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REST IN PEACE, BUTCH LEWIS
The first time I met Butch Lewis it was so long ago he was wearing a shirt.
Butch was as loud that day as he grew to be when he was at the peak of his promotional career but by then his trademark was what he called his ‘’Chocolate Tuxedo,’’ an odd fashion statement that would only fit in the world of boxing.
Lewis’ crowning promotional moments came in the 1970s and ‘80s, when he would be regularly found in the ring wearing a bow tie, collar, cuffs with cuff links, a splendid tux…and no shirt. Don King had his hair. Butch Lewis had a hairless chest.
Sadly, boxing lost another character sometime in the late hours of Friday night or the early ones of Saturday morning when the 65-year-old Lewis suffered a massive heart attack at his home in suburban Delaware and died. Although Lewis had little to do with boxing in recent years, turning most of his energy to promoting a record label and several singers, his connection to boxing remained unbroken because he was unique.
That is not simply because he rose to prominence without a shirt. It was because he was loyal to his fighters in a way seldom seen in the sport.
Although he seemed to leave the stage the same time former light heavyweight and heavyweight champion Michael Spinks did nearly 15 years ago, Butch Lewis was not a man you forgot. At least not if you had ever spent some time with him.
Originally Lewis worked as a Philadelphia car salesman at his father’s Volkswagen dealership and there is no better training ground for a boxing promoter than to be a car salesman. Promoting fighters is like selling cars in many ways, not the least being that the truth is not always helpful in either endeavor.
Lewis got into boxing through his friendship with Joe Frazier, at whose side he often was found in the years Frazier dueled with his great nemesis, Muhammad Ali. Like most promoters, Lewis eventually ended up on both sides of that fence and remains one of the few people to have worked for the sport’s two biggest promoters: Bob Arum and Don King.
Once a vice-president of Top Rank, Arum’s highly successful promotional company, Lewis eventually went off on his own. Briefly, he and King formed a promotional company aptly called “Dynamic Duo’’ but the fact is there was no arena quite big enough for both King’s hair and Lewis’ shirtless chest.
Not once during their time together or later did Lewis call King by his name. In later years he would say “Don’’ with some respect but in those days King was always “Bushy’’ to Lewis, an example of his irreverent wit and impish manner.
But to underestimate Butch Lewis as a promoter was a grave mistake. King and HBO found that out when they tried to create a heavyweight title unification series that would include Spinks.
Initially, Lewis agreed but when he got the opportunity for an easier payday of comparable numbers against Gerry Cooney, he took it. Spinks destroyed Cooney and refused to participate in HBO’s series as Tyson stormed through the tournament while HBO sued Lewis to try and force Spinks’ inclusion.
Lewis prevailed but during a deposition hearing I was called in as an expert witness and questioned by lawyers from the two sides. Lewis was on speaker phone from Philadelphia when one of his lawyer’s asked me about an interview I had done with Spinks and Lewis as Spinks trained in the Poconos.
When asked how I was sure Lewis was there I said, “He paid for lunch. If you check his taxes I’m sure he wrote it off.’’
You could hear Lewis cackling through the speaker phone.
In the end Lewis stared down HBO and landed one of the biggest guarantees in boxing history, $13.5 million for Spinks to risk life, limb and the IBF version of the heavyweight title. Then HBO Sport president Seth Abraham was furious with Lewis, who he believed had gone back on his word, but admitted reluctantly that Lewis had advocated well for his fighter.
That was true until fight night. As Spinks sat nervously in his locker room, Lewis – shirtless and bombastic as always – stormed into Tyson’s and demanded his hands be re-wrapped. As the controversy grew, Tyson sat seething while staring a hole through Lewis’ bare chest.
When the wraps were finally okayed, Tyson got up and punched a whole in the wall of his trailer. Soon after he did the same to Spinks, knocking him into retirement in 91 seconds.
While perhaps it might have been wiser for Butch to have brought Tyson a Coke rather than get him riled up, he’d done his job. Michael Spinks had enjoyed one of the biggest paydays in boxing history and did not have to wade his way through a number of dangerous heavyweights to get to Tyson after having first won the heavyweight title by twice outpointing Larry Holmes.
Lewis also promoted Spinks’ brother Leon when he won the heavyweight title from Muhammad Ali in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history and co-promoted a rematch in which Spinks lost to Ali in front of 63,350 at the Louisiana Superdome, the largest indoor crowd for a fight in boxing history.
Lewis once believed he had found the new Ali in Greg Page, a big, fast-moving heavyweight in the Ali mold. King stole Page away but Lewis sued him and won him back. Unfortunately for Lewis, Page never quite lived up to expectations and soon was back in the King fold.
