LeGarrette Blount should just give up and become a boxer already. I gather from HBO’s “Hard Knocks” that punching teammates in practice is, at times, situationally, encouraged, and that the Tennessee Titans coach had no problem with this particular punching above. But there are at least three punching incidents involving Blount that we’re aware of, and at some point the guy is going to realize his calling in the boxing ring, one hopes.
Quick Jabs!
Quick Jabs
Following up on Steve Kim’s piece on the Main Events approach to boxing, Kevin Iole adds significant detail to the story and any number of strange financial situations in the sport today. Most interesting in the must-read piece: Main Events getting an undercard fighter, junior welterweight Shem Pagan, to do some of his own promoting, effectively, for tonight’s show; heavyweight Tomasz Adamek making only $100,000 to fight on HBO recently; and junior middleweight Alfredo Angulo’s manager Mike Criscio saying he wouldn’t budget at less than $900,000 for a Sergio Martinez fight, which sounds less like the “we thought we were negotiating” story line Angulo has offered lately…
Lost in the feuding over junior middleweight Antonio Margarito’s re-licensing hearing is that fans could watch it at all. Top Rank webcast the entire affair on its website, which is a tremendous service to fans. Given how controversial Margarito has been — some who watched inevitably came away disliking him even more — it was a brave move and a real addition to transparency in the sport. More on Top Rank’s Internet presence later, but first, two more notes on Margarito. Bob Arum said afterward he thought he would get more than one “yes” vote from the California State Athletic Commission, which suggests to me that his predictions of Texas giving Margarito a license might be inaccurate. Also, there’s been some focus on the notion that the commission wasted time pestering Margarito about a sparring license when nobody’d ever heard of a sparring license, but by multiple accounts, the sparring license only applies to unlicensed fighters. And, if Margarito’s argument was that he was paying attention to the details these days and accepting responsibility for whatever happens on his team, whatever i’s he didn’t dot or t’s he didn’t cross are very relevant to that…
It’s been a bad stretch for boxers that Floyd Mayweather favors. First, Mayweather’s hand-picked successor junior welterweight Devon Alexander had a tough outing against Andriy Kotelnik a couple weeks ago. The next week, another Mayweather favorite — light heavyweight Chad Dawson, whom Mayweather called the top pound-for-pound fighter in the world during his “retirement” — suffered his first loss. And that same weekend, Mayweather Promotions’ Cornelius Lock got a brutal beat down in a KO loss to Miguel Angel “Mikey” Garcia in a featherweight bout…
I still haven’t caught heavyweight Chris Arreola’s oft-panned performance on Friday Night Fights last weekend, but it doesn’t sound like the usual lame excuse being offered by a boxer’s team post-lackluster performance to point out that he injured both hands in the fight. Arreola’s injured a hand in his last two consecutive fights, so it’s not hard to imagine it now being three. It’s a troubling trend. He’s already handicapped by being a fat guy, but he made some of that up by being exciting and hitting hard. A fat guy with two bad paws is useless…
Kudos to BoxingScene’s Rick Reeno for staying on top of the bizarre Alexander Povetkin-Bruce Seldon “exhibition.” The Pennsylvania commission apparently is unconcerned by what went down, calling it a glorified sparring session, but Reeno couldn’t get the commission to directly answer some very important and specific questions. If you care about the safety of boxers — and it saddens me that Povetkin trainer Teddy Atlas, who usually criticizes all the mismatches on FNF, was involved — then you should care about this story…
Mike Tyson, a Senate candidate, drugs on a yacht and accusations of erroneous stories. My day job prevents me from commenting much, but, hey. Read up….
Heavyweight David Haye claims he is going to reveal some “dirt” about the nature of the contract(s) offered to him by the Klitschko brothers, and that we’ll see that it was Klitschko who is the “bitch” in this situation. He starts off in a deep hole, crediblity-wise. Haye went totally quiet during the time when the Klitschkos were making details of the contract public, which made it look like he didn’t disagree with them. Now, weeks upon weeks later, he’s going to respond. It doesn’t look good…
Michael Marley has revealed more about the aforementioned Dawson’s career turmoil, this time with some folks talking on the record. Incidentally, Dawson manager Criscio is on the record in both stories here after Marley’s earlier piece, which makes me wonder if he was the unnamed source in a previous story, which would — given the feud between the two men — undermine some of the points if so…
There are a few airings coming up of recent fights that some didn’t see. Top Rank is airing a bunch of bouts on Top Rank Live, which began tonight. Also, DiBella Entertainment has acquired the rights to Vitali Klitschko’s heavyweight bout against Albert Sosnowski, and it starts Sunday on SportsNet New York at 8 p.m. and Comcast Sportsnet affiliates, per a news release. This, too, is a good development. Lastly, check out this spot on Integrated Sports, which is handling tonight’s pay-per-view card and has found a nice niche in the sport.
