ATLAS, POVETKIN IN UPHILL FIGHT FOR HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE

Published

14 years ago

August 26, 2011

Ron Borges

Heavyweight-Povetkin-looks-to-overcome-short-camp-9UAUJ8S-x-large photo Jens Meyer, AP

Sometimes folks grow so used to seeing people do the wrong thing that when someone does the right thing they think it’s wrong. Teddy Atlas is the latest to be victimized by what we’ll call the “Right Way Is Wrong’’ syndrome.

Saturday night Atlas will lead heavyweight contender Alexander Povetkin into a ring in Erfurt, Germany to face former champion Ruslan Chagaev for the somewhat vacant WBA title. It’s not really vacant since Wladimir Klitschko owns it but the alphabet organizations have a way of always making room for an extra sanction fee one way or another and so they have in this case.

Klitschko is now a unified “super’’ champion and so the title is ‘’vacant’’ even while he still wears it. If you are confused, welcome to boxing.

Confusion reigns in this sport, which is why so few sports fans care about it anymore. In boxing up is down, right is wrong and making the wise decision is a vice not a virtue.

A year or so ago Atlas rejected a shot at Klitschko for young Povetkin because, of all reasons, with only 19 professional fights he wasn’t going to sacrifice his future for a payday. That cost Atlas about $200,000 and, frankly, Povetkin about the same because of the way his contract would be stepped on by promoters, managers and their various agents and minions.

There is a risk-reward ratio in boxing that must always be measured. The usual way they do it in boxing is you make the fighter take the risk and you keep most of the rewards. Atlas sees it differently, which is why he rejected the fight and was highly criticized by the No Nothing Party for it.

His job, as he sees it, is to not only train young Povetkin but also to put him in fights that make sense. There might be a time it made sense to risk him against the bigger, harder punching and vastly more experienced Klitschko but that was not the time. That will remain true regardless of what happens Saturday night in Erfret, even though some will argue otherwise.

If Povetkin loses, Atlas’ critics will say he got him beat for short money. They will say he could have made vastly more against Klitschko, which is true if you only look at the gross and forget about the net. In boxing, as with the IRS, the net is all the matters and what Povetkin was going to net against Klitschko was very likely a career-altering beating for very short money.

Saturday night the money is no better but his chance to win is. At least it would have been had Povetkin’s management team allowed (or forced if necessary) him to come to America as was his contractual obligation and train for eight weeks with Atlas.

Atlas’ deal with Povetkin has always been that he would travel to Russia to train him when his work at ESPN allowed. But during the ESPN2 fight season, which ends with the beginning of college football and begins in January, the fighter was supposed to train in the U.S.

This time he did not, for reasons really only known to Povetkin and his manager, and Atlas refused to put his full-time job at risk simply to please them. Ultimately he decided he would not train Povetkin at all for the biggest fight of his life, a decision they refused to accept. Atlas remained firm until his phone rang about a month ago and it was the 31-year-old Povetkin, who speaks little English, calling just to say hello.

Not long after that, at a press conference in Germany to hype the fight, writers noticed Atlas was missing and asked Povetkin who his trainer was. He said “Teddy Atlas.’’

At that point, for the second time in his two-year stint with the former Olympic gold medalist, Atlas did what others would not. He put himself at risk.

Just as he stood up to German promoter Wilfried Sauerland, refusing to send Povetkin like a lamb to the slaughter against a far more experienced and well prepared Klitschko, he stood up against his own instincts and got on a plane to Russia knowing it was far too late for the kind of full training camp one needs for a fight of this magnitude.

In both cases, Atlas did what far too few do in boxing. He did the right thing and yet if Povetkin’s hand isn’t raised Saturday night he’s going to catch hell. That’s what happens in boxing. You try to do the right thing and you catch hell. You roll over and conduct business as usual and everybody thinks you’re smart, a realist or both.

My colleague Eric Raskin postulated several days ago that if Povetkin loses, Atlas’ career as a top-flight trainer is over because he will be perceived as someone who blocked his fighter from an opportunity and then got him beaten for a lesser opportunity.

Someone who sees what happened in these two cases that way should not be licensed to box because their vision is impaired. Protecting your fighter from a match he isn’t ready for is not something to be vilified for. It’s good business.

Sticking by him even when the people around him – either through ignorance, arrogance or worse, corruption – break their contractual obligations to his trainer and create a problem-filled work environment in the months before the biggest fight of his life should not be something other fighters fear. It should be something they seek.

“What happened was it got to be about three weeks before the fight and the fighter himself and the people asked me to come over and I found out that they had made no other arrangements and the fighter was waiting for me and I had a decision to make, more from a personal standpoint, I guess a moral standpoint where – do I stay away from it?’’ Atlas said this week.

“Because we didn’t have the situation that was agreed to, my brain told me that a little bit, but my heart told me, do I want to be thinking about the fighter being left alone? And I didn’t want to be thinking about that.

“So I got on a plane. I went to (Chekhov, Russia) about three weeks and two days before the fight and as I said, we had a very condensed training camp, not the amount of sparring that we would normally want to have, especially southpaw sparring because we are fighting a southpaw.

“I organized things the best I could from a mental standpoint, trying to get his mind right in the time that was allowed and trying to get the – obviously the game plan, the strategy in place. I think we’ve done a good job getting the strategy in place. We understand what will work against Chagaev and what to be concerned about with Chagaev. My biggest concern was having not the full amount of time for physical training, that’s my biggest concern that we didn’t have that and the full amount of time in sparring.

“Look, either I’m going to keep my damn mouth shut and say nothing, which I probably should do sometimes, or I’m going to tell the truth. I’d feel more comfortable if I had more time. Do I feel we’ve done the best we could do in these conditions, in these circumstances? Yes, I do.’’

Atlas is a realist. He sees the world not as he’d like it to be but as it is. He knows an ambush disguised as an opportunity is a trap, as the Klitschko fight was. He knows Povetkin was contractually bound to be in New Jersey two months ago and was prevented or allowed not to do it at his peril.

Atlas was not willing, nor should he have been, to put his primary job at risk with ESPN for people who were not willing to honor their word, a contract or what was best for their fighter. Yet, in the end, he swallowed both his pride and his good sense and went to Russia three weeks and two days before Saturday night’s fight to do what he could for a young man who still believes, “Teddy Atlas is my trainer.’’

If those things make him unemployable as a trainer it says more about boxing’s ills than it does about Atlas.

On Saturday night Atlas will have run out of time but he’ll be where he felt he needed to be. He’ll be in Alexander Povetkin’s corner. If a few other people claiming to be actually had been the fighter would have been at his optimum for the toughest fight of his career.

Come what may, Alexander Povetkin’s real problem won’t be the man in front of him or the man in his corner. His problems will be sitting in expensive seats they got for free wearing expensive suits guys like Povetkin paid for. They won’t be in his corner when the fight starts. Then again, they never really were any way.

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Ron Borges

Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

3 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-322-Super-Welter-Week-in-SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

TSS-Salutes-Thomas-Hauser-and-his-Bernie-Award-Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

Published

3 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Mekhrubon-Sanginov-whose-Heroism-Nearly-Proved-Fatal-Returns-on-Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.

He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.

Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.

“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.

“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)

Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.

During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”

He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.

He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.

On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.

Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.

If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.

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