Quick Jabs: Apocryphal Sparring Tales Flourish; Manny Pacquiao “Knocks Out” Dandruff; Chris Arreola Redefines “In Shape;” More

It’s about time to dive head-first into next week’s Floyd Mayweather-Juan Manuel Marquez coverage. It all kicks off here Sunday, with daily posts about the event throughout the week. Also Sunday, I’ll be on Boxing Truth Radio, talking about Mayweather-Marquez, among other topics. I’ll try to set it up so you can listen from this site if you want starting at 9 p.m. EST. No promises.

But the world, it doesn’t revolve around that one fight, no no no. There’s stuff like the stuff in the headline going on. There’s Jewishness, drug use allegations, football player punches and tons of other stuff to talk about. And so talked about it must be. Welcome to this week’s edition of Quick Jabs.

(P.S. Today through me off my stride — today’s earlier post, I felt, needed to be addressed separately — so watch tomorrow afternoon for Round And Round, the feature where we run through news of fights in the works.)


Quick Jabs

Let’s start with an entertaining video. I have a few of them, so they need to be spread out. Manny is battling “hair fall” by way of battling dandruff. THIS COULD BE PACQUIAO’S TOUGHEST OPPONENT.

I forgot to mention one thing about some upcoming boxing. Gofightlive.tv is going to carry the Ivan Calderon-Rodel Mayol junior flyweight rematch-headlined pay-per-view, in case your cable carrier is only picking up the Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. junior middleweight-headlined pay-per-view. The gofightlive team recently got a favorable and deservedly favorable write-up here, and I like their philosophy. One more thing, because it could get swallowed up by Mayweather-Marquez coverage next week — on Tuesday, there are two separate noteworthy fight cards in Mexico featuring numerous Ring magazine top-10-ranked boxers, such as junior flyweight Edgar Sosa; junior bantamweight Jorge Arce; junior lightweight Humberto Soto; and junior flyweight Ulises Solis. Arce is in toughest, going up against Siphiwe Nongqayi, who beat Arce’s brother to set up the bout…

I’m not saying people shouldn’t report on it, or comment on it, but gossip about who beat up whom in sparring is usually very, very unreliable, so do not — repeat, do not — put very much stock in this kind of thing. For instance, according to Doug Fischer’s source, Mayweather handed Lamont Peterson his ass in sparring. According to Peterson’s people and some of Rick Reeno’s sources, it was the other way around. Likewise, there are all kinds of contradictory reports about whether junior welterweight Amir Khan was handing out beatdowns to Manny Pacquiao in sparring, and that had something to do with Pacquiao-Khan being a viable fight (offered by Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum, turned down by Khan’s camp). My guess is that, in both cases, the truth is in between. Enough witnesses suggest that Mayweather-Peterson was a heated sparring session. Most accounts have Khan holding his own in sparring with Pacquiao. But what if Pacquiao was working on something with Khan and not going full-bore when the “eye witnesses” were in attendance? And haven’t two separate fighters now taken credit for Mayweather’s rib injury, the one that delayed the fight from July to September? Seriously people. Don’t get too worked up about this stuff…

A bit more on Mayweather-Marquez vis-a-vis Pacquiao-Cotto: HBO asked Top Rank, promoter of the latter, to delay a press conference it had planned for Monday to later in the day so as not to upstage an earlier Mayweather-Marquez news conference. I’m not always in favor of one fight’s news conference happening around the same time as another fight’s news conference. But in this case, I totally think Top Rank should be holding news conferences next week. After all, Mayweather-Marquez was announced just as Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton was about to start, so there’s no question of who set this precedent. Furthermore, Mayweather-Marquez is having a news conference every day this week and last; rivals gotta have theirs sometime. And furtherermore, it’s such a natural to say “Mayweather-Marquez” and “Pacquiao-Cotto” in the same sentence, since the winners of both fights really ought to meet; in some sense, the main appeal of Mayweather-Marquez, really, is who might get Pacquiao next…

A couple last thoughts on Mayweather-Marquez: Did you know Mayweather Promotions isn’t actually a real promoter according to the state of Nevada? Are you surprised to find this out? Also, no instant replay for that fight, after all…

And one last bit on Pacquiao-Cotto: This Michael Koncz joker in Pacquiao’s camp really works my nerves — saying Pacquiao doesn’t have to talk to Freddie Roach because he’s “just the trainer,” arranging sparring partners for Pacquiao that make no sense, generally just mucking things up — but it’s worth noting that Pacquiao likes him, and why. “I like him because he does what I tell him to do,” he said. Interesting. I guess this means Roach wasn’t be “kept” from talking to Pacquiao during their recent period of non-communication, but that Pacquiao put Koncz up as his shield. I like Pacquiao, love him even, but sometimes he’s just a weird dude. We’ll get to see him and Cotto be mostly humble and quiet in an HBO 24/7 series that starts Oct. 24, per HBO’s Twitter feed…

I find it highly amusing that some journalists are writing “reports that Chris Arreola is fat are wrong” stories. They judged this, apparently, on him not looking all that plump during a recent public workout, and on his actual professed number on the scale. Except I don’t know how much you can tell about someone looking plump or not when he has his shirt on — conspicuous during a public workout, huh? — and even the number Arreola has cited, 260 pounds, isn’t all that damn impressive. I thought Arreola looked at his best at 239, against Chazz Witherspoon, and even then he could have used some work on that flab. Arreola needs to be at his absolute best condition for his heavyweight fight against Vitali Klitschko, an opponent like no other he’s ever faced, and I am going to go ahead and be skeptical that he loses 20 pounds before Sept. 26. There are people who just obviously WANT Arreola to not be fat, so they’re interpreting the facts to fit that…
Two other notes on Klitschko-Arreola: 1. Per a news release, Johnathon Banks will be fighting heavyweight Javier Mora on the undercard. Could be a fun scrap, but it’ll probably only be for the live audience. Another heavyweight fight between Alexander Ustinov and Cedric Boswell is on the card, too. 2. Klitschko just needs to shut the hell up about a Lennox Lewis rematch. It’s not going to happen, even if you insult his mommy, Vitali. I understand the competitive fire of wanting to avenge that loss, but even if Vitali beat Lennox now, what would it prove? Lewis has been retired FOR FIVE YEARS. Nobody would be impressed if you beat up a rusty, 44-year-old Lewis, Vitali…
I now give you two Filipino boxers belting out tunes. Up first is Pacquiao, singing, like the hippie he is, “Let It Be.” (I kid, I kid.) Up second is junior bantamweight Nonito Donaire, being cheesy by singing some cheesy pop love song. But the woman in the
funny hat likes it. (I guess it’s a staple of these celebrity talent shows to have one insane woman on the panel. Some things cross all cultural barriers.)

Light heavyweight Clinton Woods has retired, and it comes at just the right time. Woods definitely falls under the category of “blue collar guy who got more with less,” and as such his career was pretty admirable. Yes, he got trounced a couple times, but he never stopped fighting in those bouts; he also went 1-1-1 with Glen Johnson and beat top-10-level light heavies Julio Cesar Gonzalez and Rico Hoye. It was a pretty good, and pretty fun, career…
It’s rare when Bob Arum and I have the exact same thought, but that punch in the Oregon-Boise State football game was well-thrown, we both agree. Every boxing fan knows that it’s the punch you don’t see that hurts most, so the sucker punch nature of the shot takes away some of its impressiveness. But still. Me. Bob Arum. Mind meld…
If you were wondering whether Arum had gone crazy by insisting on putting boring junior middleweight Yuri Foreman on the Pacquiao-Cotto undercard, Thomas Hauser recently got a heartfelt quote out of him as to why he was doing it: “For me as a Jewish person, to give a young Jewish man from Israel the opportunity to fight for a world championship and then have him win it would be enormously satisfying. I’d consider it one of the most significant achievements of my career.” Look, I rag on Arum sometimes, but there is a real human being in there, I suspect. It’s why he’s always talking up the idea of putting on boxing matches in Yankees Stadium or whatever. He really seems to genuinely, personally want to satisfy his own personal goal here, one that harkens back to his childhood memories…
Amir Khan and Frank Warren are threatening to sue Facebook because of some phony, racist accounts targeting Khan. This sounds like a perfectly bad way to waste money…
It surprises me how many headlines junior middleweight Ricardo Mayorga got for talking about moving to mixed martial arts. So a faded, disgruntled boxer decides he wants to try his hand with a small MMA promoter, and this is big news? Mayorga has had his problems with Don King, which is one of the reasons he’s doing the MMA thing, but junior welterweight Nate Campbell, another disgruntled Don King-promoted fighter, says that he’s so desperate to escape King that he not only is not asking King for money he’s owed, but that he’s willing to pay King out of his pocket for his release. I wish I understood what King got out of sitting on fighters’ careers and not letting them do anything. He doesn’t make any money that way, does he?…
In an otherwise entertaining rant where Hector Camacho, Jr. said things about Fernando Vargas like “I ain’t losing to no guy with tits,” he took it to a sublime, higher level of ironic, belly-busting comedy when he said Vargas was “a bum with a name.” Wow. Wow. Says HECTOR CAMACHO’s son, a fighter no one would otherwise pay attention to, as he has accomplished absolutely nothing…

Things have gotten kinda ugly in the back-and-forth between Beibut Shumenov and Gabriel Campillo, the latter of whom won a light heavyweight fight recently. Lawsuits, allegations of potential drug use, reportedly unpaid purses, you name it. I don’t even want to dive into who sounds right and who sounds wrong. I just want to give you the whole unholy mess and let you suss it out…

If you’ve been wondering when junior welterweight Victor Ortiz will restart the clock on his career revival, he’s been out with an injury, according to his promoter, and will be ready by the end of the year…

Amateur news: Mongolians! And: Weight class reduction, as expected.

About Tim Starks

Tim is the founder of The Queensberry Rules and co-founder of The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board (http://www.tbrb.org). He lives in Washington, D.C. He has written for the Guardian, Economist, New Republic, Chicago Tribune and more.

Quantcast