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RASKIN’S RANTS: Judah Loses, Tarver Cruises, Freitas Chooses, Martinez’s Head Oozes

The bad news for me: I look like a schmuck for believing Zab Judah could beat Amir Khan. The good news for me: I didn’t put any money on the fight and didn’t publicly promise to swim the English Channel or walk barefoot to and from Brooklyn or tattoo Judah’s name on my neck if my prediction didn’t pan out.
Still, I have to answer for my poor judgment, and that means responding to some playful pokes (at both me and Zab) in the miniature mailbag. For the record, this poking comes not from a direct email, but rather from a listener reaction posted on the Ring Theory podcast comment board:
Well, it looks like the stage is set for 2013. That’s when we’ll see a reborn, revitalized, refocused, and, of course, more mature version of Zab Judah finally be ready at age 35 to give us his best. Some top boxing scribes will listen to his story, watch him spar a few rounds, and will buy into this scenario hook, line, and sinker—and as much as I enjoy Eric’s work, Young Raskin’s pick was like watching a puppy chase a ball into traffic.
As for a supposedly “new” Zab, remember how this was the story back in 2008 before he met Clottey? Or in 2006 when people had him in pound-for-pound lists before losing to Carlos Baldomir? Or back in 2004 when he’d finally exorcized the demons from the Tszyu fight and was ready to realize his full potential? This guy gets more chances at redemption than Lindsay Lohan—and seems to have the same failure rate. Give him a few stoppages against journeymen and a close win or two against a fringe contender and he’ll be in with a top fighter within 24 months.
Great performance by Khan who has, with the right people, figured out how to become a world-class boxer with a terminally flawed chin. Kudos. And “bully” to Zab Judah for starting his next journey to realizing more maturity and whatever other intangibles he’ll bring to the table the next time he fights and eventually loses to another top flight fighter.
—Chaz
Chaz,
Excellent analogy about the puppy. Yep, I chased that ball into traffic and ended up splattered across an 18-wheeler’s front grill. Part of it was because I underestimated Khan a bit; I thought if Marcos Maidana could find that chin, Judah could too, but I overlooked the importance of surviving Khan’s formidable offense first. Maidana is a great survivor (as you’d have to be to come back from the bodyshot he took from Khan in the first round). Judah is not a survivor at all. Khan’s attack is first-rate, and it prevented Judah from ever mounting one of his own.
Still, I stand by my observation that Judah has matured as a person (and that’s not something I said in 2004 or 2006 or 2008). The problem is that he’s apparently slowed down enough physically that emotional maturity is of no use at the top level. And Khan definitely represents that top level. Put the 2011 Judah brain in the 2006 Judah body, and he doesn’t lose to Baldomir. But against 2011 Khan, it doesn’t matter which Judah brain and body you use. He’s simply in over his head. Again, full credit to Khan (and Freddie Roach) for shoring up the defense while continuing to grow into more and more of a beast on offense.
In any case, I eagerly await the 2013 Judah revival. Just make sure to bury an invisible fence in the ground and strap an electric shock collar on me so I don’t chase that ball into traffic again.
Okay, enough about Khan-Judah. Let’s get to the Rants, starting with another surprisingly one-sided fight halfway around the globe:
• It’s a shame for Antonio Tarver that Bernard Hopkins is still around at 46, kicking ass and winning legitimate world titles, because otherwise, a 42-year-old Tarver beating the piss out of Danny Green might have gotten more attention. Good for “The Magic Man,” who became the biggest star in the cruiserweight division overnight.
• From Tarver to another member of the ’96 U.S. Olympic team: Normally, I wouldn’t say I’m happy to see a guy I like flirting with obesity, but in the case of Fernando Vargas, it’s a relief to see him about 50 pounds over his fighting weight again. The comeback is off (at least for now), and that’s a good thing.
• You know who else ought to stay retired? Acelino Freitas. If I believed he could come back and do more brawlin’ than bawlin’, I’d be all for it. But I’m pretty sure a return to the ring for “Popo” would be just another one of those clichéd wet eyes for boxing.
• The highlight of last week’s ESPN2 Friday Night Fights: Teddy Atlas calling the Aron Martinez-Joseph Elegele fight and using the phrase “Eleg Elegele.” (According to translators who are fluent in the Atlasian dialect, Teddy was trying to say “I like Elegele.”)
• The treatment of Martinez’s fight-ending gash definitely set the record for most Vaseline I’ve ever seen applied to a human head. That was like watching a cupcake get iced.
• Vanes Martirosyan has been fairly adamant that Saul Alvarez ought to face him, since Alvarez has a sanctioning body belt and Martirosyan is ranked as “Canelo’s” number-one contender. I’ll be interested to see how adamant Martirosyan is about these sanctioning bodies enforcing their arbitrary rules now that he’s being ordered to face Alfredo Angulo first.
