The Boys of November: The Bowe-Holyfield Trilogy

Published

10 years ago

November 13, 2014

When most people think of November, they think of Thanksgiving. During the 1990s, the next-to-last month of the calendar year came to mean something else to fight fans, a reason in triplicate to give thanks for a heavyweight trilogy that ranks just below the Holy Trinity that was Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier.

Yes, Riddick Bowe vs. Evander Holyfield was that exhilarating, that special. Oh, there have been other notable ring trilogies since then – Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward comes to mind – but in terms of the elite quality of the participants, and the fierce, unrelenting competitiveness of all three bouts, Bowe-Holyfield was a smorgasbord of pugilistic delights that, as much as anything, is the cornerstone of each champion’s professional legacy.

Remember, then, what was and hope that the heavyweight division someday soon can offer up more of the same superb stuff involving big men possessed of the same level of talent, heart and willingness to lay it all on the line.

*November 13, 1992, the Thomas & Mack Center, Las Vegas: In a spirited scrap that earned Fight of the Year recognition from The Ring magazine, despite the relatively wide scores (117-110 twice, 115-112 for the winner), Bowe came away with the unanimous decision and Holyfield’s lineal, WBA, WBC and IBF titles.

*November 6, 1993, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas: Whether the unexpected, out-of-the-sky appearance of paraglider James Miller, who came to be known as “Fan Man,” affected the outcome – there was a 20-minute delay in the seventh round to extract and remove Miller, who became ensnarled in the ring ropes – will forever be a matter of conjecture. When the bout resumed, Holyfield took charge down the stretch to eke out a 12-round majority decisions (115-113, 115-114, 114-114) and reclaim the WBA and IBF belts.

*November 4, 1995, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas: No widely recognized world title was on the line, and there was creeping suspicion that neither the 33-year-old Holyfield nor the 29-year-old Bowe was at their peak, but remember, the same was said of Ali and Frazier prior to the third act of their ongoing passion play, the “Thrilla in Manila.” Squaring off for pride and the so-called “People’s Championship” in their rubber match, Bowe – who went into the eighth round trailing, 66-65, on all three official cards – promptly floored Holyfield twice, prompting referee Joe Cortez to step in and award him the technical knockout victory.

It can be argued that Holyfield and Bowe weren’t the two finest heavyweights of the division’s most recent “golden era,” sharing as they did top billing with Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson, but it is beyond dispute that, together, they made magic on three occasions. And maybe that is enough to gain additional consideration when it is time to put together any kind of best-of-the-best pecking order.

“Bowe brings out the best in me, and I think I bring out the best in him,” Holyfield said before their third fight. “We bring out the best in each other.”

With Act III approaching, someone asked Bowe if, were the bout to end in a draw, a fourth matchup might be in the offing.

“Last year I felt a little out of place when November rolled around because I had gotten so accustomed to fighting Evander Holyfield at that time,” Bowe said. “Me and Evander beating up on each other in November has become, you know, sort of habit-forming.

“And as far as a fourth fight between us … man, I don’t even want to think about (what would happen if there were) a draw. As hard as Evander Holyfield fights, if this one is a draw, he can fight the next one by himself.”

Although the more anxiously anticipated pairing no doubt involved Holyfield and Tyson, that megafight was delayed for five years, the result of, first, a thumb injury to Tyson that forced the cancellation of their scheduled bout in November 1991 and then Tyson’s rape conviction that landed him in prison for three-plus years. The post-incarceration Tyson was a pale imitation of his ferocious youth, and in his two meetings with Holyfield, he was knocked out in 11 rounds on Nov. 9, 1996 – another historic date in November — and then was disqualified for chewing off a piece of Evander’s right ear in the infamous “Bite Fight” of June 28, 1997.

With Tyson unavailable, it was almost inevitable that Holyfield and Bowe gravitate toward each other. Then again, a fight between them probably was bound to happen in any case. They had a shared history long before they squared off for anything of consequence, having been frequent sparring partners in the mid-1980s, when Evander was a young pro who hadn’t yet won his first world title and Bowe was a teenage amateur phenomenon.

“I realized at the time that we might wind up fighting someday,” Holyfield said in August 1992, after the contracts for their first bout were signed. “He wasn’t that much younger than me, and he was very gifted. I knew he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for me to get out of boxing before he made his move.

“I don’t think our situation is that unusual. Ali and Larry Holmes sparred when Ali was on top and Larry was coming up. I think maybe they knew they were going to fight for real one day. The guy who’s your sparring partner today might be your opponent tomorrow.”

