0 comments by Tim Starks on 1/5/2021
Welcome to The Queensberry Rules’ annual year-end boxing awards, wrapping up. Here’s how we do it around these parts: The major categories are Knockout of the Year, Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year. For each category, we give five finalists, with video and/or relevant info. On the second day after a category is […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 1/3/2021
When Daigo Higa emptied the contents of Yuki Strong Kobayashi’s face onto the ring canvas of Tokyo’s Ota-City General Gymnasium around suppertime, Japan Standard Time, on New Year’s Eve, I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes amid the glow of a flatscreen in Midwest suburbia. Nothing about the moment, neither the act […]
0 comments by Tim Starks on 1/2/2021
Welcome to The Queensberry Rules’ annual year-end boxing awards, continuing throughout the week. Here’s how we do it around these parts: The major categories are Knockout of the Year, Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year. For each category, we give five finalists, with video and/or relevant info. On the second day after a […]
0 comments by Tim Starks on 12/31/2020
One of the things that sucks in life, if you value intellectual honesty even one iota, is having to admit that someone you don’t like did something impressive. The more prideful and/or dickish that constitute the rest… you wonder if it burns harder for them not to admit it. Michael Jordan, for instance, for all […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 7/26/2020
We’ve had ourselves a year, huh? It’s only July, I know, but aren’t all of us reaching to throw in the towel on 2020 right now? COVID. Kobe. Thirty years of Cops squeezed into a two-week off-off-Broadway shitshow. Existential dread surrounds us like Confederate Flags at a Charlie Daniels concert. (Alas, now we’re denied even […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 2/3/2020
In the winking, cloak-and-dagger-and-big-ass-laser spy classic “Goldfinger,” an unforgettable exchange between Sean Connery and Gert Fröbe sets the template for an iconic cinema franchise and, somewhat oddly, got me thinking about the role of Mike Dallas Jr. in Saturday’s fight with Yordenis Ugas on Fox Sports 1. In the scene, Fröbe’s Auric Goldfinger has captured […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 12/7/2019
A plaque at the foot of the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino — downtown, where Freemont intersects Main — commemorates the first telephone installed in the city of Las Vegas. It belonged to Charles “Pop” Squires, a publisher and local pioneer who was known around town as “Mr. Las Vegas” — long before Wayne Newton […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 9/29/2019
It’s hard not to think about Michael Grant. Two decades ago, Grant was boxing’s latest next big thing. A chiseled, athletic 6-foot-7 250-pounder with an 86-inch reach, Grant was a radioactive-spider-bitten unicorn — a powerful, athletic American heavyweight. Born in Chicago, he would have appeared just as formidable a figure rushing the quarterback off the […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 9/25/2019
Sometimes, the forming of a more perfect union requires the separation of a rib or three. At least that’s what our politicians would have us believe. Bureaucrats, wonks, and snake-oil salesmen love nothing more than co-opting the language of boxing (“I’ll fight for you!”), but believe it or not, some pols have actually gone so […]
0 comments by Brent Hedtke on 9/18/2019
You do the crime, you do the time. That’s the law of personal accountability on the streets, and in boxing, it’s no different. Ok, it’s somewhat different. You piss hot, you miss your shot. Or something. This is the situation that Brooklyn based heavyweight Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller (23-0-1, 20 KO) found himself in April […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 2/21/2018
My undergraduate mentor always starts a piece of advice with, “My boy…” I’m 35 and he still does it. He spoke to me that way when I was a precocious 18 year old hell bent on fucking up his own life. He said it to me when I was a driven, if utterly directionless, 23 […]
0 comments by Tim Starks on 9/9/2017
The Roman Gonzalez era of boxing is now definitively over. In a night of super flyweight bouts on HBO, the recently deposed and long-ruling pound-for-pound king got knocked out by Srikaset Sor Rungvisai, in a rematch of a hotly disputed decision. It was a Saturday evening that shined a spotlight on the depth and excitement […]
at StubHub Center on June 4, 2016 in Carson, California.
0 comments by Tim Starks on 12/30/2016
Crown him: Orlando Salido is THE boxing action hero of his time. From 2011 to 2016, he’s waged war in a whopping six Fight of the Year candidates. The workmanlike Mexican — he moonlights as an Uber driver — secretes grit. And no one alive gives a damn that his record is 43-14-4. When he […]
0 comments by Alex McClintock on 8/11/2015
These days it seems like Al Haymon is the only thing keeping boxing ticking along. Thanks to “Premier Boxing Champions” offerings on various networks, fans of the sport have avoided the kind of summer off season we’ve seen in past years, even if the fights haven’t always been dazzling. This week is a microcosm of summer, […]
0 comments by Kevin Canfield on 6/23/2015
Mark Kram worked for Sports Illustrated for 13 years, and for a good chunk of that time he was the magazine’s ace boxing writer, a coveted perch from which he penned a series of evocative, irreverent and generally superb pieces about the heavyweight wars of the 1970s. To be sure, he had lots of compelling […]