• I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Dereck Chisora, but maybe coming in 17 pounds above your usual weight for the biggest fight of your career wasn’t the smartest possible move.
• Add Kenichi Yamaguchi to the long list of guys who possess more toughness in their little toe than I possess in my entire body. I’d include David Haye on that list also, but, well, you know.
• Just throwing this out there for discussion: Is it time to start mentioning Freddie Roach in discussions of the greatest trainers ever? This might be a topic I handle in more detail at a later date, but for now, I’m curious for my readers’ thoughts on whether Roach has already done enough to crack the Mount Rushmore of legendary cornermen.
• The special “Best Of Ring Theory” episode is now live at http://ringtheory.podbean.com, and you don’t have to be a paid subscriber to listen to it. This show features guest appearances from Jim Lampley, Max Kellerman, Al Bernstein, Nigel Collins, and Rich Marotta, and, importantly, no guest appearances from Ferdie Pacheco.
Eric Raskin can be contacted at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com. You can follow him on Twitter @EricRaskin and listen to new episodes of his podcast, Ring Theory, at http://ringtheory.podbean.com.
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A Paean to the Great Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon Who Passed Away 50 Years Ago This Week

“Of all his assignments,” said the renowned sportswriter Dave Anderson, “[Jimmy] Cannon appeared to enjoy boxing the most.”
Cannon would have sheepishly concurred. He dated his infatuation with boxing to 1919 when he stood outside a saloon listening to a man with a megaphone relay bulletins from the Dempsey-Willard fight in faraway Toledo. His father followed boxing as did all the Irishmen in his neighborhood. For him, an interest in the sport of boxing, he once wrote, was like a family heirloom. But it became a love-hate relationship. It was Jimmy Cannon, after all, who coined the phrase “boxing is the red light district of sports.”
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Jimmy Cannon’s death. He passed away at age 63 on Dec. 5, 1973, in his room at the residential hotel in mid-Manhattan where he made his home. In the realm of American sportswriters, there has never been a voice quite like him. He was “the hardest-boiled of the hard-drinking, hard-boiled school of sports writing,” wrote Darrell Simmons of the Atlanta Journal. One finds a glint of this in his summary of Sonny Liston’s first-round demolition of Albert Westphal in 1961: “Sonny Liston hit Albert Westphal like he was a cop.”
In his best columns, Jimmy Cannon was less a sportswriter than an urban poet. Here’s what he wrote about Archie Moore in 1955 after Moore trounced Bobo Olson to set up a match with Rocky Marciano: “Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds…It should be a song that comes out of the backrooms of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns. The guy who writes this one must be a piano player who can be dignified when he picks a quarter out of the marsh of a sawdust floor.”
Prior to fighting in Madison Square Garden the previous year – his first appearance in that iconic boxing arena – Moore had roamed the globe in search of fights in a career that began in the Great Depression. Cannon was partial to boxers like Archie Moore, great ring artisans who toiled in obscurity, fighting for small purses –“moving-around money” in Cannon’s words — until the establishment could no longer ignore them.
Jimmy Cannon was born in Lower Manhattan. He left high school after one year to become a copy boy for the New York Daily News. In 1936, at age 26, the News sent him to cover the biggest news story of the day, the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping trial. While there he met Damon Runyon who would become a lifelong friend. At Runyon’s suggestion, he applied for a job as a sportswriter at the New York American, a Hearst paper, and was hired.
During World War II, he was a war correspondent in Europe embedded in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. When he returned from the war, he joined the New York Post and then, in 1959, the Journal-American which made him America’s highest-paid sportswriter at a purported salary of $1000 a week. His articles were syndicated and appeared in dozens of papers.
Cannon was very close to Joe Louis. He was the only reporter that Louis allowed in his hotel room on the morning of the Brown Bomber’s rematch with Max Schmeling. Louis, he wrote, “was a credit to his race, the human race.” It was his most-frequently-quoted line.
In an early story, Cannon named Sam Langford the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time. Later he joined with his colleagues on Press Row in naming Sugar Ray Robinson the greatest of the greats. As for the fellow who anointed himself “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali, Cannon profoundly disliked him. He persisted in calling him Cassius Clay long after Ali had adopted his Muslim name.
It troubled Cannon that Ali was afforded an opportunity to fight for the title after only 19 pro fights. Ali’s poetry, he thought, was infantile. He abhorred Ali’s political views. And, truth be told, he didn’t like Ali because certain segments of society adored him. Cannon didn’t like non-conformists – hippies and anti-war protesters and such. When queried about his boyhood in Greenwich Village, he was quick to note that he lived there “when it was a decent neighborhood, before it became freaky.”