Truth be told, Holyfield might have made the mistake of still thinking of Bowe – who had something of a reputation, and deservedly so, of a talented slacker who ate too much and trained too little – as that sparring partner of a decade earlier. His failure to push himself to peak efficiency, as he so frequently had and would do so in the future, might have cost him his titles.

“You couldn’t get him to do anything,” Holyfield’s trainer, George Benton, said of “The Real Deal’s” uninspired preparation for the first Bowe bout. “Some days he refused to work at all. Every day he had a different ache or pain.”

For his part, Bowe, who had a penchant for dramatic weight increases between fights, had given Team Holyfield at least a little reason to be confident. He had come in at a then-career-high 245 pounds for his most recent ring appearance, a seventh-round stoppage of Pierre Coetzer. Taking a poke at the soft midsection Bowe displayed that night, Lou Duva, Holyfield’s co-manager, presented the challenger with a pair of fancy, size-42 trunks at an August media gathering in New York. Bowe’s trunks had split down the back against Coetzer, revealing more of himself to an HBO audience then he would have preferred.

“Either your trunks are too small or you butt is too big,” Duva chided Bowe. “With these on, at least you’ll look good when they carry you out of the ring.”

But Bowe came in fit and ready, and when it became apparent that he would be no soft touch for the favored champion, the toughest, most resilient part of Holyfield’s inner self was activated. Bowe jolted Holyfield with a right uppercut early in the 10^th round and seemingly was poised to score a knockout, but the exhausted Holyfield, after going down along the ropes, rose and fought back with a fury.

Color analyst Al Bernstein shouted to the pay-per-view audience, “That was one of the greatest rounds in heavyweight history! Ever! Period!” Boxing historian Bert Sugar later would compare that round to Round 15 of the Larry Holmes-Ken Norton war, Round 14 of Ali-Frazier III and Round 1 of Jack Dempsey-Luis Firpo, which featured seven knockdowns by Dempsey and two by Firpo.

Act II, of course, is especially notable not only for more of the kind of action that had marked Act I, but for Fan Man’s drop-in from the night sky and the tumult that set off. There probably always will be debate as to what would have happened had there not been a delay, which some believe benefited Holyfield and others feel was of assistance to Bowe, had had gone into training at around 300 pounds before paring down to an weigh-in weight of 246.

“I felt at that particular point that I had Evander right where I wanted him,” Bowe said. “I had the impression his back was giving him trouble. I felt that if the fight had continued, he would have quit.

“Then, when I saw what happened with my wife (Judy, who was pregnant, fainted and had to be carried out on a stretcher), I considered leaving the ring. I didn’t know what was going on. I was bewildered. But I knew enough to understand that if I left, they would have said I was quitting. So I waited until the fight resumed and tried to pick up where I left off. But by then I had gotten cold. I never did get warm again, and that’s what cost me my title. Holyfield didn’t beat me; Fan Man did.”

Holyfield, not unexpectedly, had a different take on what had transpired.

“Bowe and I fought two different six-round fights tonight,” he said shortly after his majority decision victory was announced. “In the first one, I was just getting ready to go toe-to-toe with him when that guy dropped in. I was in a rhythm, and I felt like I could outgun him. I started to get upset (during the delay), but then I realized it was the same for both of us. With that cleared from my mind, I just went out and got my rhythm back.”

The only certainty is that “Fan Man” – Miller, who would commit suicide, hanging himself from a tree in a remote part of Alaska in 2002 – is the one who came out the worst for wear. Intending to land in the middle of the ring, his chute became tangled in the overhead lights, causing him to land on the top strand of ropes, after which he tumbled awkwardly into a group of startled spectators. It spoke much as to the jinxed nature of Miller’s life that the ringside seats he toppled into were filled by Minister Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam security detail, who were none too pleased to have an unidentified white guy unexpectedly arrive in their midst. The intruder was beaten unconscious by big, burly dudes brandishing walkie-talkies as makeshift clubs.

“It was a heavyweight fight,” a well-bruised Miller said afterward, “and I was the only guy who got knocked out.”

Fast-forward to Act III, which was to have shared the TV and local Las Vegas audience with another high-profile boxing event, Mike Tyson’s bout with Buster Mathis Jr., scheduled to take place on the same night just down the Strip at the MGM Grand. But that bout was postponed a few days earlier because of a fractured thumb on Tyson’s right hand. It eventually took place the following month, on Dec. 16 in Philadelphia, with Tyson winning on a third-round knockout. Not that Holyfield was overly concerned about what a rusted Iron Mike, whose only fight after leaving prison was a first-round disqualification win over the oafish Peter McNeeley on Aug. 19, 1995, was up to.

