man across from him. During a sporting event.

Sergey Kovalev is a very good prizefighter in a decent division in a tired and tiring and tiresome era – and unfortunately for him and his copromoters, Main Events and HBO, no magical number of iterations will someday make him a great prizefighter (in the sense of Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao or Juan Manuel Marquez). A certain number of prizefighters get elected to the hall of fame each year, though, and boxing’s fabric is diaphanous and thinning, and so, sometime in the next 15 years, Kovalev’s immortality will gain purchase of a sort, with youngsters backing and filling our memories of his good fights with numbers and metaphors to prove his greatness.

It’s all in the game, sure, but howsoever will “Legendary Nights: Kovalev Krushes Pascal Twice” weather a scheduling error that sets it beside “Legendary Nights: The Tale of Hagler vs. Hearns”?

Better, probably, than Freddie Roach’s reputation will suffer Pacquiao’s first retirement a few months from now. Coach Freddie was back in promoter mode last week, casting colorful quotes at bored writers in the buildup to a rematch of a first match that was not competitive, assuring those gathered the improvement he wrought with Pascal was not subtle. But it was exactly that, as Pascal demonstrated by enduring Kovalev’s fury for 63 seconds less than he did 10 months ago. Coach Freddie’s solace is found here: The version of Pascal who sneaked past a lad named Yunieski Gonzalez in July was fated for a fiveround stoppage Saturday in Montreal, and the small, but enormous, stylistic details, that were overhauls, performed by Coach Freddie kept Pascal conscious if barely competitive for an extra six minutes of abuse.

Pascal has a great physique and a handsome face, both improvements made by Roach, and a penchant for winging wide punches and stumbling over his own aggressiveness – also wrinkles, pleats really, Coach Freddie ironed in. Unconvinced? Coach Freddie is going to overhaul that last sentence, a strategic revision about which he says, “Every writer is different in a job like this, but making Barry’s sentence better is kind of easy because there are so many mistakes.”

Let’s have a look:

Pascal has a tremendous physique and a striking face, both improvements made by Roach, and a tendency to wing punches wide and stumble over his own aggression – also wrinkles Coach Freddie folded in.

There you have it. Editor of the year.

With or without Roach, Pascal now returns to the toughman circuit to which Englishman Carl Froch remanded him seven years ago and whence Chad Dawson and Bernard Hopkins drafted him in 2010. Pascal is the sort of dark brute our nightmares convince us to favor in confrontations with wafers like Froch or Kovalev, but Pascal’s menace, much like Adonis Stevenson’s, is a cultivated superficiality, an amplifier of North American stereotypes more than a genuine bit of danger.

Froch was not menacing; Froch was a craftsman, a man who obsessed over manly comportment, found its purest manifestation in prizefighting, and obsessed over prizefighting. Froch wanted to be a great prizefighter and didn’t particularly care what pathway might get him there. Kovalev is a different thing entirely.

Were he not bludgeoning men with his fists, Kovalev would’ve done things vile enough to someone like Liam Neeson and his family for the subtext of “Taken” to have been Inspired by true events. Trainer emeritus Don Turner once used a telling word to describe Kovalev: mean. From Matthew the college professor or Sarah the barista, a word like that describing a professional fighter does not register, but from a man whose livelihood derives in large part from midwifing a will-to-cruelty in other men, the word is potent. The word manifests itself in the deadness of Kovalev’s countenance when he attacks – a predatory lack of empathy. Kovalev is more an athletic psychopath, more Sonny Liston, than an athlete who suspends his conscience to steal another man’s consciousness.

After Pascal’s corner waved the white towel Saturday, Kovalev fumbled a bit with the straightening of his Krusher kap, and it sent the mind to no coordinate sharper than Juan Manuel Marquez a minute after he snatched the animating force from Manny Pacquiao – mounting the turnbuckle a length from Pacquiao’s stillmotionless body, and ensuring his bill was just so for the cameras. Marquez’s willingness to kill another man in the ring, though, was tempered slightly by a very deep Mexican prizefighting tradition, a decree from the elders like: Thou shalt not. Russian boxing, an amateur-only affair till the 1990s, a sportsman’s endeavor performed with pillowy gloves and headgear till Kovalev was at least 10 years-old, has no such tether for its current practitioners.

Which means Andre Ward’s undefeated record, nay his life, is in jeopardy! Not so fast.

Kovalev is a very good 175-pound prizefighter. Andre Ward is a great 168-pound prizefighter. If Ward is not quite mean as Kovalev, he’s resentful as hell, distrustful, and unafraid to lead with his head or hit a man low if the moment warrants it. For all his menace and horror of intention, Kovalev barely dented a 50-year-old Bernard Hopkins in 36 minutes of trying. Anyone who thinks Kovalev is going to krush a 31-year-old version of Hopkins needs to start muting his HBO telecasts.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Boxing’s ugly history repeated itself, warts and all, with Jean Pascal calling Sergey Kovalev a racist in the final news conference before their rematch Saturday night at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

I’m not sure what to make of it. The cynical side of the scarred business suggests that Pascal’s accusation is just another way of marketing a tough sell in his hometown.

Late Thursday, seats in every corner of the building, other than the pricey ones at ringside were available on the Bell Centre’s website.

Pascal, who has been calling Kovalev a racist since the light-heavyweight fight (HBO 9:45 p.m. ET/PT) was announced, raised the volume by several octaves with a performance that included bananas and a near brawl with Kovalev’s African-American trainer, John David Jackson. If Pascal was looking for twitter hits and website headlines, he got them.

Kovalev, an unbeaten Russian and a pound-for-pound contender, left himself open to the charge last April when he posed for a photo with a child in a T-shirt adorned with a boxer topped by a gorilla’s head. At the bottom of the photo, Kovalev wrote a caption that took aim at Adonis Stevenson, who like Pascal is a Quebec light-heavyweight of Haitian descent.

It says: “Adonis looks great!!!’’

It’s stupid.

Kovalev, long frustrated by the inability to land a fight with Stevenson, apologized. In this polarized era, however, apologies aren’t believed. They don’t last long either. But that photo isn’t going anywhere. It’s only a few keystrokes away for any rival who wants to use it as evidence to support an allegation.

