A Wrinkle in Time

Published

10 years ago

November 14, 2014

Three months ago, Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins raised his gnarled hand to fight the most dangerous light heavyweight on the planet. Many wondered why. Those who did so aloud found themselves rebuked by a serious man: “Have you been paying attention to my career?” I have. His career is a study in bootstrap pride and star-flung ambitions. One of his ambitions is to surpass the achievements of the Ursa Major of geriatric pugilists, Archie Moore.

Twenty years ago he was a workman toiling in the long shadows of Roy Jones Jr. and James Toney. Few saw him for who and what he was. The truth of him was obscured by more than an executioner’s hood or an alien mask. What is the truth of him? Ask him and you’ll be in for mind-bending misdirection. He knows better than you that words don’t matter. The answer has been unveiled, gradually, since he lost the middleweight crown at the ripe old age of forty. It’s in a remarkable campaign that saw him seize the light heavyweight crown at age forty-six, lose it at forty-seven, and spend the last seventeen months spanking top-ranked contenders twenty years his junior. But it’s his decision to face Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev two months before turning fifty that would make Moore tip his top hat.

“Alien vs. Krusher” was televised live from Atlantic City on HBO Saturday night. I wasn’t about to watch it from the couch. I put on a suit and boarded an Amtrak train at Boston.

The fellow traveler I shared a space with was too riveted to an iPad to acknowledge my greeting. He was watching a college football game, drinking Bloody Marys like my Camaro drinks gasoline, and cheering at turnovers with increasing bravura. Once, glancing up from Liebling’s essays, I found him in a fighter’s pose -his right fist cocked as if. He looked closer to fifty than me, but probably knew not a whit about Bernard Hopkins and what he was risking and reaching for that very day.

My seat faced backwards. For a sentimental sort who prefers books to iPads, this gives the unwelcome feeling of being pulled kicking and screaming into the future like a reluctant astronaut. I looked out the window at the things receding behind us. At Central Falls, Rhode Island a prison appeared, sprawled behind fences and great concentric circles of barbed wire. Hopkins history. The future fighter was convicted of armed robbery when he was seventeen and his name became a number. Inmate #Y4145 spent five years at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison thinking about life and all that comes with it. Archie Moore also did time after stealing seven dollars from a street car. Both counted those lost years as a turning point. Both found an older mentor inside, a necessary man who showed them the ropes and blessed the boxing ring and their place in it. “It was then that I made up my mind,” Moore said. “There were two ways to go, you understand, and only two.” One was surrender and single-file between cinderblocks. The other was hope and what Moore called “the glass mountain.” Hopkins knows what that is. Many who came out of big-city housing projects will tell you it’s the black man’s experience -two steps up to slide four steps down, scratching and clawing in a desperate effort “to touch that peak with outstretched fingertips.”

Moore and Hopkins made vows to climb.

It took years, but they proved their mettle as men and champions. And they wouldn’t let the formative past recede out of reach. They made it a point to visit reform schools and penitentiaries to place a strong hand on the shoulders of outcasts. They brought hope. In the early 1990s, Hopkins actually held a training camp at Graterford. “I’ve seen how Bernard inspires the inmates,” a promoter said. “I’ve seen their eyes light up. After sparring, he’ll sit down and talk to them for hours.”

I had a five-hour train ride to think about the fight and all that comes with it. Images strangely fitting flashed by the window; at times like archetypes, at times like credits in a movie trailer. Military trucks and other objets d’guerre at ease in Pawtucket and rubble strewn along the tracks in Providence called to mind the Russian puncher. Antique tractors of no use to anyone anymore, half-sunk in the ground. Somewhere near New Haven I saw cars piled like metal corpses in a dirt morgue, tires stripped, hoods open-mouthed. Only the graffiti had vitality. Crossing into New York City brought plenty -of graffiti, not vitality. Some of the tags took on a power of suggestion that a subtle-minded theorist like Hopkins would not miss: “Solo” “Shock” “Bard” “Stoic” “Distort” “Duzzit” “Ready”. One was not so subtle. Toward the end of a sun-splashed tunnel, twenty-feet of sharp angles and pastel green went racing by that read “Alien Intelligence.”

It got my hopes up.

In 1952, A.J. Liebling boarded this train at Penn Station when he covered Jersey Joe Walcott’s world title defense against Rocky Marciano in Philadelphia. Across the aisle from him was a contingent of Brocktonians laying 5 to 1 odds on their hero. “They might have been either union officials or downtown businessmen,” he observed. They were on the train with me, sixty-two years later, only the subject was less stirring than a championship bout and less historic than Hopkins’ battle against two destroyers in Time and Kovalev. “The Eagles lose their quarterback. The Giants can’t get out of their own way,” said one. “They’re supposed to have this lightning quick offense and they’re fumbling on their own line!” said another. I yawned.

At 4:10pm, I disembarked with Liebling’s book where Liebling did at Philadelphia’s 30^th Street Station. Before boarding the New Jersey Transit to Atlantic City, I scanned the concourse for some tribute to Hopkins, a statue maybe. I found one, though it was a memorial to other warriors from a greater war. “Angel of the Resurrection” by Walker Hancock features a forty-foot bronze Archangel holding up a fallen soldier. It was dedicated in August 1952. Liebling waddled past it only a month later on his way to the Municipal Stadium where he would witness “old man Walcott” collapse at Marciano’s feet. In September of 1955, he would witness the Ole’ Mongoose himself in the same undignified position. Both fell and could not get up.

