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Boyd Melson: An Atypical Fighter
People tend to stereotype fighters. Boyd Melson is not your average fighter. Then again, he’s not your average West Point graduate or your average Jewish kid from Westchester or your average anything.
Melson’s maternal grandparents were born in Poland and were Holocaust survivors. His grandfather escaped from a train that was en route to an extermination camp and joined the Russian Army in the war against Nazi Germany. His father, who spent 26 years in the United States military, is Louisiana Creole with African-American, French, Spanish, and Cherokee roots. Boyd’s sister is an officer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Group. His brother is in a public health doctoral program at New York Medical College.
Melson is thoughtful, affable, and a talker. “I was raised as a black male, and I’m Jewish,” he says. “But I’m open to different religions.” Then he elaborates, saying, “Religions are the same in a lot of ways. They’re just written differently. I believe that the highest power in the world is love. I believe that God exists in every one of us, but it’s not Him or Her or It that’s making things happen. It helps us to think that someone else is responsible for what goes on because it takes the burden off of us. But we’re all responsible for what we do and who we are. Bad things can happen for no good reason or because someone planned them to happen. You can ask, ‘Why do people get cancer?’ But you can also ask, ‘Why do people do bad things to each other?’ Good things are the same way. Some good things happen by accident and some good things happen by design. Loving human beings is my identity. I take that very seriously. Everything else in my life complements that.”
Those thoughts might sound incongruous coming from a professonal fighter, particularly one who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. After all, the sweet science and the United States Army aren’t the first things that come to mind when the average person thinks of “love.” But they’re part of the mosaic that’s Melson’s life.
West Point was a transformative experience for him.
“I’d heard stories about plebe year at West Point and thought getting yelled at would be funny,” Melson recalls. “That lasted about ten minutes. Then shock set in. I can’t really explain what the experience was like. But in the end, West Point teaches you to believe in yourself. You learn to sift through the crap to get to your objective. You learn that, no matter how bad something is, it will pass. You develop confidence that, no matter bad things are, you’ll find a way to get to where you want to be. You learn how to handle stress with everything – I mean everything – on the line.”
As part of the West Point curriculum, all plebes (first-year cadets) are required to take a boxing class that consists of twenty 45-minute lessons. The last four classes are graded bouts. Each plebe engages in four bouts with two one-minute rounds in each contest.
The purpose of the class isn’t to teach boxing skills as much as it’s to instill mental toughness; to teach young men to face their fears and prepare them for that moment down the road in military combat when they have only themselves to rely on.
“When you’re in combat,” Melson explains, “it’s not about American freedom at that particular moment in time. It’s about you and your buddies surviving. In boxing, you’re trying to hurt someone to win, and that person is trying to hurt you. You learn to think and make decisions under stress. You train your mind to not give up before your body does. Military combat is far more serious than boxing, but some of the demands are the same.”
Melson won all four of his plebe bouts and went from there into intramural boxing. Then he joined the intercollegiate boxing team.
“Eventually,” he recalls, “word began filtering through the ranks that this crazy plebe was knocking people out.”
Melson graduated from West Point in 2003. His first assignment after matriculation was to teach plebe boxing at West Point. Then, after four-and-a-half months of artillery school, he was assigned to the U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program, which trains Army personnel to compete at the national and international level with the ultimate goal of making the United States Olympic Team. He won numerous amateur honors and was a four-time United States Army champion.
Melson stopped boxing in November 2007 after failing to qualify for the United States Olympic Team. On May 31, 2008, he completed his five-year military commitment and took a job in corporate America, selling spinal implants for Medtronic (a leader in the development and manufacture of medical devices).
The new career fit nicely with a passion that Boyd had developed over time. On June 22, 2002, toward the end of his junior year at West Point, he’d met a woman named Christan Zaccagnino at a dance club. Christan had been wheelchair-bound since age ten after breaking her neck in a diving accident.
A relationship followed. And while Boyd and Christan haven’t been romantically involved since 2009, he still describes her as his “soulmate.”
Melson’s relationship with Christan led him to become a forceful advocate for stem-cell research.