“At my best, I am the best,” Holyfield said. “Everybody in boxing is supposed to have that `champion’ attitude, which means that you fight the best to prove you’re the best. There was not one day when I was the champion of the world that I didn’t want to prove I was the best. The way I look at it, Bowe and I are the best heavyweights out there.

“Who is Mike Tyson in this day and era? He’s not the same champion he was when he was 20, 21 years old. That’s in the past. If you talk about who the best fighters are today, that’s Bowe and myself. We’re going to get it on. If Tyson wants to fight one of us, fine. But I can’t see why everyone puts so much (emphasis) on someone who has fought only once in four years.”

Muhammad Ali’s biographer, Thomas Hauser, once noted that Ali and Frazier “were fighting for something more important than the heavyweight championship of the world” in the Thrilla in Manila. “They were fighting for the championship of one another.” And so, in a way, were Holyfield and Bowe in the final act of their remarkable rivalry.

Holyfield held the early edge in another humdinger of a battle, knocking Bowe down for the first time in the younger, larger man’s career in the sixth round, and he seemed to be in control when momentum took a sudden turn only seconds into Round 8. An overhand right dropped Holyfield, hard, and he arose at the count of nine on unsteady legs. That drew a long look from referee Joe Cortez, who signaled the fighters to come forward and engage. Making the most of his opportunity to close the show, Bowe delivered a pair of rights to the head that sent Holyfield to his knees and obliged Cortez to wave a halt to the proceedings.

“When he stayed down for that long of a time (after the first knockdown), I knew I would get him,” said Bowe, who went off as a 3-1 favorite. “I knew, if I maintained my composure, I would get him.”

There would be more exclamation-point moments for Holyfield, who would go on to fight for nearly 16 more years and win a version of the heavyweight championship twice more, giving him a record four division titles, the most obvious successes being his pair of conquests of Tyson. Bowe, despite posting a final record of 43-1 with 33 KOs, would not fare as well in his professional dotage. He was badly beaten up in his two bouts with the “Foul Pole,” Andrew Golota, who still found a way to screw things up en route to bookend DQ losses for repeated low blows. Eight years after the second “victory” over Golota, Bowe made a comeback in 2004, winning three bouts against third-tier opponents, the last of which, at 40, was an eight-round unanimous decision over someone named Gene Pukall on Dec. 13, 2008.

The lives of the Boys of November have been marked by disappointment and turmoil outside the ropes. Holyfield, for so long perceived as boxing’s St. George equivalent, a knight in shining armor who dashed around the countryside slaying dragons and righting wrongs, endured three divorces and the embarrassment of foreclosure on his 109-room mansion in Fairburn, Ga. Bowe, a two-time champion, has had an even rockier time of it. He was served 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to a domestic violence charge, which was part of a plea bargain involving the kidnapping of his first wife, Judy (who later divorced him) and the couple’s five children; arrested for assaulting his second wife, Terri, and he washed out of Marine Corps boot camp after only three days of actual training.

As Joe Louis and Mike Tyson demonstrated, as have so many other former champs, fame does not necessarily evaporate like morning dew, but wealth (Holyfield earned an estimated $250 million in purses) can and does. It’s difficult to climb that figurative mountain, but even more difficult to remain at its summit.

No matter what, though, Holyfield and Bowe gave us three electrifying nights for the ages. For that, fight fans should forever be grateful.

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Bernard Fernandez

Floyd Mayweather has Another Phenom and his name is Curmel Moton

Published

2 days ago

April 22, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Floyd Mayweather has Another Phenom and his name is Curmel Moton

In any endeavor, the defining feature of a phenom is his youth. Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Bryce Harper was a phenom. He was on the radar screen of baseball’s most powerful player agents when he was 14 years old.

Curmel Moton, who turns 19 in June, is a phenom. Of all the young boxing stars out there, wrote James Slater in July of last year, “Curmel Moton is the one to get most excited about.”

Moton was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His father Curtis Moton, a barber by trade, was a big boxing fan and specifically a big fan of Floyd Mayweather Jr. When Curmel was six, Curtis packed up his wife (Curmel’s stepmom) and his son and moved to Las Vegas. Curtis wanted his son to get involved in boxing and there was no better place to develop one’s latent talents than in Las Vegas where many of the sport’s top practitioners came to train.

Many father-son relationships have been ruined, or at least frayed, by a father’s unrealistic expectations for his son, but when it came to boxing, the boy was a natural and he felt right at home in the gym.

The gym the Motons patronized was the Mayweather Boxing Club. Curtis took his son there in hopes of catching the eye of the proprietor. “Floyd would occasionally drop by the gym and I was there so often that he came to recognize me,” says Curmel. What he fails to add is that the trainers there had Floyd’s ear. “This kid is special,” they told him.

It costs a great deal of money for a kid to travel around the country competing in a slew of amateur boxing tournaments. Only a few have the luxury of a sponsor. For the vast majority, fund raisers such as car washes keep the wheels greased.

Floyd Mayweather stepped in with the financial backing needed for the Motons to canvas the country in tournaments. As an amateur, Curmel was — take your pick — 156-7 or 144-6 or 61-3 (the latter figure from boxrec). Regardless, at virtually every tournament at which he appeared, Curmel Moton was the cock of the walk.

Before the pandemic, Floyd Mayweather Jr had a stable of boxers he promoted under the banner of “The Money Team.” In talking about his boxers, Floyd was understated with one glaring exception – Gervonta “Tank” Davis, now one of boxing’s top earners.

When Floyd took to praising Curmel Moton with the same effusive language, folks stood up and took notice.

Curmel made his pro debut on Sept. 30, 2023, at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on the undercard of the super middleweight title fight between Canelo Alvarez and Jermell Charlo. After stopping his opponent in the opening round, he addressed a flock of reporters in the media room with Floyd standing at his side. “I felt ready,” he said, “I knew I had Floyd behind me. He believes in me. I had the utmost confidence going into the fight. And I went in there and did what I do.”

Floyd ventured the opinion that Curmel was already a better fighter than Leigh Wood, the reigning WBA world featherweight champion who would successfully defend his belt the following week.

Moton’s boxing style has been described as a blend of Floyd Mayweather and Tank Davis. “I grew up watching Floyd, so it’s natural I have some similarities to him,” says Curmel who sparred with Tank in late November of 2021 as Davis was preparing for his match with Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz. Curmell says he did okay. He was then 15 years old and still in school; he dropped out as soon as he reached the age of 16.

Curmel is now 7-0 with six KOs, four coming in the opening round. He pitched an 8-round shutout the only time he was taken the distance. It’s not yet official, but he returns to the ring on May 31 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas where Caleb Plant and Jermall Charlo are co-featured in matches conceived as tune-ups for a fall showdown. The fight card will reportedly be free for Amazon Prime Video subscribers.

Curmel’s presumptive opponent is Renny Viamonte, a 28-year-old Las Vegas-based Cuban with a 4-1-1 (2) record. It will be Curmel’s first professional fight with Kofi Jantuah the chief voice in his corner. A two-time world title challenger who began his career in his native Ghana, the 50-year-old Jantuah has worked almost exclusively with amateurs, a recent exception being Mikaela Mayer.

It would seem that the phenom needs a tougher opponent than Viamonte at this stage of his career. However, the match is intriguing in one regard. Viamonte is lanky. Listed at 5-foot-11, he will have a seven-inch height advantage.

Keeping his weight down has already been problematic for Moton. He tipped the scales at 128 ½ for his most recent fight. His May 31 bout, he says, will be contested at 135 and down the road it’s reasonable to think he will blossom into a welterweight. And with each bump up in weight, his short stature will theoretically be more of a handicap.

For fun, we asked Moton to name the top fighter on his pound-for-pound list. “[Oleksandr] Usyk is number one right now,” he said without hesitation,” great footwork, but guys like Canelo, Crawford, Inoue, and Bivol are right there.”

It’s notable that there isn’t a young gun on that list. Usyk is 38, a year older than Crawford; Inoue is the pup at age 32.

Moton anticipates that his name will appear on pound-for-pound lists within the next two or three years. True, history is replete with examples of phenoms who flamed out early, but we wouldn’t bet against it.

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Arne’s Almanac: The First Boxing Writers Assoc. of America Dinner Was Quite the Shindig

Published

4 days ago

April 20, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-First-Boxing-Writers-Assoc-of-America-Dinner-was-Quite-the-Shindig

The first annual dinner of the Boxing Writers Association of America was staged on April 25, 1926 in the grand ballroom of New York’s Hotel Astor, an edifice that rivaled the original Waldorf Astoria as the swankiest hotel in the city. Back then, the organization was known as the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York.

