Oh, how hard it can be to discern accurate info from the boxing media. You can get sucked into a quicksand quagmire, no smarter than before you read any given article based on incomplete information or agendas. Sometimes even when the boxing media is operating at its peak, the information is still hard to come by. It's treacherous, man. Sometimes all you can do is try to make maximum sense of what's available to you, and try not to get drawn into premature conclusions.
That's where we are on the subjects in the headline, as well as some boxing television ratings issues, some promotional issues and more.
Quick Jabs
We are at a loggerheads about how drug testing will go for the September welterweight clash between Juan Manuel Marquez and Timothy Bradley. Bradley wants the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association. Marquez wants the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. The promoter of both men, Bob Arum, wants the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Bradley and Marquez appeared to settle on some combo of USADA and VADA, but Arum is pushing for a renegotiated contract where the NSAC handles it. There are pros and cons to every single option. The NSAC's Keith Kizer had made the case to me for states handling it here, and it's a compelling case, except as some have pointed out, the Nevada commission's standards are lower than are ideal, and I think we'd need to see what lab NSAC is using and more before concluding it was necessarily a bad idea OR a good one. The overall question — who pays for the tests and any conflict of interest with that — is uniform to all potential scenarios. If Top Rank pays the state commission to do it, both sides then have an interest in the bout happening. If the individual fighters pay for it, the individual fighters also have an interest in the fight going forward or not, and the state commission might not be in a position to halt the bout quickly enough or at all. Everyone has a financial stake in this no matter what, in other words, and I guess I'm more inclined to trust the state commission on this over anyone else, but I'm also concerned about the potential shortfalls in the states' testing regimes. I do think either VADA, USADA, or NSAC doing advanced testing is better than nothing, so I'd happily take anyone handling it over the fight not going forward at all…
The Nevada commission has issued rulings on the drug testing cases of two big-name fighters, middleweights Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. and J'Leon Love. Chavez's penalty was reduced from $900,000 to $100,00 and a nine-month suspension remains, and suspicious minds could raise questions about the timing of this in relation to Top Rank wanting to pay for some advanced drug testing, although reasonable minds could just as easily assume that the commission realized it went too far over a pot bust based on the public criticism of that penalty. Also, reasonable minds might conclude that the court fight could get out of hand, so might as well settle. Here, the reasonable minds and suspicious minds can be one and the same, however. Love's penalty of $10,000 and six months sounds about right from the start, although I might've gone higher on the financial end and overall would like to see some kind of mandatory additional testing for boxers who test positive, which, in the case of Chavez, sounds like what will happen, albeit the lower-end kind of testing the states does vs. what VADA or USADA might do…
From the Floyd Mayweather-Canelo Alvarez press tour, one of the things we've learned is that Mayweather will have his guys (Love and Mickey Bey have both tested positive) do year-round USADA testing. It's a good step. USADA has had its problems, sure, and one of them is the same as VADA's, namely that there's no guarantee the states will honor the VADA/USADA tests. Hell, there's no guarantee we'll learn if a boxer tests positive under this Mayweather Promotions/USADA alliance. So, like with all drug testing these days, the advances are tiny, and can be interpreted as PR, but are in theory better than nothing. Are we learning much from the Mayweather-Canelo press tour, overall? Nah, besides the Mayweather drug testing stuff. Neither man is making all that much news, but the events are, if nothing else, arousing traditional news outlet coverage in vital markets. That ain't so bad…
On a basic surface level of super middleweight champion Andre Ward wanting to leave Goossen-Tutor, it makes you wonder what more Goossen could've done to turn Ward into a star — he's one of the few big consistent U.S. ticket draws and an HBO darling who got an especially friendly draw in Showtime's Super Six back when. If the idea is that Ward would get a big-money Chavez, Jr. fight by signing up with Top Rank, it makes slightly more sense, what with HBO and Top Rank forming such a close alliance and Top Rank having little to gain by feeding Chavez to a style mismatch on the scale of Ward unless a promotional deal with Ward awaits on the other side. We've heard Ward's version of the story, which is that Goossen is cutting out manager James Prince and refusing to meet with HBO, something Goossen hasn't directly addressed. The ending, as of now, anyway, is that Goossen wins. But something tells me this isn't over, no matter Caifornia's ruling…
Yet more murky water: I spent some time on Twitter trying to get Showtime's Stephen Espinoza to explain his remarks about the exact measurement of Adrien Broner's claimed viewership of 1.3 million against fellow welterweight Paulie Malignaggi. Was it peak? Or average? He couldn't or wouldn't explain other than to say it was neither. It looks to me like it's peak, which would contradict all the talk of it being one of the couple highest ratings of the year, unless you measure everything in a uniform way, and it doesn't seem like anyone is these days — the 1.4 million figure for Broner-Gavin Rees, for instance, was reportedly the average, with a peak higher than that. Peak looks better than average, as the NBC Sports rating of 1.7 peak vs. 1.2 average for Tyson Fury/Steve Cunningham more than indicates. It's maddening trying to sort through all the different ways you can estimate TV ratings and how inconsistently it's measured…
Golden Boy Promotions has signed 2008 Olympian Sadam Ali, per a news release, which is a good signing for both given GBP's East Coast operation, Ali's popularity there and how little Ali has developed since turning pro. Meanwhile, Olympic medalist Vasyl Lomachenko is meeting with all the pro promoters, and has set an ambitious agenda for himself. If anyone can pull it off, it's Lomachenko…
Various forces, from the WBC to Gary Shaw, have taken to criticizing the International Amateur Boxing Association's (AIBA) plan to allow pro boxers to compete in the 2016 Olympics. None of their arguments are convincing to me. Either the Olympics should be pure amateur, or they should allow pros. Right now, it's a hybrid. I'm open-minded to arguments against professionalizing the Olympics, but for the time being I am fine with pro boxers in the Olympics…
No surprise here: HBO, which swore off working with GBP, reportedly turned down a bout between light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson and GBP's Bernard Hopkins. I don't suppose it hurts GBP to throw it out there for Hopkins, who might otherwise be left fighting the Karo Murats of the world, but they had to know it probably would go the way it did…
Jeez, have things gotten ugly quickly for Mark Melligen.
