As the vice president of the Carson Jones fan club, I’m duty-bound to show you this video of the exciting junior middleweight taking out Ricardo Williams. ESPN2, are you watching? Get this man on your program!
There ain’t a whole lot to Quick Jab, but promises were made. Besides the items in the headline, we have a turkey hijacking, Tomasz Adamek moving on from Main Events and more.
Quick Jabs
Sometimes real life is funnier than any potential satire, and that was the case with the WBC convention this week. The WBC, as money-grubbing and self-centered an organization as exists on the planet, kicked off its conference with “We Are The World,” a song meant to raise money for starving children in Africa. Then it gave its “lifetime achievement award” to its treasurer, i.e. the man who collects money for the organization. Outstanding. It also did a couple meaningful things besides self-satire, and one of them was to force open scoring down America’s throat in a modified form. The only good thing about announcing scores periodically midfight, it would seem, would be transparency for the fans so they know everything’s on the up-and-up, that cards aren’t filled out afterward for the favored fighter. The bad thing about open scoring is that if the boxers themselves know the scores, they will often fight differently because of it, namely running out a lead. So what’s the WBC gonna do? It’s going to give the scores to the corners of the fighters only. Worst of all possible worlds…
The other meaningful things they did were to order a Bernard Hopkins-Chad Dawson rematch for the WBC’s light heavyweight belt, and Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr.-Sergio Martinez for its middleweight belt. I doubt either fight happens. Hopkins is saying, “yeah yeah, I want it,” but what network would pay anything more than pocket change for a rematch of a horrible style match-up? If there is anyone, that would suck. And as much as Chavez’ team talks up how willing they are to face Martinez, no way does Top Rank let the kid near Sergio anytime soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some step-aside fee paid, as I’m pretty sure Chavez would prefer to keep the belt…
More Lamont Peterson-Amir Khan clean-up: Khan filed an appeal with the IBF on the scoring of the junior welterweight fight he lost, an unpopular maneuver and one that was swiftly rejected. There are times when filing a goofy protest can lead to boxers retaining high rankings and such, so I get why it’s done, but this one was probably unwise. Also, I’d erroneously said in an earlier piece that Peterson was promoted by Golden Boy. In fact, he’s a free agent, and that means a Khan rematch is far less of a sure thing…
A couple weeks back, it was confirmed that HBO would have a studio show on boxing. It does make some sense. The only thing I hope is that it’s not expensive at all. Would you rather have a bunch of people talking about boxing for a year, or would you rather squeeze in one more good fight in 2012 with the money HBO would’ve spent on a studio show?…
Also going back a couple weeks, I failed to say anything about the worrisomely late stoppage of the Brandon Rios-John Murray lightweight contest. By some of those late rounds, it was pretty obvious Murray was fading and Rios was picking up steam, and all the while Murray’s face was turning into mush. The referee, or Murray’s corner, should’ve stopped it sooner than they did…
Heavyweight Tomasz Adamek is leaving Main Events, which has worked wonders with his career. I get the idea of Adamek wanting to hang his own shingle and such, but how’s he going to fight in Newark, an area where he sells tons of tickets, when Main Events controls the biggest venue in the area? This also leaves Main Events without its biggest fighter…
File under “Sad, Funny AND Ironic”: Don King had a bunch of turkeys stolen from a truck. Sad because they were meant for poor people. Funny because the words “hijacked” and “turkeys” go together really well. Ironic because now King knows after a long career of ripping off fighters what it feels like to be stolen from…
Arturo Gatti’s widow is gonna get that money. Ugh…
HBO has put together the video below by way of year in review. It’s hard to imagine how much worse they could’ve made themselves look, because, uh, Saul Alvarez-Matthew Hatton? Their replay schedule for “best of” looks a bit better. If you were going just by pure excitement, though, you’d want to throw in Antonio DeMarco-Jorge Linares, Marcos Maidana-Erik Morales and Mike Alvarado-Breidis Prescott.
