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Notes and Nuggets

Boxrec.com is boxing’s indispensable website and the most heavily-trafficked boxing website in the world. Its main competition (such as it is) comes from Fight Fax, which is the only record-keeper whose reports are officially accepted by members of the Association of Boxing Commissions in the United States. Boxrec is free to users. Fight Fax is a pay-for-use service.
Every state athletic commission in America is required by law to send bout results, suspensions, and federal ID numbers to Fight Fax (as are ABC associate members in Canada). Boxrec tries to get this information. Some commissions provide it to the site as a matter of course. Some send it upon request. A few commissions refuse to send the information to Boxrec even when asked.
ABC president Tim Lueckenhoff says, “All our member commissions have been asked to submit results to both Boxrec and Fight Fax. I believe it is even contained in the minutes of the ABC meeting from South Carolina several years ago. However, some commission refuse to send those results [to Boxrec]. There are just a handful that I am aware of. I think all commissions use Boxrec as a reference, but not as the official record keeper. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the sport for all commissions to send their results to both. It is just a few key strokes to get that done, as we all know.””
New Jersey, by virtue of its hosting fights in Atlantic City, is the most visible of the states that refuse to send bout results and suspensions to Boxrec. Neither Aaron Davis (director of the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board) nor Deputy Attorney General Nick Lembo (counsel for the NJSACB) returned telephone calls asking about the reasons for their refusal.
Perhaps that’s because there’s no good explanation.
* * *
The Nevada State Athletic Commission embarrassed itself on February 28, 2013, when it fined Julio Cesar Chavez Jr $900,000 and suspended him for nine months because he tested positive for marijuana use after his September 15, 2012, fight against Sergio Martinez.
Chavez, of course, started the idiocy when he smoked grass and, after testing positive, proclaimed, “I have never smoked marijuana. For years, I have had insomnia, so I went to the doctor and he prescribed some drops for me that contained cannabis. I stopped taking them before the fight with Martinez, and I didn’t think I was going to test positive.”
Then the grandstanding WBC got into the act, announcing on October 3, 2012, that it had fined Chavez $20,000 and ordered him to enter a drug rehabilitation center.
Chavez responded, “I do not condone what the World Boxing Council said, about their desire to send me to rehab. That’s for drug addicts, and I’m not. The Council has not even seen me. How can they say that?”
Perhaps some of the people who pull the strings at the WBC could enter an eating disorder clinic.
But back to Nevada.
Last week, Chavez belatedly and penitently explained his marijuana use to the Nevada State Athletic Commission as follows: “I was told it would help my stress. I was tense for the fight and someone mentioned it to me and that’s why I did it eight or nine days before the fight. I couldn’t tell you the exact reason why I did it. I just can tell you I was under a lot of stress and had family problems, a lot of things going on in my life. It was the biggest mistake and I’ll never do it again.”
Chavez also told the commission that he hadn’t smoked marijuana before any other fight, but declined to say whether he’d smoked marijuana at any time in his life other than “eight or nine days” before the Martinez fight.
Nine hundred thousand dollars? For smoking marijuana?
Let’s get real! What do you think would happen if all NSAC commissioners and commission employees were subjected to random testing for recreational drug use?
As for the WBC; maybe Jose Sulaiman and his executive committee will ask the Nevada commission for three percent of the $900,000 fine as a sanctioning fee.
* * *
With the baseball season fast approaching, it seems appropriate to reference what Top Rank’s extraordinary director of public relations Lee Samuels describes as his greatest moment in sports outside of boxing.
“I played second base for the Kurland’s Drug Store team in the Pennsville [New Jersey] Little League,” Samuels recalls. “We wore white jerseys with blue trim. Across the front, it said “Kurland’s.” I was very proud to wear that jersey. I couldn’t hit or field well, but I loved being on the team.”
“My father was a rough guy,” Lee continues. “He wasn’t a people person. He’d been in the Army for seven years and fought in World War II. When I was growing up, he watched wrestling on television every Friday night and loved it. We played catch occasionally, but that was about all. We never went to a ballgame together or anything like that. And he’d never come to any of my games.”
“This time, I rode my bike to the game. And there he was, standing on the first baseline. In my first at bat, I hit the hardest ball I’d ever hit. It bounced over the fence in left field for a ground-rule double. That was it as far as moments of glory are concerned. To be honest, I don’t think I ever hit a home run. A few years later, I got to high school and saw my first curve ball. I just stood there and said to myself, ‘Oh, my God. This isn’t going to work.’ That’s when I stopped playing baseball and started writing.”
* * *
Do you remember when Manny Pacquiao was criticized in some circles because he supposedly was avoiding “slick African-American fighters” as opponents?
Floyd Mayweather has fought one African-American opponent (an aging Shane Mosley) since April 2006. And Adrien Broner, who’s being touted as Mayweather’s heir apparent, has faced only one African American (John Redish) in his last fourteen fights. In fact, as best I can tell, “The Problem” has fought only five African Americans (Henry White Jr, Eric Ricker, Terrance Jett, and Allante Davis being the others) in his entire 26-bout pro career. As of this writing, those five Broner opponents have a composite ring record of 21 wins in 69 fights.
* * *
THINGS YOU’LL NEVER READ ON A BOXING WEBSITE
Our regular baby-sitter isn’t available, so we’ve asked Roger Mayweather to take care of the kids tonight.
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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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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