I saw Youth deck Age yet again when Kovelev slung a right hand like an iron ball on a chain. It landed, literally and figuratively, on the temple of the Philadelphian.

But the Philadelphian got up.

Flying Objects
Kovalev’s tendency to sling first and think later was tempered by a masterful strategy. He began with a statement of power to keep Hopkins at bay. It worked. After Hopkins was decked, he adjusted his distance from the perimeter (only a half-step away from Kovalev’s chin) to just off the perimeter (a full step outside Kovalev’s reach). This adjustment was made early and told the story of the fight.

By round five, Nazim Richardson knew what was happening. He saw very human impulses of self-preservation. “You’re not trusting your weapons,” he told Hopkins in the corner. “Relax, get inside, and smother.” But Hopkins could not relax and had no inclination for close encounters of that kind. Kovalev only had to feint to send thirty years of drills into complete disarray. Jabs likewise forced the thinking veteran to think again while a debilitating body attack depleted his already suspect energy reserves. What had been well-timed invasions against lesser opponents became infrequent forays against Kovalev. He seemed content to hover.

Hopkins noted Kovalev’s strategy of stepping out of range after landing his punches, though there was more to it. When Kovalev wasn’t stepping back, he was finishing his combinations with a left hook or a jab. It’s called “finishing on your left” and Marciano’s trainer recommended it because it naturally returns the conventional fighter to the ready position. It does something else too; a left ‘going away’ is a surprise to opponents. A big right at the end of a combination registers as an exclamation point, a signal that the worst is over, and most fighters will follow it with their own attack. They don’t expect a left to pop them on the nose. Not even Hopkins could figure it out.

Plan B from Outer Space
Hopkins was forced to reconfigure his whole motherboard. As winning became more and more remote, his objective was reduced and he found new answers to new questions. He would do what neither Walcott nor Moore could do against Marciano. He would take him the distance. Kovalev, who had yet to stand around in his own sweat after twelve or even ten rounds waiting for judges’ scorecards to be read, would have to tonight. Hopkins switched into defensive overdrive and displayed a vast array of old ring foils to find an advantage. In the third round he landed a left hook to the body and at the same time swung his right foot behind Kovalev’s front foot, jammed his forearm under Kovalev’s armpit, and pushed him down. Then he raised his hands in hopes that the referee would take the cue and start a count. It was an underhanded version of the Fitzsimmons Shift, which is over a century old.

In the eighth round, Hopkins was hurt by a right hand. He sagged and stumbled like a septuagenarian in a stairwell-and what does he do? He does what he did in the first round when he got knocked down-he glances down at the canvas. It was a ploy to stunt Kovelev’s adrenalin-fueled rush with a suggestion that perhaps, just perhaps, he he’d slipped.

In the tenth round Hopkins surprised everyone. He gritted his dentures and landed a right blast that repeated all the way to the nosebleeds. Kovalev’s leg shuddered and the Russians seated near me jumped up and spilled their vodka. “Rossiya! Ataka!” they hollered as their hero resumed control of the bout.

Bernard Hopkins finished the fight going to toe-to-toe with Time the Destroyer and getting the worst of it. The crowd roared. I saw the glass mountain. I saw an old black man scratching and clawing in a desperate effort to touch that peak with outstretched fingertips.

……

It was 3:26am Sunday when the New Jersey Transit pulled into Philadelphia’s 30^th Street Station. Eleven hours earlier, I hadn’t noticed its magnificence as a work of architecture. A coffered ceiling looms a hundred feet overhead and six Corinthian columns stand at the main entrances. The design of the building combines Neoclassicism with Art Deco -old with new.

With two hours to kill before the arrival of my Boston-bound train, I lingered with the low echoes in the main concourse. The chandeliers were dimmed and it was almost deserted. Spectral shoes clacked now and then on marble floors. An off-duty conductor was stretched out on a bench, snoring like three men in a chamber.

I wandered underneath Walker Hancock’s war memorial and was reading the inscription when I sensed a presence over my shoulder. An old man stood there gazing up at the angel and the fallen warrior. I didn’t hear him approach. His skin was the color of good coffee; gray mutton chops graced his face. He was smiling, as if he knew the answers.

And then he was gone.

Resources include Robert Seltzer’s article “‘E xecutioner’ Visits Prison” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 12/3/92); Archie Moore’s “glass mountain” found in his autobiography Any Boy Can: The Archie Moore Storywith Leonard Pearl (Prentice-Hall, 1971); Charley Goldman recommendation to “finish on your left” was found in A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science (Viking, 1956). Special thanks to Jason McMann for coming through in a pinch.

Springs Toledo is the author of the newly-released book, The Gods of War: Boxing Essays (Tora,2014,$25).Contact him at scalinatella@hotmail.com for signed copies.

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Springs Toledo

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

Former-World-Bamtamweight-Champion-Richie-Sandoval-Passes-Away-at-age-63

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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