Hopkins Hoping To Avoid Bittersweet Taste of Stale Sugar

Published

10 years ago

November 7, 2014

Boxing writers are only human, so members of our curious fraternity perhaps can be excused for repeating certain mistakes, if for no other reason than force of habit. A lot of us appear ready to trudge down that potentially crooked path again as Saturday night’s HBO-televised light heavyweight unification bout between IBF/WBA champion Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins (55-6-2, 32 KOs) and WBO titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev (25-0-1, 23 KOs) in Atlantic City Boardwalk Hall nears.

Consider the poll of fight scribes taken by our veteran colleague, Jack Obermayer. Of 23 media types asked to predict the outcome of Hopkins-Kovalev, a slight majority, 12, went with ageless wonder Hopkins, who turns 50 on Jan. 15, to 11 votes for the much-younger (31), much harder-hitting Russian.

Among those who grappled with the improbable notion that B-Hop might again bridge the Grand Canyonesque age gap was yours truly. This is how I called it for KOJO: “Can’t believe I’m going to the well again. Hopkins has a history of success against big punchers who come forward and try to take his head off. Will Kovalev be the guy who finally hands it to him? No. Hopkins by decision.”

Hopkins has made me appear smart more often than not. Oh, sure, I whiffed badly in going with Kelly Pavlik in 2008, but I was spot-on (and definitely in the minority) when I picked Hopkins to not only defeat, but to stop Felix Trinidad in 2001. I also correctly predicted B-Hop victories against Joe Lipsey, Oscar De La Hoya, Winky Wright, Jean Pascal, Karo Murat and Beibut Shumenov. But, in addition to the miscall on his scrap with Pavlik, I stubbed my toe in going against Hopkins in his matchups with Chad Dawson, Antonio Tarver and Joe Calzaghe. Still, I figure my perhaps excessive confidence in the Philadelphia boxing master has me mostly on the plus side of the ledger.

Face it: Boxing writers, and quite a few fight fans, are enthralled by anyone who wears a robe of greatness, even when that robe begins to get a bit threadbare. There is a hesitancy to let go of the idea that a surefire Hall of Famer has regressed to the point where he no longer can routinely dial up past glories as if he were ordering takeout pizza. But that most relentless of opponents, Father Time, doesn’t always rush onto the scene while blaring a trumpet. He frequently sneaks up on even the best of the best on little cat’s paws, stealing bits and pieces of reflexes, mobility and punching power until even the most celebrated of fighters reveals that he is, finally, past the point of no return.

Not that it’s certain, or even likely, that a still-very-capable Hopkins will suddenly fall into that familiar trap, but it has begun to occur to me that Hopkins-Kovalev could turn out to be a repeat of the Feb. 9, 1991, pairing in Madison Square Garden of 23-year-old WBC super welterweight champion Terry Norris and the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard. The Sugar man was three months shy of his 35^th birthday and hadn’t fought since scoring a unanimous decision over the even older Roberto Duran in their rubber match on Dec. 7, 1989.

The public, and the press, had grown accustomed to seeing Leonard – who had already retired and unretired three times – pick right back where he had left off, the most stirring example being his shocking split-decision nod over the heavily favored Marvelous Marvin Hagler on April 6, 1987. Few people expected Leonard to fare so well; he had not fought in three years and had answered an opening bell only twice in the preceding five years. Still, that Leonard was only 30, and a comparatively low-mileage 30, in terms of professional wear and tear.

An ascending Norris figured to be a different and maybe even tougher test at that stage of Leonard’s career, but, hey, there was a widespread school of thought that this was still Sugar Ray Leonard. And so those inclined to bet with their hearts instead of their heads sent the five-time former world champion off as a 12-5 favorite. I sort of rolled with the prevailing tide, predicting a Leonard victory via ninth-round technical knockout.

I wasn’t the only one to figure Leonard’s glorious past again would serve as prologue to future triumphs. Before the fight, Thomas Hearns said, “Ray wouldn’t have picked anyone he wasn’t certain he could beat. This kid Norris has no chance.”

Norris, for his part, felt he had a very good chance. In fact, he was absolutely convinced that the ghost of the Sugar Ray that had been wouldn’t be glimpsed that evening.

“Ray is a great fighter, or at least he was a great fighter,” Norris judged. “I know he has a big edge in experience in big fights, but you know what they say about youth being served.

“No matter what he does, no matter what he says, he can’t do anything about the difference in our ages. I’ve seen the tapes of Ray when he was at his best, and I’ve seen tapes of his last few fights. It should be obvious to anyone that the Ray Leonard of today is not the same fighter as the Ray Leonard of five, six years ago. I’m stronger than him. I’m faster. My endurance is greater. I can outbox him and I can outpunch him. Really, I don’t see any way how he can beat me.”

The bout, as it turned out, went exactly as Norris had imagined. He floored Leonard in the second and seventh rounds en route to a rout on the official scorecards, which read 120-104, 119-103 and 116-110.

At the postfight press conference, Norris was almost apologetic at having won so emphatically. “It’s a sad victory because of the way the fight ended,” he said. “Ray took a pretty bad beating, and that was sad for me. Ray was my idol … still is my idol. That’ll never change.”

