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| Down Goes Huck on SpikeTV for PBC |
By Jeffrey Freeman, KO Digest
August is my least favorite month. Not because of the beautiful late
summer weather in New England, but because of the boxing drought that we all experience
year after year. For whatever reason, rare is the big or important bout
held in the eighth month of the year.
Sometimes I think of it
like this: If a year represented a 12 round title fight, August would be
the round both fighters take off in order to save a little
something extra for the championship ro
unds
still to come. As the weather cools, boxing heats up in the fall and
into the winter. Last month was not without its exception to the rule of
course and by that I mean the incredible Marco Huck-Krzysztof Glowacki brawl aired on SpikeTV by Premier Boxing Champions.
The defending cruiserweight champ
was cruising to a record setting 14th successful title defense when he
was brutally stopped late in the fight by Glowacki of Walcz, Poland. Like it or not, 2015 has been, and will continue to be, the year of
Premier Boxing Champions. Al Haymon's revolutionary production concept
is now in full swing. Boxing is suddenly everywhere you look. Fighters
(and fans) are actively benefiting from all the exposure and all the
action. Yet only the fighters seem to know this and appreciate it.
Perpetually impossible to please boxing fans seem unappreciative of
Haymon's efforts to preserve and restore their favorite
sport through clever use of nostalgia and all-you-can-eat knuckle
sandwiches on "free" TV. After some of their early bouts fell flat, PBC
now has a legitimate "Fight of the Year" candidate in Glowacki's "made for television" knockout of Huck to win the
cruiserweight title with a stunning, come from behind, get up off the
floor, and knock the long reigning, defending world champion through the
ropes KO. It is exactly these kinds of improbably exciting results that
will create new boxing fans and bring old ones back to the fold. Thank
you Mr. Haymon, thank you PBC, and thank you to the fighters who put it
all on the line for our televised entertainment.
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Lowell Golden Gloves
|
PBC in Lowell, Massachusetts is right up my alley.
Not only has KO Digest
live covered the last two significant boxing cards held in the Mill
City
(2012 at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium and 2013 at the Tsongas
Arena, both Chicago Fight Club Promotions shows headlined by Irish Joey
McCreedy) but I also lived in Lowell during the best years of Micky
Ward's memorable career, from 1998 to 2003. I know the city. I know the
people. I know the history of fisticuffs on the streets and in the r
ing
there. I even covered the entire 2012 Lowell Golden Gloves tournament
from start to finish and let me tell you, that's a lot of amateur bouts
to have kept track of.
In this photo I took from ringside during the
2012 Lowell GG's, that's Matt Doherty
(born and raised in nearby Salem, MA where they once famously burned
"witches" to death) in the corner with Lowell's Cowboy cutman Bill Murphy and trainer Michael Strazzere.
Doherty, now 3-1 as a professional lightweight, and known as "The
Mantis" will be competing when big time professional boxing returns to
the Lowell Memorial Auditorium on Saturday October 10. That's just 6
days after Micky Ward ("The Pride of Lowell") celebrates his 50th
birthday in style on October 4. Additional details on the card are
"sketchy" at this time (that just means I can't say anything yet) but
what I can tell you is that this is a Murphy's Boxing card under the
Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) banner. Local New England talent will be
in action and the rich history of boxing in Lowell, Massachusetts will
be featured prominently. Look for KO in press row again for this one.
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| Santa Cruz batters a Schaefer-jinxed Mares on PBC on ESPN |
Just days before his crushing KO loss to Jhonny Gonzalez and
approximately two years before last month's thrilling majority decision loss to
Leo Santa Cruz in Los Angeles, Abner Mares was badly jinxed by Golden
Boy CEO Richard Schaefer who said on international media
conference call for all to hear loud and clear — "Abner Mares is a pound
for pound star. I believe Mares belongs in
the number two spot. We have Andre Ward, a fighter I respect, who's
had tremendous accomplishments. He won the Super Six. Mares
won the bantamweight tournament. Both fought the best in their division.
Look what Mares has done since. Look at what Ward has done since. No
question Abner belongs in the number two spot. You look at Juan
Manuel Marquez, who I believe is in the number three spot. He got
dominated every second of every round, by Floyd Mayweather, who is the number one pound for pound star."
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| Catch me if you can Manny |
In Praise of TBE — Look, I know everybody is frustrated with boring
mismatches and overblown Pay-Per-View costs. I know everybody would rather see
Floyd "Money" Mayweather take on just about anybody but Andre Berto for victory
#49. I get it. Trust me, I do. But the man is a living legend and if
what he says is true, this is his Sweet Science swan song. Does that not
warrant some attention and respect? I think it does even if I like to
have some fun with Floyd's antics from time to time. Say what
you like, but Mayweather has fought all comers and only a handful of
them could even compete with him. That's not an accident. Mayweather is
one of the greatest defensive fighters in the history of boxing and his
timing, instincts, and ring intelligence are off the charts. Rare is the
glove that's been solidly laid on him. Most great champions at his age,
38, are in sharp decline and showing signs of it. Not Mayweather. He's still
P4P #1 and as strange as it may sound, he'll surely leave us wanting more.
