(Photo: Chris Farina, Top Rank, via)
It’s very Manny Pacquiao-ish around here these days, and it probably won’t change for a couple weeks given his upcoming fight, but that picture of Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach mocking Antonio Margarito’s handwrap controversy was too funny not to run. Nothing else to add. On the picture, anyway.
In this shortish Quick Jabs, the stuff in the headlines plus a sneak peak at this week’s Fight Camp 360 and a dab of history and HBO future. [WITH UPDATE ABOUT A TELEVISION APPEARANCE FOR THIS SITE!]
Quick Jabs
Really, Fight Camp 360 rules. Some of it is helped by the format of Showtime’s super middleweight tournament and its capacity to create drama, sure. I got a sneak peak of the episode that airs Saturday, and despite what you might have read elsewhere, it will NOT air at the same time as HBO 24/7 — that show starts at 10 p.m., and Fight Camp 360 starts at 10:45. The new episode might not be the most dramatic of the series, but it is the most tense. Carl Froch has cross words with promoter Kalle Sauerland; Andre Dirrell and his team nearly pull out of the “exclusive interview” Showtime promised; and the whole premise of the tournament continuing on under difficult circumstances is examined. Only the addition of Glen Johnson gives the episode a dose of lovability (although if you’re a Dirrell conspiracy theorist, you’ll get a huge symbolic kick out of his promoter Gary Shaw telling a pet bird to “play dead,” which it dutifully does). If you don’t love Johnson, you probably are a Satanist [UPDATED: I failed to notice initially, but my site makes a brief cameo in the episode, around the thirteenth minute. Another reason to watch]…
Johnson, by the way, is at 171 pounds as of today, per a news release that points out a number of super middleweights would weigh more one week before a fight. That’s true. But it’s also true that for a boxer who has trouble making weight, the number cited as hardest is always “those last three pounds.” And it’s worth wondering whether Johnson being ahead of the game is a bad sign in some ways — remember, Oscar De La Hoya was well beneath the welteweight limit going into his bout with Pacquiao, his first in years at the lower weight (similar to Johnson), and we all remember how drained De La Hoya was…
Earlier this week, in advance of their 158-pound bout — up from the reported 157 lbs., although apparently 158 was always the number — Sergio Martinez and Paul Williams announced their weights 30 days from the fight per a news release. The disparity created a “whoa” moment. Martinez was at 176, and Williams was at 162. What’s “whoa” about it is that Martinez has been training for a while, and he’s still nearly 20 pounds away. Even assuming Martinez can get there in time without overtraining and draining himself, Williams speculated Martinez started camp at 200, so we’re talking about a potential 42-pound drop here, the kind of thing that hasn’t been good in the past for fighters like Ricky Hatton. Martinez’ team isn’t worried, noting that days later, he was already down to 169, but it’s strange. Meanwhile, Williams might be too low — but as his team has always said, he has trouble keeping weight on, given his slender frame…
David Haye’s heavyweight fight with Audley Harrison will be in 3-D in the U.K. After the interview, we can watch Haye trash talk the Klitschko brothers again, only to subsequently hide from them. This is what 3-D was meant to be! Anyway, interesting that I used Haye as an example of a boxer whose fist you wouldn’t want to see flying toward you in 3-D in my recent Ring magazine story on 3-D boxing, and now that’s going down. I can predict the future, obviously…
HBO didn’t make much news here and here, but since it’s rare for the company to do interviews on the big picture, you might check them out. Short of it: They want to bring boxing back to the mainstream, somehow, and they’ll air more lower-weight fights (although why stop at 112 lbs., when there are so many good and exciting 108-pound fights and fighters right now?)…
A la my criticism of boxing and Twitter, you might check out Paul Magno’s Twitter “interview” with welterweight Andre Berto. It’s pretty creative…
And while I don’t understand Doug Fischer leaving out Roy Jones, Jr., his piece on weight climbers — and how Pacquiao is far from unique in boxing history in that regard — is most interesting and informative…
So why not end Quick Jabs with Pacquiao? Even in the United States, his political distractions continue, and it’s hard to imagine flying to Las Vegas to endorse Sen. Harry Reid as having anything but a potentially negative effect. More concerning, though, is that Pacquiao has some other kind of distraction that he won’t tell anyone about. Wonder what’s up with that.
