The rest of the TQBR team will have the helm for a great number of days as I take a brief vacation. But first, some Jabs that are Quick. And we will keep them quick, except the first two. We'll even skip funny pictures or videos.
The sanctioning belt gang has done some goofy/arguably goofy things lately — ranking Amir Khan as a welterweight before he fights at welterweight, taking away the super middleweight belt of Andre Ward — that have belt defenders in a weird kind of tizzy; where's the outrage about the first, they ask, and who cares about the second if you dislike the belts? It takes a certain kind of willful misrepresentation of those of us who are opposed to the IBFs and WBCs of the world to say we should be fighting individual bad decisions, or even that we shouldn't fight individual bad decisions. Most of us have given up arguing with the individual decisions; we know that the belt gang cannot be redeemed, so why challenge the logic of the kind of decisions they make on a near daily basis? The whole point for those of us I talk to is to ignore them so they go away. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but expecting us to get all fired up about bullshit decisions by bullshit outfits we're deliberately shunning is missing the point…
Along the same lines, this whole "the belts matter" line is arguing a point no one is arguing against. The idea is to ignore them so they don't matter anymore. When fans/writers who oppose the alphabets say the belts are "meaningless," they are referring to what they symbolize as an accomplishment on our end; you'd have to be blind to argue that all boxers don't care about the belts, or that they don't sometimes get fighters fights they want. At the same time, though, you'll see lots of fighters saying they want to be pound-for-pound king — junior middleweight Austin Trout, most recently — and you'll see the same belt defenders talking about how "meaningless" pound-for-pound rankings are. So, look, either things matter because fighters care about them, or they don't. And FWIW, the belts only sometimes matter in any tangible way to anyone. Does anyone care that Lucas Matthysse-Lamont Peterson won't be for a 140-pound belt because it's at 141 to avoid alphabet political drama? Does Matthysse? Peterson? Do the fans? Does Showtime?…
Golden Boy doings: The company is fighting with yet another promoter/manager, Sampson Lewkowicz, and they better hope this deal with Showtime works out for them because they're burning bridges almost everywhere else. Well, almost. They've got a new deal with Fox Sports to air bouts on Monday nights. I know a lot of boxing fans who aren't boxing fans first and foremost, so that'll be a risky play once the NFL gets started again, but I do like the idea of boxing on days other than Friday and Saturday…
The PED chronicles: Junior welterweight Kendall Holt's team released a statement saying that his test results for performance enhancing drugs from the Peterson fight have come back clean, and nobody has contradicted it, so we have to assume it was true. Lightweight Mickey Bey, though, has a suspicious case, as chronicled by David P. Greisman here. Meanwhile, light heavyweights Lucian Bute and Jean Pascal will have some kind of testing program for their fight, although details about basics like "who will conduct the testing" are scant…
Welterweight Robert Guerrero says that if Floyd Mayweather puts his hands on him prior to the fight, he'll retaliate. Good, it's about time someone did. Brandon Rios (junior welterweight) thought that Mike Alvarado "ran" too much in their rematch, which is sour grapes for a loss if there ever was any, but, hey, fighters always have something to say about why the fight didn't go their way and Rios no doubt feels like Alvarado took a less macho path by not simply standing and slugging, which not coincidentally was a proven failed technique the first time around. Now, welterweight Timothy Bradley saying that losing all that weight before his bout against Ruslan Provodnikov affected him — that I buy, although I still maintain the biggest factor in that near-loss was Bradley slugging when he should've been boxing and moving…
Suddenly, right before his big fight with Trout, Mexican authorities care about how Canelo Alvarez allegedly laid a street beating a year and half ago on Ulises Solis. Corruption to benefit a national celebrity, Mexican authorities?: You're doing it wrong…
Female boxer Holly Holm is moving over to mixed martial arts for good. Based on some anecdotal evidence — my gf watching females in MMA on pay-per-view whenshe doesn't usually care about combat sports, some female friends at a party being drawn to watching ladies battle it out MMA-style on a dude's computer — boxing might be missing an opportunity to appeal to an untapped female fan base and letting MMA hog it all up…
Olympic boxing will indeed be dropping headgear after suggesting it would, which makes sense both for safety and aesthetic appeal. Indian Olympian Vijender Singh being accused of using heroin then testing negative? Don't know what's going on there.