Cannon’s animus toward Ali spilled over into his opinion of Ali’s foil, the bombastic sportscaster Howard Cosell. “If Howard Cosell were a sport,” he wrote,” it would be roller derby.”
Cannon frequently filled his column with a series of one-liners published under the heading “Nobody Asked Me, But…” His wonderfully acerbic put-down of Cosell appeared in one of these columns. But one can’t read these columns today without cringing at some of his ruminations. He once wrote, “Any man is in trouble if he falls in love with a woman he can’t knock down with one punch.” If a newspaperman wrote those words today, he would be out of a job so fast it would make his head spin.
Similarly, his famous line about Joe Louis being a credit to the human race no longer resonates in the way that it once did. There is in its benevolence an air of racial prejudice.
Jimmy Cannon was a lifelong bachelor but in his younger days before he quit drinking cold turkey in 1948, he was quite the ladies man, often seen promenading showgirls around town. Like his pal Damon Runyon, he was a night owl. As the years passed, however, he became somewhat reclusive. The world passed him by when rock n’ roll came in, pushing aside the Tin Pan Alley crooners and torch singers that had kept him company at his favorite late-night haunts.
Cannon’s end days were tough. He suffered a stroke in 1971 as he was packing to go to the Kentucky Derby and spent most of his waking hours in his last two-plus years in a wheelchair. Fortunately, he could afford to hire a full-time attendant. In 2002, he was posthumously elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the Observer category.
Jimmy Cannon once said that he resented it when someone told him that his stuff was too good to be in a newspaper. It was demeaning to newspapers and he never wanted to be anything but a newspaperman. He didn’t always bring his “A” game and some of his stuff wouldn’t hold up well, but the man could write like blazes and the sportswriting profession lost a giant when he drew his last breath.
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Arne K. Lang is a recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling. His latest book, titled Clash of the Little Giants: George Dixon, Terry McGovern, and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910, was released by McFarland in September, 2022.
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Ryan “KingRy” Garcia Returns With a Bang; KOs Oscar Duarte

It was a different Ryan “KingRy” Garcia the world saw in defeating Mexico’s rugged Oscar Duarte, but it was that same deadly left hook counter that got the job done by knockout on Saturday.
Only the quick survive.
Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) used a variety of stances before luring knockout artist Duarte (26-1-1, 21 KOs) into his favorite punch before a sold-out crowd at Toyota Arena in Houston, Texas. That punch should be patented in gold.
It was somewhat advertised as knockout artist versus matinee idol, but those who know the sport knew that Garcia was a real puncher. But could he rebound from his loss earlier this year?
The answer was yes.
Garcia used a variety of styles beginning with a jab at a prescribed distance via his new trainer Derrick James. It allowed both Garcia and Duarte to gain footing and knock the cobwebs out of their reflexes. Garcia’s jab scored most of the early points during the first three rounds. He also snapped off some left hooks and rights.
“He was a strong fighter, took a strong punch,” said Garcia. “I hit him with some hard punches and he kept coming.”
Duarte, an ultra-pale Mexican from Durango, was cautious, knowing full well how many Garcia foes had underestimated the power behind his blows.
Slowly the muscular Mexican fighter began closing in with body shots and soon both fighters were locked in an inside battle. Garcia used a tucked-in shoulder style while Duarte pounded the body, back of the head and in the back causing the referee to warn for the illegal punches twice.
Still, Duarte had finally managed to punch Garcia with multiple shots for several rounds.
Around the sixth round Garcia was advised by his new trainer to begin jabbing and moving. It forced Duarte out of his rhythm as he was unable to punch without planting his feet. Suddenly, the momentum had reversed again and Duarte looked less dangerous.
“I had to slow his momentum down. That softened him up,” said Garcia about using that change in style to change Duarte’s pressure attack. “Shout out to Derrick James.”
Boos began cascading from the crowd but Garcia was on a roll and had definitely regained the advantage. A quick five-punch combination rocked Duarte though not all landed. The danger made the Mexican pause.
In the eighth round Duarte knew he had to take back the momentum and charged even harder. In one lickety-split second a near invisible counter left hook connected on Duarte’s temple and he stumbled like a drunken soldier on liberty in Honolulu. Garcia quickly followed up with rights and uppercuts as Duarte had a look of terror as his legs failed to maintain stability. Down he went for the count.
Duarte was counted out by referee James Green at 2:51 of the eighth round as Garcia watched from the other side of the ring.
“I started opening up my legs a little bit to open up the shot,” explained Garcia. “When I hurt somebody that hard, I just keep cracking them. I hurt him with a counter left hook.”
The weapon of champions.
Garcia’s victory returns him back to the forefront as one of boxing’s biggest gate attractions. A list of potential foes is his to dissect and choose.
