Never thought I’d see those two with their arms around each other. (Jamie Foxx is a throw-in on the deal; he serenaded them with some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross and a little Anita. The idea was to set the party off right.)
By all accounts the reunion of Bob Arum and the boxer he once promoted, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., was a one-time thing at the Super Bowl where boxing didn’t even come up in their chat. But if you’re holding out hope that Mayweather will eventually fight the Arum-promoted Manny Pacquiao, then this is certainly a good sign rather than a bad one, since some nastiness between Arum and Mayweather stood to inhibit it, among other barriers.
Welcome to Quick Jabs, where all the subjects in the headline are on the table for discussion, as well as the weekend’s schedule; some promoter and trainer switcheroos; whether a couple boxers are pigging out too much, a remark with a double meaning; and more.
Quick Jabs
Your weekend preview: Our Corey Erdman already set you up with some Friday Night Fights previewing, but did you know Steve Forbes lost 20 percent of his purse for being .14 pounds over the welterweight limit? It’s true. The major competition for FNF tonight is ShoBox, where the headliner is junior featherweight Rico Ramos. I tried to do a feature on the guy but he and his manager didn’t return my calls, despite the best efforts of his promoter Goossen-Tutor and Showtime to get me together with them. Anyway, he’s talented. He’s fighting Alejandro Valdez, who two fights ago suffered a brain clot, which is never a good thing. I haven’t seen prospect Cornelius “Da Beast” White in action yet, but Don “Da Bomb” George is a middleweight who had some prospect juice but got knocked out in a brutal beat down by Francisco Sierra last year. Over on TeleFutura, super middleweight Peter Quillin takes on an opponent who hasn’t won in seven fights and hasn’t even fought since 2007, which is a low standard even by the revived Solo Boxeo measuring stick….
Your weekend preview part II: On Saturday, lightweight Marco Antonio Barrera headlines on Fox Deportes and maybe Fox Sports Net, taking on 43-year-old/16-fight Jose Arias. In Germany, there are several notable fights on one card. The headliner is a competitive match-up between Steve Herelius and Yoan Pablo Hernandez, while fellow cruiserweights Steve Cunningham and Alexander Frenkel are in separate fights. Super middleweight Arthur Abraham takes a get-well fight after refusing to see a psychologist at his trainer’s direction, although said trainer believes Abraham will once again exhibit a smidge of boxing skill like he used to do. Elsewhere, Omar Narvaez is defending his junior bantamweight belt…
Prior to this weekend, we got some Broadway Boxing, covered here by our Mike Coppinger, and we got an upset of undefeated strawweight Oleydong Sithsamerchai by Kazuto Ioka, who only had six fights coming in. That’s a big upset — Oleydong was ranked #2 by The Ring…
The reason lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez didn’t want to take a fight with Erik Morales is that it would have involved re-upping his contract with Golden Boy Promotions. That now makes any number of Golden Boy veterans who have left, or threatened to leave, the company they’re supposed to be pillars of: Marco Antonio Barrera (gone), Bernard Hopkins (repeated threats), Shane Mosley (gone) and now Marquez (might be going). There’s an interesting big picture story about this to be had somewhere. Some of it is situational — Marquez wants a fight with Pacquiao and being with Golden Boy hurt his chances of getting one in May, plus Hopkins has always been a promotional prima donna — but the trend suggests that as boxer-friendly as Golden Boy has said it would aspire to be, it hasn’t succeeded…
After all kinds of reporting and announcements back and forth on this, the latest schedule has three episodes of the Fight Camp 360 documentary series on the Pacquiao-Mosley bout airing on CBS. Episode one, three and four will be on CBS, and all of them will be on Showtime. It’s too bad some of them are airing on Saturday afternoons on CBS, though — as big an audience as the network has, I’m guessing that’s the lowest ebb. That in no way fundamentally alters the ground-breaking nature of this, it just tempers the enthusiasm slightly…
Speaking of Hopkins, he’s getting a three-fight deal from HBO. I’m not aware of Hopkins being a big ratings star, so maybe I’d have picked somebody else to give a multi-fight deal, especially someone who isn’t 46 years old and a notorious overnegotiator who doesn’t fight very often…
Hopkins’ old rival, Roy Jones, Jr., has been receiving treatment for bad balance related to being knocked out too much. I don’t know about most of you, but that would be my sign to quit boxing. (I’ve stopped updating people on the various fights in the works for the likes of Evander Holyfield and Jones and some of those other over the hill superstars, but this is so depressing I had to pass it along.)…
A few promotional/trainer updates: 1. Junior welterweight Marcos Maidana is now going to be trained by Nacho Beristain. Fascinating pairing. If nuclear punchedr Maidana could hone his boxing skills, he’d be even more dangerous, maybe illegal, and Beristain churns out almost scientifically skilled offensive boxers. On the other hand, some have struggled to pick up his system mid-career, or even from the start. 2. Siarhei Liakhovich, the heavyweight who once held a piece of the division crown and since has lost a bunch and changed his name spelling 3,591,004 times, is going to be promoted by Main Events. Interesting pick-up. Main Events is pretty picky with who they sign these days, so either they believe in his talent (and once, he looked like a pretty talented heavy) and want to redeem him, or the plan is to feed him to Tomasz Adamek someday. 3. Junior middleweight Kermit Cintron will be co-promoted by Lou DiBella, who’s handled his career recently, and Top Rank. It was the only way Lou could get Top Rank to allow Cintron to fight anybody from their stable, apparently, which is a heavy-handed way to do business…
Has Juanma joined the ranks of between-fight fatties? If so, it’s not a great career move for the talented and explosive featherweight. Juan Urango, meanwhile, has taken to pigging out in a different way — he disappeared to started a hog farm, and, really, having spent a day on a hog farm once for a reporting assignment, I’d rather make a living taking punches to the head. I couldn’t get the smell off my skin or out of my hair for days. At least neither of them were getting gored in the butt (heh heh he) by a charging bull, like flyweight Luis Concepcion…
I can say with absolute certainty that the war of words between Alex Ariza and Shah Khan is the longest-running such feud between a boxer’s strength and conditioning coach and his dad that involves allegations of hotel break-ins and stolen contracts…
Super middleweight Andre Dirrell vastly misunderstands his ratio of fans to haters, and this interview where he discusses said ratio probably isn’t going to help him with that ratio much. I’d dissect it but it kind of speaks for itself — he becomes harder to believe all the time, and I’m not sure he even understands when he’s telling the truth or not…
Super middleweight Shawn Estrada is trying to join the ranks of warrior-kings led by Philippines congressman Pacquiao, or, at least, the ranks of boxer-city councilmen. Good on ya, Shawn…
And just cuz some people have found this amusing [UPDATED: The video might be two fights combined, making it far less awesome, and it really only ever was borderline]:
