The Holidays Can Be Hard, But Most Have Gifts To Be Thankful For..WOODS

Published

13 years ago

December 24, 2011

esquire-xmas-1963-hornets It is supposed to, if you go by those commercials on TV, a time of constant cheer, a short span where the American man suspends all animosities and instead luxuriates in vibes of harmony and amiability. If you are a particularly lucky soul, you have placed a four-foot red bow on the luxury auto you purchased for your significant other, and will be rewarded with a look of adoration as intense as has ever been bestowed, and perhaps a lush lip lock under the mistletoe a l'il later. Yes, the Christmas season, or holiday season, if you prefer, is a time of joviality, of convening with family and friends, and toasting the year's bounty.

Supposed to be.

The holidays are not, sometimes, all Hollywood or Madison Ave. cracks them up to be. You may be trying to scrounge up money for your mortgage payment, or lamenting the forthcoming cutoff of your unemployment check. Hey, I'm not going all Grinch on you, but I do like to traffic in reality here at TSS. Convening with family for some doesn't always result in a marvelous soiree of sterling conversation and warm recollections. Dec. 25th can mean it's six days from the end of your unemployment benefits.

But I'm guessing there are things for you to be thankful for, that you can hunt a little harder and muster some holiday cheer even if your “luxury auto” is a '98 Accord so busted that car thieves don't bother trying to make off with it. Even if the eggnog you're sipping is a few days past the sell-by date. Did the family make it through to the end of the year with all lives and limbs intact? Mom and dad still of sound mind and body, still able to remind you of the time you peed your pants right before you were to pose on Santa's lap at Sears in 1967? Did you manage to fool 'em all at the office again, hold on to your job, which may not be the ticket to the paradise, but keeps food on the table, which is something that can't be said for millions of kids around the world?

Sometimes, you have to hunt a little harder to find the joy, to fix on those slightly smaller, subtler bounties that you don't drive off a lot, or find in a Tiffany's box.

Even high rollers sometimes go cold, go on losing streaks. Kelly Pavlik was the pride of Youngstown, circa 2007, 2008. The kid had it all, he was the middleweight champion of the world who would provide hope and change for not just a struggling sport, but a rusted out region which has been kicked in the teeth by the death of American-made. Contrast that period of time with today, when Pavlik finds himself at a scary crossroads. He went to rehab last year, and all of us hoped he'd kick the booze jones, settle down and take care of business in that zone where he seemed most comfortable, the ring. But putting the cork in the bottle, and keeping it there, isn't so easy. It takes some folks a few tries. They need to learn a few lessons. We can hope the 29 year-old boxer has figured out that it seems quite likely that booze only complicates matters for him. It is no friend, no salve. On Wednesday, Pavlik was arrested at his home in the Youngstown neighbor Canfield after a neighbor told cops the fighter crashed an ATV he was driving into a telephone pole and lampost.

This holiday season has had to have been the most tumultuous for the fighter, who announced after an October meeting with manager Cameron Dunkin and promoter Bob Arum that he'd be relocating to California, to train with Robert Garcia, who tutors Tony Margarito and Brandon Rios. This came after he bagged out in the 11th hour on a fight with Darryl Cunningham, leaving cabler Showtime angry as a kicked bucket of bees for leaving them hanging. The OVI charge, to which Pavlik entered a not guilty plea on Friday, comes two weeks after things between him and now ex trainer Jack Loew went from bad to worse. Loew was asked about no longer being part of Team Pavlik, and it all spilled out. He said in a TV interview with the local NBC station that he was sick of taking flak for Pavlik, was sick of being insulted as a trainer, after he'd taken a kid from age 9 and they won the middleweight crown together. I spoke to Loew on Thursday, and he was still sort of heated. The man's pride his hurt, but he wasn't backing off anything he said in the interview. “Nothing I said wasn't public knowledge,” said the man I like to call Paver Jack, a nod to his past as a paver of driveways.

Loew wanted some credit for spending his money taking young Pavlik to amateur tournaments. He took issue with Pavlik, who he said accused him of having a booze problem himself up til last year.

Yes, no holiday spirit is left in this relationship. By the end of the call with Loew, I felt sad that it had come to this. See, I'm a sort of conflicted tabloid reporter. I like to go where the drama is, but I can't help but get sad when a pair like this splits. These two were from a screenplay. Paver Jack and the kid from the region left behind.

Loew thinks that Pavlik's dad is more interested in Kelly's ring life than his personal life, which has been rocky the last few years. “Whatever is here is in California too,” Loew pointed out to me.

By the end of the call, I told Loew I have a guarantee for him. I said that it may take awhile, it may take a few years, but these two will get over this. Some of these stinging words will need to recede, specifics will need to become fuzzy, but they will hug, and be able to focus on the happy times.

But for now, Loew said, he wants the kid, who will turn 30 in April, to get straight. He covered for him, made up excuses when his partying affected him, and now feels jilted, like his loyalty was meaningless. The implication is that the problem is the trainer, that a switch in teachers will cure Kelly. Hey, a new voice, some new techniques could indeed help him grow as a boxer. But my guess is, and this is just a guess, I don't know intimately the depth of his problems, the kid needs tutoring outside the ring. Like, twelve step stuff. I'm not talking smack from my behind here. I've walked that walk. I've hit some of those same sort of “jackpots” Pavlik has, been at scenes where there was broken glass and sirens and lights and the like, and needed some structure and humbling to see straight. Until that stuff stops, it will be impossible for him to even attempt to get back to where he was as a boxer, even if the ghost of Eddie Futch comes back to guide him.