“I’ve spent the past twelve years of my life trying to help Christan walk again,” Boyd says. “And that effort has turned into a quest to get all people who’ve suffered spinal cord injuries out of their chairs. I’ve spent a lot of time educating myself on paralysis and neurology and neuroscience and stem cells so I can understand the issues.”
“The hypocrisy and ignorance that surrounds the political debate over stem-cell research is incredibly frustrating to me,” Melson continues. “People are so ignorant on the issue. To give you one example; stem cells don’t just come from abortions. Stem cells can come from umbilical cords after a baby is born. One reason I wanted to make the U.S. Olympic Team was I’d heard that, if you won a gold medal, you’d get to shake hands with the President of the United States. I had a vision of winning a gold medal, meeting George Bush at the White House, and shaking hands with him so hard that it crushed the nerves in his hand and he needed stem-cell treatment to get the function back in his hand. Would I really have done it? Probably not. But I would have wanted to. And I have a very strong grip.”
Melson left Medtronic after two years and took a job as a medical device sales representative for Johnson & Johnson. “But over time,” he says, “a sadness came over me. I couldn’t figure it out. And then I realized it was because I was no longer trying to do something amazing and different from anyone else. I wanted to do something special. That meant I wanted to box again.”
Boyd resumed training in summer 2010 and turned pro with a four-round triumph over Andrew Jones on November 20 of that year. His professional record to date is 14 wins against 1 loss and a draw with 4 knockouts. The loss came by decision in an eight-round war against Delen Parsley. Melson was on the canvas once and Parsley twice.
Melson’s primary income now comes from teaching boxing and physical conditioning classes at Equinox (a national health club) and training a handful of private clients. He donates his fight purses to justadollarplease.org, a non-profit organization that raises funds for research at The Spinal Cord Injury Project at the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience (affiliated with Rutgers University). In addition, Boyd and Christan have co-founded Team Fight to Walk, a 501(c)(3) corporation that raises money for Just A Dollar Please and will continue to support other research ventures after the clinical trials at Rutgers are complete.
“When Christopher Reeve died, we lost our celebrity,” Melson says. “I’m fighting to get attention, but not for myself. It’s for the cause.”
What sort of a future does Melson have in boxing?
He’s a 32-year-old southpaw without much power who gets hit too much.
“I don’t see him cracking the top ten in any legitimate rankings,” Showtime boxing analyst Steve Farhood says. “But he’s a great guy. And for his own sense of competitiveness, I hope he gets the chance to test himself at least once in the bigtime.”
Ron Katz, one of the savviest matchmakers in the business, is in accord and adds, “Very few people are blessed with the physical gifts you need to be a great fighter. Boyd doesn’t have those gifts. But he enjoys boxing. He does the best he can with what he has and gives it his all. There are far more talented fighters out there who don’t bring honor to the sport the way Boyd does.”
“I’m boxing because there’s so much that I love about it,” Melson says. “I love the the physical and the intellectual competition, the me versus you. It’s competition in its most basic form. You have to be willing to suffer in training to get to where you want to be. You have to be a masochist to do what you have to do. You have to be cruel to yourself to be a fighter. If you’re not pushing yourself to misery, you’re not preparing yourself properly.”
“For me, there’s always that moment in the dressing room before a fight when they bring the gloves in. I say to myself, ‘I must be crazy; I’m never doing this again.’ But at the same time, I want to get in the ring so I can make happen what I want to happen. Then I get in the ring. My adrenalin is flowing. I know I’m going to get hurt; it’s just a question of how much. I get hit in the face. And unless it’s on the nose or in the eye, it feels like pressure, that’s all. Getting hit on the back of the head hurts. Getting hit in the throat, sometimes I can’t breathe. All body shots hurt.”
And what goes through Melson’s mind when he hits someone?
“I hope I hurt him. In the military, very often, you’re trying to kill people. In boxing – let’s be honest about this – you’re trying to hurt people. Before the world was civilized, we were here to survive and procreate. Boxing brings you back to that. To survive, you conquer. But in both disciplines – military combat and boxing – you rely on brotherhood and you’re surrounded by love. You can only tap in to a certain level with anger, and then it runs dry. You can tap in deeper with love.”
Would Melson be boxing if he’d been deployed in the military and seen combat?
