THE BORGIES: Borges Hands Out Year-End Honors

Published

13 years ago

December 29, 2011

Ron Borges

WardFroch Bailey9 It is nearly the end of another year and boxing remains alive and…well?

Actually, the signs are good for a sport whose passing seems to be continually predicted by its critics. It is returning to a form of regular television with the new NBC deal that kicks off next month as part of NBC’s expansion into the world of 24-hour sports. If the originators of this new series stick with their plans and keep the network open to any and all promoters rather than making what always become death-knell deals with a single promoter it is a chance to bring boxing back to the people without charging them an arm and a leg for the privilege.

That NBC has taken this small step is a sign, at least, that they realize, as Bernard Hopkins once aptly put it, “as long as you got ghettos you’ll have boxing.’’

Despite the self-destructive attitudes and actions of so many of the people who make a living in the sport, boxing has begun to prosper once again because the fans are more resilient than Arturo Gatti. They can take a shot and keep on coming, for which all fighters and promoters should be thankful.

So as another year closes let’s take a look at three categories of annual awards and single out a few people for giving boxing what it needs most – their best efforts.

FIGHTER OF THE YEAR – Although there are a few candidates one can debate about there seems to be only one conclusion in this category. Who had a better year in boxing than Andre Ward, the soft-spoken, hard-edged super middleweight champion from Oakland, Ca.?

Nobody, to be truthful about it.

Ward not only unified the WBA and WBC versions of the 168-pound championship as well as laying claim to the RING magazine belt but he ended the SHOWTIME Super 6 Super Middleweight tournament with a win so convincing over then WBA champion Carl Froch that the brash Brit said something you too seldom hear today. He said the other guy won.

“I lost the fight for sure,’’ Froch admitted after Ward schooled him on Dec. 17 to end the SHOWTIME tournament with a much-needed American winner. “I got beat by the better man. He’s a slippery eel.’’

He’s also a lethal one. While Ward lacks the concussive, one-punch knockout power fans crave, he is an adroit surgeon who can both box and punch. He has not lost a fight in over 15 years yet continues to be looked upon as less than he really is because he wins with skill and an aggressive but wise nature rather than with bombast and bombing runs.

This year alone he destroyed former middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (a pre-tournament favorite) as well as Froch and became the only fighter involved in the event not to lose a single match. He opened things up two years ago with a beat down of the man many felt (myself included) would win the tournament, Mikkel Kessler, and never looked back. Considering that he beat five of the top super middleweights in the world over the past three years while also being the last American to win an Olympic gold medal (when he was an overlooked underdog in Athens) Ward should be a star in America and once he would have been.

But such is the nature of the sport’s place among the U.S. media these days that is not the case. At least not yet.

“Slowly but surely we made believers out of a lot of people that doubted me,’’ Ward said recently, without a hint of rancor of self-pity. “It’s been a long time coming, almost 15 years of grinding and toiling when no one was around patting you on the back and there were no lights, cameras action!’’

Ward is right about that and now stands as living proof that a man can make it in boxing, if he is skilled enough and relentless enough and faithful to himself and the people around him enough, without making headlines for bad behavior or one-punch knockouts. Truth be told, it’s easier to do it the latter way but Ward has done it his own way and it seems unlikely the 27-year old champion will not end the year being named the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Fighter of the Year.

Ward is what everyone should want in a fighter. He is relentless, so ever ready he could be a battery if he wasn’t a boxer, highly skilled and outside the ring genteel but far from gentle. He is, as he pointed out after beating Froch, “a warrior’’ even if many have yet to understand that because he doesn’t feel the need to pound his chest about it.

Instead he pounds the chest, head and ribs of opponents to prove the point, something he did so well this year he had, in my opinion, no peer.

FIGHT OF THE YEAR

This is always a difficult category because A) no one sees every fight that’s fought around the globe and B) one fan’s stylistic favorite pales in comparison to another’s. Having said that who didn’t love watching Delvin Rodriguez and Pawel Wolak take the measure of each other last July on ESPN2?

