There almost comes a time with Roy Jones, Jr. where it doesn’t make any sense to hope anymore that he’ll eventually stop. It doesn’t matter how badly he’s put to sleep — as he is in the video above, yet again — he’s going to keep fighting, and keep fighting, and keep fighting, until the best chance of him quitting is failing a physical, yet even then he’ll probably find a forum in which to fight where the standards are lower. This could go on for far, far too long, and that’s saying something because it’s already gone on pretty far too long. He’s apparently in those kind of financial dire straits, and after his latest KO loss on Saturday, he said he was inclined to keep fighting.
Jones, as usual, looked good in spots. But as usual, it wasn’t enough. After losing nearly every round, he wobbled cruiserweight Denis Lebedev with a left hook in the 9th, then didn’t — or couldn’t — do anything about it. He arguably deserved a knockdown call in the 10th when Lebedev got held up by the ropes. But with seconds to go in the fight a series of lefts and rights, with a right hook doing most of the damage, ended Jones’ night. Referee Steve Smoger should have stepped in when it was obvious Jones was out on his feet, and Lebedev even paused and looked at him in hopes he’d move in to halt matters. When he didn’t, Lebedev did what boxers are trained to do, which is to keep punching until someone makes them stop. One last sickening right hook at last brought it to a finish. Too bad it probably won’t be the last sickening knockout punch Jones takes.
As for some other weekend results, check out Mike Coppinger’s post just below on Friday Night Fights. I’ll leave it to Andrew Harrison to give us a dispatch on James DeGale-George Groves, but it was a close fight that Groves won by majority decision, outboxing Groves early and pulling out some tight rounds late in a boring bout that heated up over the final four rounds. I had DeGale winning by two rounds, but a draw might’ve made more sense.
Besides the subjects in the headline, we have updates on Nonito Donaire and his legal situation, updates on some fights in the works that have changed since we last visited them just a couple days ago and more. Because we never Weekend Afterthoughted it up, we’ll also go back to the past weekend for a look at some of that business, too.
Quick Jabs
We’ll have another couple videos, besides Jones’. Here’s heavyweight Chris Arreola looking trim last weekend, and, probably not by accident, he goes for the finish with a stamina level that’s impressive. If you’re a regular reader you’ll notice the people I’m hardest on are the people who I believe are not living up to their talents, with Floyd Mayweather and David Haye some such targets and increasingly, Manny Pacquiao. Arreola’s not in their class, but he could be better than he has been when he’s a fattie. If he stays in shape — and this is two fights in a row now where he was near his ideal fighting weight — I can imagine picking him to beat anybody in the division but the Klitschko brothers.
Updating this preview of the light heavyweight championship bout between division kingpin Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins: B-Hop had some trouble making weight, but he was only off by four ounces. As we discussed in the comments section, it’s rare for Hopkins, a true pro, to be off weight at all, but he blamed it on something very minor here, and then he made some jokes about dropping a deuce to lose the weight. It was a concerning development for those who picked Hopkins, but I ultimately didn’t think it was enough to change my prediction for a fight in which I was very unsure of the result to start…
Updating our latest Round and Round column, part I (with the same sources as before): Paul Williams has an opponent switcheroo from Nobu Ishida to Erislandy Lara July 9 on HBO, after HBO suddenly reversed itself on the acceptability of Ishida. It’s a better fight, obviously, but I wish Williams-Ishida had been an undercard fight and the bout wouldn’t have attracted as much negative attention. It also continues to annoy me that Williams and his team are taking heat for, for once, not taking on the best available opponent, when they’ve always tried before. Of course, it’d be crazy for Williams to take on the best available opponent after a crushing knockout loss. And then there are people who will criticize everything Williams does just because he’s managed by Al Haymon, which is the product of a ridiculous bias. After tonight, there will have been 24 appearances by boxers on HBO, and only two of them are Haymon fighters — which goes to show that this “Haymon Box Office” b.s. is just that. Haymon has influence, no doubt, and his influence surely helped Williams get back into this spot, but the same people criticizing Williams are the same people who won’t shut up about how important it is that we have action fighters, when Williams has only ever been that. Now, Williams and his crew have hurt themselves somewhat by saying they’d go right back in against tough opposition when Ishida probably doesn’t qualify, and they also have hurt themselves by not taking some smaller fights off HBO to get back into a position to fight somebody like Lara without it being a risky bout. And Williams-Ishida was legitimately a bad HBO main event, so it deserved some criticism. But all in all, there’s a lot of misdirected angst on this count…
