In Boxing News: Mike The Bounty Hunter, Virgil Hill, Sex And Sports

In Boxing News: Last Days of Mike “The Bounty� Hunter

Today, LA Weekly gets things started not with a bang but with a whimper with a heartfelt article about the career and last days of former USBA heavyweight and IBF cruiserweight champ Mike “The Bountyâ€? Hunter. Born in South Carolina, he started boxing in Maryland in 1985 and ended up in glittery LA. It was all fast cars, fast women, fast lane; James Caan of “The Godfather” was even his manager for three years. It was quite a ride for the big tough back country scrapper. But Mike Hunter’s rags to riches tale wouldn’t be complete without that inexorable return to rags. The end came on Feb. 8 on the roof of the San Moritz Motel in Los Angeles, where a drug-crazed Hunter, armed with a black polymer replica of a gun, allegedly attacked an LAPD officer while he was talking on his cell. Mike “The Bountyâ€? Hunter was shot in the chest and arm and later pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center … Marc Lichtenfeld gives his trademark compassionate spin to The Sudden Starts and Stops of Richard Hall, a feature on the journeyman light heavyweight who gets the chance of a lifetime when he faces Glen “The Road Warrior” Johnson this weekend in Florida. Read all about it …  

Virgil Hill is alive and well and back from a holiday in sunny Mexico. The 30 stitches over his left eye, a wound from winning his fifth world title in his last fight with Valery Brudov at the Tropicana in Atlantic City, have been removed. Quicksilver Hill, a young 42 with a record of 50-5 (23), is returning to the gym in New Jersey to resume training for his first defense of his new crown … National Geographic, onetime purveyor of topless pics of native girls for a pre-internet lost generation, weighs in on abstinence and sports with an article titled Sex and Sports: Should Athletes Abstain Before Big Events? Doctors of this and professors of that have their say on this always pressing matter … And finally, from Merry Old England, a 54-year-old Dunmurry man has been given a three-year suspended sentence for attacking WBU welterweight champion Eamonn Magee with a bat and breaking his leg in February 2004. Magee successfully defended his title a year later.

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