By the tail end of the call, Loew even sounds ready to start a reconciliation. “Those were some of the greatest times of my life,” he said. “It opened doors for me, and I don't have to wait till later to say how great it was.”

No, the holidays are not always the most wonderful time of the year, are they? But we can always hold on to hope, look a bit harder for the gifts we've been given, and I think it helps to open our eyes to the fact that things can get tough in any zip code, even for high rollers.

Merry Christmas, readers. And happy Hannukah, as well. Thanks for logging on to TSS, and remember, if you've had one too many spiked eggnogs, hand over the keys to a sober pal.

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Michael Woods

TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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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

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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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Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

Published

6 days ago

April 12, 2025

David A. Avila

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In the showdown between undefeated welterweight champions Jaron “Boots Ennis walked away with the victory by technical knockout over Eamantis Stanionis and the WBA and IBF titles on Saturday.

No doubt. Ennis was the superior fighter.

“He’s a great fighter. He’s a good guy,” said Ennis.

Philadelphia’s Ennis (34-0, 30 KOs) faced Lithuania’s Stanionis (15-1, 10 KOs) at demonstrated an overpowering southpaw and orthodox attack in front of a sold-out crowd at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It might have been confusing but whether he was in a southpaw stance or not Ennis busted the body with power shots and jabbed away in a withering pace in the first two rounds.

Stanionis looked surprised when his counter shots seemed impotent.

In the third round the Lithuanian fighter who trains at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, began using a rocket jab to gain some semblance of control. Then he launched lead rights to the jaw of Ennis. Though Stanionis connected solidly, the Philly fighter was still standing and seemingly unfazed by the blows.

That was a bad sign for Stanionis.

Ennis returned to his lightning jabs and blows to the body and Stanionis continued his marauding style like a Sherman Tank looking to eventually run over his foe. He just couldn’t muster enough firepower.

In the fifth round Stanionis opened up with a powerful body attack and seemed to have Ennis in retreat. But the Philadelphia fighter opened up with a speedy combination that ended with blood dripping from the nose of Stanionis.

It was not looking optimistic for the Lithuanian fighter who had never lost.

Stanionis opened up the sixth round with a three-punch combination and Ennis met him with a combination of his own. Stanionis was suddenly in retreat and Ennis chased him like a leopard pouncing on prey. A lightning five-punch combination that included four consecutive uppercuts delivered Stanionis to the floor for the count. He got up and survived the rest of the round.

After returning shakily to his corner, the trainer whispered to him and then told the referee that they had surrendered.

Ennis jumped in happiness and now holds the WBA and IBF welterweight titles.

“I felt like I was getting in my groove. I had a dream I got a stoppage just like this,” said Ennis.

Stanionis looked like he could continue, but perhaps it was a wise move by his trainer. The Lithuanian fighter’s wife is expecting their first child at any moment.

Meanwhile, Ennis finally proved the expectations of greatness by experts. It was a thorough display of superiority over a very good champion.

“The biggest part was being myself and having a live body in front of me,” said Ennis. “I’m just getting started.”

Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn was jubilant over the performance of the Philadelphia fighter.

“What a wonderful humble man. This is one of the finest fighters today. By far the best fighter in the division,” said Hearn. “You are witnessing true greatness.”

Other Bouts

Former featherweight world champion Raymond Ford (17-1-1, 8 KOs) showed that moving up in weight would not be a problem even against the rugged and taller Thomas Mattice (22-5-1, 17 KOs) in winning by a convincing unanimous decision.

The quicksilver southpaw Ford ravaged Mattice in the first round then basically cruised the remaining nine rounds like a jackhammer set on automatic. Four-punch combinations pummeled Mattice but never put him down.

“He was a smart veteran. He could take a hit,” said Ford.

Still, there was no doubt on who won the super featherweight contest. After 10 rounds all three judges gave Ford every round and scored it 100-90 for the New Jersey fighter who formerly held the WBA featherweight title which was wrested from him by Nick Ball.

Shakhram Giyasov (17-0, 10 KOs) made good on a promise to his departed daughter by knocking out Argentina’s Franco Ocampo (17-3, 8 KOs) in their welterweight battle.

Giyasov floored Ocampo in the first round with an overhand right but the Argentine fighter was able to recover and fight on for several more rounds.

In the fourth frame, Giyasov launched a lead right to the liver and collapsed Ocampo with the body shot for the count of 10 at 1:57 of the fourth round.

“I had a very hard camp because I lost my daughter,” Giyasov explained. “I promised I would be world champion.”

In his second pro fight Omari Jones (2-0) needed only seconds to disable William Jackson (13-6-2) with a counter right to the body for a knockout win. The former Olympic medalist was looking for rounds but reacted to his opponent’s actions.

“He was a veteran he came out strong,” said Jones who won a bronze medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics. “But I just stayed tight and I looked for the shot and I landed it.”

After a feint, Jackson attacked and was countered by a right to the rib cage and down he went for the count at 1:40 of the first round in the welterweight contest.

Photo credit: Matchroom

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