Roy Jones, Antonio Tarver and Two Gray Birds Who Stare

Published

10 years ago

June 18, 2014

It’s not every day you meet the man who destroyed your childhood hero. I was afforded the opportunity earlier this year in Houston when Antonio Tarver came to town to meet with his public relations firm, ThinkZilla.

This was not a media event. It was him and me, and it was surreal. I make it a point to never meet my childhood idols. In boxing, this would consist of exactly two people: Roy Jones, Jr. and Evander Holyfield. I’ve never had to duck Holyfield, but I’ve been face-to-face with Jones several times over the years. I pass him by as if he were a stranger. I’m not exactly sure why I do this. Is it that I don’t want to be disappointed in someone I looked up to as a kid? Is it that I don’t want him to be disappointed in me? Is it that there’s nothing really to say to him? I don’t know.

But when I learned Tarver had hired ThinkZilla, I contacted them and told them to let me know when he came to town so I could come interview him. I’m always looking for people to talk to for The Sweet Science and Boxing Channel, and honestly, I didn’t immediately connect Tarver to Jones in my mind until the day I was about to meet him.

ThinkZilla’s CEO, Velma Trayham, contacted me Saturday afternoon and told me where to be. I was there within the hour. It hit me hard when he walked into the room. Tarver had effectively destroyed my childhood on May 15, 2003 when he knocked out Jones with one punch at the Mandalay Bay Resort Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I was shaking hands with him.

When I was in my early 20s, I was at a particularly desperate point in my life when I witnessed a miracle. I was a hardcore drug user and I finally wanted help. I was so sick of it all. But that’s not the miracle. Plenty of people go through that.

My dad had dropped me off at what seemed like a thousand miles from nowhere in a little Texas town called Alpine. The thinking behind the move was that I could simply go to college out there and get my life back on track. But Dad was wrong. I quickly found fellow druggies and got right back where I once belonged.

But like I said, one day I was finally sick of all that mess. I was ready to change, but wasn’t quite sure how. I reached out to my parents to try and get into rehab or something but my neither of them wanted to help me. I don’t blame them. I was as trustworthy as a snake.

I was stuck and felt as though I might as well be dead.

I was walking back to the library one day when I saw the miracle. There was a small, gray bird lying dead in one of those big, rectangular ashtrays outside the building. It was an ugly, wretched and dead thing. Like me, I thought. Like me! I could not help but to cry about it. Or maybe I was crying about me. I don’t know. I felt so bad that he had died there like that in those ashes that I took the poor little thing out of there and put him in the green grass where the sunlight could touch him one last time. Soon he would rot and decay, I thought, and it will be as if he’d never been.

I sat there crying. I looked at that bird forever. I do not know if anyone else was around me, though I suppose there were many as I was near a busy walkway. But I cried my desperate little eyes out for that bird and stared at it until my head sunk down so low into my hands that I couldn’t see anymore.

That’s when it happened.

Suddenly, the stiff, dead bird started to regain his color. All of a sudden, he was moving around! I could not believe my eyes. I wiped my tears away and began to laugh from the sheer joy of it all. How could this be? How? He was dead!

Soon the bird stood up on his legs as if he had never been dead at all. He looked at me for a long time. I looked right back at him. It was very peculiar, but I feel like the bird was both thanking me and pitying me at the very same time. Then he flew away into the blue sky.

I wasn’t technically a child the night Tarver knocked out Jones. I was in my early twenties, actually, but I still thought and acted like a one. Believe me. Youth was still served to me in its fullest measure, and while my younger life had experienced a strong serving of pain and suffering, I still maintained a ton of affection for hero-types. It didn’t matter to me whether or not that was a healthy thing, or even if it was truly warranted. That’s just the way it was.

Honestly, part of me still can’t believe Tarver knocked out Jones. How could that even happen? Jones was everything to me. I was nothing and had nothing, but he was everything. He was fast, strong and made everything look so cool. He was the best in the world at what he did.

I didn’t even believe it at first. Tarver knocked him out? With one punch? Was it legit? Was it legal? How could that have possibly happened? It was unfathomable to me. Jones had never come close to tasting defeat. Not really. Up to that point in his career, his lone loss was when he was disqualified for hitting Montell Griffin after he had already put him down on the canvas. He avenged it later with a first round KO of Griffin and made it look easy.

That was Jones. He was Superman.

Jones was the best fighter I’d ever seen. I saw him dominate other fighters the way you might think could only happen in the movies. He knocked out Virgil Hill with a body punch. He played basketball on the same days as he fought. He barley ever lost a round. Heck, I once saw Jones put both hands behind his back before luring a fighter named Glen Kelly in close for the knockout blow.

Jones just couldn’t be touched. He was the best ever. Well, at least to me.

But Tarver didn’t think so. After going 12 rounds with Jones the year prior and losing a majority decision, Tarver was sure he could beat him. In fact, Tarver told me he thought he beat Jones the first time. After all, he threw and landed more punches in the fight, and appeared to control the action throughout.

But Jones had a fairly good excuse, and I believed it. The fight took place just six months after he had moved up to heavyweight to snatch a title belt away from John Ruiz. Jones had to lose 25 pounds to come back down to 175, and he appeared gaunt and listless like never before.