The ballroom was configured to hold 1200 for the banquet which was reportedly oversubscribed. Among those listed as agreeing to attend were the governors of six states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland) and the mayors of 10 of America’s largest cities.

In 1926, radio was in its infancy and the digital age was decades away (and inconceivable). So, every journalist who regularly covered boxing was a newspaper and/or magazine writer, editor, or cartoonist. And at this juncture in American history, there were plenty of outlets for someone who wanted to pursue a career as a sportswriter and had the requisite skills to get hired.

The following papers were represented at the inaugural boxing writers’ dinner:

New York Times

New York News

New York World

New York Sun

New York Journal

New York Post

New York Mirror

New York Telegram

New York Graphic

New York Herald Tribune

Brooklyn Eagle

Brooklyn Times

Brooklyn Standard Union

Brooklyn Citizen

Bronx Home News

This isn’t a complete list because a few of these papers, notably the New York World and the New York Journal, had strong afternoon editions that functioned as independent papers. Plus, scribes from both big national wire services (Associated Press and UPI) attended the banquet and there were undoubtedly a smattering of scribes from papers in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Back then, the event’s organizer Nat Fleischer, sports editor of the New York Telegram and the driving force behind The Ring magazine, had little choice but to limit the journalistic component of the gathering to writers in the New York metropolitan area. There wasn’t a ballroom big enough to accommodate a good-sized response if he had extended the welcome to every boxing writer in North America.

The keynote speaker at the inaugural dinner was New York’s charismatic Jazz Age mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker, architect of the transformative Walker Law of 1920 which ushered in a new era of boxing in the Empire State with a template that would guide reformers in many other jurisdictions.

Prizefighting was then associated with hooligans. In his speech, Mayor Walker promised to rid the sport of their ilk. “Boxing, as you know, is closest to my heart,” said hizzoner. “So I tell you the police force is behind you against those who would besmirch or injure boxing. Rowdyism doesn’t belong in this town or in your game.” (In 1945, Walker would be the recipient of the Edward J. Neil Memorial Award given for meritorious service to the sport. The oldest of the BWAA awards, the previous recipients were all active or former boxers. The award, no longer issued under that title, was named for an Associated Press sportswriter and war correspondent who died from shrapnel wounds covering the Spanish Civil War.)

Another speaker was well-traveled sportswriter Wilbur Wood, then affiliated with the Brooklyn Citizen. He told the assembly that the aim of the organization was two-fold: to help defend the game against its detractors and to promote harmony among the various factions.

Of course, the 1926 dinner wouldn’t have been as well-attended without the entertainment. According to press dispatches, Broadway stars and performers from some of the city’s top nightclubs would be there to regale the attendees. Among the names bandied about were vaudeville superstars Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante, the latter of whom would appear with his trio, Durante, (Lou) Clayton, and (Eddie) Jackson.

There was a contraction of New York newspapers during the Great Depression. Although empirical evidence is lacking, the inaugural boxing writers dinner was likely the largest of its kind. Fifteen years later, in 1941, the event drew “more than 200” according to a news report. There was no mention of entertainment.

In 1950, for the first time, the annual dinner was opened to the public. For $25, a civilian could get a meal and mingle with some of his favorite fighters. Sugar Ray Robinson was the Edward J. Neil Award winner that year, honored for his ring exploits and for donating his purse from the Charlie Fusari fight to the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund.

There was no formal announcement when the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York was re-christened the Boxing Writers Association of America, but by the late 1940s reporters were referencing the annual event as simply the boxing writers dinner. By then, it had become traditional to hold the annual affair in January, a practice discontinued after 1971.

The winnowing of New York’s newspaper herd plus competing banquets in other parts of the country forced Nat Fleischer’s baby to adapt. And more adaptations will be necessary in the immediate future as the future of the BWAA, as it currently exists, is threatened by new technologies. If the forthcoming BWAA dinner (April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in mid-Manhattan) were restricted to wordsmiths from the traditional print media, the gathering would be too small to cover the nut and the congregants would be drawn disproportionately from the geriatric class.

Some of those adaptations have already started. Last year, Las Vegas resident Sean Zittel, a recent UNLV graduate, had the distinction of becoming the first videographer welcomed into the BWAA. With more and more people getting their news from sound bites, rather than the written word, the videographer serves an important function.