In later years Lewis move into music promotions and movie production, his biggest event being the comeback concert of James Brown after he was released from prison, but it always seemed the place where he belonged was promoting a big fight.
Butch Lewis was the kind of guy you find less and less in sports today. He was an original. He talked the talk and walked the walk, a man unable to give his fighters the shirt off his back because he didn’t wear one but one who gave them what they needed most – a loud and loyal advocacy.
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Fury-Usyk Reignited: Can the Gypsy King Avenge his Lone Defeat?
In professional boxing, the heavyweight division, going back to the days of John L. Sullivan, is the straw that stirs the drink. By this measure, the fight on May 18 of this year at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was the biggest prizefight in decades. The winner would emerge as the first undisputed heavyweight champion since 1999 when Lennox Lewis out-pointed Evander Holyfield in their second meeting.
The match did not disappoint. It had several twists and turns.
Usyk did well in the early rounds, but the Gypsy King rattled Usyk with a harsh right hand in the fifth stanza and won rounds five through seven on all three cards. In the ninth, the match turned sharply in favor of the Ukrainian. Fury was saved by the bell after taking a barrage of unanswered punches, the last of which dictated a standing 8-count from referee Mark Nelson. But Fury weathered the storm and with his amazing powers of recuperation had a shade the best of it in the final stanza.
The decision was split: 115-112 and 114-113 for Usyk who became a unified champion in a second weight class; 114-113 for Fury.
That brings us to tomorrow (Saturday, Dec. 21) where Usyk and Fury will renew acquaintances in the same ring where they had their May 18 showdown.
The first fight was a near “pick-‘em” affair with Fury closing a very short favorite at most of the major bookmaking establishments. The Gypsy King would have been a somewhat higher favorite if not for the fact that he was coming off a poor showing against MMA star Francis Ngannou and had a worrisome propensity for getting cut. (A cut above Fury’s right eye in sparring pushed back the fight from its original Feb. 11 date.)
Tomorrow’s sequel, bearing the tagline “Reignited,” finds Usyk a consensus 7/5 favorite although those odds could shorten by post time. (There was no discernible activity after today’s weigh-in where Fury, fully clothed, topped the scales at 281, an increase of 19 pounds over their first meeting.)
Given the politics of boxing, anything “undisputed” is fragile. In June, Usyk abandoned his IBF belt and the organization anointed Daniel Dubois their heavyweight champion based upon Dubois’s eighth-round stoppage of Filip Hrgovic in a bout billed for the IBF interim title. The malodorous WBA, a festering boil on the backside of boxing, now recognizes 43-year-old Kubrat Pulev as its “regular” heavyweight champion.
Another difference between tomorrow’s fight card and the first installment is that the May 18 affair had a much stronger undercard. Two strong pairings were the rematch between cruiserweights Jai Opetaia and Maris Briedis (Opetaia UD 12) and the heavyweight contest between unbeatens Agit Kabayal and Frank Sanchez (Kabayel KO 7).
Tomorrow’s semi-wind-up between Serhii Bohachuk and Ismail Madrimov lost luster when Madrimov came down with bronchitis and had to withdraw. The featherweight contest between Peter McGrail and Dennis McCann fell out when McCann’s VADA test returned an adverse finding. Bohachuk and McGrail remain on the card but against late-sub opponents in matches that are less intriguing.
The focal points of tomorrow’s undercard are the bouts involving undefeated British heavyweights Moses Itauma (10-0, 8 KOs) and Johnny Fisher (12-0, 11 KOs). Both are heavy favorites over their respective opponents but bear watching because they represent the next generation of heavyweight standouts. Fury and Usyk are getting long in the tooth. The Gypsy King is 36; Usyk turns 38 next month.
Bob Arum once said that nobody purchases a pay-per-view for the undercard and, years from now, no one will remember which sanctioning bodies had their fingers in the pie. So, Fury-Usyk II remains a very big deal, although a wee bit less compelling than their first go-around.
Will Tyson Fury avenge his lone defeat? Turki Alalshikh, the Chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and the unofficial czar of “major league” boxing, certainly hopes so. His Excellency has made known that he stands poised to manufacture a rubber match if Tyson prevails.
We could have already figured this out, but Alalshikh violated one of the protocols of boxing when he came flat out and said so. He effectively made Tyson Fury the “A-side,” no small potatoes considering that the most relevant variable on the checklist when handicapping a fight is, “Who does the promoter need?”
The Uzyk-Fury II fight card will air on DAZN with a suggested list price of $39.99 for U.S. fight fans. The main event is expected to start about 5:45 pm ET / 2:45 pm PT.
