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Sorta Super: Bute-Johnson, And The Question Of Where It Leads
Boxing and college football have a fair amount in common. The championship pictures in both are an absolute mess and many would-be fans keep their distance as a result. The rankings in both are based not just on wins and losses but on perception of quality of opposition and quality of performance. In both sports, there are new scandals surfacing seemingly every week. And in both boxing and college football, if you can overlook all the external crap, the actual athletic competition is often spectacular.
I don’t follow college football closely at all (ever since the ’94 season ended with Penn State undefeated and somehow not able to play for the national championship, I’ve found better things to do with my Saturdays), but I pay just enough attention to know that there’s a parallel to be drawn between Lucian Bute and Boise State. For whatever reason, Bute wasn’t invited to the Super Six. His schedule since Showtime’s two-year-long tournament began has been as small-conference as it gets (Librado Andrade, Edison Miranda, Jesse Brinkley, Brian Magee, and Jean-Paul Mendy). While the big-conference players like Andre Ward and Carl Froch and Mikkel Kessler and Arthur Abraham have been beating up on each other and spoiling all the undefeated records except one, Bute has just kept winning. And in so doing, he’s kept everyone wondering: Should he be ranked number one? Number two? Number three? Can you have a championship fight without him? Does he deserve to fight for the championship? All the same questions college football fans will be asking about Boise State if they finish their season undefeated apply here.
Given the quality of his last few opponents, Bute’s fight this Saturday night against Glen Johnson at the Pepsi Coliseum in Quebec City is easy to embrace. Even nearing his 43rd birthday, “The Road Warrior” is a dramatic step up from Mendy, Magee, Brinkley, and Miranda. (Andrade was perceived as a real test at the time of their rematch since, you know, he sort of knocked Bute out in their first fight.) It’s not Bute’s fault that, for their various reasons, neither Kessler nor Kelly Pavlik put pen to paper to face him on this date. And the fact of the matter is, Johnson might prove to be a stiffer test for the Romanian-born Canadian ticketseller than either Kessler or Pavlik would have been.
Bute-Johnson is neither a superfight nor a sham. It might turn out to be lopsided and devoid of drama. Or it might turn out to be a back-and-forth rumble for the ages. Even if it’s a marking-time fight of sorts for Bute, it’s one of those rare marking-time fights in which victory is far from assured.
So just how big is Bute-Johnson? Just how meaningful is it? Just how excited should fight fan be for it?
That all depends on where it leads.
On December 17, Ward is set to fight Froch in the Super Six finals. If Bute defeats Johnson and faces the winner of Ward-Froch next, then Bute-Johnson will have been, in retrospect, very big and very meaningful indeed. If Bute defeats Johnson and doesn’t fight the Super Six winner soon thereafter, then Bute-Johnson will have been just another fight in a not especially fruitful relationship between Bute and Showtime.
I asked both a representative of Bute’s promotional company InterBox and a representative of Showtime about their intentions regarding a matchup in 2012 with the Super Six winner. As you might expect, without knowing whether that winner will be Ward and Froch, and without knowing for sure that Bute will escape this weekend’s fight with his unbeaten record intact, all parties played it conservatively and were optimistic but non-committal.
“Previously, InterBox was going to outline where we would go with Lucian on November 6,” explained David Messier, the publicity director for Interbox. “But with the injuries to Kessler and Ward, that will delay knowing exactly the plan for 2012. InterBox and Lucian’s wish is to fight the winner of those two fights [Kessler vs. Robert Stieglitz and Ward vs. Froch]. But first, Lucian will have to beat Glen Johnson. A very difficult fight awaits Lucian on November 5 in Quebec City. He’ll think about his future after this fight.”
Chris DeBlasio, the head of communications for Showtime Sports, weighed in: “I think everybody wants to see Lucian Bute fight the winner of the Super Six final. It would be the biggest fight in the history of the super middleweight division and one of the biggest fights that can be made in boxing right now. But we can’t begin to speculate yet on the likelihood that it will happen, particularly because we don’t have a Super Six winner yet and Lucian has a very tough challenger in Glen Johnson ahead of him this Saturday night. What we know is that these fighters, Ward, Froch, Bute and Johnson, they all want to fight the best—they’ve proven that. So we’re hopeful that it can happen and we’d look forward to it being a terrific fight.”
Bottom line: We don’t know if Bute-Johnson is a semifinal matchup in a four-man tournament featuring Ward and Froch on the other side of the bracket, but we all want it to be. Unfortunately, all we can do right is analyze the pairing between Bute and Johnson on its own merits.
Bute is 11 years younger than Johnson and is faster, slicker, and a more accurate puncher. And he’s probably the very best bodypuncher in the sport at this moment. It would appear that Bute is in his absolute prime right now. Then again, Miranda, Brinkley, Magee, and Mendy might have simply been the perfect opponents for making it look that way.
