As funnier wags have said about this photo of Peter Dinklage and Gennady Golovkin, “GGG would have decimated the Mountain.” Golovkin certainly would have confirmed the kill.
In this mammoth-sized edition of Quick Jabs, we will have more substantial matters to discuss about GGG. We will also have the subject in the headlines, and more goofy-ass discussion about the alphabet gang, and Victor Conte, and boxers being stabbed or shooting people. Quick Jabs is a font of positivity.
Let’s get a whole bunch of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao junk out of the way first. Remember, Quick Jabs is a la carte, so you can always skip around if you’re sick to damn death of Mayweather and Pacquiao. We’ve even evenly bisected it for you.
Quick Jabs, Floyd And Manny Parts
Surprise, surprise: Mayweather has been accused of beating up another woman. By this point, with all the things Mayweather has been convicted of doing to women and all the things he’s been accused of, too, you’d have to be naive not to take the claims seriously. The woman this time is ex-fiancee Shantel Jackson, who has hired Gloria Allred, which means this could get pricey. Anytime someone goes to civil rather than criminal court first for a battery allegation, though, it can give off the appearance of someone who’s more interested in money than justice. The invasion of privacy stuff from the lawsuit? That could hold some legal water in a civil court…
50 Cent hasn’t let up on his attacks against Mayweather as illiterate, and yes, truth be told, it’s cruel. It’s also hard to have sympathy for Mayweather when he’s just as cruel toward others, or even more cruel, absent some kind of disclosure of a learning disability. 50 has offered to fight Mayweather, to which Mayweather has responded like he’s some innocent victim. Like he’s not the one who triggered 50’s attacks from the start…
The episode of Showtime’s All Access program to hype the Mayweather-Marcos Maidana welterweight rematch had about one good moment featuring Mayweather — him buying the sex toy for one of his assistants was moderately amusing — and a few that weren’t so pleasant. For instance: He should hire someone to tell him to wipe his mouth off after eating a Big Mac. And yeah, yoga has been bastardized as it has been westernized, but doesn’t it take it to a new level of gross for something that was meant to be spiritual for Mayweather to throw a bunch of dollar bills down around his yoga mat?…
Presumably the next episode will touch on Mayweather’s consultation with Alex Ariza, the former Maidana strength and conditioning coach that Mayweather had darkly hinted was affiliated with PEDs when he was hanging out with Pacquiao. Ariza isn’t the most trustworthy figure, as Mayweather himself hinted at a not so long ago, so all the people who thought Mayweather was really, truly trying to clean up the sport back when he was insisting on advanced PED testing to face Pacquiao probably ought to give up that foolish belief. And Mayweather, already the source of scurrilous “rumors,” deserves extra scrutiny for hiring someone he himself has vaguely suggested is a PED supplier…
Oh, and if you were on the side of “Pacquiao is to blame” for why we don’t have a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in the record books by now, shift your allegiance in the other direction, because the latest impossibly adjusted goal post from Mayweather as a condition for the fight is that Pacquiao sign with Mayweather Promotions. The drug tests? Mayweather had an argument (back when; as mentioned above, less so now). The “can’t be with Top Rank” condition? Not an argument. The “must sign with Mayweather Promotions?” Just flat ridiculous. It’s why you should just go ahead and ignore it anytime one side or the other talks up Mayweather-Pacquiao. Even if one side or the other wants it more, it isn’t going to happen. And if you want to blame anyone, right now, Mayweather is more to blame…
Pacquiao is in the midst of dealing with another claim of a big tax bill. So far, he’s avoided the full brunt of this one. At a certain point, why wouldn’t you just hire a reliable accountant? If it kept happening to me, if I kept being hit with multi-million dollar tax bills, I’d fire whoever was working for me…
J’Leon Love has, on one level, earned his animosity, that level being his failed drug test a couple years ago. On another level, the animosity is simply tied to him being promoted by Mayweather. It’s understandable to want Mayweather to fail; it’s less understandable to be happy because of that when Love gets knocked out, as he was this past weekend. David Greisman has a great column on that subject here.
Quick Jabs, Non-Floyd And Non-Manny Parts
If you were PED pioneer turned would-be anti-PED evangelist Victor Conte, and you saw over-40 Cung Le — who had a rep for coming into MMA fights a little flabby — looking like he did above while working with someone with a history of supplying PEDs, what would you say? You might comment upon how he probably shouldn’t be having “muscles popping out,” and that he was “using PEDs,” among other remarks. Which is what he said about another fighter of that age in that situation, namely Juan Manuel Marquez. But, then, what if you were Conte and you had been working with Le? What would you say then? As it turns out, what you would say was, “So the look test by you is final? Blocked.” Nothing suspicious about that, either!…
I finally caught up to the Big Knockout Boxing main event pitting Gabriel Rosado against Brian Vera, and perhaps it’s neither the end of the world nor anything all that unique. Rosado-Vera, by temperament, might have provided the exact same level of (high) action in a boxing ring. So might any club fighters across America on any given night. The format provides no special interest to me, and I still share the reservations of Alex McClintock, but until we see more of it we might not know what it means, pro or con…
A. Let’s talk alphabet belts. First, here’s HBO’s Jim Lampley lighting into the alphabet gang for quite some time on a podcast, and doing so with a level of command of boxing history that counters the arguments you’ll hear sometimes about how there were no “good old days” of one recognized champion (read the comments in the second link for more of a rebuttal of that)….