During his turn at the podium, Leonard announced his fourth retirement from the ring. But it would not be the one that stuck.

“I don’t listen to anyone but myself, so I had to find out for myself,” he said of his decision to test himself against the hot young kid whose attributes closely mirrored that his decade-younger self. “I’ve always been a risk-taker, and tonight I took a risk that didn’t pan out for me. This fight showed me it’s time to move on.”

Sugar Ray moved on from boxing all right, but the incessant itch to test himself required another scratch on March 1, 1997. After a ring absence of six years, Leonard, 40, came back against 34-year-old Hector “Macho” Camacho in Boardwalk Hall. As had been the case when he took on Norris, Leonard was viewed as somehow being immune to the natural laws of diminishing returns, or maybe his legion of admirers were still hesitant to let go of their fondest memories.

“Ray is an athlete,” said Leonard’s former trainer, Angelo Dundee. “Ray’s always doing something. Basketball, tennis. I understand he’s into golf now. I haven’t seen him play, but I bet he’s shooting pretty good scores. Any kind of sport, Ray picks up right away, like he’s been doing it his whole life.

“I think Ray will beat Camacho. I strongly believe that. I know what Ray can do. Macho’s thing was his speed, his quickness. Grabbing on to you. He won’t be able to do that with Ray.”

As might be expected, Leonard – who by then had become a grandfather – retained traces of a confidence that verged on arrogance. Asked if he still considered himself one of the top 10 middleweights in the world, despite his age and inactivity, he said, “Hell, yes.”

Top five?

“Yeah.”

Leonard said he was coming back, again, because “I need the attention that boxing brings. My ego is what made me who I am.” It was that ego that prompted Leonard to say that he could beat Camacho even if he was just 50 percent of his prime self, and that he would win “comfortably” at 75 percent of peak efficiency.

And if he somehow was able to reach back in time and make it to 100 percent?

“Annihilation,” he proclaimed.

His many acolytes bought into Leonard’s sales pitch, big time. Although Camacho opened as a 2-1 favorite, by fight night the line had moved so much that Leonard went off as a 7-5 favorite. He was, as always, the people’s choice.

But what happened that night was as jarring to the public’s sensibilities as had been the one-sided loss to Norris. Camacho, never noted for his punching power, had proclaimed “I ain’t running from no 40-year-old man,” and he didn’t, standing and trading in the center of the ring with no apparent fear of retaliation. And when referee Joe Cortez stepped in to stop the bout 68 seconds into the fifth round, after Leonard had been wobbled and then knocked down by two left uppercuts, it was time to bring down the curtain on a career that ranks among the grandest the fight game has ever seen. The fifth retirement announcement by Sugar Ray Leonard, the first man ever to have earned $100 million in purses, would be the one that was carved in granite, not written in wet sand.

“When I was knocked back and staggered, Joe Cortez said, `Ray, are you OK?’ And I was OK,’” Leonard said at the postfight media gathering. “Then when I went down, he asked, `Are you OK?’ I said yes again. But you know what? There was no sense pushing it. I was in trouble.”

Still reluctant to admit that his skills had faded, Leonard cited undisclosed injuries and other factors – to his right calf vs. Camacho, to his rib cage and the emotional turmoil of his divorce from his first wife, Juanita, vs. Norris – for those unsugary performances. But who could blame him for raging, raging against the dying of his once-luminescent light as a fighter?

“You always think of yourself as the best you ever were. That’s human nature,” Leonard, now 58, told me in March 2013 for a story I did for THE RING about fighters who keep saying goodbye, then hello again. “And that’s not just how highly successful people think. Everyone thinks that way.

“Most guys come back for money. They need another payday, and there are people around them feeding their egos, telling them how good they still are, because they want a piece of the action. Maybe they come back because they really don’t know anything but boxing, and they’re apprehensive about entering the next phase of their lives that doesn’t include it.

“But even if money is not an issue, and you have other options, you never lose that belief in yourself as a fighter, particularly if you’ve been to the very top of the mountain. (Being retired) eats at you. It’s hard to find anything else that can give you that high. Once you accomplish what I did against Marvin, you tell yourself, `I did it before, I can do it again.’ I felt that way about Muhammad Ali when he fought Larry Holmes. I had so much belief in Ali because of all the miraculous things he’d done, like going to Africa and beating George Foreman. But that Ali didn’t exist anymore by the time he fought Holmes.

“The reason I came back those last couple of times was because I was not happy. I was dying inside. The only place I felt truly comfortable and relaxed was in the ring. I needed that safety net. But at some point you have to face up to whatever problems you might have and deal with them. Nine times out of 10, it’s disastrous if you continue to push the envelope.”

One of these nights, if Hopkins continues to thumb his nose at Father Time while simultaneously offering it as a target for the fists of a lights-out puncher like Kovalev, he might know what it feels like to be have been Sugar Ray Leonard against Terry Norris or Hector Camacho. Will that night be this Saturday? I don’t think so, but then maybe that’s just the sentimentalist in me refusing to let go of the comfort zone B-Hop has made for me and so many others who are unwilling to turn away from yesterday in order to face tomorrow.

Photo Credit : Tom Hogan – Hoganphotos/Golden Boy Promotions

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Bernard Fernandez

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

2 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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