For Manny Pacquiao, Dec. 8 was a nightmare ending to a long fairy tale. For Juan Manuel Marquez, Dec. 8 was a fairy tale ending to a long nightmare.  It was an ending written out with one tremendous right hand. Pacquiao has been boxing’s happy, innocent warrior, its smiling, bouncing ball of lightning. Marquez has […]

(announcement) Last May, a small cabal of boxing writers discussed an idea that had all the staying power of a cigarette butt under a shoe. The idea was to create a global rankings organization uncompromised by competing interests and hell-bent on restoring sense to a confused sport. The writers found enough common ground to usher […]

Cassius Clay TKO6 Henry Cooper, 1966 Not unlike Marcel Thil in the first installment of this “bad cuts” list, sitting atop Sir Henry Cooper’s neck was the visage of a born fighter. He looked like a man who had worked in some sort of mine for fun, or picked fights because it just happened to […]

(Amir Khan gives Carlos Molina an uppercut; photo: Tom Casino, Showtime) LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Saturday night at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on Showtime Championship Boxing, Carlos Molina fought like a guy in search of that Cinderella moment, similar to the one Josesito Lopez found in his shock victory against Victor Ortiz in June.  […]

(Leo Santa Cruz throws a right hand at Albert Guevara; photo credit: Tom Casino) For a while Saturday, Alberto Guevera was in danger of turning CBS' happy lead-in of Leo Santa Cruz as a family-friendly plugger into a tale of a guy who suffered his first loss and needed to learn to fight a little […]

The Internet suffers for no lack of pictures of women with boxing gloves draped over their breasts, but none have a worse haircut than that. (h/t unofficial TQBR visual consultant Che) Saturday suffers from no lack of boxing. You could watch boxing on TV in the United States starting on CBS at 4:30 p.m. until […]

Mark "Too Sharp" Johnson, just inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame this year, was arrested this week and charged with possession of liquid PCP with the intent to distribute. The arrest darkens what had been a celebratory period for Johnson, the only boxer born and raised in Washington D.C. to enter the Hall. Johnson […]

(Santa Claus helps Leo Santa Cruz [no relation] work out in advance of his appearance on CBS; photo credit: Esther Lin, Showtime) If you read boxing ignoramuses like ESPN's Scoop Jackson, boxing died this past weekend, just like critics have taken any occasion over the last 100 years-plus to declare it dead. So it must […]

British junior middleweight champion Brian Rose attempts to capture the Lonsdale belt he carries but does not yet own, against one of its former custodians, in cut-prone Chislehurst man Sam Webb. Back on benevolent hunting ground at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens — a 19th century opera house turned entertainment complex in the heart of the seaside […]

As the diminutive idol plummets face first into the mat, a country of 95,000,000 people watch in stunned silence… their breath stolen away by a Mexican fighting god. Manny Pacquiao lay motionless, unconscious, for almost exactly a minute. In that blackness he is oblivious to hundreds of millions of eyes on him.  Ten seconds vanish […]