Quick Jabs: Amir Khan Loves Fish, Nonito Donaire Got Beat Up By A Girl (Again); Goats Juicing; The Last Of The Chad Dawson Vs. Bernard Hopkins Fallout; More

Posted by on Oct 21, 2011 23:35

This edition of Quick Jabs is packed to the gills with shocking and bizarre boxing news tidbits and ephemeral thoughts that Kelly Rowland definitely couldn’t handle. How many love children does Manny Pacquiao have? Could Sven Ottke be better than Joe Frazier? Is Oscar De La Hoya going to come back to boxing for real for real? I can’t even begin to introduce the tawdry nature of some of these outrageous topics with sentences that end in question marks, so I won’t try anymore. I leave it to you to BELIEVE IT OR NOT. (!)

Quick Jabs

Let’s get this Bernard Hopkins-Chad Dawson fallout out of the way, because I’m sick of it, really, and I’m not going to bitch about how bad the fight was anymore because it’s Friday and people are still griping about it non-stop. We get it, you didn’t like the fight, nobody did. This week both the WBC and The Ring decided to keep Hopkins as their light heavyweight beltholder even though he officially lost and the California commission hasn’t acted on an appeal. With a banana republic like the WBC, I don’t try to make sense of what they do. The Ring, though, made a bad call. I invite you to read the un-bylined justification; it doesn’t come off so great. It sets up a pretty terrible set of conditions going forward. If you say that a pending appeal is the standard by which a fighter gets to keep his belt or ranking, you’ll be holding off on changing many rankings or belts because appeals happen every week. If you say that public opinion polls matter more than what the official record states, then the rankings become a popularity contest. If you cite one journalist who isn’t on your Ratings Panel to help explain the decision — and I know of several panelists other than myself who advised against keeping Hopkins the champion — what’s the point of a panel? And most importantly of all, if you don’t adhere to the strange logic above the next time a similar kind of thing happens, it looks like Hopkins’ ties to Golden Boy — which owns The Ring — were the deciding factor. I really don’t want to leap to that conclusion based on this one decision. I hope this is just a bad call from new leadership still finding its legs. But it’s not a promising start…

Chad being beltless changes his fortunes not one whit. I’ve seen it said in several places that Dawson somehow needed the belt to fall back on as some kind of leverage since he doesn’t have many fans. Leverage for what? Having belts didn’t earn him any fans, unless I missed something. He’s dropped belts and gained them and throughout it all he’s still a figure without a significant fan base. HBO likes him. That’s his leverage. Until that changes, what belt he has or doesn’t have matters not, if it even matters then…

On the record, Golden Boy’s Richard Schaefer has said pay-per-view buys for Dawson-Hopkins amounted to less than 100,000, which is no surprise, but one account via unnamed sources had it as low at 50,000, which is really, really bad. Some things about that fight’s undercard: Saturday on HBO we’ll get a replay of “select rounds” of the excellent lightweight scrap between Antonio DeMarco and Jorge Linares, which is good (Linares and his team finally protested the stoppage, by the way but it would’ve been more credible if they’d raised a stink at the time). We’ll also get highlights replayed of the Dewey Bozella fight, which wasn’t much to look at but it’s rare that a boxing match generates that kind of widespread attention, so I get why HBO’s doing it. Both those things came via an HBO news release. By the way, who woulda thunk that the president calling a boxer who was exonerated for a murder he didn’t commit after 26 years in prison could be so boring? We might also get highlights of featherweight Mikey Garcia from the undercard of the live main event, but if not Top Rank’s website should be streaming that and some other undercard bouts….

Lastly, the ending that left such a sour taste in my mouth and that of others and had a bunch of people saying, effectively, “fuck boxing,” well, you should know that unsatisfactory endings are nothing new. Kieran Mulvaney ran down some really crazy ones that remind us that the long view is always good to consider. This isn’t some recent suckage where boxing used to be so tidy and isn’t any longer. If you want to say “fuck boxing” as a result of the accumulation of all this, I still couldn’t blame you. This kind of thing happens far too often. When it happened in Floyd Mayweather vs. Victor Ortiz, I urged people to keep in mind that it was a fluke, but, clearly, that was the short view. In other words, you can interpret this optimistically or pessimistically…

On the other end of the journalistic spectrum, there’s a voting member of the Boxing Writers Association of America who claims that Joe Frazier shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, but Sven Ottke should. If this fool had left it at “Frazier was overrated,” and if I was under the impression he was intoxicated or concussed, I might indulge him while differing vociferously, but there is no drug or alcohol or blow to the head that should make a paid boxing writer say, “Frazier out, Ottke in,” let alone someone who gets a vote on the matter. The culture of boxing journalism is simply insane. There is so much fucked-up stuff that happens with boxing writers who inhabit a serious platform that I take the “Or Not” when the option is to “Believe It”…

