Sick of the drip-drip-drip of year end boxing awards yet? Hard to blame you, hard to blame you. So we'll bring out two enormous platters to conclude our 2013 awards. In the first installment, that flavor was heavy and serious. In the second one, that flavor is light and fluffy. Just add "of the year" […]

(Miguel Cotto revels in his hard fought win over Ricardo Torres; photo credit: AP) When Bernard Hopkins effectively ended Felix Trinidad’s run as a world class fighter with an emphatic stoppage in 2001, a sort of vacuum of power was created in Puerto Rican boxing. Era after era, Puerto Rico essentially overachieved in the sport […]

We're at the point where we're starting to get some of the flavor of whether 2014 will follow on the example of a strong 2013 for boxing — not that we ought to read too much into it based on the early-year calendar, which tends to start slowly for the sport. The returns so far […]

"Get me the other bottle. The one I mixed." It has not been the best month ever for strength and conditioning/nutrition guy Alex Ariza. He mocked a fellow with Parkinson's disease and kicked him (Freddie Roach), then had one of his fighters (Brandon Rios) test positive for a banned substance and another (Marcos Maidana) be […]

Tim Bradley started 2013 as a pariah. He emerges from it triumphant. The Queensberry Rules’ Fighter of the Year beat out Floyd Mayweather for the honour, the biggest attraction and best boxer in the sport, and a tier of men who made their names in 2013: Danny Garcia, Guillermo Rigondeaux and Adonis Stevenson. And he did […]

“I saw Gary as clear as day. I know it sounds like a movie script, but I saw my brother. He told me to get up.” Everything struggles to live, yet it is in surviving our own individual struggles that true strength is forged. Barnet middleweight Darren Barker had known the worst of times; after […]

(Timothy Bradley, left, Ruslan Provodnikov, right) The defining trait of Timothy Bradley vs. Ruslan Provodnikov, both before and during, was how little sense it made.  Choosing an opponent from the ranks of ESPN's Friday Night Fights for Bradley's comeback on HBO after a long layoff? Nonsense. Expecting a competitive fight out of it that fans […]

Taking the inimitable pay-per-view record-breaker Floyd Mayweather out of the equation, 2013 was arguably nothing to write home about when measured in terms of outright star power. The cash cows were, on the whole, either absent or slaughtered. Manny Pacquiao barely featured, Canelo Alvarez and Adrien Broner both lost their shine, even the original Golden […]

(Chad Dawson attempts to rise from being flattened by Adonis Stevenson; photo credit: Graham Hughes/AP) Chad Dawson’s technical decision loss to Jean Pascal in 2010 signaled the end of his tenure as an undefeated fighter. It wasn’t a big deal, though; losses do and should happen in boxing, even if the sport has evolved to […]

(Via Facebook user Dobie Gillis) It was not a dream. Marcos Maidana really did slap the waves off of Adrien Broner’s head. And those were indeed the droids you were looking for. On Sunday morning, the world woke up to a reality in which Marcos Maidana, just the night before, had probably done enough to […]