“I don’t know,” he answers. “I might have come back angry and had an even greater need to fight. Or I might have come back and said ‘that’s enough.’”
Melson is now slated to fight Glen Tapia on the undercard of Gennady Golovkin vs. Daniel Geale at Madison Square Garden on July 26. A lot of people who care about Boyd don’t like the fight.
Tapia is 24 years old with a 21-and 1 record and 13 knockouts. His one loss was a brutal beatdown at the hands of James Kirkland in Atlantic City last December. But before being stopped, Tapia had Kirkland in trouble.
Boyd is on the card because he sells tickets. For the first time in his pro career, he’ll be a heavy underdog.
“I know I’m the opponent going in,” Melson says. “But it’s a dream of mine to fight at Madison Square Garden. I’ve fought at Barclays Center twice and Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City twice. Those are great places but they’re not the Garden. I don’t know how far I’ll go in boxing, but this is an opportunity for me to get to the next level. I want to be on the card and I’m willing to be the B-side fighter. It’s an opportunity for me to test myself and build on what I accomplished in my last fight.”
That fight took place on February 12 at Roseland Ballroom in New York against a club fighter named Donald Ward. It was supposed to be an easy victory for Melson. But in round three, he injured his brachial plexus (a network of nerve fibers running from the spine through his neck into his right arm).
“The pain was excruciating,” Boyd recalls. “I couldn’t control my arm. I couldn’t feel my fingers in my glove. I thought I was having a stroke. My first thought was, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to my body. I’m scared. I have to quit.’ I started to turn to take a knee. Then I thought about my training at West Point. To survive in combat and in the ring, you slow time down around you when, in reality, real time is taking place. You gut it out and do whatever you have to do to survive. That’s what I try to do for every second of every fight. That’s what I did that night.”
From that point on, Melson was a wounded soldier. “I was barely able to move my right arm,” he recalls. “I landed only one good right hand all night after that – a right hook – and it almost threw me into shock.”
But he survived and won a majority decision.
“Of all my fights, that’s the one that’s the most meaningful to me,” Boyd says. “It confirmed what I’ve always believed about myself; that I can overcome the worst kind of adversity and do what I have to do to prevail. The idea of quitting kept trying to creep into my head. But I was able to block out worrying about my injury and stay in the moment when I couldn’t move my arm and didn’t know what had happened to me and suppress the fear and do what I had to do to win. It’s not just about how far I can go in boxing. It’s about testing myself and enjoying the journey.”
“I love boxing,” Melson says, summing up. “It’s the ultimate experience for testing physical ability and intelligence under threat of the greatest adverse consequences possible short of death. And I love being called upon to comport myself with dignity when I’m in the spotlght, competing in a sport that some people think is barbaric but I think is wonderful.”
Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His most recent book (Reflections: Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings) was published by the University of Arkansas Press.
People tend to stereotype fighters. Boyd Melson is not your average fighter. Then again, he’s not your average West Point graduate or your average Jewish kid from Westchester or your average anything.
Melson’s maternal grandparents were born in Poland and were Holocaust survivors. His grandfather escaped from a train that was en route to an extermination camp and joined the Russian Army in the war against Nazi Germany. His father, who spent 26 years in the United States military, is Louisiana Creole with African-American, French, Spanish, and Cherokee roots. Boyd’s sister is an officer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Group. His brother is in a public health doctoral program at New York Medical College.
Melson is thoughtful, affable, and a talker. “I was raised as a black male, and I’m Jewish,” he says. “But I’m open to different religions.” Then he elaborates, saying, “Religions are the same in a lot of ways. They’re just written differently. I believe that the highest power in the world is love. I believe that God exists in every one of us, but it’s not Him or Her or It that’s making things happen. It helps us to think that someone else is responsible for what goes on because it takes the burden off of us. But we’re all responsible for what we do and who we are. Bad things can happen for no good reason or because someone planned them to happen. You can ask, ‘Why do people get cancer?’ But you can also ask, ‘Why do people do bad things to each other?’ Good things are the same way. Some good things happen by accident and some good things happen by design. Loving human beings is my identity. I take that very seriously. Everything else in my life complements that.”
