MONTREAL — Canadia, you ARE beautiful. This town’s percentage of hot women is, approximately, 99 percent, and they all dress so well and look so cool. Its architecture is lovely, too. So far, besides reenacting Chad Dawson-Jean Pascal posters, Mr. David P. Greisman (above) and myself (below) have enjoyed Montreal’s Mexican food and Irish pubs, the latter of which featured Salt-N-Pepa/Queen/Queens of the Stone Age dance parties and full-grown men running and leaping into piles of McDonald’s trash bags. And we’re just getting started.

There is work to attend to between this play, though. First up, it’s the Quick Jabs column. Soon, I’ll be adding to my unintentionally extensive collection of men posing in their underwear when we head to the Dawson-Pascal light heavyweight weigh-in.

Weekend Schedule (Besides Dawson-Pascal)

• Chris Arreola-Manuel Quezada, Friday, ESPN2/ESPN Deportes, Ontario Calif. There are three lies boxers tell that you can count on like clockwork: Floyd Mayweather will go for the knockout; Rocky Juarez will start punching more, earlier; and Arreola trained hard this time. The heavyweight tipped the scales at 256, worse than his last fight. I wish, at this point, Arreola would just say, “Screw it, I’m going to be hella fat for this fight, but you know I’ll put on a show.” Because at least he wouldn’t tease with his potential anymore. As it is, Arreola will be hella fat for this Friday Night Fights bout. It also should be a good one. Quezada has one upset on his record followed by a loss to the next decent opponent he fought, but he’s fun, too.
• Ji Hoon Kim-Miguel Vazquez/Miguel Angel “Mikey” Garcia-Cornelius Lock, Saturday, Fox Sports Net/Fox Sports en Espanol, Laredo Texas. Not every Top Rank Live show has been a winner, but there have been some damn good ones, and this one might be the best two-fight card of the series that began this year. Kim is the reckless puncher with dynamite in his right hand; Vazquez is the unorthodox fellow who upset Breidis Prescott last year but hasn’t fought since. Garcia is one of Top Rank’s top prospects, and Lock has proven himself dangerous against capable foes, sometimes winning but sometimes not.
• Anselmo Moreno-Nehomar Cermeno II, Saturday, TVMax, Panama City. You can check this one out via a legal web feed here, probably. It’s the most significant fight of the weekend outside of Dawson-Pascal, as Moreno’s the #2 bantamweight according to Ring and Cermeno’s #7 — bantam being one of boxing’s deepest and best divisions — and they had a close fight the first time around. Also on the card, well-regarded middleweight prospect Gennady Golovkin fights for a vacant alphabet belt against an archetypical Colombian who hasn’t fought anybody and has a gaudy KO record, Milton Nunez.
• The Rest. On Saturday, Donnie Nietes defends his strawweight strap… On TeleFutura Friday, light-hitting junior lightweight prospect Eloy Perez headlines the Solo Boxeo show against Derrick Campos, who’s tough enough to give folk trouble… Telemundo on Friday hosts what could be a slugfest.

Quick Jabs

I don’t want to get too optimistic — and there’s hardly much call for it these days — but I’m feeing a touch better about recent boxing developments vis-a-vis the best fighting the best. Some of it’s calendar-based: there was a good card of fights last weekend; Dawson-Pascal is a very significant bout Saturday; the Super Six tournament’s round-robin phase is set to wrap up next month, and that thing is about as good as it gets these days; and junior flyweight champion Ivan Calderon is fighting his top contender, finally, in Giovanni Segura at the end of this month. But take a look at some highly-desirable fights in the works, too. The much-coveted rematch between middleweight champion Sergio Martinez and Paul Williams is inching closer to happening later this year. The much-coveted showdown between top junior welterweights Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander is all but done for January. And while it was a bummer that Top Rank kept Nonito Donaire and Fernando Montiel out of a Showtime bantamweight tournament, the tourney is going forward and will feature at four good fights featuring top-notch bantams in Yonnhy Perez, Joseph Agbeko, Abner Mares and Vic Darchinyan…

Thomas Hauser weighed in on the Antonio Margarito hand wrap scandal this week, and I have a bone or two to pick with it. The smaller of the two bones is that the quotes from trainers are mostly of the “yes, it’s POSSIBLE he might not have known his gloves were loaded.” None of them said it was likely. A wide number of trainers and boxers came out immediately afterward when the scandal first unfolded and said quite the opposite: It was unlikely Margarito wouldn’t have noticed. Second, Hauser presents it as a “guess” whether he knew or not. But that’s secondary to whether he should be banned for life or not. The most important standard is the one Hauser pointed out earlier in the article, which is that boxers must be held accountable for their equipment, what goes into their bodies, etc. If the only standard was proving whether an athlete knew he was cheating, Major League Baseball would never suspend anyone for steroid use, because almost every single baseball player who’s been busted said it was all a big misunderstanding, he took a supplement and didn’t know it was illegal, or assorted other “It Wasn’t Me” Shaggy defenses…

Steve Kim has long been on top of the problem of boxers’ pay scales, and, at times, I’ve not always agreed with him. But it’s had a direct negative effect on boxing in several instances of late, with the guaranteed minimums of middleweight Kelly Pavlik and junior middleweight Sergiy Dzinziruk getting in the way of desirable fights; junior middleweight Alfredo Angulo pricing himself out of a fight; and Bradley-Alexander happening in 2011 following at 2010 where Bradley only has fought once. These boxers might be in for a market correction, though, if Gary Shaw’s remarks are accurate about HBO looking to “slay some monsters”…

Weird story of the week: Heavyweight Alexander Povetkin had an unsanctioned “exhibition” against Bruce Seldon that sounded every bit like a pro fight, and now it’s being investigated…

It’s remarkable the degree to which some of Mayweather’s hardest-core fans have turned against him for shooting down a welterweight mega-fight with Manny Pacquiao. The latest is Scoop Jackson, the ESPN writer who has backed Mayweather often in the past. But, hey, at least Mayweather weighed in on important stuff like whether Andriy Kotelnik beat Alexander last weekend…

Heavyweight David Haye claims the Klitschko brothers need him to make serious money. No, David. The Klitschkos make plenty of serious money without you. They want to fight you because they’re competitive people — unlike you — and you’re hiding from them reprehensibly after talking all kinds of nasty trash toward them. I’m still not sure who’s the most disingenuous hider in boxing today: Haye, or Mayweather.