In words and tone, Kovalev (28-0-1, 25 KOs) suggests that Pascal (30-3-1, 17 KOs) is calling him a racist out of fear or in an attempt at gamesmanship. If it’s the latter, Pascal is making a terrible mistake.

Kovalev is not easily distracted. The photo was dumb. The caption was dumber. But nobody has detected anything dumb in the way Kovalev fights. He is as poised as he is ruthless.

Bernard Hopkins, one of the game’s wise men, knew that instinctively throughout the all the hype before their 2014 fight. He didn’t do any of his trademark trash-talk, a Hopkins art form. He had read Kovalev well enough to know it wouldn’t work. Nothing did. Kovalev won a crushing decision and Hopkins, who was widely criticized for calling Joe Calzaghe “a white boy,” praised him in its aftermath.

It’s also noteworthy that Hopkins defended Kovalev after the photo appeared. Hopkins was quoted as saying he didn’t believe the Russian was racist. However, he also said that Kovalev would regret it.

Regret, race and, yes, racism have been part of the boxing narrative for as long as there has been an opening bell. It produced The Great White Hope more than a century ago in a segregated society’s desperate attempt to find a white heavyweight who could beat Jack Johnson.

To this day, Mexican fans chant “Guero.” Loosely translated, that means White Boy. Those fans will chant it, in singsong fashion, at almost any fighter of any color without a chance and/or the willingness to brawl. A racist slur? Depends on the listener. From this white face in a ringside seat, it’s merely a genuine expression from a crowd with a tribal-title loyalty for a fighter it knows like a neighbor.

In 1975, Muhammad Ali mocked Joe Frazier with a toy, a rubber gorilla that he tied onto a string and playfully battered around during a news conference before he beat Frazier in the Philippines.

“It’s going to be a Thrilla In Manila when I kill that Gorilla,’’ Ali said then.

Ali probably cringes now, which is what Pascal and Kovalev will probably do years from now.

Follow all the action LIVE  as Danny Garcia and Robert Guerrero fight for the vacant WBC Welterweight title.  The action begins at 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT with a Heavyweight attraction of former U.S. Olympian Dominic Breazeale knockout Amir Mansour that will be followed by a Welterweight fight between Sammy Vasquez Jr. and Aron Martinez

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Round 1 Guerrero putting the pressure on..Straight left to body

Round 2 Quick left from Garcia…right..left hook..

Round 3 Body shot from Guerrero..right..Nice left hook..Right to the body…

Round 4 Guerrero working on inside..Garcia lands a body shot..right to body…left..1-2…Uppercut from Guerrero..

Round 5 Long left from Guerrero..Right from Garcia..Garcia starting to swell under his right eye..Straight right from Garcia..looping right…

Round 6 Uppercut and right from Garcia…Left …Quick right…Right to chin..quick left hook..lead right..2 big rights and left at the bell

Round 7 Big right from Garcia..right…

Round 8 Right from Garcia at the bell

Round 9 Straight right from Garcia..left hook..big left hook..Lead right…sneaky right

DANNY GARCIA WINS ON ALL CARDS 116-112

Round 10

Round 11 Big right from Garcia..Body work and left hook to head..Guerrero lands a left..nice flurry from Garcia..Good uppercut..

Round 12 Left hook from Garcia…straight left from Guerrero..left..Good action to close it out

Round 1 Straight left to body from Vasquez..

Round 2 Combination from Vasquez…Vasquez lands in the corner..Martinez telling Vasquez to come on…

Round 3 Left from Vasquez

Round 4 Right hook from Vasquez..Right from Martinez..

Round 5 Vasquez being aggressive

Round 6 Vasquez lands a left….MARTINEZ QUITS IN CORNER

 

Round 1 Mansour comes out swinging…Jab to the body…Breazeale lands a right..Mansour lands a hard left..Left to body

Round 2 Right and left from Brezeale…Hard left hurts Breazeale…Hard right hooks rock Breazeale

ROUND 3 BIG RIGHT HOOK TO TOP OF HEAD AND DOWN GOES BREAZELE…Hard jab…right hook..Big uppercut from Breazeale

ROUND 4 Mansour jabs to the body..Right from Breazeale…Jab

Round 5 Huge right from Mansour…Right…Body work..double right hook…right hook..Right from Breazeale..Straight left from Mansour..

ROUND 6 MANSOUR DOESNT GET OUT OF CORNER…FIGHT STOPPED

By Norm Frauenheim-

There is no good way to say goodbye to boxing. Manny Pacquiao is trying to. At campaign stops in New York and Los Angeles this week, he said repeatedly that his fight with Timothy Bradley on April 9 would be his last.

In a political season full of Trump, Palin, Cruz and Hillary, however, few believe the soft-spoken Filipino Congressman, who also happens to be running for one of 24 seats in his country’s Senate. His promoter, Bob Arum, doesn’t. His trainer, Freddie Roach, doesn’t. His Filipino constituency doesn’t want

The prevailing skepticism is rooted in precedent. Boxers come back as often as politicians break promises. In Bill Dwyre’s ongoing series for Top Rank on the second Pacquiao-Bradley rematch, the retired Los Angeles Times sport editor quotes Arum on just the latest example.

Brandon Rios retired at a news conference in the immediate aftermath of his one-sided loss to Bradley last November. Arum immediately applauded his announcement.

“Half-an-hour later,’’ Arum said, Rios “unretired.’’

The entertaining anecdote is as true a guide as any on what to expect — or not expect — from Pacquiao or anybody else in a business where scar tissue is the only sure thing.

But it’s an awkward way to sell a fight.

The guess here is that Pacquiao believes what he is saying, just as surely as Rios did with a decision that sounded heartfelt at the time. But there are all kinds of reasons and scenarios that could change Pacquiao’s mind.

To wit:

§ If he wins, he has a title to defend and chance at more money to finance further campaigns.

§ If he loses, his reputation is at stake. Careers end in defeat all the time. But a loss might be tougher for a politician whose clout with the voters is built on how he won them over. His political career was launched by what he did within the ropes. A pound-for-pound ranking was the only poll he ever needed. The ring was his bully pulpit.

Either scenario comes with reasons to think his career continues beyond his third fight with Bradley at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

Meanwhile, Arum is confronted with the tough task of selling a bout that Pacquiao calls his farewell-fight, which is an oxymoron, if there ever was one. You fight to stick around. Throwing in the towel is one way of saying farewell.