Those thoughts might sound incongruous coming from a professonal fighter, particularly one who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. After all, the sweet science and the United States Army aren’t the first things that come to mind when the average person thinks of “love.” But they’re part of the mosaic that’s Melson’s life.
West Point was a transformative experience for him.
“I’d heard stories about plebe year at West Point and thought getting yelled at would be funny.” Melson recalls. “That lasted about ten minutes. Then shock set in. I can’t really explain what the experience was like. But in the end, West Point teaches you to believe in yourself. You learn to sift through the crap to get to your objective. You learn that, no matter how bad something is, it will pass. You develop confidence that, no matter bad things are, you’ll find a way to get to where you want to be. You learn how to handle stress with everything – I mean everything – on the line.”
As part of the West Point curriculum, all plebes (first-year cadets) are required to take a boxing class that consists of twenty 45-minute lessons. The last four classes are graded bouts. Each plebe engages in four bouts with two one-minute rounds in each contest.
The purpose of the class isn’t to teach boxing skills as much as it’s to instill mental toughness; to teach young men to face their fears and prepare them for that moment down the road in military combat when they have only themselves to rely on.
“When you’re in combat,” Melson explains, “it’s not about American freedom at that particular moment in time. It’s about you and your buddies surviving. In boxing, you’re trying to hurt someone to win, and that person is trying to hurt you. You learn to think and make decisions under stress. You train your mind to not give up before your body does. Military combat is far more serious than boxing, but some of the demands are the same.”
Melson won all four of his plebe bouts and went from there into intramural boxing. Then he joined the intercollegiate boxing team.
“Eventually,” he recalls, “word began filtering through the ranks that this crazy plebe was knocking people out.”
Melson graduated from West Point in 2003. His first assignment after matriculation was to teach plebe boxing at West Point. Then, after four-and-a-half months of artillery school, he was assigned to the U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program, which trains Army personnel to compete at the national and international level with the ultimate goal of making the United States Olympic Team. He won numerous amateur honors and was a four-time United States Army champion.
Melson stopped boxing in November 2007 after failing to qualify for the United States Olympic Team. On May 31, 2008, he completed his five-year military commitment and took a job in corporate America, selling spinal implants for Medtronic (a leader in the development and manufacture of medical devices).
The new career fit nicely with a passion that Boyd had developed over time. On June 22, 2002, toward the end of his junior year at West Point, he’d met a woman named Christan Zaccagnino at a dance club. Christan had been wheelchair-bound since age ten after breaking her neck in a diving accident.
A relationship followed. And while Boyd and Christan haven’t been romantically involved since 2009, he still describes her as his “soulmate.”
Melson’s relationship with Christan led him to become a forceful advocate for stem-cell research.
“I’ve spent the past twelve years of my life trying to help Christan walk again,” Boyd says. “And that effort has turned into a quest to get all people who’ve suffered spinal cord injuries out of their chairs. I’ve spent a lot of time educating myself on paralysis and neurology and neuroscience and stem cells so I can understand the issues.”
“The hypocrisy and ignorance that surrounds the political debate over stem-cell research is incredibly frustrating to me,” Melson continues. “People are so ignorant on the issue. To give you one example; stem cells don’t just come from abortions. Stem cells can come from umbilical cords after a baby is born. One reason I wanted to make the U.S. Olympic Team was I’d heard that, if you won a gold medal, you’d get to shake hands with the President of the United States. I had a vision of winning a gold medal, meeting George Bush at the White House, and shaking hands with him so hard that it crushed the nerves in his hand and he needed stem-cell treatment to get the function back in his hand. Would I really have done it? Probably not. But I would have wanted to. And I have a very strong grip.”
Melson left Medtronic after two years and took a job as a medical device sales representative for Johnson & Johnson. “But over time,” he says, “a sadness came over me. I couldn’t figure it out. And then I realized it was because I was no longer trying to do something amazing and different from anyone else. I wanted to do something special. That meant I wanted to box again.”
Boyd resumed training in summer 2010 and turned pro with a four-round triumph over Andrew Jones on November 20 of that year. His professional record to date is 14 wins against 1 loss and a draw with 4 knockouts. The loss came by decision in an eight-round war against Delen Parsley. Melson was on the canvas once and Parsley twice.