Johnson has had one of the most unusual boxing careers of the last couple of decades. He won his first 32 pro fights, but hasn’t enjoyed a winning streak exceeding four fights since. In fact, he hasn’t won more than three in a row since 1999. But of his 15 defeats, there’s a case to be made in seven of them that he won. And his two draws both should have gone his way. Johnson is 51-15-2 (35) with a whole bunch of asterisks.
Since his career year in ’04 in which he beat both Roy Jones and Antonio Tarver and was named Fighter of the Year, it’s fair to say Johnson has declined. But it’s been the most incremental of declines. He’s slipped by about a percentage point or two each year, which means now, seven years past his absolute prime, he’s somewhere in the vicinity of 90 percent of what he was in ’04. Two fights ago, Johnson knocked out Allan Green, and in his next fight, he came up just a round or two short against Froch. This isn’t a shot fighter. This is a guy in his 40s who beats all the guys he’s supposed to beat and comes pretty damned close against all the others.
Johnson is going to pressure Bute; we know that. He has one of the great chins of his era; we know that. The questions are, has Bute progressed enough since his 12th-round meltdown in the first Andrade fight to deal effectively with Johnson’s pressure, and what’s going to happen when the best bodypuncher in the business bangs Johnson’s 42-year-old ribs? We might see Johnson’s first knockout loss in 15 years. We also might see Johnson’s first win as an underdog since December ’04 against Tarver.
Bute vs. Johnson is a solid, compelling super middleweight fight, one nobody can reasonably complain about. But if Bute wins and this victory doesn’t lead to Ward-Bute or Froch-Bute, then “solid” is all it is. If it does lead to one of those showdowns for undisputed 168-pound supremacy, then it’s much more than that. If it sets up Bute for the ultimate challenge, Bute-Johnson is super by association.
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 No-Brainer: Turki Alalshikh is the TSS 2024 Promoter of the Year
Years from now, it’s hard to say how Turki Alalshikh will be remembered.
Alalshikh, the head of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some see him as a poacher, a man who snatched away big fights that would have otherwise landed in places like Las Vegas, New York, and London, and planted them in a place with no prizefighting tradition whatsoever merely for the purpose of “sportswashing.” If that be the case, Alalshikh’s superiors, the royal family, will turn off the spigot once it is determined that this public relations campaign is no longer needed, at which time the sport will presumably recede into the doldrums from whence it came.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that boxing is in much better shape today than it was just a few years ago and that Alalshikh, operating under the rubric of Riyadh Season, is the reason why.
One of the most persistent cavils lobbied against professional boxing is that the best match-ups never get made or else languish on the backburner beyond their “sell-by” date, cheating the fans who don’t get to see the match when both competitors are at their peak. This is a consequence of the balkanization of the sport with each promoter running his fiefdom in his own self-interest without regard to the long-term health of the sport.
With his hefty budget, Alalshikh had the carrot to compel rival promoters to put down their swords and put their most valuable properties in risky fights and he seized the opportunity. All of the sport’s top promoters – Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn (pictured below), Bob Arum, Oscar De La Hoya, Tom Brown, Ben Shalom, and others – have done business with His Excellency.
The two most significant fights of 2024 were the first and second meetings between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury. The first encounter was historic, begetting the first undisputed heavyweight champion of the four-belt era. Both fights were staged in Saudi Arabia as part of Riyadh Season, the months-long sports and entertainment festival instrumental in westernizing the region.
The Oct. 12 fight in Riyadh between undefeated light heavyweights between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol produced another unified champion. This wasn’t a great fight, but a fight good enough to command a sequel. (Beterviev, going the distance for the first time in his pro career, won a majority decision.) The do-over, buttressed by an outstanding undercard, will come to fruition on Feb. 22 in Riyadh.
Turki Alalshikh didn’t do away with pay-per-view fights, but he made them more affordable. The price tag for Usyk-Fury II in the U.S. market was $39.99. By contrast, the last PBC promotion, the Canelo vs. Berlanga fight on Amazon Prime Video, carried a tag of $89.95 for non-Prime subscribers.
Almost half the U.S. population resides in the Eastern Time Zone. For them, the main event of a Riyadh show goes in the mid- to late-afternoon. This is a great blessing to fight fans disrespected by promoters whose cards don’t end until after midnight, and that goes double for fight fans in the U.K. who can now watch more fights at a more reasonable hour instead of being forced to rouse themselves before dawn to catch an alluring match anchored in the United States.
In November, it was announced that Alalshikh had purchased The Ring magazine. The self-styled “Bible of Boxing” was previously owned by a company controlled by Oscar De La Hoya who acquired the venerable magazine in 2007.