Sometimes it’s on the boxers, though. Oscar De La Hoya has twice in the past month discussed the option of getting back into the boxing ring, and Dan Rafael interviewed Schaefer about the chances that such a thing could happen, and even though nobody has accused Rafael of fabricating Schaefer’s quotes and Oscar’s quotes are public record on Twitter, Oscar attacked him for getting it wrong. Cocaine is a hell of a drug, I guess…

Welcome to the Manny Pacquiao and Mayweather section of this edition of Quick Jabs. Mayweather’s case for strenous drug testing got a boost from a goat-juicing scandal that has rocked America. Or did it? Pacquiao has never been a party to a goat sacrifice, the kind of thing that could suggest he was trying to soak up PEDs from the blood of roid-raging goats. He has been involved in a chicken sacrifice, though. And his friend Rick Ross has a rap line about “feed ’em steroids to strengthen up all my cheeeick-ens.” Ipso facto. (This is just Mayweatherian logic. P.S. Pacquiao has agreed to all Mayweather’s original demands on drug testing and then some)…

We still don’t have the Mayweather-Ortiz pay-per-view buy numbers and I’m getting suspicious that they are very low. Rafael has reported two different explanations of why it’s taking so long, and while they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, changing explanations don’t give me much confidence. Meanwhile, he’s ducked yet another court date. It’s long overdue for some judge to throw him in jail for a night to give him some respect for the court system, but how someone with his criminal background is given the kid glove treatment is beyond me…

This kind of gossipy and innuendo-based reporting isn’t my thing, but this kind of salacious tale is. Check this out for a full recounting of all the children outside of wedlock Pacquiao might have had. Wowsers. And Pacquiao, he’s getting sued now by VisionQwest, too. Forget the baby momma drama. Hell hath no fury like an accounting firm scorned…

Too often, boxing cards are given corny names. But this weekend’s Showtime-televised Lou DiBella card is called “Octoberfist,” and whoever came up with it should set up a consulting firm to farm out names to all the other imaginationless promoters…

Super middleweight Carl Froch is invading America and moving here because he doesn’t get the love he wants across the pond. That love was just starting to pick up, albeit far too late. Anyway, Froch is someone I wouldn’t mind keeping on our side of the Atlantic. Win or lose against Andre Ward in December, he’s still going to be a good, exciting fighter with a compelling personality…

Lightweight Kevin Mitchell can’t stay out of piddly and comical legal trouble. First it was his mom-and-pop pot operation, and now it’s a butterfly knife…

A couple more off-kiler tales: 1. Bantamweight Nonito Donaire got beaten up by a girl over a drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog. (Not the first time a woman has defeated him in combat, either.) 2. Junior welterweight Amir Khan loves tropical fish. 3. Rendall Munroe has quit his job as a trash collector, sadly bringing to an end the junior featherweight’s wonderful “Boxing Binman” nickname. Or maybe we’ll all still call him that, just to remember where he came from…

Let the speculation about future HBO boxing boss Ken Hershman as a double-agent begin (apparently)…

Look for a review before long in TQBR about a new Howard Cosell biography due out Nov. 14. It’s by Mark Ribowsky and it’s called “Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth and the Transformation of American Sports.” When we were offered a review copy, I was surprised to learn that there hasn’t been a Cosell biography before, although Howard wrote some autobiographies. It’ll go into Cosell’s views on Muhammad Ali, as any biography should, and it’ll be good to get a third-party take on Cosell and his place in boxing; I hope they’re insightful.

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.

[UPDATED] Quick Jabs: Sunglasses And Aggravated Battery; Going Scorched Earth On Nonito Donaire; The Reasons We Love Boxing; More

Posted by on Mar 26, 2011 18:23



I think that’s the only Stone Temple Pilots song I like, since most of the rest of them are ripoffs of assorted grunge bands and even, once, The Rolling Stones. It’s not a band I’d want to be the basis of any questions about my journalistic integrity. Yet, a couple weeks ago, Steve Kim wrote this:
“Didya guys know I actually went to a Stone Temple Pilots concert on Friday night at the Palms? Thanks to Showtime’s Chris Legentil for hooking me up…”

Call me a stickler if you will, but I’m thinking if a PR person for one of the main subjects I covered “hooked me up” with some concert tickets, I’d be looking to hide the fact, not call attention to it. I’d like to hope that said PR person was reimbursed. If an aide to a congressman I cover in my day job gave me tickets to something — or $45 in cash, or whatever the price of the tickets were — I’d definitely pay him back. So I asked Steve what was up. He answered:

“Well, its no bigger of an issue than a guy like you writing for a publication that is owned by a promoter. Let’s just put it that way. This individual had an extra ticket, asked if I wanted to go, I accepted, its that simple. Make any issue out of it that you want. You should really address your own conflict of interest. But I wonder will you also be addressing when other writers have dinner with promoters and openly talk about it or post it on Twitter, are you asking them the same question?”

