That’s boxer-lawyer Lovemore Ndou. We have various boxing-related legal matters to discuss in this edition of Quick Jabs, so he’s a fitting avatar.
For instance: Jonathan Koh just published in the Southern California Law Review this paper on the regulatory and legal issues surrounding performance enhancing drugs in boxing. It’s very smart, and I don’t just think that because he mentions me in it — he also got some kudos from the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association. Don’t be intimidated by its length; it’s researched like crazy so the footnotes add to the page total considerably.
Besides law-talking and the other entity in the headline, we’ll look at the latest word on the Golden Boy Promotions schism, speculate without much evidence on the buy rate for the Floyd Mayweather-Marcos Maidana pay-per-view and more.
Quick Jabs
How about some other law dog stuff next? The National Law Journal has a write-up of the Main Events lawsuit against Al Haymon and the rest of the gang over the thwarted bout between light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson and Sergey Kovalev. It doesn’t add a ton of new information but what it does is signal that this is a lawsuit that the legal world is paying attention to, at minimum…
And then there’s the revenge porn. Just, like, of course there is. Good ol’ Adrien Broner remains a pioneer of vulgarity in this sport, and he’s now on the opposite end of a lawsuit alleging that he released that infamous sex tape on purpose. (Not exactly revenge porn in the sense that Broner was trying to get revenge [if he did it! {which he probably did}] but that’s what people are calling it because that’s the term in some states for what is alleged.) He keeps saying that nothing will humble him, but at a certain point he needs to wise up to the value of being humbled. It’s like being scared to be hit by traffic: It keeps you from running out in the middle of a six-lane highway…
Let’s defend Mr. Broner on another count, however briefly. The WBC has decided to suspend him from their rankings over his comment about beating up a “Mexican,” which if he had been allowed to go through with his usual patter by Showtime’s Jim Gray, would’ve included a long list of other nationalities ending in “can” he had beaten up our would, a la the “Can Man” joke he loves so well. Once again: This wasn’t racist. Even if you think it was, once again, the WBC’s warped priorities are such that you can literally go to jail for beating up a woman and still remain ranked –vhell, they’ll even stick up for you! — but using curse words or making a clumsy joke is verboten. Aren’t the alphabets just the greatest?…
We do know via the WBC that lineal middleweight champion Sergio Martinez weighed 170 on May 7, and his June challenger Miguel Cotto weighed 160.2. If you were already worried that Cotto, moving up to 160 for the first time, would be too small for Martinez, this is confirmation of that. If you weren’t worried, you should probably start…
How many buys did Mayweather-Maidana do on Showtime PPV? Nobody is saying officially, and if it was a good number they would’ve said by now. Matchmaker Rick Glaser, who is wrong as often as he is right (but at least black people like hime because he’s a felon — or so he says!), pegs the number at 845,000 from a Golden Boy source. Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza says he’s wrong. ESPN’s Dan Rafael said he expects the number to land between 800-900,000 based on what he’s hearing. Either figure, from Glaser or Rafael, sounds about right to me. It’s hard to imagine it cracking 900,000. And that would be an excellent number for any fighter in the world not named Mayweather, who has outrageous minimum purses…
It’s pretty clear Top Rank’s Bob Arum isn’t interested in seeing Golden Boy execs Oscar De La Hoya and Richard Schaefer make up. The two are fighting over whether to go back to doing business with Top Rank, primarily, with De La Hoya wanting to and Schaefer not. Quoth the Arum: “Oscar really has got his act together and he realizes the guy who was his CEO was looting his company and trying to steal it from him and Oscar’s a fighter and is not going to let that happen.”
Featherweight Abner Mares is going to be working with a new trainer, Virgil Hunter, who has a reputation as a defensive coach despite mixed results there and has issued his own repudiation of the designation. He’s had mixed results overall with anyone not named Andre Ward…
Boxing programming usually does well at the Sports Emmys but the only awards this year were for Showtime’s “All Access – Mayweather vs. Canelo Epilogue” and HBO’s Real Sports, which isn’t a boxing program but sometimes does boxing segments. Speaking of Real Sports, though, next week on Tuesday they’ll have a segment on the boxing/mixed martial arts announcing siblings Michael and Bruce Buffer. It sounds interesting; I’ve seen segments on Michael but not so much on the pair…
The Onion always wins. “Local Man Not Sure How He Ended Up In Boxing Entourage.” Read it.
