My 86-Year-Old Mother Meets…

Published

13 years ago

September 28, 2012

ENH-Ali9272012 A tradition continues.

In the 1980s and 1990s, my mother met Muhammad Ali several times. In 2007, I brought her to a press conference to meet Don King. Now, once a year, Anthony Catanzaro hosts a pizza party at Portobello’s (83 Murray Street in Manhattan) in her honor.

Anthony is a popular figure in the Hauser family. My great-nephew (who turns four in October) thinks that Anthony is Thomas the Tank Engine in disguise. That’s because, when we visited Portobello’s late last year, Anthony sang, “He's a really useful engine, you know” a half dozen times.

This year, again, Anthony was a gracious host at the annual “My Mother Meets” pizza party. The idea behind these gatherings is to introduce her to an interesting mix of boxing people.

“Sitting between Seth Abraham and Lou DiBella is an interesting experience,” my mother acknowledged after last year’s lunch.

And I have to think that eating pizza with Paulie Malignaggi and Vinny Maddalone on either side (2010) is a life-affirming experience.

This year’s gathering was on September 24th. Teddy Atlas couldn’t make it because of a previous commitment to speak at a local high school. But he sent chocolate and flowers.

Tom Gerbasi was also waylaid by a school commitment. He had to meet with his daughter’s college-application counselor. But Tom telephoned to share a recollection about his mother.

“She got pissed off at me when I dedicated my first book to my father,” Tom recalled. “She asked, ‘Where’s my dedication.’ I told her, ‘Hey; when you die, I’ll dedicate a book to you too.’”

The official guest list (in addition to my mother, Anthony, and yours truly) was:

Brian Kenny – The former studio host for ESPN2 Friday Night Fights, Brian is currently a studio host for the Major League Baseball Network. He also does play-by-play for MLB Network and was recently hired as the desk host for Showtime Championship Boxing.

David Diamante – The ring announcer with the stentorian voice and dredlocks. David’s career has blossomed in recent years. In addition to ring announcing, he’s now the in-arena voice of the NBA Brooklyn Nets and narrator of the new NBC Sports offering, The Lights.

Harold Lederman – HBO’s “unofficial ringside judge,” boxing’s greatest fan, and possibly the nicest man in boxing.

That’s heavy on people who make their living behind a microphone. So we added Michael Woods, esteemed editor of The Sweet Science (who’s also a contributing writer for ESPN: The Magazine and crafts a boxing blog for the ESPN NY website).

Michael (inquisitive reporter that he is) began the conversation by asking my mother, “Can you tell us some embarrassing stories about Tom?”

I shut down that line of inquiry in a hurry and countered with, “Do you have a story you can tell us about your mother?”

“That would be a therapy session,” Michael responded.

Brian asked my mother the same question she’s always asked at these gatherings: “Have you ever been to a fight?”

“No; and I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be there when people are hitting each other.”

“I can understand,” Brian told her. “My wife watches fights on TV all the time. But the first time I took her to a fight, she was aghast. It’s different when it’s happening right in front of you.”

For a while, we talked about the craft of television commentating.

“I was impressed with Paulie Malignaggi last week on Showtime,” Brian noted. “Before the fight, I told him, ‘‘You don’t have to talk all the time. If you say one insightful thing each round, you’re doing your job.’ And he did.”

Then the conversation segued to Don King.

“I enjoyed meeting him,” my mother said.

“Don will make you feel like a million dollars,” Brian explained. “But you’re not getting a million dollars.”

We ate pizza for two hours. In between bites, David Diamante talked about finding it hard to believe that he’s where he is professionally. “I love my life,” he told us. “I went through some dark times when I was younger. And to be where I am today; I wouldn’t say I’m lucky, but I’m fortunate.”

Harold and my mother referenced their various aches and pains.

“At a certain age, if you’re not feeling bad, that’s good,” Harold said philosophically.

Eventually, the conversation turned to baseball.

“Yankee Stadium was hallowed ground,” David proclaimed. “Once they tore down the old Yankee Stadium, nothing was sacred anymore.”

“The best ballpark right now is AT&T Park in San Francisco,” Brian posited. “It’s intimate. They pack the place for every game. I love being at the ballpark; there’s a feel to being there that’s special to me. But my heart races a little more when I’m at ringside. I remember being in Memphis when Mike Tyson fought Lennox Lewis. Tyson was coming down the aisle. I turned to Al Bernstein and said, “Let’s remember what we’re feeling now. After the fight, we’ll sit around and say, ‘Oh, we knew all along what would happen’. But right now, it’s ‘Here comes Mike.’”

Then I learned something about my mother that I hadn’t known before. Brian asked if she’d ever been to a baseball game.

“I went to a few games at Shea Stadium in the early 1990s.”

I’d known that.

“And when I was seventeen, I went to a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. My boyfriend and I got up at four-thirty in the morning and stood on line for hours to sit in the bleachers.”

That I hadn’t known.

“I don’t remember much about the game,” my mother continued. “I went because my boyfriend – his name was Buddy – wanted to go. But it was exciting to be there. You knew the names of the players back then because they didn’t change teams every year.”

For the record; the Yankees played the Cardinals in the 1942 World Series. Stan Musial had just finished his first full season in leftfield for St. Louis. Joe DiMaggio patrolled centerfield for New York. The Cardinals won all three games at Yankee Stadium and emerged triumphant in the series four games to one.

As a remembrance of this year’s “My Mother Meets” luncheon, Brian gave her a gift bag with a “Gertrude Stein” notepad and several other goodies. Harold drove her home afterward.

As for next year —

“Bring your mother to my restaurant in Easton,” Larry Holmes told me recently. “I’ll give her a champburger.”

Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His most recent book (And the New: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing) was published by the University of Arkansas Press.

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The Sweet Science

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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Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

Published

5 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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