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| Hunter gives the boxing media a cerebral tongue lashing |
Andre Berto's trainer Virgil Hunter on boxing writers & media members backlashing over #MayBerto
— "Some people don't have any grasp of what it takes to
be a fighter. When I see the attitudes that come along with such an
event, it usually comes from somebody who doesn't know what fighters go
through. We acknowledge
everybody whether you come up to us with a set in one of these rooms, or
whether you come up to us with your
camera phone. A lot of you can't even get us past YouTube but we still
acknowledge you because we understand the sport and we appreciate that
you're participating in our sport. So we love you just the same. It's
time you give back to the sport. Anybody who has any negativity about
it, who's fighting who, we can sit up here and go through
history and contradict everything that coming from the negative side."
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| Only the Ghost of Rocky Marciano can stop 49-0 |
KO's #MayBerto
Prediction — Ordinarily, for a fight of this magnitude, you would read
my prediction published on RingTV but this one is such a forgone conclusion,
they're not even doing a "Fight Picks" article. That should tell you
something. Now let me tell you something else. Floyd Mayweather will
"punish" disinterested boxing fans for their wholesale rebuke of this
fight by making it fun and semi-competitive, not unlike what he did with
Marcos Maidana the first time. And also
not unlike what he did with Manny Pacquiao, but in the opposite way. In
that farce of the century, Floyd "punished" fans and media alike for
forcing him to fight Pacquiao by making the fight a grossly overpriced
and boring shit show. Against Andre Berto, Mayweather will rumble more
than usual, win eight of twelve rounds, and say: "See, I told you Berto
was a tough competitor, he gave me a better fight than Manny did." This
serves to humiliate Pacquiao further, something Mayweather won't be able
to resist.
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| The greatest upset in sports history, for Mom |
Busted Upset — The quick and easy comparisons to Douglas-Tyson as they relate to Saturday's
#MayBerto
farce don't really fit beyond the similarly long odds against the
motivated underdogs. For one thing, Mayweather is a training
machine who never slacks off or shows up to fight in poor condition. By
contrast, Tyson trained for Buster on a diet of drugs, alcohol, and
cheap Japanese geishas.
As a challenger to the best fighter on the
planet, Douglas, unlike Berto
, was known
for a questionable heart and for quitting under fire in a title fight.
Berto, immeasurably less talented than Douglas but no less written off,
suffers from no such ticker issues as evidenced by his many entertaining
wars in the ring. If Berto somehow beats Mayweather, it will be because
he outfought him not because he caught him unprepared or undertrained.
Divine Intervention — What do Evander Holyfield and Manny Pacquiao have
in common? Both now claim to have been miraculously healed of physical
afflictions by the power of the Lord our God. Long time fight fans will
recall that when "The Real Deal" was diagnosed with a pin sized hole in
his enormous heart back in the 1990's, Holyfield actually claimed it was
God and God alone who healed his ticker and ultimately made him fit for
epic battle against Iron Mike Tyson. Pacquiao, he
of the torn rotator cuff and ensuing "fraud of the century" against
Floyd Mayweather last April, now claims that his injured shoulder was
healed by God and swimming in salt water, this according to boxing
writer Mike Coppinger
in his new piece about Pacquiao on Boxing Junkie for USA Today Sports.
But the questions remain, was either condition ever legitimate to begin
with and does God really heal prizefighters?
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| Times have changed in boxing |
The Bottom Line — Have you ever wondered why boxing insists on
maintaining the controversial status quo of 24-hour weigh-ins
(the day
before the fight) as opposed to the more traditional "same day"
weigh-ins used in the past? Do you realize that the political will to
stick with the current method has more to do now with publicity
(and of
course money) than safety? Back then, nobody much cared about
weigh-ins as an important event to be observed personally and only t
he
very biggest fights drew fan attention to the scales. As the domain of
newspaper writers and other industry insiders, the weigh-in was more of a
formality than a function of the fight.
Then in the 1980's, when
"same day" weigh-ins went the way of 15-round
title fights and mob control of the Sweet Science, the rationale behind
the change was easily attributable to health concerns and fighter
safety. A boxer who has to dehydrate his body to make a strict
divisional weight limit will be weakened to the point of peril, or so
the claim went. Give that fighter a full day to rehydrate with fluids
they argued. That makes sense, fans said, and so it went on and on that
way for over 30 years now.
Today, weigh-ins are big business and
a big part of the
"fight week" experience. Fans and media attend in
droves, even paying for the right to be there, as was the case last
April for
#MayPac
when a ticket cost $10 to something that was traditionally free.