A lot of fans feel as if they said farewell to Pacquiao, the fighter, on that December night in 2012 when he landed on the canvas, face-first, from a right hand delivered by Juan Manuel Marquez.

That might have been as good a time as any to say goodbye, except for that opportunity at a huge payday against Floyd Mayweather Jr. Good business sense dictated he continue, despite pressure to quit from family and friends.

Pacquiao stuck around, collecting what was reported to be between $160 and $180 million. It was worth it. It made him a very rich man. But it looks as if the May loss to Mayweather was just one more bout in the inevitable decline of a fighter in his mid-to-late 30s. He’s back now. He says he has recovered from surgery to the right-shoulder, which he said was injured in training, yet wasn’t disclosed until after the dull, controversial loss to Mayweather.

Then, there’s Mayweather, of course. He says he’s retired. But nobody believes him, either. The prevailing speculation since Mayweather’s promised career-ender –a September victory over Andre Berto — is that he’ll be back.

As different as they are, it turns out that Pacquiao and Mayweather have one thing in common. In a business with no term limits, it’s hard to say so long.

By Norm Frauenheim

He calls himself Big Baby. But don’t let the nickname fool you. This baby doesn’t cry. Jerrell Miller only boasts.

Miller (15-0-1, 13 KOs) hopes to back up those noisy boasts Friday on ShoBox (Showtime 10:35 p.m. ET/PT) at Casino del Sol in Tucson against Donovan Dennis (12-2, 10 KOs) on a card that feature middleweight prospect Rob Brant (18-0, 11 KOs) against DeCarlo Perez (15-3-1, 5 KOs).

Miller, of Brooklyn, is fighting to get noticed in the scrum of heavyweights that has gathered in the wake Tyson Fury’s stunning upset of longtime king Wldimir Klitschko last month.

The first to score a winning ticket was Charles Martin, who won a vacant IBF title last Saturday when his opponent, Vyacheslav Glazkov, went down with a knee injury in the third round of a bout on a Brooklyn card that included WBC champion Deontay Wilder’s stoppage of Artur Spizlka.

Now, it’s Miller turn to make a statement that Martin didn’t.

In Friday night’s main event, Brant, of Minnesota, makes his second straight ShoBox appearance after a tough, majority decision over Louis Rose up the road in Phoenix.

“It’s a New Year, but I don’t go into it with any kind of timetable,’’ said Brant, a former national Golden Gloves champion. “I just need to win and let the wins take care of everything else.”

By Bart Barry-

Recently the New York Times published a column on beauty by David Brooks and a long-form piece on boxing by Dan Barry. Brooks’ column marked a sincere effort to celebrate a thing its author freely concedes he does not understand. Barry’s investigation marked a sincere effort to demonize a thing its author thinks he understands. One challenges its readers, and the other “challenges” its readers.

As Barry set out to write his literary synthesis of Thomas Hauser’s 2013 investigative report, one senses, he did it with an editor’s silent incantation – “What is the angle here?” – drumming through his head. A tragedy happened, and that means a villain, or villains, and the more villains, the less any one villain deserves empathy, who has time for that when villains lurk round every paragraph, and that means going hard-down on whichever villain, full-literary, award-winning, drilling to the “truth” – however superficial that particular truth might be, however much of a caricature you must make of a nobody or two to get that truth through your editor’s filters.

In Barry’s case, the villain is a villainous inspector endangering a prizefighter, his home state’s reputation, and the sanctity of sport itself, all in the petty pursuit of handwraps (he uses as a fundraising tool for former prizefighters). One hopes the first angle for this story was an irony like: An inspector trying to raise money for impoverished prizefighters inadvertently minted another impoverished prizefighter. That first angle might not have suffered an editor’s skepticism, though: These barbarians believe in saving them after they destroy them?! Subsequent reporting, too – interviewing men Hauser’s story already gave a mirror with which to study themselves for two years – revealed, much as Hauser already had, that the language barrier, Russian-to-English, likely precluded Abdusalamov’s words from tripping an inspector’s alarms, no matter his attentiveness.

As Barry re-reported, Abdusalamov’s stating his face hurt carried fractionally the conditional impact of his stating his head hurt. A light headache is expected by any athlete who exerts like that for 30 minutes, much less an athlete struck repeatedly to the skull, and as boxers are of the sturdiest stock if a fighter tells an inspector his head hurts, he’s describing a perilous abnormality, and a chain of actions gets triggered. When those actions do not get triggered, later interviews with medical professionals tend to reveal nothing so much as the extraordinary self-aggrandizement of someone who attends medical school. The hypotheticals are invariably rich and the mistakes of others who are not them invariably inexcusable: Every second counts!, everything might have been different!, were it my hospital . . ., it reminds me of someone I saved!, they did what?

A few years ago, the least-pleasant writing assignment I’ve endured sent me to fetch the likeliest cause of Frankie Leal’s 2013 death, asking if it could have been avoided. The question itself is an angle-beggar: Every event in a human life is not equal parts impossible and inevitable, and you need to decide which this event was and prove it. I interviewed a host of experts, lost most of my admiration for the field of neurology – the delta between its certainty and expertise being absurd – and concluded Leal’s death was equal parts impossible and inevitable, and if anyone were to blame it was Leal himself (a verdict and sentence, both, Leal would have accepted).

Last week Carlos Acevedo provided a review of Barry’s piece that included this insight: “That an underclass pursuit as barbaric as boxing can still exist in 2016 in a country known for its exceptionalism and for meritocracy is a shock to progressives who, like Marxists, view prizefighting as the exploitation of the destitute for the frivolous benefit of the bourgeoisie. But in the streets where gunshots echo in perpetuity, where drug gangs rule corners in daylight and moonlight alike, where unemployment is a scourge and in which prison terms are more common than college degrees, risk is a relative concept.”

Notice the empathy, notice the dexterity, notice the tolerance for ambiguity. Among Acevedo’s advantages over Barry are these: Talent, and softer editing – Acevedo didn’t have to compose his story before he wrote it and then watch anxiously as his boss changed his prose and then changed those changes.