Melson’s primary income now comes from teaching boxing and physical conditioning classes at Equinox (a national health club) and training a handful of private clients. He donates his fight purses to justadollarplease.org, a non-profit organization that raises funds for research at The Spinal Cord Injury Project at the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience (affiliated with Rutgers University). In addition, Boyd and Christan have co-founded Team Fight to Walk, a 501(c)(3) corporation that raises money for Just A Dollar Please and will continue to support other research ventures after the clinical trials at Rutgers are complete.
“When Christopher Reeve died, we lost our celebrity,” Melson says. “I’m fighting to get attention, but not for myself. It’s for the cause.”
What sort of a future does Melson have in boxing?
He’s a 32-year-old southpaw without much power who gets hit too much.
“I don’t see him cracking the top ten in any legitimate rankings,” Showtime boxing analyst Steve Farhood says. “But he’s a great guy. And for his own sense of competitiveness, I hope he gets the chance to test himself at least once in the bigtime.”
Ron Katz (one of the savviest matchmakers in the business) is in accord and adds, “Very few people are blessed with the physical gifts you need to be a great fighter. Boyd doesn’t have those gifts. But he enjoys boxing. He does the best he can with what he has and gives it his all. There are far more talented fighters out there who don’t bring honor to the sport the way Boyd does.”
“I’m boxing because there’s so much that I love about it,” Melson says. “I love the the physical and the intellectual competition, the me versus you. It’s competition in its most basic form. You have to be willing to suffer in training to get to where you want to be. You have to be a masochist to do what you have to do. You have to be cruel to yourself to be a fighter. If you’re not pushing yourself to misery, you’re not preparing yourself properly.”
“For me, there’s always that moment in the dressing room before a fight when they bring the gloves in. I say to myself, ‘I must be crazy; I’m never doing this again.’ But at the same time, I want to get in the ring so I can make happen what I want to happen. Then I get in the ring. My adrenalin is flowing. I know I’m going to get hurt; it’s just a question of how much. I get hit in the face. And unless it’s on the nose or in the eye, it feels like pressure, that’s all. Getting hit on the back of the head hurts. Getting hit in the throat, sometimes I can’t breathe. All body shots hurt.”
And what goes through Melson’s mind when he hits someone?
“I hope I hurt him. In the military, very often, you’re trying to kill people. In boxing – let’s be honest about this – you’re trying to hurt people. Before the world was civilized, we were here to survive and procreate. Boxing brings you back to that. To survive, you conquer. But in both disciplines – military combat and boxing – you rely on brotherhood and you’re surrounded by love. You can only tap in to a certain level with anger, and then it runs dry. You can tap in deeper with love.”
Would Melson be boxing if he’d been deployed in the military and seen combat?
“I don’t know,” he answers. “I might have come back angry and had an even greater need to fight. Or I might have come back and said ‘that’s enough.’”
Melson is now slated to fight Glen Tapia on the undercard of Gennady Golovkin vs. Daniel Geale at Madison Square Garden on July 26. A lot of people who care about Boyd don’t like the fight.
Tapia is 24 years old with a 21-and 1 record and 13 knockouts. His one loss was a brutal beatdown at the hands of James Kirkland in Atlantic City last December. But before being stopped, Tapia had Kirkland in trouble.
Boyd is on the card because he sells tickets. For the first time in his pro career, he’ll be a heavy underdog.
“I know I’m the opponent going in,” Melson says. “But it’s a dream of mine to fight at Madison Square Garden. I’ve fought at Barclays Center twice and Boardway Hall in Atlantic City twice. Those are great places but they’re not the Garden. I don’t know how far I’ll go in boxing, but this is an opportunity for me to get to the next level. I want to be on the card and I’m willing to be the B-side fighter. It’s an opportunity for me to test myself and build on what I accomplished in my last fight.”
That fight took place on February 12 at Roseland Ballroom in New York against a club fighter named Donald Ward. It was supposed to be an easy victory for Melson. But in round three, he injured his brachial plexus (a network of nerve fibers running from the spine through his neck into his right arm).