With the news came Alalshikh’s assertion that the print edition of the magazine would be restored and that the publication “would be fully independent.”
That remains to be seen. One is reminded that Alalshikh revoked the press credential of Oliver Brown for the Joshua-Dubois fight on Sept. 21 at London’s iconic Wembley Stadium because of comments Brown made in the Daily Telegraph that cast a harsh light on the Saudi regime.
There were two national anthems that night, “God Save the King” sharing the bill, as it were, with the Saudi national anthem. Considering the venue and the all-British pairing, that rubbed many Brits the wrong way.
The Ring magazine will always be identified with Nat Fleischer who ran the magazine from its inception in 1922 until his death in 1972 at age 84. It was written of Fleischer that he was the closest thing to a czar that the sport of boxing ever had. Turki Alalshikh now inherits that mantle.
It’s never a good thing when one man wields too much power. We don’t know how history will judge Turki Alalshikh, but naming him the TSS Promoter of the Year was a no-brainer.
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The Ortiz-Bohachuk Thriller has been named the TSS 2024 Fight of The Year
The Aug. 10 match in Las Vegas between Knockout artists Vergil Ortiz Jr and Serhii Bohachuk seemingly had scant chance of lasting the 12-round distance. Ortiz, the pride of Grand Prairie, Texas, was undefeated in 21 fights with 20 KOs. Bohachuk, the LA-based Ukrainian, brought a 24-1 record with 23 knockouts.
In a surprise, the fight went the full 12. And it was a doozy.
The first round, conventionally a feeling-out round, was anything but. “From the opening bell, [they] clobbered each other like those circus piledriver hammer displays,” wrote TSS ringside reporter David A. Avila.
In this opening frame, Bohachuk, the underdog in the betting, put Ortiz on the canvas with a counter left hook. Of the nature of a flash knockdown, it was initially ruled a slip by referee Harvey Dock. With the benefit of instant replay, the Nevada State Athletic Commission overruled Dock and after four rounds had elapsed, the round was retroactively scored 10-8.
Bohachuk had Ortiz on the canvas again in round eight, put there by another left hook. Ortiz was up in a jiff, but there was no arguing it was a legitimate knockdown and it was plain that Ortiz now trailed on the scorecards.
Aware of the situation, the Texan, a protégé of the noted trainer Robert Garcia, dug deep to sweep the last four rounds. But these rounds were fused with drama. “Every time it seemed the Ukrainian was about to fall,” wrote Avila, “Bohachuk would connect with one of those long right crosses.”
In the end, Ortiz eked out a majority decision. The scores were 114-112 x2 and 113-113.
Citing the constant adjustments and incredible recuperative powers of both contestants, CBS sports combat journalist Brian Campbell called the fight an instant classic. He might have also mentioned the unflagging vigor exhibited by both. According to CompuBox, Ortiz and Bohachuk threw 1579 punches combined, landing 490, numbers that were significantly higher than the early favorite for Fight of the Year, the March 2 rip-snorter at Verona, New York between featherweights Raymond Ford and Otabek Kholmatov (a win for Ford who pulled the fight out of the fire in the final minute).
Photo credit: Al Applerose
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Women’s Prizefighting Year End Review: The Best of the Best in 2024
Women’s Prizefighting Year End Review: The Best of the Best in 2024
It’s the end of the year.
Here are our awards for the best in women’s boxing. But first, a rundown on the state of the sport.
Maybe its my imagination but it seems that fewer female fights of magnitude took place in 2024 than in previous years.
A few promoters like 360 Promotions increased their involvement in women’s boxing while others such as Matchroom Boxing and Golden Boy Promotions seem stagnant. They are still staging female bouts but are not signing new additions.
American-based promotion company Top Rank, actually lost 50 percent of their female fighter roster when Seniesa Estrada, the undisputed minimumweight champion, retired recently. They still have Mikaela Mayer.
A promotion company making headlines and creating sparks in the boxing world is Most Valuable Promotions led by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian. They signed Amanda Serrano and have invested in staging other female fights
This year, the top streaming company Netflix gambled on sponsoring Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson, along with Amanda Serrano versus Katie Taylor and hit a monster home run. According to Netflix metrics an estimated 74 million viewers watched the event that took place on Nov. 16 at Arlington, Texas.
“Breaking records like this is exactly what MVP was built to do – bring the biggest, most electrifying events to fans worldwide,” said Nakisa Bidarian co-founder of MVP.
History was made in viewership and at the gate where more than 70,000 fans packed AT&T Stadium for a record-setting $17.8 million in ticket sales outside of Las Vegas. It was the grand finale moment of the year.
Here are the major contributors to women’s boxing in 2024.
Fighter of the Year: Amanda Serrano
Other candidates: Katie Taylor, Claressa Shields, Franchon Crews, Dina Thorslund, and Yesica Nery Plata.
