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WHO DO YA LIKE? Bogere or Abril?

LAS VEGAS (Feb. 28, 2013) – Golden Boy Promotions hosted the final press conference Thursday for the big fight card this Saturday, March 2 live on SHOWTIME® (10 p.m. ET/PT, delayed on the West Coast) and SHOWTIME EXTREME® (8 p.m. ET/PT) from The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in LasVegas.
In the main event of a SHOWTIME BOXING – Special Edition, Cuba’s Richar “El Tigre” Abril (17-3-1, 8 KO’s), of Miami, Fla., will make the first defense of his WBA Lightweight World Championship when he meets unbeaten Ugandan Sharif “The Lion” Bogere (23-0, 15 KO’s), of Las Vegas.
The co-feature on SHOWTIME will feature undefeated, world-rated southpaw Gary Russell Jr. (23-0, 15 KO’s), of Capitol Heights, Md., against Russia’s Vyacheslav Gusev (20-2, 5 KO’s) in a 10-round featherweight bout.
Preceding the SHOWTIME telecast will be live preliminary fights on SHOWTIME EXTREME. Hard-hitting Jorge Melendez (25-2, 24 KO’s), of Manati, Puerto Rico, takes on Ryan Davis (24-9-3, 9 KO’s), of Granite City, Ill., in an eight-round middleweight match and Thomas Williams (12-0, 9 KO’s), of Fort Washington, Md., risks his unblemished record against Kevin Engel (20-7, 16 KO’s), of St. Louis, in an eight-round light heavyweight scrap. Time permitting, Jeffrey Fontanez (10-0, 9 KO’s) of Caguas, P.R., collides with Daniel Attah (27-13-1, 10 KO’s), of Washington, D.C., in a lightweight bout slated for six rounds.
Tickets priced at $150, $100, $75, $50 and $25, plus applicable taxes, fees and services charges, along with a limited number of VIP suite seats priced at $125, are on sale at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Box Office, all Ticketmaster locations, online at www.ticketmaster.com or by phone at (800) 745-3000.
Thursday’s press conference was coming to a quiet and peaceful conclusion when Ken Adams, the veteran Las Vegas trainer of Bogere, stood up from his seat near the dais and asked permission to speak.
“When I watched tapes of your [Abril’s] fights, I couldn’t tell if you were on the track team (because you run so much), or if you were on the wrestling team (because of the way you fight inside),” said Adams, who has worked with numerous world champions including Eddie Cook, Kennedy McKinney, Freddie Norwood, Al Cole, Charles Murray and Stevie Johnson. “The Lion’s last meal is going to be Abril!”
Countered Ricardo Rizzo, Abril’s advisor who was standing off to the side of the dais. “With all due respect to the trainer, Abril isn’t running from anyone and he is ready to fight March 2!”
What the fighters said Thursday:
RICHAR ABRIL:
“I’ve waited for this fight a long time because of the postponements, so I’m happy we’re just two days away.
“I don’t really understand why Bogere talks so much (on Twitter), but I can tell you one thing: on Saturday, I am not going to run.
“I respect Bogere, I respect all fighters, but I’m just saying let’s put on a good show for the fans.
“He’s a lion, but I’m a tiger, and the real king of the jungle is the tiger.”
SHARIF BOGERE:
“I want to thank everyone for being here today. I knew if I stayed positive my time would come and now it’s almost here. I want to thank Golden Boy and my team for making this fight happen.
“On Saturday night, I’m going to take care of business. I’m 100 percent prepared and ready to go. On Saturday, I’ll become champion of the world.”
GARY RUSSELL JR.:
“I think I trained for six and a half or seven weeks, so I am definitely ready to go. I’m looking forward to Saturday, fighting again and fighting on SHOWTIME again.
“I had a good, exciting knockout in my last fight, but I don’t put pressure on myself to duplicate that kind of fight. My job is to perform and win fights.”
VYACHESLAV GUSEV:
“I came all the way from Russia for this fight and I’m here to put on a really great fight. I’ve trained very hard for this. I know Russell is a good fighter. I’m excited about the opportunity that I’m getting.”
JORGE MELENDEZ:
“I’d like to thank Miguel Cotto Promotions and Golden Boy Promotions for the opportunity. I want to thank Ryan Davis for accepting the fight. This victory is dedicated to all of Puerto Rico.”
THOMAS WILLIAMS:
“I want to thank Golden Boy for giving me another opportunity to showcase my skills. Fighting on the undercard of a world title fight brings me a lot more exposure. I’m excited and looking forward to putting on a good show.”
KEVIN ENGEL:
“I’d like to thank Golden Boy for bringing me in for this fight. I think this is a good matchup and that our fight will be the most exciting of the night.”
JEFFREY FONTANEZ:
“It’s a great pleasure for me to be fighting in Las Vegas again. I want to thank my promoters, Miguel Cotto Promotions and Golden Boy for this opportunity. My team has me ready. Like always, I’m very well prepared. I have a tough opponent, but I’ll be the one coming out victorious. I look forward to a good fight.”
ABOUT ABRIL VS. BOGERE:
Abril vs. Bogere, a 12-round fight for Abril’s WBA Lightweight World Championship, will take place Saturday, March 2 at The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The event is promoted by Golden Boy Promotions, sponsored by Corona and will be televised live on SHOWTIME beginning at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT (delayed on the West Coast) with preliminary fights to air live on SHOWTIME EXTREME at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT (delayed on the West Coast). The co-main event will be a 10-round featherweight bout between undefeated phenom Gary Russell Jr. and Russia’s Vyacheslav Gusev.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.
One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.
Take your pick.
The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.
Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.
Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.
If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.
He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.
During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.
Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.
Fundora
Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.
Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.
Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.
Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.
Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?
When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.
This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.
Commerce Casino
Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.
UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.
Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.
It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.
Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?
That’s a question for another day.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).
Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).
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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 11th 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

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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