The reporters who conducted interviews with pen and paper have gone the way of the dodo bird and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A taped interview for a “talkie” has more integrity than a story culled from a paper and pen interview because it is unfiltered. Many years ago, some reporters, after interviewing the great Joe Louis, put words in his mouth that made him seem like a dullard, words consistent with the Sambo stereotype. In other instances, the language of some athletes was reconstructed to the point where the reader would think the athlete had a second job as an English professor.

The content created by videographers is free from that bias. More of them will inevitably join the BWAA and similar organizations in the future.

Photo: Nat Fleischer is flanked by Sugar Ray Robinson and Tony Zale at the 1947 boxing writers dinner.

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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Gabriela Fundora KOs Marilyn Badillo and Perez Upsets Conwell in Oceanside

Published

4 days ago

April 20, 2025

David A. Avila

Gabriela-Fundora-KOs-Marilyn-Badillo-and-Perez-Upsets-Conwell-in-Oceanside

It was just a numbers game for Gabriela Fundora and despite Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo’s elusive tactics it took the champion one punch to end the fight and retain her undisputed flyweight world title by knockout on Saturday.

Will it be her last flyweight defense?

Though Fundora (16-0, 8 KOs) fired dozens of misses, a single punch found Badillo (19-1-1, 3 KOs) and ended her undefeated career and first attempt at a world title at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, California.

Fundora, however, proves unbeatable at flyweight.

The champion entered the arena as the headliner for the Golden Boy Promotion show and stepped through the ropes with every physical advantage possible, including power.

Mexico’s Badillo was a midget compared to Fundora but proved to be as elusive as a butterfly in a menagerie for the first six rounds. As the six-inch taller Fundora connected on one punch for every dozen thrown, that single punch was a deadly reminder.

Badillo tried ducking low and slipping to the left while countering with slashing uppercuts, she found little success. She did find the body a solid target but the blows proved to be useless. And when Badillo clinched, that proved more erroneous as Fundora belted her rapidly during the tie-ups.

“She was kind of doing her ducking thing,” said Fundora describing Badillo’s defensive tactics. “I just put the pressure on. It was just like a train. We didn’t give her that break.”

The Mexican fighter tried valiantly with various maneuvers. None proved even slightly successful. Fundora remained poised and under control as she stalked the challenger.

In the seventh round Badillo seemed to take a stand and try to slug it out with Fundora. She quickly was lit up by rapid left crosses and down she went at 1:44 of the seventh round. The Mexican fighter’s corner wisely waved off the fight and referee Rudy Barragan stopped the fight and held the dazed Badillo upright.

Once again Fundora remained champion by knockout. The only question now is will she move up to super flyweight or bantamweight to challenge the bigger girls.

Perez Beats Conwell.

Mexico’s Jorge “Chino” Perez (33-4, 26 KOs) upset Charles Conwell (21-1, 15 KOs) to win by split decision after 12 rounds in their super welterweight showdown.

It was a match that paired two hard-hitting fighters whose ledgers brimmed with knockouts, but neither was able to score a knockdown against each other.

Neither fighter moved backward. It was full steam ahead with Conwell proving successful to the body and head with left hooks and Perez connecting with rights to the head and body. It was difficult to differentiate the winner.

Though Conwell seemed to be the superior defensive fighter and more accurate, two judges preferred Perez’s busier style. They gave the fight to Perez by 115-113 scores with the dissenter favoring Conwell by the same margin.

It was Conwell’s first pro loss. Maybe it will open doors for more opportunities.

Other Bouts

Tristan Kalkreuth (15-1) managed to pass a serious heat check by unanimous decision against former contender Felix Valera (24-8) after a 10-round back-and-forth heavyweight fight.

It was very close.

Kalkreuth is one of those fighters that possess all the physical tools including youth and size but never seems to be able to show it. Once again he edged past another foe but at least this time he faced an experienced fighter in Valera.

Valera had his moments especially in the middle of the 10-round fight but slowed down during the last three rounds.

One major asset for Kalkreuth was his chin. He got caught but still motored past the clever Valera. After 10 rounds two judges saw it 99-91 and one other judge 97-93 all for Kalkreuth.

Highly-rated prospect Ruslan Abdullaev (2-0) blasted past dangerous Jino Rodrigo (13- 5-2) in an eight round super lightweight fight. He nearly stopped the very tough Rodrigo in the last two rounds and won by unanimous decision.

Abdullaev is trained by Joel and Antonio Diaz in Indio.

Bakersfield prospect Joel Iriarte (7-0, 7 KOs) needed only 1:44 to knock out Puerto Rico’s Marcos Jimenez (25-12) in a welterweight bout.

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