Updating our latest Round and Round column, part II: Amir Khan and his team keep sweetening the pot for a junior welterweight showdown with Timothy Bradley. I want to say it again — it’s irrelevant to me whether or not it’s a good short-term business decision for Bradley to avoid taking this fight. What matters to me is that Bradley has very quickly gotten himself a sense of entitlement that, perhaps more than anyone else in boxing other than maybe Andre Berto, far outstrips his actual value as a fighter. For a fighter with no fans, avoiding a Khan bout in July for whatever reason is a contemptible thing to do, and it sure isn’t going to win him any new fans. If Bradley doesn’t take the Khan fight and then wants a fight on HBO later this fall after his contract with Gary Shaw runs out, I hope HBO sticks it to him for turning down a meaningful bout with a purse beyond what he deserves. The rest, involving some featherweights — Orlando Salido is apparently going to fight in July, thereby pushing back an August rematch with Juan Manuel Lopez, and I failed to note that Jhonny Gonzalez has said he wants to take on Daniel Ponce De Leon, which would be a firecracker of a bout…
Elaborating on the Williams/action fighter note: Williams is case in point that there’s more to making a boxer a draw than action. Williams can’t sell tickets. His two-fight rival, middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, is an action fighter who can’t draw. Yet heavyweight champ Wladimir Klitschko sells out shows all the time, and Mayweather is the pay-per-view king when he can bring himself to get into the ring, and both those men are not in any way action stars. This is all pertinent to super middleweight Andre Ward, whose style took a lot of criticism over the past weekend and which we discussed on Ring Theory this week. Never mind that it was Arthur Abraham who was less inclined or unable to engage; Ward, somehow, became the person who made the fight “boring.” In truth, whether Ward is “boring” — which is not the case for my eyes — isn’t and won’t be the only standard for whether he becomes a draw. Things like regional and ethnic loyalties, a fighter’s personality or story, how he’s promoted, how successful he is in the ring, his level of competition and more can be just as important as whether a boxer is all-action, all-the-time. Ward and all-action featherweight Yuriorkis Gamboa drew about the same number of fans to their most recent bouts, yet strangely you don’t hear the same criticism of Gamboa’s lackluster gates. It’s a strange, convoluted-thinking world out there for some boxing writers and fans (Although it’s not all bad; passages of this paragraph draw on the constructive comments on Twitter of @jasonto, @fightingwords2, @dstyleboxing and @allahschild)…
In another Ward-related matter, he said this week he favored Olympic-style drug testing for boxing. Considering Ward’s affiliation with the disgraced Victor Conte, it was a head-scratching thing to do. But I support Ward’s view. Maybe some day boxing will do this uniformly, although I have my doubts. And it still won’t catch anyone using HGH…
Video break! Here’s Daniel Tosh getting whacked by pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao. You owe me a debt of gratitude. When I first saw it, I had to sit through the latest clip of somebody vomiting (how ground-breaking, Daniel, for your program, Tosh.O!), another clip of an awkward public fistfight (Tosh.O! So unfunny! Shouldn’t be on Comedy Central! Should be on Unfunny Central!) and I think there was a scene where he was pretending to eat poop or something; my attention waxed and waned. I do wish Pac had fired a left, not a right, and I do wish Tosh hadn’t rolled with the punch, but hey, good dig at Mayweather (legitimately).
Tosh.0
Tags: Tosh.0 Videos,Daniel Tosh,Web Redemption
By the way, Pacquiao is probably headed back to Showtime for his 144-pound rubber match with Juan Manuel Marquez, unless HBO can come up with something to rival Showtime’s alliance with CBS. We still don’t really know to what degree that alliance helped the pay-per-view buys for Pacquiao’s fight with Shane Mosley, because those figures still haven’t been released, among other unknown variables. We do know the Fight Camp 360 episodes on CBS did well ratings-wise, but there are potential asterisks to that…
Another Filipino fighter, bantamweight Nonito Donaire, remains tied up in a legal situation between promoters Top Rank and Golden Boy. Top Rank met with Donaire and his team recently, and they reported it went well. But there’s another hearing on his case in June, so don’t mistake that for meaning this is all over…
Nor is junior middleweight Antonio Margarito’s career over, at least not yet — he plans to take the rest of the year off as a result of the injuries Pacqiao dealt him. Then, if he can, he’ll try again. I know I won’t be upset by a year free of Margarito, anyway…
Sugar Ray Leonard’s new autobiography reportedly claims that he was molested by an Olympic coach. I’m not going to go so far as Buzz Bissinger and cast doubt on the story — he doesn’t know anything, so he’s just talking out of his ass, basically. I do find it peculiar that we haven’t heard a name of the alleged molester, which, as Michael Woods observed, will leave a pall hanging over the head of every Olympic coach from that time. If Leonard was molested, and I trust his claim that he was, then it’s an uncool thing to do to leave suspicion on everyone who didn’t do it; he should name the name and let the chips fall where they may…
This afternoon came a report that Oscar De La Hoya has checked into rehab. I wish him well. We’ll contemplate later what it means for his promotional company, Golden Boy Promotions, if anything. For now, get better Oscar…
Finally, here’s another video for you. It’s of Kendall Holt’s big knockout of fellow junior welterweight Julio Diaz from last weekend. It’s not the KO of the Year, but it’s an honorable mention, probably, at the end of 2011.
