The Amir Khan-Paulie Malignaggi junior welterweight fight started early Friday. It was supposed to be today, but as this video (h/t friend of the site Mady) shows, they got to swangin’ at the weigh-in. The promoter for Malignaggi, Lou DiBella, is upset and will be seeking fines and suspensions and such; fines are more likely than suspensions, though, given what happened after the last prominent press conference shoving match I can remember, Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright.
That’s but one of three videos worth checking out in this edition of Quick Jabs, which covers the items in the headline plus what’s next for Lucian Bute, Robert Guerrero, Nonito Donaire and others.
Quick Jabs
So Kermit Cintron — he’s not trying to win any popularity contests, is he? The junior middleweight is threatening to sue everyone over everything, including the incredibly lame allegation that loose ring ropes were to blame for him catapulting out of the ring last weekend against Paul Williams. When people are calling you a crybaby, and you explicitly are pissed off about it, frivolous-sounding lawsuits aren’t going to help. The plot on all this thickened a touch when the ring doctor claimed days later that Cintron told him twice he couldn’t continue. Of course, now it’s one man’s word against another, and we’ll never know who’s telling the truth unless we get independent witnesses confirming who said what when. But the doc sure didn’t help Cintron’s cause, that’s for sure. (P.S., if you thought the ending to that fight was weird, try this list on for size)..
HBO reportedly paid about $2 million for Williams-Cintron, and I’m not sure why. Other than that they love bidding against themselves. That price tag makes a rematch more unlikely. Also, I’m unsure how Goossen-Tutor managed to stage another fight on the same night as a Lakers playoff game…
If you haven’t seen the final round of the junior bantamweight bout between Hugo Cazares and Nobuo Nashiro from last weekend, check out the exchanges in the 12th. It’s enough to make it a candidate for Round of the Year:
In case you were the kind of person who thought that only corruption could lead Ring magazine to rank Manny Pacquaio #1 pound-for-pound and #2 welterweight behind Floyd Mayweather: Well, ESPN’s Dan Rafael did the same thing. And I’d do the same. We’re all peas in the same corruption pod, I guess….
Edwin Valero’s dead, and still he’s producing drama. His body is being exhumed for a murder investigation…
Hey, European friends! Golden Boy is coming your way! Per BoxingScene…
The Boxing Writers Association of America gave out its awards this week, and you can check out the list here. Some of the winners don’t strike me as particularly deserving — I’ve commented on some of them before, for instance, Tim Smith’s piece included that sole-sourced blind quote of an e-mail exchange for the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight that doesn’t pass journalistic muster — but some of them do. Give ’em a look…
Pacquiao was on Nightline this week, too. He made the interviewer wait 16 hours!
Round And Round
There are a lot of fights dependent on what happens next with Mayweather-Pacquiao. Pacquiao has dates reserved in November in both Texas and Las Vegas, regardless of who he fights. Middleweight champion Sergio Martinez now says he wants Mayweather, since Kelly Pavlik has turned down a rematch to move up to super middleweight. But Martinez may instead fight Shane Mosley or Winky Wright, who said he’d rather retire than take a smaller fight. Williams, according to Steve Kim, is giving up on getting a big welterweight fight against Mayweather or Pacquiao, and plans to settle in at 154. And Cintron, he’s calling out Andre Berto — whose inability to fight Mosley in January led to Mayweather-Mosley. Don’t figure Cintron-Berto would be too hard a fight to make given that they share promoters, and it sounds good to me, even if I doubt Lou DiBella would put two of his more prominent guys in against each other.
We were going find out as soon as Monday whether heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko will fight David Haye in September, as there’s a Monday deadline by the IBF for Klitschko to decide whether he wants to fight mandatory challenger Alexander Povetkin. But then Haye went and decided he wants Vitali instead. Here we go again with this leg-jerking b.s. from Haye.
Robert Guerrero may fight Joel Casamayor at around 140 on the undercard of Juan Manuel Marquez-Juan Diaz II in July, which would set Guerrero up nicely for the winner and give the undercard yet more juice. Middleweight Sergio Mora has reportedly decided he doesn’t want to fight Matthew Macklin, so here’s yet another dude turning his nose up at fights for which he ought to be grateful.
Super middleweight Lucian Bute’s next opponent is likely Jesse Brinkley. How did that happen? Brinkley was supposed to meet Sakio Bika in a title eliminator, but pulled out sick. Then, he was anointed the mandatory challenger anyway. The alphabet gang is goofy as hell.
Here’s a good use of Top Rank Live on Fox Sports Net: On June 19 (my birthday!) it may air the rematch of the controversial junior flyweight fight between Rodel Mayol and Omar Nino. Bring it on.
On May 29, Paulus Moses will defend his lightweight belt against Miguel Acosta. It’s too small a fight to get distributed here by anyone, I’m guessing, but I’d like to see it.
Erik Morales has had two rumored opponents, Jorge Barrios and Willie Limond, who he’s denied being interested in. Instead he might fight Eduardo Escobedo. Escobedo is a legit fight for the comebacking Morales, even if it requires Escobedo to move up to 140, and it should be a test of what Morales has left.
Welterweight Mike Jones continues taking on tough journeymen, with Irving Garcia lined up for July 9.
Rocky Juarez-Jason Litzau II, a rematch of (another) controversial junior lightweight bout, might soon make its way to one of Golden Boy’s Telefutura dates. Again, another good usage of some of the smaller shows out there.
Junior bantamweight Nonito Donaire may open up for Juan Manuel Lopez-Bernabe Concepcion on Showtime July 10. The good news is that he’s due to get off that pay-per-view run he was on. The bad news is that I’d be hugely surprised if Donaire fought anyone with a pulse. Quickly becoming the biggest waste of talent in the sport, is Donaire.
(Round and Round sources: Maxboxing; ESPN; BoxingScene)
