America just don't know. That's Victor Ortiz in a publicity shot for Dancing With The Stars; he looks like he's got his VO FaceLube on in that very, very baby blue photograph, or else it's shopped to the max and DUDE WATCH OUT THERE ARE SOME FIREWORKS GOING OFF RIGHT BEHIND YOU. Although for now Ortiz is talking fairly innocuously about how he's going to win, it won't take long for the peculiarity to begin creeping into the conversation. For instance, this week, going on two years after his fight with Floyd Mayweather, he claimed for the first time that he head butted Mayweather in their welterweight bout because his corner ordered him to do it, followed by the aforementioned corner denying it. There's the Victor Ortiz Experience in a nutshell: He says something odd, then more often than not someone else immediately says it's not true.
While Ortiz is dancing, boxing keeps on keeping on without him. Somehow. A pair of old promoters are having a rough week; performance enhancing drugs are in the headlines, just like they are almost every week these days; and there are some fights in the works for people like Adrien Broner and Juan Manuel Marquez.
A couple quick housekeeping notes before we dig into it: TQBR joined the Guardian Sports Network this week, which means some of our work will be featured on the website of one of the world's biggest and best publications several times a month. We're pretty proud of that around here. And Karl Greenberg has departed the staff — best of luck to him out there.
Quick Jabs
Shocking, I know: Floyd Mayweather behaved offensively toward a female, and is not at all a class act. Used to be, he just assaulted his baby mama, but he got into the news this week for gyrating his crotch in the face of another fighter's wife, the one married to junior middleweight Cornelius Bundrage. Mayweather's team played it off like it was all fun trash talk between Bundrage's wife (his manager) and the fighter he promotes, Ishe Smith, but the reaction from the Bundrages indicates they didn't take it that way. If Bundrage hit him over the head with a bottle in an alleyway, I don't think anyone would think it was all that out of line…
Don King wanted a 10 count for deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez for tonight's fights. I get that Chavez has his fans in America, King clearly among them, but that would probably be the first 10 count where people weren't just disobeying the request for silence, but actively booing. Chavez wasn't exactly kind in his remarks about the U.S. of A., and fight crowds can be pretty patriotic, even obnoxiously so…
British promoter Frank Warren is having a helluva time keeping guys in his stable. Super middleweight George Groves left this past week for Matchroom, and now lightweight Ricky Burns — upset over his bout with Miguel Vazquez being postponed — is trying to leave him, too. Golden Boy Promotions wants Burns, reportedly, but GBP leader Richard Schaefer said, basically, ignore all that because GBP isn't in the business of stealing fighters. That's only technically true since it tried to steal Manny Pacquiao and Nonito Donaire away from Top Rank, and neither move succeeded — and it's had to negotiate deals with a few other promoters whose fighters it acquired, so maybe it's not even technically true. Either way, it's getting dark for Warren — not quite as bad as it's gotten for King in America, but bad…
Gary Russell, Jr. will be out six to eight weeks after fracturing his hand in his latest featherweight mismatch on Showtime. Last weekend, I said that I couldn't envision anything that would break the cycle of Russell's mismatches on Showtime. As it happens, a broken hand will slow it down. But when he comes back, look for everyone to make an argument that he'll need another easy one to test out his healed paw…
On one level, I like that the Nevada State Athletic Commission wants to heavily fine middleweight Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. for a second drug offense. On another level, fining someone $900,000 for smoking pot (which he finally admitted he did — it wasn't insomnia tea, a cover story no one believed) sounds absurd. The drug rules ought to be oriented toward PEDs and their masking agents (like the diuretic Chavez got busted with in his system in Nevada the first time), not recreational drugs like marijuana that help no one in the ring…
Middleweight champion Sergio Martinez really wants Chavez to take expanded drug tests as a condition for their rematch, and he has every justification for doing so based on Chavez's record of substance use. On the other hand, his team insisting that they'll only fight junior middleweight Canelo Alvarez at 160 is the kind of double standard that annoys people about Martinez. They say they'll fight Floyd Mayweather at 154, but not Alvarez. Why? Mayweather is really good! Which has to do with what weight you'll fight someone how, exactly? Especially after spending so much time talking up Martinez's ability to swing between 154 and 160; it's not uncommon for boxers to try and fight at the weight that gives them the biggest advantage, but it's rare for them to be so obvious about it…
After getting the win of his career over Felix Sturm, middleweight Sam Soliman has reportedly tested positive for some kind of PED. There are a few things weird about this, some of which Soliman's team has discussed. We only know about his A sample, and usually A samples aren't the foundation for a public disclosure of a positive test, because the B sample usually is used to confirm the A sample result. The news of it broke March 2, and it's March 9, and there's still no B sample news, although there was a longer period of time between the news on Lamont Peterson's A and B samples…
Welterweight Mike Jones has found a new trainer, and it's Eddie Mustafa Muhammad. Not a bad choice. I still think he was wrong to abandon his old team, however…
We leave you with another Ortiz DWTS publicity picture before we move on to the next part of the post, because there's no amount of these that could bring the total to "too many":
Round And Round
A few fights in the works:
If Juan Manuel Marquez doesn't rematch Manny Pacquiao yet again, he reportedly could next face the winner of Timothy Bradley-Ruslan Provodnikov or Brandon Rios-Mike Alvarado II. My personal preference would be either of those bouts over Pacquiao. I was fine with all the other rematches with Pacquiao because I thought the business had never been settled definitively, but after Marquez's huge knockout, it has been settled to my tastes. I know this puts me in the minority. But I don't think anyone would complain, per se, about Marquez-Rios or Marquez-Bradley. (It's not clear what weight the potential fights would be at — everybody there has a background of fighting at junior welterweight, but Marquez and Bradley have been welterweights of late.)
Adrien Broner is contemplating a move up to welterweight, skipping 140 altogether, to face Paulie Malignaggi, probably in June. That's too bad. Broner was probably going to be a welterweight eventually, but there are so many appetizing opponents for him at 140 that I'd hate to see him skip it, especially for a so-so match-up with Malignaggi. Better that Burns is available this summer to keep Broner at lightweight for one more bout. (Vazquez even provided a signed doctor's note about his illness, but this being boxing, people still are inclined to think somebody's lying.) Keith Thurman also wants some Malignaggi, which makes sense for him as a fight to happen next should he beat Jan Zaveck tonight.
Featherweight Mikey Garcia was flirting with the idea of facing Orlando Cruz, which says more about progress in boxing against homophobia and/or how much boxing will use anything for a marketing angle than it does about it being a fight worth a sliver of a damn. Garcia might instead fight Juan Manuel Lopez in May, a fight that makes more sense on all levels. We'll see if JuanMa can be talked into fighting at 126 or whether he'll insist on 130.
Super middleweight Andre Dirrell will face Ossie Duran next month on Friday Night Fights. It looked like 50 Cent was off to such a hot start with the guys he was promoting, but that's two fights in a row on low-paying ESPN2, and his last guy, featherweight Billy Dib, even got upset. It looks like Fitty is going to have to earn his promoter stripes the hard way, with the way things are going.
(Round And Round sources: BoxingScene; RingTV; ESPN)
