Boxers are fairly unique among human beings in that they regularly and consciously place themselves in harm's way as part of their job description. The list of such instinct-defying professions is short: It includes other kinds of fighters, mixed martial artists, say, or Secret Service agents, who are trained to turn themselves into meat shields. […]

If you have Showtime, or are creative with Internet streams, you most likely saw Golden Boy Promotion’s card from Carson, Calif. last Saturday night. It was supposed to be another showcase for two of the company’s up and coming stars: junior featherweight Leo Santa Cruz and featherweight Abner Mares. Mares was in tough against veteran […]

So much of boxing’s appeal is how it relates to the world around it, including media and their free market functions. As we move away from legacy media and towards a deeply consumer-driven world, boxing’s powers that be have ignored some business principles and suffered for it. They shrank their supply channel, undermined where their […]

(Juan Francisco Estrada) There's some tricky business to deal with in the latest update period, not that there is a whole lot of change afoot in this list of top 20 boxers on the planet, regardless of their weight. One issue was that two fighters in the top 10 are approaching one year of inactivity, […]

(Jun 29, 2013; Mashantucket, CT, USA; Gennady Golovkin [blue trunks] celebrates his win over Matthew Macklin [green trunks] after their bout at Foxwoods Resort and Casino-MGM Grand Theatre. Golovkin won via 3rd round knockout. Credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY) I’m still not completely sold on Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, or GGG to his fans. There is no […]

Sept. 8 will mark one year since Andre Ward last entered the boxing ring. That’s one year since he destroyed Chad Dawson, the former lineal light heavyweight champion, over 10 brutal rounds and rose to number two in the consensus pound-for-pound rankings of those that like to keep track of such things. To say the […]

(Katy Perry as a boxer at the MTV VMA’s, probably inspired by listening to TQBR Radio; photo credit: WENN) Enough of that pseudo-musical nonsense. You come here for boxing. We may be due for a really crappy weekend of fighting, but don’t tell the boxing gods that. Two supposedly ho-hum weekends in a row turned […]

That's Canelo Alvarez getting his romance novel cover on, from a still from Saturday's episode of All Access. The episode gave people plenty of things to laugh about and talk about besides Canelo's topless bareback adventure, which marks an improvement from the Showtime series' handling of Floyd Mayweather's last fight. We had Mayweather vocally hoping […]

(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 […]

There exist very few avenues a reasonable person could saunter down in arguing that the sport of boxing hasn’t infused itself into the fine spirits of history. In fact, the idea of boxing and the fates of laws, nations and ethnic populations being intertwined — sometimes violently, sometimes less so — has been pointed out […]