Whatever David Brooks’ stature as a writer, he is remarkably adept at navigating editors and getting his occasionally angle-less columns published with charming ambiguity. His Jan. 15 column has something like an angle – he favors beauty over economists – but it allows a wide enough band for agreement as to have no angle at all. He also addresses something like physical intelligence, a form of beauty often misclassified as athleticism – that linear measurement of times and spaces, adored equally by scouts, geeks and other men enchanted by being right.

Because of the way it punishes errors, more viciously than another sport, boxing uncovers its practitioners’ physical intelligence in a way no IQ test or SAT ever measured a brain. It engenders intimacy, too: A man will forget his sexual partners before he forgets his sparring partners. Much to the chagrin of those who would ban it, boxing reveals what man senses even when he cannot prove it: This world is an unpredictable and often violent place for all who occupy it. Boxing is ugly and vital, and often its vitality grows in proportion to its ugliness.

And boxing buries its undertakers.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action LIVE  from Ringside as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight title against Artur Szpilka.  The action begins at 10 PM ET / 7 PM PT / 4 AM in Warsaw and  5 AM in Kiev with a battle for the IBF Heavyweight title between undefeated fighters Charles Martin and Vyachelsav Glazkov

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Round 1 Wilder gets in a jab..Jab..

Round 2 Szpilka gets in a left..Jab from Wilder..Counter right from Szpilka..Left..left..

Round 3 Szpilka gets in a left on ropes..left..left..Counter left from Wilder..Counter right..

Round 4 Jab from Wilder..Jab…right..Hard right..1-2;

Round 5 Szpilka gets in 2 jabs..Right from WIlder///Left from Szpilka..Hard right from Wilder..

Round 6 Right hook from Szpilka…Right from Wilder..right hook from Szpilka…

Round 7 Big right from Wilder..Right..3 punch combo on ropes..Big right..Combo from Szpilka..left..

Round 8 Jab from Wilder..Left from Szpilka…Right from Wilder

Round 9 Counter left from Wilder to top of head..Right..COUNTER RIGHT AND DOWN GOES SZPILKA AND HE IS KNOCKED OUT

Round 1 Martin lands a straight left…

Round 3 Martin lands a LEFT AND DOWN GOES GLAZKOV…THE FIGHT IS OVER

By Norm Frauenheim

Six days after George Foreman’s birthday, four days after Joe Frazier’s birthday and the day before Muhammad Ali’s birthday, the heavyweight division will attempt another rebirth Saturday in Brooklyn with Deontay Wilder in a title defense on a Showtime-televised card that includes a bout for a vacant version of another acronym-sanctioned championship.

Birthdays or astrology or coincidence might suggest that January is a promising time for the heavyweights. But the only chart that matters is the ongoing one that says the division has been receding faster than a glacier.

It hasn’t exactly vanished. Wilder (35-0, 34 KOs), who defends his WBC title against mostly-unknown Spzilka (20-1, 15 KOs), shows promise with great athleticism and intriguing power. There are moments when he looks like a big version of Thomas Hearns.

He figures to beat Spizlka, an unknown Pole who has even less experience than he does. Spizlka decided to take up boxing on the urge of a promoter who saw him in soccer brawl outside of a Polish nightclub in 2008.

Nevertheless, Wilder’s relative inexperience leaves skepticism, impossible to dismiss. Despite an Olympic bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Games, he’s a newcomer. The 30-year-old Wilder didn’t start boxing until he was 20.

It makes you wonder how he would do against Russian Alexander Povetkin (a 2004 gold medalist at the Athens Olympics) or Luis Ortiz, who learned his way around the ring in Cuba’s amateur system. Povetkin and Ortiz were schooled in the game’s subtleties at an age when skill becomes instinct.

The unbeaten Wilder likes to say that potential rivals have to enter “the athletic department.’’ Fair enough. He’s stronger and more agile than most. But instinct is critical, especially in the face of heavyweight power that can stop a fight within fractions of a single second. It’s there when a big shot short-circuits the ability to think. We’ve yet to see whether Wilder can react in that brief, yet critical moment of adversity.

Yet, Wilder still appears to be the one heavyweight who can restore attention on the division in an era about to unfold – ready or not — in the wake of Tyson Fury’s November upset of Wladimir Klitschko.

Klitschko’s heavyweight reign, almost a decade long, was a run of reliability. Predictability, too. But it eliminated a critical element. There were no rivalries. There was only Klitschko.

Rivalry creates interest. Draws an audience, too. That’s the great lesson of Ali, Frazier and Foreman, each also an Olympic gold medalist. Ali turns 74 on Sunday. Foreman was 67 on Jan. 10. The late Frazier would have been 72 on Jan. 12. Their birthdays are worth celebrating. They represent chapters in a time still unequaled.

Ali-Frazier became a historical reference point for every rivalry in and out of sports since their trilogy (1971, 1974 and 1975). Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were the NBA’s Ali-Frazier. The Yankees and Red Sox were baseball’s Ali-Frazier. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were tennis’ Ali-Frazier.

By its very nature, rivalries come easy in boxing. It’s the one-on-one drama, which in part was re-created by Magic and Bird. During the Ali era, there was more than one, mostly because of his charisma, salesmanship, brinkmanship and mouth. The Floyd Mayweather model rules today’s business. To wit: The most money for the smallest risk.

It enriched Mayweather, yet left longtime fans and new customers frustrated. The public demand got whipped up into a lotto-like froth for Mayweather-Pacquiao. But Mayweather’s fight was a dud. The rivalry, past its prime, was a figment of social media’s imagination.

But Ali’s rivalries were real because of his willingness to take repeated risks. During the last couple of decades, film and song have memorialized Ali’s 1974 victory over Foreman in Zaire. Over time, that one fight has gained as much historical significance as Ali-Frazier.

Can it ever happen again? Doubtful. But mid-January is as good a time to try as any.

By Bart Barry-

In only its second week, 2016 promises a paucity of suitable subjects to rival its predecessor. Rather than write 52 columns without end, we begin a new series called “To the contrary” – in which I will select some column from my archives and rewrite it, expressing a different, if not wholly opposite, opinion in celebration of subjectivity.

*

About 9 1/2 years ago, I wrote a preview of Marco Antonio Barrera’s rematch with Rocky Juarez and called it “No polemical decisions.” Today I rewrite it.

*

At a recent dinner after a Celebrity Theatre card with the creator of this site, John Raygoza, the subject of a charismatic local cruiserweight’s intellect got broached.