Amanda Serrano was chosen for not only taking part in the most viewed female title fight in history, but also for willingly sacrificing the health of her eye after suffering a massive cut during her brutal war with Taylor. She could have quit, walked away with tons of money and be given the technical decision after four rounds. She was ahead on the scorecards at that moment.
Instead, Serrano took more punches, more head butts and slugged her way through 10 magnificent and brilliant rounds against the great Taylor. Fans worldwide were captivated by their performance. Many women who had never watched a female fight were mesmerized and inspired.
Serrano once again proved that she would die in the ring rather than quit. Women and men were awed by her performance and grit. It was a moment blazed in the memories of millions.
Amanda Serrano is the Fighter of the Year.
Best Fight of the Year – Amanda Serrano versus Katie Taylor 2
Their first fight that took place two years ago in Madison Square Garden was the greatest female fight I had ever witnessed. The second fight surpassed it.
When you have two of the best warriors in the world willing to showcase their talent for entertainment regardless of the outcome, it’s like rubbing two sticks of dynamite together.
Serrano jumped on Taylor immediately and for about 20 seconds it looked like the Irish fighter would not make the end of the first round. Not quite. Taylor rallied behind her stubborn determination and pulled out every tool in her possession: elbows, head butts, low blows, whatever was needed to survive, Taylor used.
It reminded me of an old world title fight in 2005 between Jose Luis Castillo a master of fighting dirty and Julio Diaz. I asked about the dirty tactics by Castillo and Diaz simply said, “It’s a fight. It’s not chess. You do what you have to do.”
Taylor did what she had to do to win and the world saw a magnificent fight.
Other candidates: Seniesa Estrada versus Yokasta Valle, Mikaela Mayer versus Sandy Ryan, and Ginny Fuchs vs Adelaida Ruiz.
KO of the Year – Lauren Price KO3 Bexcy Mateus.
Dec. 14, in Liverpool, England.
The IBO welterweight titlist lowered the boom on Bexcy Mateus sending her to the floor thrice. She ended the fight with a one-two combination that left Mateus frozen while standing along the ropes. Another left cross rocket blasted her to the ground. Devastating.
Other candidates: Claressa Shields KO of Vanessa LePage-Joanisse, Gabriela Fundora KO of Gabriela Alaniz, Dina Thorslund vs Mary Romero, Amanda Serrano KO of Stevie Morgan.
Pro’s Pro Award – Jessica Camara
Jessica Camara defeated Hyun Mi Choi in South Korea to win the WBA gold title on April 27, 2024. The match took place in Suwon where Canada’s Camara defeated Choi by split decision after 10 rounds.
Camara, who is managed by Brian Cohen, has fought numerous champions including Kali Reis, Heather Hardy and Melissa St. Vil. She has become a pro fighter that you know will be involved in a good and entertaining fight and is always in search of elite competition. She eagerly accepted the fight in South Korea against Choi. Few fighters are willing to do that.
Next up for Camara is WBC titlist Caroline Dubois set for Jan. 11, in Sheffield, England.
Electric Fighters Club
These are women who never fail to provide excitement and drama when they step in the prize ring. When you only have two-minute rounds there’s no time to run around the boxing ring.
Here are some of the fighters that take advantage of every second and they do it with skill:
Gabriela Fundora, Mizuki Hiruta, Ellie Scotney, Lauren Price, Clara Lescurat, Adelaida Ruiz, Ginny Fuchs, Mikaela Mayer, Yokasta Valle, Sandy Ryan, Chantelle Cameron, Ebanie Bridges, Tsunami Tenkai, Dina Thorslund, Evelin Bermudez, Gabriela Alaniz, Caroline Dubois, Beatriz Ferreira, and LeAnna Cruz.
Claressa Shields Movie and More
A motion picture based on Claressa Shields titled “The Fire Inside” debuts on Wednesday, Dec. 25, nationwide. Most boxing fans know that Shields has world titles in various weight divisions. But they don’t know about her childhood and how she rose to fame.
Also, Shields (15-0, 3 KOs) will be fighting Danielle Perkins (5-0, 2 KOs) for the undisputed heavyweight world championship on Sunday Feb. 2, at Dort Financial Center in Flint, Michigan. DAZN will stream the Salita Promotions fight card.
“Claressa Shields is shining a spotlight on Flint – first on the big screen and then in the ring on Sunday, February 2,” said event promoter Dmitriy Salita, president of Salita Promotions. “Claressa leads by example. She is a trailblazer and has been an advocate for equality since she was a young lady. This event promises to be one of the most significant sporting and cultural events of the year. You don’t want to miss it, either live, in person or live on DAZN.”
Shields is only 29 years old and turns 30 next March. What more can she accomplish?
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