Here I was, all prepared to make fun of fussy U.K. heavyweight David Haye for saying he wouldn’t fight Vitali Klitschko in the Ukraine because he’d heard the country was racist. “But David,” I was going to say, “Men of all color can agree that Ukrainian women are pretty hot, right? Even the ones with […]

The Scene: Hilton Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. — November 22, 1986. Brooklyn-born Mike Tyson, boxing’s newest sensation, entered an HBO-devised heavyweight unification tournament against Jamaican-born WBC titlist Trevor Berbick. Tyson was a prodigious force but untested; Berbick had been in with men like Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes and Pinklon Thomas. As we join the […]

Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao have put an end to their defamation case. No, they probably still won’t be fighting in the ring, despite recent public concessions from the Pacquiao side, but at least they’re no longer fighting in the courts. Progress is progress. The Mayweather camp statement, released late Tuesday, is a riot. […]

I used to watch “Press Your Luck” when I was younger, but I only recently learned of the Michael Larson “scandal.” Fascinating stuff. It relates to boxing matches in the works because beep-boop-beep-bop-beep is how it goes until it stops, and hopefully you don’t get a Whammy. After an early 2012 filled with Whammys, there […]

(Kevin Mitchell, left; Ricky Burns, right) Britain’s best match-up of the year takes place Saturday, as cockney wrong ‘un Kevin Mitchell invades Glasgow to face Scotland’s smiling assassin, Ricky Burns. The Dear Green Place isn’t an ideal pit-stop for a fighter with a propensity for swimming at the bottom of a bottle. Nevertheless, Mitchell, who pissed […]

It’s a simple formula. Two fighters face off over a table. They sit backwards on aluminum chairs and perform a strange good cop/bad cop parody routine. Both try to be the bad cop. It’s HBO’s Max Kellerman, also astraddle his seat, who’s the good cop. Or at least the goofy cop. When the recipe works, […]

(Photo credit: Chris Farina,Top Rank) LAS VEGAS — For 30 minutes, it looked like a fight that needed no return bout. Three minutes later, the word most thrown around in the post-fight press conference was “rematch.” That was the kind of predictable then surprising fight that Sergio Martinez’s victory over Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. turned […]

No sooner had Ricky Hatton officially announced the worst kept secret in British boxing on Friday (he’s baaaaaacckkk), punters (who had obviously left cookies in the Manchester MEN Arena ticketing system) began receiving e-mails inviting them to be there for the reboot on Nov. 24 (never mind the fact that Hatton hasn’t as yet sourced an […]

Being tricky there in the headline. “Wha wha wha wha?” you might be asking yourself, “Did I miss the big fights, thinking they were on Saturday when really they were on Friday?” You did not. It’s just that there’s already talk about what might happen next for some of this evening’s contestants. In this relatively […]

Floyd Mayweather might be Manny Pacquiao’s rival for the honor of best boxer in the world and biggest boxing superstar in the world, but there’s no question who his biggest rival is in the ring: Juan Manuel Marquez, who has given him 36 rounds of hell dating back to 2004. And now they’ll meet for […]