(I’ve addressed my conflict of interest numerous times. I also asked ESPN’s Dan Rafael — presumably the writer Steve was referring to, since he recently did what Kim described — to respond to Kim’s remark, and as of this afternoon, he had not.)

I’ll attach the entire e-mail chain in the comments section below, so you can see all the points the two of us made to one another, but my point to him is summarized thusly: I don’t see as big an issue with him performing commentating roles for TKO Boxing, so long as he manages that conflict of interest well. It’s the idea of just flat taking a gift from a subject he covers that I don’t get. Under the Society of Professional Journalists’ standards, writing for Ring or commentating for TKO Boxing might or might not be ethical (and at any rate, virtually everyone who writes professionally about boxing today has some kind of conflict); accepting free stuff for no reason wouldn’t. And once upon a time, Kim himself mocked writers who accepted free wristwatches from Floyd Mayweather.

I bring it up because I often find journalistic standards in boxing are lacking, and this struck me as a particularly egregious example. But it happens on a routine, mundane level, with guys pigging out on promoters’ food or what have you (as Thomas Hauser wrote about for SecondsOut and in the book “The Boxing Scene”). If ever you notice someone’s coverage leaning pro or con for one entity or the other, and you have questions about how it got that way, well, this kind of thing is but one potential answer.

On to some other Quick Jabs:

It was pretty quick and unsavory how quickly Bob Arum turned to scorched-earth strategies on Nonito Donaire, the bantamweight he promoted and whom Golden Boy claims belongs to them. The bad things he said about Donaire — that he wasn’t a draw, that the Filipino people dislike him because of his wife (whom Arum said criticized how Jinkee Pacquiao dressed, a remark I’ve not been able to verify), etc. — suggest to me that Arum doesn’t want anything to do with Donaire. Despite the legal challenge we can all expect, the desired outcome of that is for Arum to get a cut of whatever revenue Golden Boy makes of Donaire, because if Arum wanted to retain Donaire’s marketability he wouldn’t be so critical. I suppose it’s maybe Arum just being hurt and lashing out at a fighter he had high hopes for, but my take is that he’s wanting to be rid of Donaire but not some of the money he provides….

Check out this remarkable piece of boxing writing by novelist Sergio De La Pava, via Deadspin. It says a lot of what I tell people who ask me about why I like boxing, about some of the fights that make quite clear why boxing is such a great sport. It is heroic that people even box for a living. The kind of heroism that people like Arturo Gatti and Diego Corrales showed in those moments defies comprehension. And it happens a lot more often than it ever should. This afternoon I watched a replay of Pacquiao-Erik Morales I. In the 12th round, Morales was ahead and his trainer instructed him “not to do anything stupid,” but he turned southpaw and got blasted, JUST BECAUSE. This sport amazes me, and I mean that in a way that Louis C.K. would approve of…

John Chavez is usually dead-on in his assessment of HBO’s television ratings for its boxing program, but I’ve yet to see HBO or any other news outlet claim that the 1.4 million viewers it says it got for Saul Alvarez-Matthew Hatton were “live,” as Chavez savages them for saying. I bring it up only because I saw Lois’ point repeated in many, many places. Maybe it’s fair to criticize HBO for using total viewership numbers at all, but if they didn’t say it was “live,” then they shouldn’t be criticized as though they did. And if I see any evidence they did, then I’ll gladly point out how right Lois was here…

It’s too bad “Lights Out” is getting canceled due to low viewership, but then, I’m part of the problem. I watched the review copy they sent and we reviewed it on this site, but I’m bad at making sure I watch things at the times they come on. Hopefully I’ll catch up to the episodes I missed and do an overall series review later. Oh, and speaking of boxing programming, HBO might be working on a boxing series based on Mike Tyoson’s life, so for those of you interested in boxing-related drama, there might be a replacement in store…

So trainer Gabriel Sarmiento missed his guy Sergio Martinez’ last fight because he was in a spot of legal trouble. If he ends up in any real hot water over it — and details are scant — at least we’ll know that his brother Pablo will continue the family tradition of wearing sunglasses in the ring as trainer for Martinez.

[UPDATE: Because there have been some remarks in the comments section on the appropriateness of including Steve Kim’s e-mails there, I wanted to explain the reasoning here as I have done below. As the e-mails show, I explicitly stated to him that I was going to write something about the tickets (unless he reimbursed Showtime), and that I was interested in his explanation — and that if he didn’t provide one, I would say that he refused to speak to me. At that moment — if not sooner — any response he provided was subject to print. His response continued through several exchanges; I excluded several e-mails that had nothing to do with the subject matter. I included the entirety of the e-mail exchange on the subject so as to give him a full opportunity to make his points. If for some reason Steve thought I was NOT clear, I would remove those e-mails at his request.]

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.

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