“He’s a smart guy,” said John.

“No,” I said, “he’s a smart fighter. Out in the rest of the world, there are lots of smart guys.”

What the hell does this have to do with Saturday’s rematch in Las Vegas between Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera and Texan Rocky Juarez, a mulligan for May’s match, one for which Barrera was ill-prepared when Juarez, a short-notice replacement, very well may have beaten him on any honest scorecard in California? Admittedly little, though it might have a goodish amount to do with Barrera, or at least our perception of him.

Back to that in a moment. First, a few reasons why Juarez might fare worse in his rematch with Barrera than he did in their first encounter. Juarez hasn’t a championship speed in his gearbox. We saw it in last year’s loss to Humberto Soto. And if ever Juarez’s ambition takes him in the ring with another master like Juan Manuel Marquez or Chris John, we’ll see it there too. Juarez surprised Barrera in May with the rude force of his youth, pouncing on the 65-fight veteran and thoroughly discomfiting him. But if Barrera is perhaps a smart fighter more than a smart guy, he is nevertheless an incredibly smart fighter.

“No me gustan las decisiones polémicas,” said Barrera, when asked why he granted Juarez an immediate rematch.

While “polemical” was a curious choice of words, it signaled Barrera’s decisiveness of craft more than his precision, quickness or relaxation with the Spanish language. Better put: Barrera will not be surprised twice by Juarez’s youthful exuberance. To win a decision that is not polemical against Juarez, Barrera will have to thwart Juarez, dis-couraging him from first bell.

Who better to complete a pattern like that, match to rematch, than Marco Antonio Barrera?

Since Barrera’s 2001 masterpiece against Naseem “The Prince” Hamed, the doctoral dissertation he gave the precocious undergrad Hamed, a roaming exploration of everything from self-defense to balance to concussive leverage to a textured and personal experience with a turnbuckle’s cover, Barrera has been considered by some aficionados, this one especially, more than a smart prizefighter. We considered him a smart guy

But isn’t this always the way with eloquence? In a postmodern haze of admiration, that our own cant might someday be admired by other postmodernists, we find ourselves enraptured by the words another man chooses, excited by our own imagining of him crouched over a dictionary improving himself with a rapacity like ours.

Some persons’ eloquences are a paragon of willfulness and discipline, perhaps, but most of us evince nonlinear systems’ sensitivity to initial conditions more than our own striving. A human’s capacity to grow from a pair of microscopic cells to an NBA center, after all, is nonlinearity’s calling card. And the initial conditions?

Homes in which our native languages are spoken well by the adults we hear speaking before we know what language is, before we have even a concept of “we” to assign letters to – these form the initial conditions that, subjected to hundreds of millions of iterations, eventually form a capacity with sounds and letters we are told is eloquence.

Barrera grew up in the relative luxury of Mexico City with parents who spoke the language well. His accent is upper-middleclass, his confidence appreciable Has he strived to improve his use of the language? Possibly. Did he have a considerable head start on peers raised in homes where Spanish was spoken less eloquently? Certainly. Does he feel a touch of contempt when he hears them speak? Probably.

Along with what close, and fairly unfair, decisions their first two fights brought, Barrera’s eloquence and evident breeding offended the sensibilities of nemesis Erik Morales, a tijuanense Barrera once derisively called an “Indian,” enkindling a rivalry outside the ring detrimental to the men as what they’ve now done to one another during 108 minutes of sanctioned violence together.

In their public exchanges, Barrera has contented himself to play the diplomat, leaving Morales, and tacitly encouraging him, to play the role of resentful savage. Barrera’s charm, an eloquence that occasionally strays from detached insight to gilded emptiness, got displayed yet again in Tucson a few months back when, as Golden Boy Promotions’ designated partner, Barrera was ringside at Desert Diamond Casino.

Asked if he might someday welcome an induction to boxing’s hall of fame alongside his rival Morales, the way Michael Carbajal recently accompanied Humberto Gonzalez, Barrera paused then replied:

“For our part, there is nothing against Morales. I have always said that he is a great champion. It does not displease me that we are mentioned together.”

It was pure Barrera – eloquent and disingenuous to the last.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

It’s hard to know whether the search for the next great heavyweight will ever end. Generation after generation, from baby boomer to millennial, it goes on. And on.

I’m not sure it will ever produce much more than nostalgia, but it looks as if we’re about to embark on a part of the expedition that will reveal whether there is only history and nothing else after Wladimir Klitschko.

It’s premature to declare an end to the Klitschko era. It also unfair to Klitschko, whose steady reign at the top of the fabled division for nearly a decade suggests he might make all those declarations look foolish in a rematch of his November loss to Tyson Fury.

Nevertheless, the biggest upset of last year and just about any other year left inescapable evidence that Klitschko’s suffocating grip on the heavyweights is finally gone, even if he regains his titles against the thoroughly unpredictable Fury. Klitschko looked like an old monument. Moved like one, too. According to CompuBox, he landed about five punches a round. That’s more than a stat. It’s a symptom, a sign of age. He’ll be 40 on March 25.

Potential rivals in a younger generation have noticed. Klitschko looks like wounded prey and they’ve begun to circle.

“It’s our time now,’’ said 29-year-old Charles Martin, who faces Vyacheslav Glazkov on Jan. 16 at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for an IBF title stripped from Fury in the immediate aftermath of his upset of Klitschko.

Martin went on to say that he wants everything that Klitschko had in terms of belts and presumably money. His reported purse for Fury was $18 million.

“Yeah, I want it all,’’ Martin added during a Wednesday conference call that also included Deontay Wilder, who is the biggest star on Showtime-televised card.

Wilder, who defends his WBC belt against Poland’s Artur Szpilka, has emerged as perhaps the most marketable rival to Klitschko. He’s media friendly. He’s American. He has a big punch, although there are still questions about whether he can withstand similar power. There’s another wrinkle, too. He worked as a Klitschko sparring partner a few years ago.

“I was disappointed that Klitschko didn’t show up,’’ said Wilder, who also might have been disappointed that Fury had the good timing or dumb luck to be in the ring when Klitschko was as vulnerable as he’s been in many years. “Something was missing. That wasn’t what we’re used to seeing.’’

