Boxing Buzz Report – No Mayweather-Pacquiao, Olympic-sized Letdown and More

Unlike other sports, boxing season is never over. With that in mind, here is the latest and greatest buzz from the world of the sweet science.

Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Not Happening (Again)

Look, this one should probably just stop being reported as news (heck, we might as well be reporting on them not fighting a Klitschko brother or something). Still, just in case you had even a smidgen of hope left inside your soul that Floyd Mayweather’s recent release from jail would get talks started again with Bob Arum and the Manny Pacquiao camp for a lucrative super fight…it isn’t happening. According to Dan Rafael at ESPN.com, the Pacquiao camp is focused on bouts against Timothy Bradley, Juan Manuel Marquez or Miguel Cotto. While all those match-ups make some sense for Pacquiao in one way or another, nothing in boxing makes more sense than the one fight that just doesn’t ever seem to get made.

Sigh.

Olympic-sized Letdown

NBC tabbed boxing scribe Ryan Maquinana to track the progress of Team USA’s boxing exploits, and with Errol Spence’s loss to Russia’s Andrey Zamkovoy in the welterweight quarterfinal on Tuesday, he can now focus solely on the inaugural women’s team who will be the only group of fighters to actually come away with a medal.

This year’s Olympic team was supposed to be something special. Instead, they will forever be known as the first team to leave the Olympics empty handed. Never before has the USA left the Olympics without a medal.

Luckily, the ladies are in London to help salvage any sort of respectability the United States has left in the sport internationally. Two of the three women on the team, Marlen Esparza and Claressa Shields, are guaranteed to win at least bronze medals after each procured quarterfinal wins earlier this week.

Texas Two-Step

Sergio “The Latin Snake” Mora (23-2-2, 7 KOs) travels down to Texas again this Saturday night to face fellow middleweight Brian Vera (20-6, 12 KOs) in a rematch of Vera’s split decision win over Mora last year in Fort Worth.

This time, the two will tangle in San Antonio under the banner of the surging promotional team of former world champion Jesse James Leija and San Antonio businessman Mike Battah. This will be Leija/Battah’s first co-promotion with Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions.

The card is an interesting concept. It will feature twenty amateur bouts followed by seven of the professional variety.

The main event will be broadcast on Telefutura at 10 p.m. CST. The Sweet Science will be there to cover the action live from ringside. Follow @TheRealKelseyMc for live updates and commentary from press row.

A Wealth of Coverage

It’s said that you can always tell how much money someone has by the number of television channels they have. I’m not so sure that is true, but the fact remains that anyone with a cable package that includes something called WealthTV will have access to more boxing than us normal folk come September.

According to a recent press release, WealthTV has secured the live U.S. television rights for the upcoming heavyweight battle between Tomasz Adamek (46-2-0) and Travis Walker. WealthTV will begin airing the undercard bouts of the show (which haven’t yet been announced) at 3 pm ET on Saturday, September 8th. The card is promoted by Main Events.

What does all this mean?

It means those of you keeping score should mark Main Events CEO Kathy Duva down as someone bringing more boxing to television sets everywhere than just about anyone. Duva’s company also has a multi-fight deal with television giant NBC which has been wildly successful thus far on the NBC Sports Network and with the network execs looking to bring boxing back to broadcast television soon, it means fight fans can expect even more boxing on the way to their TV sets soon.

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