The two met again the very next year.

Jones blamed his subpar performance in the first fight on the weight issue. During the prefight instructions at center of the ring, referee Jay Nady asked if anyone had any questions. Tarver replied, “I got a question. You got any excuses tonight, Roy?” I mean, he said that to Roy Jones, Jr.! Can you believe it? This dude was in trouble! Right? Jones was going to knock him out with one punch!

Things looked good at first. Jones won the first round on all three official scorecards. But during an exchange in the second round, Tarver dropped Jones with a deadly accurate overhand left flush to the chin. Jones went down like he just got hit by a bowling ball. He rose at the count of nine but the fight was rightly waved off when he stumbled across the ring into the ropes like a newborn baby deer.

I was absolutely crushed. Superman was dead. In that one moment, someone who grew up believing Jones was invincible was slapped aside the head with the stark reality of truth: no one is invincible. Not even Jones.

It took much longer than I’d like to admit to get clean after witnessing such an amazing and astonishing miracle, but I eventually did it. I never forgot that little, sweet bird and what he meant to me. But I soon began to doubt exactly what happened that day. How could that bird have been dead? That’s impossible. Right?

But sometime later in my life, maybe in my early 30s, during another particularly desperate moment, it happened again. I was in the side bedroom, the one where I thought my wife and I would have one of our children in someday. But we didn’t have kids after years and years of trying and still haven’t. We may never have them. Such is life.

It was with great horror when I saw it that day: our two dogs playing with a wounded gray bird. It was barely alive and could not fly. It was broken. Like me, I thought. Like me.

I ran outside as fast as I could but it was far too late. That bird was dead. I was so very sad for him. But I had seen a bird come back to life before, so I wondered if it could happen again. I felt so desperate. I found sunlight for the bird atop the back ledge of our fence. I placed him there and prayed for him. Maybe he could be fixed, too.

As you can imagine, it didn’t work. I began to cry. I had been crazy after all. While I wasn’t on drugs when I saw that first bird come back to life, maybe my mind was already so warped that I couldn’t really understand what actually happened that day. Now that I was sober for over 10 years, my brain worked as well as anyone else’s. This broken little bird was dead. He was not coming back to life again. My head sunk down so low into my hands that I couldn’t see anymore.

That’s when it happened. When I lifted my head back up to see him, the bird was gone!

What? Surely, the wind had blown him off the fence and he had fallen down to the ground. Right? Except that there was no wind that day. Still, maybe he just rolled off onto to the ground or something. Maybe I had pushed him off while I was crying or something. I don’t know. I had seen stranger things, so I looked everywhere he could have fallen. I searched frantically for that precious little bird but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere! He was gone.

Then I heard a bird sing.

I looked high above to see a bird sitting on the electrical wire above me. He looked down on me. Again, it was as if he was looking at me with a mixture of thankfulness and pity. The bird flew down towards me from the wire to the fence where I had placed him as if he wanted to get a closer look at me. He stared awhile before flying off again into the deep blue sky.

Meeting Tarver was strange. Now 45 years old, it was interesting to hear him talk about his various exploits, both inside the ring and out. What struck me was how often he seemed to reference that singular moment in time, too.

At one point in our talk, I said something like: I have to tell you, I was one of the people you devastated that night you knocked Jones out. There was an entire generation of people like me who believed he was invincible.

“I know, man,” said Tarver. “I know.”

But here’s the most interesting thing, something I only realized after talking to Tarver. He didn’t knock Jones out my memory that night. Jones will always be Jones to me, the way I can turn on ESPN Classic and see Muhammad Ali being Ali in 1965, or the way I can turn on my iPod and still listen to The Beatles be The Beatles. Things change but they always stay the same.

Recently, it has felt as if my heart is being torn up inside me, bit by bit – I literally feel as if I am being ripped in half from the top down to the bottom. I don’t know why it’s happening. I wish I did, but I don’t. Things that seemed so important seem less so now.

My life seems so small.

But here is the strangest thing: two little gray birds have been coming over to the window where I sit to peck at it with their beaks. It has happened every day for over a week now. It happened twice today as I am writing this. This has never, ever happened before, and I have lived in this house for over six years. But these little gray birds come every day as if they refuse to let me ignore them.

They look at me the same way the other two birds did, with a mixture of thankfulness and pity. Mostly, though, these birds just look at me with their deep, black eyes. They sit there and stare at me. They just stare at me, pecking at the window, and I cry.

Everything ends. But in a way, nothing really ever ends, too. Jones will always be Jones to me. Not the one Tarver knocked out way back then. Not the one who continues to fight long after his sell by date. Not the one recently caught sending nude pictures of himself to a female boxer named Stacey Reile.

No, Jones will always be Jones to me, the one I thought was Superman. And sure, the wisdom that comes with age and experience tell me heroes and such are silly matters, little and worldly trifles that shouldn’t really mean anything to me as I grow older.

But to the wonderfully fragile part of me, the one that believes dead things will live again someday, that doesn’t matter at all.

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Kelsey McCarson

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

3 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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