0 comments by Brent Hedtke on 6/6/2022
While George Kambosos Jr. brought the fans to the fight, Devin Haney almost immediately took them out of it. On a brisk Sunday afternoon, nearly 42,000 fans packed into Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium to watch Kambosos (20-1, 10 KO) make the first defense of the lightweight titles he lifted from Teofimo Lopez last November. What they, […]
0 comments by Jamie Rebner on 5/1/2022
Shakur Stevenson continues to impress and exceed the lofty expectations placed on him. Saturday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, the Newark resident thoroughly dominated Oscar Valdez by unanimous decision to hand the Mexican native his first loss. Throughout the 12 rounds, Stevenson was in command and never remotely troubled by Valdez. With such […]
0 comments by Tim Starks on 2/21/2021
For 10 rounds, Oscar Valdez was painting a boxing masterpiece Saturday on ESPN. That’s about as far as the painting metaphor goes, though, because it’s not often that Picasso or his ilk probably finish things up with a final stroke that outshines so much else of what had previously visited the canvas. Or maybe… yes, […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 8/26/2020
In the very best of times, we here at TQBR come together to discuss the biggest fights and argue about the current state of the sport. This year, unfortunately, has been a protracted rectal bleed of Old Testament severity. With that in mind, we stocked up on Neosporin, strapped on our Depends flex fits, and […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 8/17/2020
Even in the age of social distancing, you can scarcely swing a dead cat without hitting a boxer who doesn’t have a little resentment coming to him. Fighters are hard men with pocked histories. Boxing is known for its boozers, gamblers, junkies, abusers and general dirtbaggery. Self-promotion too often falls somewhere on the spectrum between […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 6/10/2020
Mismatches, propagandistic commentary and weirdly long time lags between bouts: Boxing is back, baby! The return of live boxing to the United States would normally be a cause for celebration, and we should be pleased, but as with most things in life, our expectations should be tempered by reality. Wednesday night at the Bubble, MGM […]
0 comments by Brent Hedtke on 11/13/2019
Liking stuff is hard. Even if you didn’t grow up on a steady diet of punk rock and decentralized anarchist propaganda like I did, the human brain’s capacity to enjoy things is finite. One pancake is good. Two are better. Ten is suicide. And so it goes. The more things there are, the more opportunities […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 7/16/2019
July kind of drags. For most of us, it’s hotter than Satan’s taint, and everything tends to find itself in a bit of a holding pattern. Typically there aren’t a lot of fight cards either. So, in what has been a surprisingly entertaining year to date, now feels like the exact right time to take […]
0 comments by Brent Hedtke on 7/14/2019
If you missed a call from an unknown number this past week, chances are good that it was Top Rank’s matchmaking department inquiring about your availability to fight Shakur Stevenson Saturday night. In the month leading up to the fight, one opponent after another fell through as Stevenson’s team discovered they weren’t either a woman […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 4/21/2019
In the spirit of family, togetherness, and however many holidays are being celebrated this weekend, the TQBR team has come together again. Typically we do these puppies before a big fight, but last night wasn’t really all that important, and our business is diagnosis, not prognosis. So, Brent and I have crawled out from under […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf
Give Amir Khan this: He does not merely invite derision. When Amir Khan comes calling, he asks derision to stay in the guest house for the week, drink all his top-shelf liquor and drive his wife around town, keep her company – you know, just show her a good time. It is easy for boxing […]
0 comments by Brent Hedtke on 4/6/2019
Let’s just get this out of the way right off the bat: It’s OK to cry. It’s good to cry. I’m crying right now, mostly about Verne Troyer’s death and how I never got to prove my theory that with enough duct tape and personal lubricant you could fit him inside a Pringles can. But […]
0 comments by Jason Langendorf on 1/19/2019
The American poet Edwin Markham once said, “Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.” Markham, one can only assume, died penniless and jaundiced to the teeth – just as all 19th-century poets were contractually obliged to. But that kind of street cred merely adds heft to […]