“The pain was excruciating,” Boyd recalls. “I couldn’t control my arm. I couldn’t feel my fingers in my glove. I thought I was having a stroke. My first thought was, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to my body. I’m scared. I have to quit.’ I started to turn to take a knee. Then I thought about my training at West Point. To survive in combat and in the ring, you slow time down around you when, in reality, real time is taking place. You gut it out and do whatever you have to do to survive. That’s what I try to do for every second of every fight. That’s what I did that night.”
From that point on, Melson was a wounded soldier. “I was barely able to move my right arm,” he recalls. “I landed only one good right hand all night after that – a right hook – and it almost threw me into shock.”
But he survived and won a majority decision.
“Of all my fights, that’s the one that’s the most meaningful to me,” Boyd says. “It confirmed what I’ve always believed about myself; that I can overcome the worst kind of adversity and do what I have to do to prevail. The idea of quitting kept trying to creep into my head. But I was able to block out worrying about my injury and stay in the moment when I couldn’t move my arm and didn’t know what had happened to me and suppress the fear and do what I had to do to win. It’s not just about how far I can go in boxing. It’s about testing myself and enjoying the journey.”
“I love boxing,” Melson says, summing up. “It’s the ultimate experience for testing physical ability and intelligence under threat of the greatest adverse consequences possible short of death. And I love being called upon to comport myself with dignity when I’m in the spotlght, competing in a sport that some people think is barbaric but I think is wonderful.”
Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His most recent book (Reflections: Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings) was published by the University of Arkansas Press.
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Niyomtrong Proves a Bridge Too Far for Alex Winwood in Australia
Today in Perth, Australia, Alex Winwood stepped up in class in his fifth pro fight with the aim of becoming the fastest world title-holder in Australian boxing history. But Winwood (4-0, 2 KOs heading in) wasn’t ready for WBA strawweight champion Thammanoon Niyomtrong, aka Knockout CP Freshmart, who by some accounts is the longest reigning champion in the sport.
Niyomtrong (25-0, 9 KOs) prevailed by a slim margin to retain his title. “At least the right guy won,” said prominent Australian boxing writer Anthony Cocks who thought the scores (114-112, 114-112, 113-113) gave the hometown fighter all the best of it.
Winwood, who represented Australia in the Tokyo Olympics, trained for the match in Thailand (as do many foreign boxers in his weight class). He is trained by Angelo Hyder who also worked with Danny Green and the Moloney twins. Had he prevailed, he would have broken the record of Australian boxing icon Jeff Fenech who won a world title in his seventh pro fight. A member of the Noongar tribe, Winwood, 27, also hoped to etch on his name on the list of notable Australian aboriginal boxers alongside Dave Sands, Lionel Rose and the Mundines, Tony and Anthony, father and son.
What Winwood, 27, hoped to capitalize on was Niyomtrong’s theoretical ring rust. The Thai was making his first start since July 20 of 2022 when he won a comfortable decision over Wanheng Menayothin in one of the most ballyhooed domestic showdowns in Thai boxing history. But the Noongar needed more edges than that to overcome the Thai who won his first major title in his ninth pro fight with a hard-fought decision over Nicaragua’s Carlos Buitrago who was 27-0-1 heading in.
A former Muai Thai champion, Niyomtrong/Freshmart turns 34 later this month, an advanced age for a boxer in the sport’s smallest weight class. Although he remains undefeated, he may have passed his prime. How good was he in his heyday? Prominent boxing historian Matt McGrain has written that he was the most accomplished strawweight in the world in the decade 2010-2019: “It is not close, it is not debatable, there is no argument.”
Against the intrepid Winwood, Niyomtrong started slowly. In round seven, he cranked up the juice, putting the local fighter down hard with a left hook. He added another knockdown in round nine. The game Winwood stayed the course, but was well-beaten at the finish, no matter that the scorecards suggested otherwise, creating the impression of a very close fight.
