(Jhonny Gonzalez, left, Abner Mares, right; credit: Esthen Lin, Showtime) What an upset. But it made sense. It's the kind that can always happen when you're in the ring against someone with Jhonny Gonzalez's dynamite, as Abner Mares discovered Saturday on Showtime. Mares, in his second fight at featherweight and climbing the pound-for-pound rankings of […]

(left to right: Argenis Mendez, event promoter Mike Tyson, Arash Usmanee; Tom Casino, Iron Mike Producions) Disputed decisions involving Arash Usmanee served as bookends for this season of Friday Night Fights on ESPN2, and he's now been on both sides of the dispute. Few thought he deserved to lose the season debut to Rances Barthlemy […]

Often, nostalgic memories are colored by a rose lense that distorts just how much better things were, once upon a time. If any boxers today approach that warped standard of how they used to make 'em in the good ol' days and don't anymore, one of them has to be featherweight Abner Mares, fighting this […]

Daniel Jacobs saw blood and went in for the kill. Only the blood he saw was his own: Cut in the 3rd round by Giovanni Lorenzo, Jacobs went after the toughest test of his comeback from cancer and landed a left-right combo to finish off a man who had never been stopped before. It was […]

Takashi Miura-Sergio Thompson was the least heralded of this past weekend's unending string of enthralling boxing matches, so make sure you catch up on it above if you haven't already for a three-knockdown donnybrook. It won't do much to breathe life into the comatose junior lightweight division, since Miura didn't exactly convince as a long-lasting […]

ATLANTIC CITY — There was so much beforehand that made so little sense about Aussie Daniel Geale and Brit Darren Barker fighting in A.C., but that was then and this is now. Now, anyone watching this middleweight battle from Revel or at home on HBO is a happy, happy person. In the end, Barker won […]

ATLANTIC CITY — The highlight of the HBO undercard is the broadcast of the light heavyweight clash between Nathan Cleverly and Sergey Kovalav, already covered here. That leaves the other highlights as junior featherweight contender Jhonatan Romero vs. Kiko Martinez, also televised on HBO, and once-beaten junior welterweight prospect Thomas Dulorme (fighting at a catchweight […]

This is your non-spoiler post for the HBO light heavyweight bout between Sergey Kovalev and Nathan Cleverly. If you want to wait until 9:45 p.m. to watch the fight live, read no further. SERGEY KOVALEV-NATHAN CLEVERLY I was about 95 percent sold on Kovalev before Saturday. I'm 100 percent after watching him maul Cleverly, an […]

There was a kaleidoscopic quality to Friday Night Fights this week, where it was impossible to know at any given moment who was up and who was down, and where the cylinder would stop twisting, nobody knew. The men who came out on the winning end of the stellar ESPN2 card, one of the finest […]

ATLANTIC CITY — Being at The Revel makes me feel like I'm hardly in Atlantic City; it's a classy, modernly decorated joint, with none of the general feel of sleaze or chintz that is part of A.C.'s charm and simultaneously to its detriment. At the weigh-in at The Revel for Saturday's HBO middleweight main event […]

Now I'm starting to get worried. One week ago, at a one-month mandatory weigh-in, Canelo Alvarez was very cut at 166.8, as you can see. At the same weigh-in for Austin Trout, he was actually lighter. Here's the problem: He has to get a pound and a half lighter than he was for Trout, down […]

Every other year, Australia and England meet in the world of cricket for a series known as the Ashes. It's going on now, actually, and the two countries play for an urn full of the ashes of the stumps from the first time Australia beat its colonial masters at home, which England burned because they […]

Green River and TQBR are in agreement: It's dry as a bone out there and will be for a few more weeks. There are some good scattered bouts floating around — I'm heading to Atlantic City next weekend for the middleweight clash between Daniel Geale and Darren Barker, to be aired on HBO, and it's […]

(via) If you know about us already and come around very often, you probably already know that TIME dubbed this site one of the top 25 blogs in the whole wide Internet this past week. (Thanks, TIME.) If you don't know much else about us, here are some things you should! Other big publications think […]

(Deontay Wilder, left, Siarhei Liakhovich, right; credit: Tom Casino, Showtime) Beforehand, most people expected heavyweight prospect Deontay Wilder taking on faded ex-contender Siarhei Liakhovich on ShoBox would be ugly. I was in the minority: Wilder still was living up to his name as a wild, raw, untested fighter, and Liakhovich's recent losses were against good […]