Whatever they each were paid for it was far less than they deserved. There was more action in that fight than in all the heavyweight title fights contested around the world in 2011. Wolak was a construction worker by day and fighter by night and he made both points clear in that fight because he worked his ass off constructing an approach designed to make Rodriguez’s debut at 154 pounds a difficult one.

Wolak succeeded but he sacrificed the right side of his face to do it. By the end of the night it looked like someone had stuffed a medicine ball and two rolls of quarters around his right eye. Yet he kept coming forward, landing shots and bringing the crowd to its feet while nearly knocking Rodriguez off his.

Rodriguez, meanwhile, got as good as he gave. His face was a mess as well yet for 10 rounds he kept going on bombing runs at Wolak, strafing him like the RAF over Dresden. By the end of the night both were spent shells, two men flailing away at each other round after round until mercifully it came to an end with witnesses nearly as exhausted from watching as they were from plying what that night became an angry trade.

In the end the fight was called a majority draw and rightfully so. No one deserved to win that fight but more importantly no one deserved to lose because everyone involved – fans and fighters alike – came out winners.

As a footnote, they fought a rematch Dec. 3 on the undercard of Cotto-Margarito and, as was predictable, it was nowhere near as stirring. Both men were professionals but this time Rodriguez was in control. While Wolak was relentless in his pursuit of Rodriguez this time he couldn’t reach him and by the end seemed to be a fighter who had left a large piece of himself in the ring at the Roseland Ballroom that night in July.

Soon after, Pavel Wolak announced his retirement. If indeed these were his last fights, the one on July 15 is something he and Delvin Rodriguez both can be proud of.

TRAINER/MANAGER OF THE YEAR

This is an odd hybrid category that almost doesn’t exist anymore because frankly managers barely exist anymore. Oh, there are plenty of 33 percenters out there but few of them manage fighters. They make alliances with promoters and/or TV networks and then do as they’re asked.

One exception this year was Teddy Atlas. ESPN2’s analyst on the Friday Night Fights also trains recently crowned WBA heavyweight champion Alexander Povetkin, having taken a flawed and stalled fighter and broken him down over the last year and a half and then rebuilt him into a guy at least good enough to lay claim to one of the too-many world title belts that exist today.

The improvement in Povetkin is obvious, especially in his 8^th round KO of Cedric Boswell in his first title defense after outpointing Ruslan Chagaev to win the vacated title in July. Where the manager’s end comes in is that it was Atlas alone who stood up to promoter Wilfried Sauerland and the Russians who take their manager’s cut out of Povetkin’s hide and refused to send him to the slaughterhouse against Wladimir Klitschko or his brother Vitali.

At the time Povetkin was the mandatory challenger for Klitschko he had only 21 fights and none of them had yet prepared him to face the division’s most formidable forces. He was still unsure of what kind of fighter he was and often seemed daunted and doubtful in early rounds, a recipe for being destroyed by the bigger Klitschko, who regardless of what you may think of him knows what his identity is in the ring.

Povetkin did not and Atlas knew it and refused the fight despite tremendous pressures, both internal and external to take it. He was roundly criticized by some in the media who should have known better and Sauerland was fit to be tied but Atlas would not budge, willingly giving up the mandatory position under the well thought out theory that something better would soon come along.

It did and Povetkin, although not in the greatest of shape and having less than a month with Atlas because of a dispute between his trainer and the men who ostensibly manage him over contract terms, beat back the more experienced former WBA champion to live out his dream.

Eventually, Atlas knows, the big money will be in fighting one of the Klitschkos and there will be a time when that risk has to be taken. But boxing, like the insurance business, is about risk and reward. He was willing to put his own reputation on the line by taking the risk of not sacrificing his fighter for quick money because he believed in Povetkin and in his own talents as a trainer.

When Atlas first began working with Povetkin, a member of Klitschko’s camp said privately, “The longer he’s with Teddy the better he’s going to get so the sooner we can get to him the better for us. I understand that.’’

Many in boxing did not but Teddy Atlas did, which is why this morning Alexander Povetkin is a heavyweight champion of the world.

Comment on this article

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Ron Borges

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.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

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.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

Published

6 days ago

April 12, 2025

David A. Avila

Jaron-'Boots'-Ennis-Wins-Welterweight-Showdown-in-Atlantic-City

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

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!