B. 1. A couple cases of late have been used by the defenders of the WBO, WBA and others as an example of the belts’ influence on the sport, when neither are any such example at all. Golovkin going after an interim middleweight belt with the organization where legit champion Miguel Cotto also has an alphabet belt. This has been propped up as an example of how the belts “matter.” The belts matter in various ways, so it’s a straw man argument, as always, but this isn’t one of the cases that demonstrate influence. Golovkin can pursue Cotto’s belt all he wants, but if Cotto doesn’t feel like fighting Golovkin, he’ll just drop that belt. So how does this “matter,” then? Golovkin will be in some position to have some different belt than he has already, and if the WBC orders Cotto to defend his belt (which they might not ever do) and Cotto says no, then Cotto won’t have the belt, and the sport will continue as if none of this ever happened — Cotto will keep fighting whoever he wants for big money beltless, because the belts don’t matter enough to him to force him to do anything he doesn’t want to. It’s a meaningless bit of maneuvering…
B. 2. Middleweight Peter Quillin just dropped HIS belt (and at this point we’re talking about three different middleweight “champions,” which is just goofy, not that the belt defenders ever choose to acknowledge this common sense argument) instead of facing Matt Korobov. What makes this mystifying isn’t that a boxer dropped his belt rather than face whom he was ordered to face — boxers do it all the time when it’s convenient to their aims, meaning that as a “forcing factor” for good fights they are limited — but rather because he would’ve been in line for $1.4 million thanks to Roc Nation’s exorbitant purse bid, and it’s hard to imagine him getting that much money doing anything else. But, then, Quillin could also just face two random guys who aren’t as dangerous as Korobov on Showtime, owing to his connection to the actually influential Al Haymon (who recently signed yet more fighters). There’s been some speculation about politics involving Haymon, who used to promote Beyonce concerts, wanting to stick it to Beyonce hubby and Roc Nation boss Jay-Z. Ultimately, the “whys” don’t matter. For whatever reason, Quillin decided keeping a belt wasn’t worth it, and while I think it’s a bad decision just because of the $1.4 million left on the table, the belt forced Quillin to do exactly nothing he didn’t want to. And let’s not kid ourselves: Quillin-Danny Jacobs was a fight that was on the table as an appealing bout before Jacobs picked up his own (FOURTH in the division) “championship” belt, and that belt makes this fight exactly zero more appealing, marketable or financially profitable than it was before. This is just more shifting of the deck chairs…
C. Now, if I were big into sticking up for the alphabet gang, what I’d be hyping was how three of them plan to move toward instant replay. That’s a thing that could be actually good and meaningful for the sport. Real-life me would contend that the trade off of good-to-bad with the alphabet gang still doesn’t make them worth it, and that someone else very well could’ve and indeed should’ve come along with the instant replay idea, too. But right now, it’s the alphabets doing it, and in so far as I will praise them, it’s for moves like this…
As for Showtime: The ratings for the horrible tripleheader headlined by junior welterweight champ Danny Garcia actually were better than the ratings for the legitimately good tripleheader featuring welterweight Kell Brook beating Shawn Porter, which says something about how much name value matters in a sport where there are people who think good fights are all that count for anything. That this is the situation is unfortunate. But that’s the situation we have. Until boxing fans stop giving more eyeball attention to “name” fighters than they do good fights, the networks are going to be positively reinforced to put on more dogshit like the Garcia card (Oh, and get well soon from that leg-stabbing, Brook — the Amir Khan fight looms, and it’s a good one)…
Showtime, part II: At least Canelo Alvarez’s next fight won’t be on Showtime pay-per-view. Financially, it probably would’ve benefited most everyone better, because Canelo’s holding his own, albeit at not exactly high buy rates. But when Showtime gives its subscribers a taste of the guys who make it viable, rather than making them pay even more for PPV, it’s good for everyone. Now, maybe HBO gets the next Canelo fight instead, because of the weird Golden Boy relationship with each network, which of course Oscar De La Hoya says is a-OK because that’s the kind of thing he says all the time. Either way, it’s a win for the fans for Canelo to be off PPV…
Middleweight Jermain Taylor gets brain bleeds and allegedly shoots his cousin and nothing can stop him from fighting on. It’d be impressive if it wasn’t so damn sordid. Meanwhile, somebody finally stopped Ali Raymi’s 1st round knockout streak.