The unbeaten Wilder said he’ll wait for the Fury rematch to see if the old Klitschko is still there, still able to rule boxing most historic division. It was also clear, however, Wilder sees himself as the heir apparent, regardless of Fury’s victory.

“I’m looking forward to being the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world,’’ said Wilder, who doesn’t have to go far to hear the same thing from a division suddenly crowded with promises and perhaps potential enough to make it relevant again.

By Bart Barry-

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

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, no one was certain just yet how debasing for the sport of prizefighting 2015 would be, how mercenary, how joyless, but the previous weekend’s fare served notice to all aficionados, and the worst part, too: Mayweather-Pacquiao was what we asked for, demanded, allowed the sport to suspend itself in pursuit of, for five years that did nothing so much as hollow-out the fanbase by loitering in Las Vegas while more gymnasiums shuttered and fewer American boys explored boxing as more than a cynic’s plan-c moneymaking ruse, a trashtalking musicvideo to film after flunking football and basketball.

In March, Oscar De La Hoya promised Canelo Alvarez as a savior for the sport, and everyone applied the ironist’s filter, instantly and properly, hearing: Canelo Alvarez is the man the Golden Boy hopes will save his struggling brand. It was lost on no one how instrumental De La Hoya and “his” “promotional company” were to Money May’s ascent during the seven years De La Hoya vainly searched for someone, beginning with himself, to humble Floyd Mayweather; instrumental, in fact, is not strong enough – during the partnership years, Golden Boy Promotions was the fulcrum in Al Haymon’s lever, making De La Hoya and his former friend Richard Schaefer mechanically essential to a movement that, in 2015, changed its name from “HBO” or “Showtime” to Premier Boxing Champions, PBC, and began appearing on the same terrestrial television networks promoter Bob Arum convinced aficionados should be boxing’s rightful place (about a decade after Arum first moved boxing from terrestrial television, of course).

Very few pundits realized when Canelo fought Kirkland what an existential crisis the PBC presented, with its hostility to independent media and indifference to competitive matchmaking, and only marginally more recognize it today – choosing, symmetrically, to save such a collective revelation for the very moment their powerlessness to alter it achieves fullness and perfection (with writer David Avila a noble exception).

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, brought merely one concern about a tardy arrival at the ballpark: There mightn’t be time for socializing and reminiscing with writers Kelsey McCarson, a fellow Texan, and David Greisman – not a fellow Texan but doing his level best that week to be one.

My fears were misplaced. The endless and uninspired undercard offered plenty of time for chatting and sharing a photo on the grass roamed by Astros outfielders. Seated directly in front of me, too, was Welshman Anson Wainwright, once a contributor to this very site and today a regular contributor to The Ring’s always engrossing “Best I Faced” series.

The ranks have thinned since my first visit to pressrow in 2004, and in the next five years the PBC’s subversion of media access will end either the PBC or pressrow, but wherever more than a halfdozen writers are gathered at a Texas fightcard, good health and good humor shall remain the rule.

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, anyone who told you he was sure what to expect from Kirkland was embellishing the case a bit. Kirkland had done his preparations with San Antonio’s Rick Morones, instead of Austin’s Ann Wolfe, and while it likely made no difference to the outcome – Canelo is simply a higher level fighter than Kirkland, whatever Kirkland’s conditioning – it was not the plan in March when the Canelo-Kirkland presstour made its way to Alamo City’s historic Aztec Theatre and a pleasant and plump Kirkland confidently and ominously reported his manager was in negotiations with Ms. Wolfe.

Kirkland is a known entity in San Antonio, not quite a legend but one remembered in local gyms for having manstrength even as a boy. Kirkland was the right person to make Canelo look spectacular, a lie-detector type, rough and unrelenting, one to establish quickly the difference in caliber between a champion like Canelo and a local attraction.

Canelo had not before had a man of Kirkland’s class run across the ring at him on first bell and begin hurling punches without regard for anyone’s safety, but he managed the incident as if he had, and many times. That poise is a large reason Gennady Golovkin apologists, those who’ve amplified the Golovkin-camp line for three years, the risible assertion GGG, despite never fighting anywhere but middleweight, is ready to fight any man between 154 pounds and 168, strongly prefer 2016’s superfight happen at 160.

If that fight happens, this much will be made immediately clear: While Canelo Alvarez has fought at least one man considerably better than Golovkin, and maybe several, GGG’s reign of terror at middleweight has yet to include anyone close to Canelo’s talent.

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, the 200-mile eastwards drive got justified by both men’s reputations and the increasingly unfortunate realization Canelo Alvarez will be the Mexican prizefighter most remembered in our current era – despite his technical inferiority to each member of our last era’s Mexican triumvirate: Juan Manuel Marquez, Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales.

Because of Mexican television rights and other complexities, including their standard-issue dark heads of hair, the best fighters of the last era accomplished fractionally much celebrity in their homeland as Canelo did before his 25th birthday. Canelo cannot be blamed for that. He’s squandered no opportunities, whatever his limitations of speed and power, and he remains a prompt and courteous interview even when he does not need to be. He has far surpassed his only realistic competition for Mexico’s heart, “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., and he’s done it with discipline and class.

Any aficionado seated ringside for Canelo-Kirkland and knowledgeable of Mexican prizefighting history – practically a redundancy, that – left the experience balancing a sentiment like this: An era of Mexican prizefighting could do better than having Canelo Alvarez as its standard bearer, yes, but it could also do much worse.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

A difficult year got a lot tougher in its final week. Howard Davis Jr. died.

Davis’ death Wednesday after a battle with lung cancer was confirmed Thursday, New Year’s Eve and a sober reason to mourn the loss of a fighter who was the symbolic face of better days.

For younger generations, Davis might not mean a whole lot. Truth is, he was forgettable as a pro, which is the only part of the business that gets much attention anymore.

He was a journeyman-like 36-6-1 and was 0-3 in fights for major titles. He lost a unanimous decision in 1980 to Scotland’s Jim Watt in Glasgow for the IBF’s lightweight belt. The cards went against him in a 1984 split-decision loss to Puerto Rican Hall of Famer Edwin Rosario in San Juan, also for the IBF’s 135-pound version of the title. Buddy McGirt knocked him out at New York’s Felt Forum in the first round of a 1988 bout for the IBF’s 140-pound crown.

