Jesus, it looks like Amir Khan thought he was fighting at light heavyweight against Canelo Alvarez, not 155 pounds. Maybe he’s preparing for a job as a bouncer at a bar after his boxing career is up. This fight doesn’t enthuse your humble blogger — a shaky chin is a shaky chin, no matter how much mass you tack onto it, as we’ve seen with Khan moving from 135 to 147 so far — but that Khan seems like he’s swelling in weight with great aplomb makes it mildly more intriguing.
In this edition of Quick Jabs we contemplate the subjects in the headline, drug cheats, Andre Ward and dive scandals. We already contemplated Khan being swole.
QUICK JABS
There’s good and bad in the latest Thomas Hauser opus on Al Haymon, boxing manager and would-be revolutionary. The good is that he’s largely ditched his over-reliance on anonymous sources with unknown motives this time; most everyone here is on the record, and we know who they are and what their beef is. The best material is probably the stuff that shows how much money he might be losing, and it’s properly caveated in the degree of the “might.” The bad: He still desperately needs someone who will tell him “no.” There’s some rich detail in there about a man of mystery, but the fact that Haymon likes classic movies and some new ones should be filed under the category of “not very informative,” because who doesn’t like classic movies and some new ones?; and it feels like he’s given us the Lamon Brewster-shows-Haymon-abuses-fighters anecdote 150 times. We didn’t need five parts, in other words. And the problem still remains with who Hauser is: a consultant at HBO with an ambiguous role, constantly writing takedowns of HBO competitors. The bits about Haymon’s PBC operation not putting on good fights? It won’t be until next weekend that HBO puts on its first evenly matched bout of 2016, and there’s not much else on the calendar that fits that description until June. Strange that he’s not turning his investigatory powers in that direction…
Speaking of: The Gawker media empire has been good to TQBR, but its boxing writing has gotten rather insufferable, for the most part. The main idea seems to be to take an opinion, smugly state it as fact and then publish it. The latest Deadspin heavyweight piece where the author, Charles Farrell, declared as a foregone conclusion who would beat whom — it might not go down that way, pal, the same way his “Guillermo Rigondeaux by far the best fighter in the world today” (and “last 20 years” maybe!) post is an opinion not much of anybody held at the time and hasn’t aged well as we’ve watched him again struggle against nobody very good. They probably got the reaction to Adrien Broner calling out Floyd Mayweather wrong, too — yeah, there were people laughing, including Mayweather, but the idea is far from something that made him a general “laughingstock.” Some of the people laughing were clearly in his corner, and were almost certainly laughing at the audaciousness or the delivery, not that they think the idea is a joke. It’s also an idea that some boxing fans and writers have taken genuinely seriously…
Manny Pacquiao says his comments about gays were taken out of context, the go-to for people making excuses that try to foist the blame on others, especially when “gays are worse than animals” isn’t enhanced by any context. As if to illustrate how bad the remarks were — Mike Tyson, who once issued this x-rated homophobic screed — lectured Manny about them…
Heavyweight Lucas Browne also shockingly had nothing to do with his own positive drug test. Who ever is responsible for their own positive drug tests, after all? They’re all the result of conspiracies and contaminations and everything but the boxer being the person in charge of what goes into his body. And by the way, sometimes the excuses are valid, and they might be here — but dammit…
We’re still wishing injured boxer Prichard Colon well, and if you want to read something that will definitely piss you off, read this. The report on what went wrong in the fight criticized both the referee and ring doctor but absolved them of any wrongdoing — because under Virginia’s system, they were private vendors, and the state had no authority to hold them accountable. Fucking horrible…
The case of Nick Blackwell is less clear cut. Blackwell is in a coma after the beating he took from Chris Eubank, Jr., and Eubank and his dad wanted the fight stopped after the 7th. Seeing the 7th after the fact, there’s definitely an argument for stopping it in the round, despite some defenses of the ref. The 8th, too. But it was a borderline situation — not a bout that obviously should’ve been stopped, the way so many are for fighters who end up badly hurt or dead, because Blackwell was still getting some work done even when he was clearly losing. Overall, this probably does speak to refs, doctors and fighters’ corners needing to throw in the towel when there’s any real argument for doing so, even if it is borderline. But this is also about boxing having a dark side even if there’s proper administration. It gives this writer pause, until reminded that so many things people do in their lives are inherently dangerous — with a touch of guilt and shame, and sometimes more than a touch…
This kind of boxing corruption isn’t routine, so it’s always fascinating when it happens: a (Ukrainian) dive scandal…
Light heavyweight Andre Ward didn’t do a great number of viewers in his recent HBO re-apperance — 1.064 million, head-to-head with the NCAA Elite Eight — but he did about as much as most people on HBO do, and he did the second highest figure of 2016 so far for cable TV. Presumably Ward’s critics decided his number was terrible before it ever came out…
It’s great to see one of my long-time favorite fighters, Paul Williams (whose career was cut short tragically by a motorcycle accident) finding a way back toward his passion, boxing. May his training career continue to flourish, and enjoy below the knockout his charge Justin DeLoach scored.