“I’m just ready to continue to my ascent to be a champion at 140,” Garcia said.
It was a tranquil end after such a tumultuous last three days.
Other Bouts
Floyd Schofield (16-0, 12 KOs) blitzed Mexico’s Ricardo “Not Finito” Lopez (17-8-3) with a four knockdown blowout that left fans mesmerized and pleased with the fighter from Austin, Texas.
Schofield immediately shot out quick jabs and then a lightning four-punch combination that delivered Lopez to the canvas wondering what had happened. He got up. Then Scholfield moved in with a jab and crisp left hook and down went Lopez like a dunked basketball bouncing.
At this point it seemed the fight might stop. But it proceeded and Schofield unleashed another quick combo that sent Lopez down though he did try to punch back. It was getting monotonous. Lopez got up and then was met with another rapid fire five- or six-punch combination. Lopez was down for the fourth time and the referee stopped the devastation.
“I appreciate him risking his life,” said Schofield of his victim.
In a middleweight clash Shane Mosley Jr. (21-4, 12 KOs) out-worked Joshua Conley (17-6-1, 11 KOs) for five rounds before stopping the San Bernardino fighter at 1:51 of the sixth round. It was Mosley’s second consecutive knockout and fourth straight win.
Mosley continues to improve in every fight and again moves up the middleweight rankings.
Super middleweight prospect Darius Fulghum (9-0, 9 KOs) of Houston remained undefeated and kept his knockout string intact with a second round pounding and stoppage over Pachino Hill (8-5-1) in 56 seconds of that round.
Photo credit: Golden Boy Promotions
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Jordan Gill TKOs Michael Conlan Who May Have Reached the End of the Road

Fighting on his home turf, two-time Olympian Michael Conlan was an 8/1 favorite over Jordan Gill tonight in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Had he won, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn was eyeing a rematch for Conlan with Leigh Wood. Their March 2022 rumble in Nottingham was a popular pick for the Fight of the Year. But the 29-year-old Gill, a Cambridgeshire man, rendered that discussion moot with a seventh-round stoppage. It was Conlan’s third loss inside the distance in the last 18 months and he would be wise to call it a day. His punch resistance is plainly not what it once was.
It was with considerable fanfare that Conlan cast his lot with Top Rank coming out of the amateur ranks. Tonight was his first assignment for Matchroom and his first fight at 130 pounds after coming up short in two world featherweight title fights. And he almost didn’t make it past the second round. Gill had him on the canvas in the opening minute of round two compliments of a left hook and stunned him late in the round with a right hand that left him on unsteady legs.
He survived the round and for a fleeting moment in the sixth frame it appeared that he had reversed Gill’s momentum. But Gill took charge again in the next stanza, trapping Conlan in the corner and unloading a fusillade of punches that forced referee Howard Foster to waive it off, much to the great dismay of the crowd. The official time was 1:09 of round seven.
Released by Top Rank, Conlan trained for this fight in Miami, Florida, under Pedro Diaz, best known for rejuvenating the career of Miguel Cotto. But the switch in trainer and in promoter made no difference as Conlan, who won his first amateur title at age 11, was damaged goods before he entered the ring. It was a career-defining victory for Jordan Gill (28-2-1, 9 KOs) who was not known as a big puncher and was returning to the ring after being stopped by Kiko Martinez 13 months ago in his previous start.
Semi-wind-up
In the “Battle of Belfast,” undefeated welterweight Lewis Crocker seized control in the opening round and went on to win a lopsided decision over intra-city rival Tyrone McKenna (23-4-1). Two of the judges gave Crocker every round and the other had it 98-92, but yet this was entertaining fight in spurts. McKenna had more fans in the building, but Crocker, seven years younger at age 26, went to post a 7/2 favorite and youth was served.
Other Bouts of Note
Belfast super welterweight Caoimhin Agyarko, who overcame a near-fatal mugging at age 20, advanced to 14-0 (7) with a 10-round split decision over Troy Williamson (20-2-1). The judges had it 98-92 and 97-93 for Agyarko with a dissenter submitting a curious 96-94 score for the 31-year-old Williamson who wasn’t able to exploit his advantages in height and reach.
Sean McComb, a 31-year-old Belfast southpaw, scored what was arguably the best win of his career with a 10-round beat-down of longtime sparring partner Sam Maxwell. Two of the judges gave McComb every round and the other had it 99-88. McComb, who has an interesting nickname, “The Public Nuisance, successfully defended his WBO European super welterweight strap while elevating his record to 18-1 (6). The fading, 35-year-old Maxwell, a former BBBofC British title-holder, lost for third time in his last four starts after winning his first 16 pro fights.
Photo credit: Mark Robinson / Matchroom
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