The pro record prevents him from induction to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. But he belongs there – just as surely Cuban heavyweight Teofilio Stevenson does – in some category for what he did and meant to the Olympics, an international event if there ever was one.

Sylvester Stallone is a Hall of Famer because of what his Rocky role did for the game. Yo, if Stallone is in the Hall, there’s got to be some room in there for Davis and Stevenson.

Davis, who died at home in Florida at 59, came from an era when Americans still watched and cared about Olympic boxing. He was on the fabled 1976 team, the best ever in U.S. history and the genesis of what would become the 1980s, a heyday in the pro game.

In hindsight, we remember the ’76 Olympics for Sugar Ray Leonard, who went on to one of the greatest pro careers in history.

In the public imagination, Leonard’s brilliance as a pro seemed to heighten his status as the star of that American team.

Forgotten, however, is that Leonard wasn’t even voted the most outstanding boxer of those Games. Davis, the gold medalist at 132 pounds, was.

He got a trophy called the Val Barker Award. For the record, Barker was the UK’s amateur heavyweight champion in 1891, five years before the modern Olympics began in 1896. I didn’t know who Barker was. I’m not sure anybody does, not even the winners.

It would be unfair to Barker’s descendants to ask that the Award be re-named for Davis. But it is fair to ask that the International Olympic Committee and/or USOC somehow remember Davis with an award in his name. Nobody has exemplified the Barker exemplifies more than Davis.

Three days before his first Olympic bout, his mom, Catherine, died from a heart attack. That part of the story and more has always made me think of Davis as the true face of that ‘76 team.

He fought without an agenda or an eye on what a gold medal might be worth to him as pro. At the sound of an opening bell, it was only clear that he fought because he loved it. At ringside, Howard Cosell noticed. The iconic broadcaster marveled at a dance highlighted by the choreographed balance between hand speed and footwork. Cosell compared him to Ali.

In Davis, there was a genuine expression of joy that has somehow been extinguished in the chase for money. Yet, he was nobody’s fool, either.

“Europeans take a lot of punches,’’ he told Sports Illustrated in 1976. “They get cut and looking ugly is just part of the day’s work. But I don’t want to be ugly. I’m not crazy.’’

Wasn’t angry, either.

Even after a disappointing pro career, there were few complaints. Even after the shock of being diagnosed with cancer last summer, he vowed to fight on. He seemed to say it as though he was looking forward to making cancer miss. It didn’t. Rest In Peace, Howard Davis Jr. I wouldn’t have been a fan without you.

By Bart Barry–

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, catalyzed no thoughts of making the 150-minute eastwards trek from Alamo City to Minute Maid Park, home of Major League Baseball’s Astros, a stadium with a functional train in left field in homage to its location on the hallowed grounds of a hundred-year-old station. The stadium, celebrating its fourth and surely not final appellation, was christened “Enron Field” 15 years ago – back when energy arbitrage, electronically creating shortages and satisfying them at usurious prices, eGouging as it were, appeared to Wall Street like the industry to make America great again.

The usual credentials hassle handled by fightweek intervention from a powerful editor, a man so respected I was seated onfield under the opening of the opening rooftop, I celebrated my newly unprecedented access by not beginning the 2 1/2-hour drive from San Antonio till after the opening bell of an eight-hour fightcard rang on its cavernous park.

There was an enormous Chinese heavyweight on the undercard, a 7-foot and 280-pound Dong, he may even have been co-main, but he was so dreadful, and what followed was so excellent, the enormous Dong barely got written to the hard drive.

San Antonio promoter Mike Battah, the man who put more than 40,000 folks in Alamodome for Alvarez-Trout, invariably expected a better turnout for Alvarez-FellowTexan than he got, but blessings be rained upon him, he was deep in the PBC fold before the year was out, anyway, scared neither by public uninterest nor oversized venues (he rented AT&T Center for NBC’s December PBC broadcast).

Kirkland swarmed Alvarez at the opening bell, acquitting himself more savagely than insiders feared he mightn’t – so often veteran aggressors choose matches like these to apply singleply boxing skills, making the young champion hunt instead of defend – and Alvarez demonstrated composure appropriate to his record more than age.

Canelo iced Kirkland spectacularly before 31,000 Texans in round 3.

There’s a presence about Alvarez – these things begin with selfbelief and color in the details later – that speaks to a pair of ideas at first not apparently kin: mythology and confidence.

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, was not facinorous humid as feared when the match got announced, in fact, for as long as it took to open the rooftop, blow papers about, wet the bluemat, and close the rooftop, the May breeze off the Gulf was not facinorous at all.

In lieu of a mediacenter vending machine, the promoter gave each writer a giftcertificate to a ballpark vendor, and the balance bought an astrodog and cola, or nachos and change. The match happened a week after The Fight Boxing May Never Forgive, a legacymaking bore between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, a humiliating affair for all but one man and his advisor, and a humbling affair for the compliant media in attendance – men who knew the match would suck but didn’t dare opine so publicly lest their unassigned fightweek access remain unassigned come fightday.

Perhaps Kirkland was handpicked an opponent for Alvarez as critics insisted he was, but surely the tricky Austin Trout and dreadful Erislandy Lara were not, and Alvarez made fisticuffs with them willingly as he did with the Texan Mandingo.

What Alvarez came in boxing knowing still better than his promoter Oscar De La Hoya, who knew it rather well himself, is th’t we do not believe myths because they are true; myths become true when we believe them. Alvarez came to America believing his own myth, and excepting only his disgraceful showing against Money May, Alvarez, in both the opponents he’s selected and the way he’s undone them, has satisfied the requirements of his post.

*

The May morning of 2015’s knockout of the year, the Saturday Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez spearchiseled Texan James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland in Houston, there was some question if Kirkland’s ferocity mightn’t give Alvarez a momentary fright, but it didn’t, whatever Kirkland claimed after the match about a brief exchange in the first round. Kirkland’s conditioning was a certainty to no one, his relationship with mentor Ann Wolfe switched to Off for the biggest event in Kirkland’s unpredictable career, and the opening minute allowed those with eyes to see an inferential chance they’d not miss:

Kirkland conditioned himself for a savage 10-minute assault and a dramatic conclusion, his hand raised or chest chinpinned, and the match’s conclusion was not surprising as its style.

