(Or maybe this is the better metaphor?)
It was sad for your favorite Queensberry Rules founder — and the site’s readers — to lose three staffers (Paul Kelly, Mike Coppinger and Corey Erdman) in 2011, shortly after revamping the site around this whole staff concept. But the founder is happy-faced today to announce that three new staffers are joining the team. The founder likes to think of this boxing blog franchise as the San Antonio Spurs of boxing blogging. Great players came before, but the new wave of great players is coming aboard, and the mainstays are solid as a goddam rock. The founder hesitates to assign who’s David Robinson and who’s Tim Duncan and who’s Manu Ginobili, and the founder will stop talking in the third person now.
You’ve been reading the great stuff of Patrick Connor, Karl Greenberg and Jeff Pryor in this cyber-neighborhood for a while, but as of today it’s official-like. They are now staff writers with Andrew Harrison, Scott Kraus, Alex McClintock, Gautham Nagesh and myself. Welcome them aboard. And get to know them a little better with their bios just below.
Seriously: I feel really good about this team. Everybody’s giving you different looks, different voices, all of them quality writers. Future’s so bright I gotta wear shades and all that.
**********
Patrick Connor enjoys long walks on the beach, likes his boxing with as little clinching as possible, and his favorite fighter ever is Tommy Hearns. Patrick can be found drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale during boxing cards when he’s not researching crusty bouts that have absolutely nothing to do with the contemporary sweet science. This suave armchair gladiator was a contributor to the now-defunct sites TalkingBoxing.com and TheBoxingBulletin.com, as well as a former videographer/interviewer for BoxingScene.com and MaxBoxing.com. Feel free to contact Patrick at pconnorpakal@gmail.com, or via his blog belovedonslaught.blogspot.com.
**********
Karl Greenberg’s 9-5 gig is writing about auto, sports marketing, and consumer brand marketing for a trade journal. He is also a musician (jazz and tango guitar, bass, flute, singer) and a dilettante, I mean polymath. To wit: He has a pilot’s license (earned a long time ago and not used since the early 1980s when he had a near [obviously] mid-air collision with an Army Beechcraft twin), a scuba diving certificate (not used since the 70s), some training as an actor (not used, at least in the formal sense, since the 90s, though he is a hell of an actor in his day job), standup comic (not since late 90s, though he did an open mike a few weeks ago), and a playwright (off, off to like the nth degree). He has a bachelor’s in Comparative Religion, a M.A. in Dramatic Writing, and a doctorate in jerking off, however you define that, and generally collecting useless shit.
**********
Jeff Pryor is a screenwriter and film director whose natural interest and asthetic tends to run towards noir and the darkly psychological. This probably explains why his writings on boxing are so pretentious. Aping the clipped writing style of James Ellroy, the semi-colon sentence structure of Virginia Woolf and the holier-than-thou tone of the Bible; Jeff is able to at once turn a phrase cleverly and concisely, all while showing off and self-aggrandizing nicely.
Jeff has shaken hands with Bob Arum, posed for a photo with Teddy Atlas and had Bernard Hopkins pretend to be an old woman to him when answering the phone. He previously wrote for The Boxing Bulletin.
