Little Mario Rodriguez is having himself a very fine 2012. First he took out Gilberto Keb Baas, who recently had lost to Adrian Hernandez but still was a bigger name than anyone Rodriguez had faced. Then, this weekend, little Mario scored a super upset stoppage win over Nkosinathi Joyi, considered the best man at 105 […]

Who cares if that picture is real? I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t contemplate the scenario. Someone had to go to the trouble of opening a Word file, typing the blurb, blowing up the font and finally sticking it with some tape to the window and taking a picture, rather […]

A Pole, a Kazakhstani, a Puerto Rican and a Ukranian walk into a casino in upstate New York, and… There’s no punchline to that, actually. And whatever the odd confluence of circumstances bringing the four men together at Verona’s Turning Stone Resort & Casino, there’s nothing funny about the main event on HBO Saturday when […]

Brooklyn is the epicenter of skateboards, radical bicycle modification, off-beat motorcycle clubs, every cuisine on Earth and all variations thereof. It’s the locus for international dance and performance art, has six times as many yoga studios as Subway franchises, and more tattoo parlors than plumbers. And now it has big-time professional boxing. Can boxing make […]

It is the central paradox of the Klitschko brothers in the United States that so many fans declare so frequently their disdain for the style in which the brothers fight, yet every time a Klitschko appears on HBO of late he does respectable to excellent ratings. Or maybe it’s not a pardox at all. Maybe […]

One of the more common debates I have with fellow boxing fans and writers is how much boxing should be viewed on the continuum of sports, entertainment and business. My own view is that it’s not an either/or thing. Sports are entertainment, and entertainment is a business, and what entertains some people about a sport […]

(Randy Caballero, Manuel Roman; photo credit: Omar Ornelas, The Desert Sun) Showtime’s prospect-oriented series ShoBox made a good faith attempt Friday to pair young men on the way up this weekend from Fantasy Springs Resort and Casino in Indio, Calif., a veritable hotbed of very solid fighters that seem to sprout up from nowhere in […]

This video-laden edition of Round And Round will feature, later on, a Mariah Carey boxing-themed video (not kidding) and not one but two Manuel Charr-related rap videos (still not kidding). But that video we began with… that’s sizzling material. The match-up promotes itself: aging middleweight king and superb talent Sergio Martinez vs. young, rising brawler […]

The ongoing carousel that became Don George’s next fight has finally slowed enough for the super middleweight to jump off. In a scattered series of events, George has had his bout delayed six days, moved from one network to another, promoted to the main event, lost his opponent then demoted to co-feature. “As my dad […]

What if… there existed another universe where fighters were ranked pound-for-pound — i.e., who’s best regardless of weight — based nothing at all on any actual evidence from what a fighter had actually accomplished? A dimension where some figure or the other just points at a fighter and says, “I think he looks like he’s […]

Isn’t he just the cutest. (via, h/t unofficial TQBR visual consultant Che) You know what else is cute? Our lame boxing blog trying to be all important. Like, maybe we write something for the Guardian’s website about the Olympics the other week, and then we do it again this week. Isn’t it adorable how we […]

(Some members of the British 2008 class) With the fat lady still echoing around the Olympic Stadium at the culmination of London 2012, Great Britain’s Olympic boxing squad can expect the wooing process to begin in earnest. Contract offers will already be in transit as promoters bid to prise them away from performance director Robert […]