Alvarez did not grindout Kirkland, keepaway jabbing till the Texan was soft. Alvarez clipped him with a hook, clipped him with an uppercut, and iced him with a telegraphed righthand he framed for photographers by exaggeratedly feinting low, halfjabbing Kirkland to the body and watching his sternum. Kirkland dropped everything, realized he’d been hoodwinked, and started a hopeless lefthook in time to complete the aesthetics, winning Canelo 2015’s best knockout by compliantly screwtopping himself ropes to canvas.

***

Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted next Monday.

By Norm Frauenheim

Bankers, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Manny Pacquiao, a handful of promoters and network executives can celebrate a year about to enter the books. Money ruled, which means it was Mayweather’s year. He fulfilled his nickname. Got most of the money, too.

But good for the business?

No way.

By definition, prizefighting is a simple enough formula. To wit: Get the biggest prize for the smallest risk. In 2015, Mayweather played that one out better than anyone ever has. As the year ends, there continues to be unconfirmed reports that receipts for his revenue-record setting victory over Pacquiao on May 2 are still being counted. Numbers are all over the place.

We read that his final purse is $220 million, then $260 million, which would rank the money for his 12 rounds of work somewhere between the Los Angeles Dodgers ($291 million) and the New York Yankees ($223 million) at the top of baseball’s last list of reported payrolls.

Hard to know what to believe. But there he is, in Dubai one day, in a new Bugati the next and always ready to make it rain by stuffing his bags with disposable cash.

Mayweather has gone from the top of the pound-for-pound list to being the face of the one percent. Let somebody a lot smarter than a boxing writer be the judge of that. But give Mayweather credit, not that he needs it. He might not have been TBE in the ring. But he ranks as The Best Earner in history and that figures to be undisputed for a while.

In the wake of a winner-take-all model that enriched him, however, there are consequences that could confront the game with a steep price in 2016 and beyond. HBO’s Jim Lampley said it best in the wake of his dull decision over Pacquiao, whose role as the junior partner in the money grab earned him north of $150 million.

Lampley called it a cynical exercise.

It was. As the year ends, coffers are filled, yet there’s an empty feeling about what was really accomplished. Does anybody other than Mayweather think the game is better for the exercise? Didn’t think so.

A sign of that emptiness is in the year-end ritual of voting for the various awards. Fighter of the Year is the biggie. But it’s a tough choice this time. On this ballot, the dreaded No Award, always a contender in a lot of categories, is an option. Yeah, Tyson Fury beat Wladimir Klitschko, but I’d cast a vote for Donald Trump before I’d vote for an okay heavyweight who reserves most of the fury for his insults.

The guess here is that Nicaraguan flyweight Roman Gonzalez wins, but his likely election looks to be more of a concession to a brilliant career (44-0, 38 KOs) ignored until HBO finally decided to pair him up with middleweight Gennady Golovkin in a couple of telecasts

An astonishing and worrisome aspect to the Gonzalez phenomenon goes back to where this column starts. Follow the money. In 2015, Gonzalez became the lightest ever to ascend to No. 1 in The Ring’s pound-for-pound rankings. He succeeded Mayweather after Mayweather’s announced retirement following a victory in September over Andre Berto.

The dollars, however, didn’t follow Gonzalez’ climb up the pound-for-pound scale. During his reign at No. 1, Mayweather earned a minimum of $32-million a fight through his six-fight deal with Showtime. In Gonzalez’ October stoppage of Brian Viloria in his second HBO appearance and in the immediate aftermath of his introduction as the pound-for-pound No. 1, he earned a career-high $250,000. Mayweather stuffs more than that into one of those carry-ons.

For Gonzalez, the pound-for-pound title represents little more than an honorarium. The Grand Canyon-like disparity on the pay scale, however, includes a more troubling aspect. It represents a lack of investment in lighter weights that have often sustained the business during periods of transition and/or trouble. HBO’s interest in Gonzalez is promising. Perhaps, it’s the beginning of an investment.

But the long-term trend is not good. Consider this: In the two-plus decades since junior-flyweights Michael Carbajal and Humberto Gonzalez earned $1-million purses for fighting each other three times in 1993 and 1994, there’s been no raise in pay for the little guys, who in some ways are to boxing what the working middle class is to an economy. There are no good undercards without them. Yet, they’re getting paid a lot less now than they did a few generations ago.

In stature and impact, they are so small that they often don’t seem to matter. But it’s the little things that often reveal a lot about a business and these days they appear to be troublesome fly in a problematic ointment.

Follow all the action as Luis Ortiz battles Bryant Jennings for the WBA Interim Heavyweight title.  The action begins at 10:15 PM ET / 7:15 PT with a Super Featherweight bout between former world champion Nicholas Walters and Jason Sosa

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Round 1 Ortiz working the body…Straight left hurts Jennings..Big left hurts Jennings again..Jennings wobbling..God body shot..

Round 2 Jennings lands a combination..right..Uppercut from Ortiz..Uppercut from Jennings..

Round 3  Big left hurts Jennings..Combination from Jennings…

Round 4 Ortiz lands a left…2 Uppercuts from Jennings

Round 5 hard uppercut from Ortiz

Round 6 Combination for Ortiz

Round 7 Body shots from Jennings..Straight right from Jennings..HUGE UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES JENNINGS..BIG RIGHT AND JENNINGS STUMBLES INTO THE ROPES..ONE MORE SHOT AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

 

Round 1 Good left hook to body from Walters..Left to body..Hard body..left to body and right from Sosas..Right from Walters

Round 2 Hard left from Walters..Right..left to body..Uppercut..Uppercut..Sosa lands a right uppercut..Good body shot

Round 3 Walters lands a jab

Round 4 Walters lands an uppercut on the inside

Round 5 Hard right wobbles Sosa..2 rights and uppercut from Sosa..Hard body shot from Walters..

Round 6

Round 7 Hard body shot from Walters..Vicious left hook to the body

Round 8 Walters lands a right down the middle

Round 9 2 hard rights from Sosa..right on the inside..Walters lands a body shot..Hard right and left hook from Sosa

Round 10 Right lead from Walters…

96-94 Sosa, 95-95 on 2 cards….DRAW

Punches:  Walters: 281-622    Sosa: 168-873