P.S. – Because boxrec refused to name this a title fight, it fell under the radar screen until the result was made known. In case you hadn’t noticed, boxrec is at loggerheads with the World Boxing Association and has decided to “de-certify” the oldest of the world sanctioning bodies. While this reporter would be happy to see the WBA disappear – it is clearly the most corrupt of the four major organizations – the view from here is that boxrec is being petty. Moreover, if this practice continues, it will be much harder for boxing historians of future generations to sort through the rubble.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 295: Callum Walsh, Pechanga Casino Fights and More
Super welterweight contender Callum Walsh worked out for reporters and videographers at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Thursday,
The native of Ireland Walsh (11-0, 9 KOs) has a fight date against Poland’s Przemyslaw Runowski (22-2-1, 6 KOs) on Friday, Sept. 20 at the city of Dublin. It’s a homecoming for the undefeated southpaw from Cork. UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card.
Mark down the date.
Walsh is the latest prodigy of promoter Tom Loeffler who has a history of developing European boxers in America and propelling them forward on the global boxing scene. Think Gennady “Triple G” Golovkin and you know what I mean.
Golovkin was a middleweight monster for years.
From Kevin Kelley to Oba Carr to Vitaly Klitschko to Serhii Bohachuk and many more in-between, the trail of elite boxers promoted by Loeffler continues to grow. Will Walsh be the newest success?
Add to the mix Dana White, the maestro of UFC, who is also involved with Walsh and you get a clearer picture of what the Irish lad brings to the table.
Walsh has speed, power and a glint of meanness that champions need to navigate the prizefighting world. He also has one of the best trainers in the world in Freddie Roach who needs no further introduction.
Perhaps the final measure of Walsh will be when he’s been tested with the most important challenge of all:
Can he take a punch from a big hitter?
That’s the final challenge
It always comes down to the chin. It’s what separates the Golovkins from the rest of the pack. At the top of the food chain they all can hit, have incredible speed and skill, but the fighters with the rock hard chins are those that prevail.
So far, the chin test is the only examination remaining for Walsh.
“King’ Callum Walsh is ready for his Irish homecoming and promises some fireworks for the Irish fans. This will be an entertaining show for the fans and we are excited to bring world class boxing back to the 3Arena in Dublin,” said Loeffler.
Pechanga Fights
MarvNation Promotions presents a battle between welterweight contenders Jose “Chon” Zepeda (37-5, 28 KOs) and Ivan Redkach (24-7-1, 19 KOs) on Friday, Sept. 6, at Pechanga Resort and Casino in Temecula. DAZN will stream the fight card.
Both have fought many of the best welterweights in the world and now face each other. It should be an interesting clash between the veterans.
Also on the card, featherweights Nathan Rodriguez (15-0) and Bryan Mercado (11-5-1) meet in an eight-round fight.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. First bout at 7 p.m.
Monster Inoue
Once again Japan’s Naoya Inoue dispatched another super bantamweight contender with ease as TJ Doheny was unable to continue in the seventh round after battered by a combination on Tuesday in Tokyo.
Inoue continues to brush away whoever is placed in front of him like a glint of dust.
Is the “Monster” the best fighter pound-for-pound on the planet or is it Terence Crawford? Both are dynamic punchers with skill, speed, power and great chins.
Munguia in Big Bear
Super middleweight contender Jaime Munguia is two weeks away from his match with Erik Bazinyan at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona. ESPN will show the Top Rank card.
“Erik Bazinyan is a good fighter. He’s undefeated. He switches stances. We need to be careful with that. He’s taller and has a longer reach than me. He has a good jab. He can punch well on the inside. He’s a fighter who comes with all the desire to excel,” said Munguia.
Bazinyan has victories over Ronald Ellis and Alantez Fox.
In case you didn’t know, Munguia moved over to Top Rank but still has ties with Golden Boy Promotions and Zanfer Promotions. Bazinyan is promoted by Eye of the Tiger.
This is the Tijuana fighter’s first match with Top Rank since losing to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last May in Las Vegas. He is back with trainer Erik Morales.
Callum Walsh photo credit: Lina Baker
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60 Years Ago This Month, the Curtain Fell on the Golden Era of TV Boxing
The Sept. 11, 1964 fight between Dick Tiger and Don Fullmer marked the end of an era. The bout aired on ABC which had taken the reins from NBC four years earlier. This would be the final episode of the series informally known as the “Friday Night Fights” or the “Fight of the Week,” closing the door on a 20-year run. In the future, boxing on free home TV (non-cable) would be sporadic, airing mostly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The days when boxing was a weekly staple on at least one major TV network were gone forever.