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Unheralded Bruno Surace went to Tijuana and Forged the TSS 2024 Upset of the Year
Unheralded Bruno Surace went to Tijuana and Forged the TSS 2024 Upset of the Year
The Dec. 14 fight at Tijuana between Jaime Munguia and Bruno Surace was conceived as a stay-busy fight for Munguia. The scuttlebutt was that Munguia’s promoters, Zanfer and Top Rank, wanted him to have another fight under his belt before thrusting him against Christian Mbilli in a WBC eliminator with the prize for the winner (in theory) a date with Canelo Alvarez.
Munguia came to the fore in May of 2018 at Verona, New York, when he demolished former U.S. Olympian Sadam Ali, conqueror of Miguel Cotto. That earned him the WBO super welterweight title which he successfully defended five times.
Munguia kept winning as he moved up in weight to middleweight and then super middleweight and brought a 43-0 (34) record into his Cinco de Mayo 2024 match with Canelo.
Jaime went the distance with Alvarez and had a few good moments while losing a unanimous decision. He rebounded with a 10th-round stoppage of Canada’s previously undefeated Erik Bazinyan.
There was little reason to think that Munguia would overlook Surace as the Mexican would be fighting in his hometown for the first time since February of 2022 and would want to send the home folks home happy. Moreover, even if Munguia had an off-night, there was no reason to think that the obscure Surace could capitalize. A Frenchman who had never fought outside France, Surace brought a 25-0-2 record and a 22-fight winning streak, but he had only four knockouts to his credit and only eight of his wins had come against opponents with winning records.
It appeared that Munguia would close the show early when he sent the Frenchman to the canvas in the second round with a big left hook. From that point on, Surace fought mostly off his back foot, throwing punches in spurts, whereas the busier Munguia concentrated on chopping him down with body punches. But Surace absorbed those punches well and at the midway point of the fight, behind on the cards but nonplussed, it now looked as if the bout would go the full 10 rounds with Munguia winning a lopsided decision.
Then lightning struck. Out of the blue, Surace connected with an overhand right to the jaw. Munguia went down flat on his back. He rose a fraction-of-a second before the count reached “10,”, but stumbled as he pulled himself upright. His eyes were glazed and referee Juan Jose Ramirez, a local man, waived it off. There was no protest coming from Munguia or his cornermen. The official time was 2:36 of round six.
At major bookmaking establishments, Jaime Munguia was as high as a 35/1 favorite. No world title was at stake, yet this was an upset for the ages.
Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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Steven Navarro is the TSS 2024 Prospect of the Year
“I get ‘Bam’ vibes when I watch this kid,” said ESPN ringside commentator Tim Bradley during the opening round of Steven Navarro’s most recent match. Bradley was referencing WBC super flyweight champion Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez, a precociously brilliant technician whose name now appears on most pound-for-pound lists.
There are some common threads between Steven Navarro, the latest fighter to adopt the nickname “Kid Dynamite,” and Bam Rodriguez. Both are southpaws currently competing in the junior bantamweight division. But, of course, Bradley was alluding to something more when he made the comparison. And Navarro’s showing bore witness that Bradley was on to something.
It was the fifth pro fight for Navarro who was matched against a Puerto Rican with a 7-1 ledger. He ended the contest in the second frame, scoring three knockdowns, each the result of a different combination of punches, forcing the referee to stop it. It was the fourth win inside the distance for the 20-year-old phenom.
Isaias Estevan “Steven” Navarro turned pro after coming up short in last December’s U.S. Olympic Trials in Lafayette, Louisiana. The #1 seed in the 57 kg (featherweight) division, he was upset in the finals, losing a controversial split decision. Heading in, Navarro had won 13 national tournaments beginning at age 12.
A graduate of LA’s historic Fairfax High School, Steven made his pro debut this past April on a Matchroom Promotions card at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas and then inked a long-term deal with Top Rank. He comes from a boxing family. His father Refugio had 10 pro fights and three of Refugio’s cousins were boxers, most notably Jose Navarro who represented the USA at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and was a four-time world title challenger as a super flyweight. Jose was managed by Oscar De La Hoya for much of his pro career.
Nowadays, the line between a prospect and a rising contender has been blurred. Three years ago, in an effort to make matters less muddled, we operationally defined a prospect thusly: “A boxer with no more than a dozen fights, none yet of the 10-round variety.” To our way of thinking, a prospect by nature is still in the preliminary-bout phase of his career.
We may loosen these parameters in the future. For one thing, it eliminates a lot of talented female boxers who, like their Japanese male counterparts in the smallest weight classes, are often pushed into title fights when, from a historical perspective, they are just getting started.
But for the time being, we will adhere to our operational definition. And within the window that we have created, Steven Navarro stood out. In his first year as a pro, “Kid Dynamite” left us yearning to see more of him.
Honorable mention: Australian heavyweight Teremoana Junior (5-0, 5 KOs)
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