Mayweather's greed aside, in a down economy, a niche sport like boxing
must do everything within its own power to squeeze every last drop of
publicity possible and the structure of today's boxing weigh-in allows
for that. So again we can see clearly that the powers that be don't
really care about the safety of the fighters as much as they care about
selling a few more tickets or a few more pay-per-views. That's why the
24-hour weigh-in is here to stay no matter how much weight today's
boxers put on between the scale and the ring.
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| Don't forget the girls Bob |
Promoter Bob Arum talks to KO Digest about changes in the boxing
broadcast business — "When I first started in the sport back in the mid
60's, there were no satellites, no international satellites, no domestic
satellites so the communication was, you would look at it as like being
in the dark ages. When we did a closed circuit fight we had to use
telephone company long lines. It was a whole different business model
because of how limited in retrospect, we were in communicatio
ns.
Now we have all the satellites, we have pay per view, we have stuff
that nobody even contemplated 45 years ago. In the next 10 or 15 years
people will be buying a PPV fight on their iPad. And not only buying it
on their iPad but electing which corner to watch between rounds, which
camera angle to watch a fight from. Everything changes and yet
everything stays the same. Ultimately it's still two guys in the ring facing
off against each other."
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| Holly Holm is next up for Rousey in the UFC |
The Sweet Side of the Sweet Science — Holly Holm, once considered to be the #1 pound for pound rated female
fighter in the world, shocked the sport she ruled in April of 2013 when
she announced her departure from boxing to pursue her goals in mixed
martial arts. The decision to switch sports closed the door once and for
all on an all-girl superfight against
"First Lady of Boxing" Cecilia
Braekhus, the new #1 P4P female fighter. More than two years later,
Holm's dream has come true in the form of a fight against UFC superstar
Ronda Rousey on January 2 in Vegas. Said
"The Preacher's
Daughter" at the time of her difficult decision: "When we were deciding
which way to go with my future, my trainer, Mike Winkeljohn, said it
best, ‘You want to climb a new mountain.’ This has created a new spark
in me, and I’m following my heart. I just want to fight where my passion
is."
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| Will the winner risk it all against GGG? |
Reversal of Fortune — 34 year old middleweight champion of the world
Miguel Cotto is reportedly set to make 30 million dollars for his HBO
PPV defense of the WBC title against Mexican heartthrob Canelo Alvarez,
who himself is set to make 10 million dollars. What's evident here is
that Cotto has played his economic cards correctly even if boxing fans
know in their heart of hearts that Gennady Golovkin is more deserving of
a middleweight title fight with Cotto, a Puerto Rican w
arrior
who's Mama didn't raise no fool. If you're going to lose, and perhaps
get beat up badly in the process, it's better to make 30 million dollars
than 3 times less. Though an underdog against his 25 year old
challenger, Cotto is not in an unwinnable fight against Alvarez. As
always, boxing is all about the money, that risk-reward ratio, and
that's why it's Canelo and not GGG that Cotto will risk it all against
in November.
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| Nunn has been locked up too long for drug charges |
Second To Who — I've been thinking a lot lately about former World
Middleweight Champion Michael Nunn. Currently incarcerated for buying
two pounds of cocaine from an undercover police officer, Nunn was one
hell of a good fighter. Back in 1988, when I was just 18, all I wanted
in this life was to see him fight Sugar Ray Leonard. That's how highly I
thought of Nunn. Hell, the whole boxing world was impressed with him
and for damn good reason. His beatings of Frank Tate, Juan Roldan,
and Sumbu Kalambay were all equally impressive in their own special
way. The body punch that dropped Tate was tricky quick, the knockout of
Roldan was of the ten count variety, retiring the Argentine for good.
Kalambay? He fell in one round from one punch. The sky looked the limit
for Nunn, who 26 years ago in 1989, decisioned Iran Barkley to
retain the title. Nunn made two more defenses (against Marlon Starling
and Donald Curry) before he ran into the unchecked fury of James "Light
Out" Toney who lived up to his nickname, leveling Nunn in eleven.
Editor's Note — The KO Digest Boxing News has changed a lot through years since its
inception in 2010. Writers have come and gone. Monthly columns have come
and gone as well. Change, while never easy, is a sure sign of growth.
All in all, the changes we've experienced have been for the better and I am as proud of KO
Digest today as I was when it first started to take shape, and take off
in the boxing community. Our brand is well known and well respected.
Our ringside reporters are credentialed for
many
of the biggest and best fights in boxing today. Our content is read
throughout the world by fight fans, eager for unbiased and informative
reporting. Mission accomplished. Today, it is primarily myself and David
McLeod who hold down the writing fort. John Scheinman, Chuck Marbry, and Steve Bridge remain as occasional (but valuable) contributors. I'm forever grateful to all who have contributed to KO Digest in the past and they include Edwin Ayala, Terry Strawson, Joel Sebastianelli, Mark A. Jones, and Derek Bonnett.
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| Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Freeman |
If
you enjoy KO Digest and appreciate the quality writing, boxing
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Thank you for reading and thank you for the continued support. The KO
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