PACQUAIO-MARQUEZ IV–NYC Press Conference Report

Published

12 years ago

September 19, 2012

TRPressNYC41698 Manny, Jinkee and Freddie chat in NYC on Sept. 19. The fighter says on Dec. 8 he will look to finish off Marquez, like he tried to in their first fight. (Ed Diller-Top Rank)

Manny Pacquiao, Juan Manuel Marquez and promoter Bob Arum came to New York and on Wednesday, banged the drums for the fourth fight between the rivals for the ages, which will take place on Dec. 8, in Las Vegas.

At the Edison Ballroom on 47th St., Pacquiao made clear that he will be gunning for a KO at the MGM, in order to conclusively prove that he is the better man between the two. Marquez, despite the record books showing the Congressman leading, 2-0-1, in their tussles, steadfastly clung to the belief that he won each scrap.

Of course, Manny was asked bout the fight that everyone still wants, Pacquiao-Mayweather, and the recent news that he is partnering up with Mayweather's friend 50 Cent. Manny, during the media scrum after everyone had their say at the mike, admitted, “We met each other and we talked about business, but we didn't finalize yet. We haven't finalized yet, it's a possibility, but we haven't finalized, because we've been busy.” He said he wasn't surprised to hook up with 50 because he loves boxing, and Manny loves music. Pacman said that 50 is “a nice guy” and “a smart man” and “good at business” and “a good business partner.” Trainer Freddie Roach said he likes that 50 is involved, because it means talking, about a Mayweather fight, is happening. He'd like to see it in March or April, and the sooner the better, because interest if falling off.

Regarding this bout, Manny said this time he will change his training, that he will train only at Wild Card. Does he need a KO? “I think so, to erase the doubt in the minds of the fans and my opponent,” he said. He said that before the last fight, he took Tim Bradley lightly, and that he believes to this day that he won, and that it was one sided. He also said he relaxed in the middle rounds, because he thought he was winning.

Of people who say he is dropping off, he said he can “fight 20 rounds.” The boxer said he needs to be aggressive for the whole twelve rounds.

Manny said he chose Marquez because he believes he can give the fans a good fight, and that he doesn't think a Bradley fight would be good, because the last one was one sided, in his favor.

The Congressman said he knows how to fight a counterpuncher, like Marquez, and that means being patient, and using his speed. But that would be boring, he said, so he will be aggressive. “To make the fans happy, to make the fight good,” he said. He said he could choose an easier fight, to make easy money, but he wants to give the fans a good tussle. He said he is “still young,” has a couple years left, and said he relies on Freddie Roach to determine how many fights he has left. Roach said that he has told Manny that he will pull the plug, tell him to walk away, when he sees him slipping, said Manny has agreed to that, and he hasn't seen that yet.

Roach admitted he hasn't figured out Marquez. He said most success against JMM has come when Manny rushed him. “Manny's looking for a knockout and Manny's never done that before in his life… I'm going to give Manny a bonus when he knocks his sparring partners down. I don't know that I can afford that but…” Roach said, to chuckles.

Manny offered a no comment when asked about the money judgment against Floyd Mayweather, for no-showing depositions for the defamation suit against “Money.” He also said tax issues against him have been fully settled up in his homeland.

Roach said it'll be good to have Manny fully present, in LA, that there will be no jetlag, so camp should be stellar. Freddie said that yes, Manny's killer instinct has dropped off some, because he is compassionate, because of his religion, and a bit of aging. Freddie said he will work on that in the gym, get him to finish people like he used to. The trainer said he doesn't need to watch tape of JMM, that Manny needs to attack him. “We had four knockdowns, we want four more,” he said. Manny said he can restore his killer instinct.

Pacquiao said “somewhere down the road” he and Bradley will tangle, but not yet. Arum told me he was “Switzerland” as far as who he though Manny should fight next, but acknowledged that Marquez does the best money. He also said Manny is signed through 2014, and that he hasn't heard about Pacquiao fighting twice, and then retiring. He'd like to see Manny end his career by knocking out Floyd Mayweather, he said.

Manny said he still loves to fight and please fans, and he still likes to train. His favorite part? “Winning,” he said.

As for politics, he said he will run for Congress next year, and the Senate in 2016. Asked if fighting or politics was tougher, he said, “Boxing.” In politics, he said he has to watch his back. He said he hasn't been following the Obama-Romney race, and went to zip his lips, offering a no comment. Back in May, Pacquiao got swept into controversy when a writer asked him about matters of sexual preference and referenced Obama's stances on that subject. This time, Pacquiao didn't go there.

He said before he retires, he wants to fight in the Philippines. He said he can see 100,000 people, in an open stadium, in his homeland, but he has yet to bring that up with Arum.

Pacquiao said he was surprised that Marquez was bigger than him last November. “There's no quit in Marquez, we know that, but if we keep putting him down, we hope he will stay there,” Roach said. Roach said he thinks they need redemption from the last fight, because he heard boos. He said he actually wanted Mayweather first, and then a Bradley fight, to shut up the judges. “Bradley sold six tickets last time, that's why we're not fighting him, he does no business,” Roach said of Bradley.

There were no harsh word or much in the way of trash talking. Marquez said he thought he won all three fights, and dedicated the fight to fans from the Philippines and Mexico and his country. Arum took a jab at politicians, in general, but said unlike the rest of them, Manny actually does something. Pacquiao at the mike said he wants to “make the fight as short as possible,” and fight like a 25 year old Pacman. He also gave a nod to wife Jinkee, who was present.

My take: I think it is possible we do a see a KO, one way or the other, if Pacquiao truly does press for the stoppage. Either he'll catch Marquez, and act like the “old” Manny…or Marquez will take advantage of over-aggression, and catch Pacman. This one might surpass expectations, like Ward-Dawson did, people. Thoughts?

SPEEDBAG Roach said yes, he was being scapegoated in the Amir Khan situation, but he holds no hard feelings. He said he doesn't think Khan should hang up the gloves, thinks he can still excel, and wishes him well. He should probably stay away from punchers, but that will be hard at this level.

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Michael Woods

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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