During the NBC years, the show ran on Friday in the 10:00-11-00 pm slot for viewers in the Eastern Time Zone and the “studio” was almost always Madison Square Garden. The sponsor from the very beginning was the Gillette razor company (during the ABC run, El Producto Cigars came on as a co-sponsor).
Gillette sponsored many sporting events – the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the U.S. Open golf tournament and the Blue-Gray college football all-star game, to name just a few – all of which were bundled under the handle of the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Every sports fan in America could identify the catchphrase that the company used to promote their disposable “Blue Blades” – “Look Sharp, Feel Sharp, Be Sharp!” — and the melody of the Gillette jingle would become the most-played tune by marching bands at high school and college football halftime shows (the precursor, one might say, of the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie”).
The Sept. 11 curtain-closer wasn’t staged at Madison Square Garden but in Cleveland with the local area blacked out.
Dick Tiger, born and raised in Nigeria, was making his second start since losing his world middleweight title on a 15-round points decision to Joey Giardello. Don Fullmer would be attempting to restore the family honor. Dick Tiger was 2-0-1 vs. Gene Fullmer, Don’s more celebrated brother. Their third encounter, which proved to be Gene Fullmer’s final fight, was historic. It was staged in Ibadan, Nigeria, the first world title fight ever potted on the continent of Africa.
In New York, the epitaph of free TV boxing was written three weeks earlier when veteran Henry Hank fought up-and-comer Johnny Persol to a draw in a 10-round light heavyweight contest at the Garden. This was the final Gillette fight from the place where it all started.
Some historians trace the advent of TV boxing in the United States to Sept. 29, 1944, when a 20-year-old boxer from Connecticut, Willie Pep, followed his manager’s game plan to perfection, sticking and moving for 15 rounds to become the youngest featherweight champion in history, winning the New York version of the title from West Coast veteran Albert “Chalky” Wright.
There weren’t many TVs in use in those days. As had been true when the telephone was brand new, most were found in hospitals, commercial establishments, and in the homes of the very wealthy. But within a few years, with mass production and tumbling prices, the gizmo became a living room staple and the TV repairman, who made house calls like the family doctor, had a shop on every Main Street.
Boxing was ideally suited to the infant medium of television because the action was confined to a small area that required no refurbishment other than brighter illumination, keeping production costs low. The one-minute interval between rounds served as a natural commercial break. The main drawback was that a fight could end early, meaning fewer commercials for the sponsor who paid a flat rate.
At its zenith, boxing in some locales aired five nights a week. And it came to be generally seen that this oversaturation killed the golden goose. One by one, the small fight clubs dried up as fight fans stayed home to watch the fights on TV. In the big arenas, attendance fell off drastically. Note the difference between Pep vs. Wright, the 1944 originator, and Hank vs. Persol, also at Madison Square Garden:
Willie Pep vs. Chalky Wright Sept. 29, 1944 attendance 19,521
Henry Hank vs. Johnny Persol Aug. 21, 1964 attendance 5,219
(True, Pep vs. Wright was a far more alluring fight, but this fact alone doesn’t explain the wide gap. Published attendance counts aren’t always trustworthy. In the eyes of the UPI reporter who covered the Hank-Persol match, the crowd looked smaller. He estimated the attendance at 3,000.)
Hank vs. Persol was an entertaining bout between evenly-matched combatants. The Tiger-Fullmer bout, which played out before a sea of empty seats, was a snoozer. Don Fullmer, a late sub for Rocky Rivero who got homesick and returned to Argentina, was there just for the paycheck. A Pittsburgh reporter wrote that the match was as dull as a race between two turtles. Scoring off the “5-point-must” system, the judges awarded the match to Dick Tiger by margins of 6, 6, and 7 points.
And that was that. Some of the most sensational fights in the annals of boxing aired free on a major TV network, but the last big bang of the golden era was hardly a bang, merely a whimper.
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A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.
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The photo accompanying this article is from the 1962 fight at Madison Square Garden between Dick Tiger (on the right) and Henry Hank. To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE
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