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Emanuel Steward Protege Tony Harrison Can Still Hear Manny’s Call For KOs

It was Oct. 25, 2012 when Emanuel Steward left us. He’d been sick, rumors abounded, but his family kept things quiet. The sad rumors turned true. A pied piper of decency and good humor was lost to us. It hit us hard, in the way it does when a special one leaves, a person who makes everyone they come in contact feel like they have a special bond with the charismatic one….
It hit middleweight prospect Tony Harrison harder than a George Foreman hook followed by an Earnie Shavers uppercut.
“He was one of the realest people I’ve ever seen, in the neighborhood, he was a Robin Hood. He’d give it to you if you needed it. He helped everybody. It was surreal when he passed. I was just with him, at camp for Wladimir Klitschko. It just seemed unreal. It didn’t hit me until I went back to Detroit. I was on a flight alone, and there was no Manny in first class. I was at the airport in Cologne (and it hit me). I cried for about three days straight. The one person who did believe in me was gone.”
The emotions didn’t subside quickly. He’d wake up, open his eyes, and a fresh batch of pain would wash over him. “It took months,” Harrison told me. “Jim Lampley helped me. I talked to him and his wife, they were friends with Emanuel. I flew there and stayed with them a couple days in California. They just helped me out, get a better outlook, in that you can lose someone, but there’s always another good person in your corner. In the end, I moved past the sorrow, and realized, ‘You gotta get back to work.’
Got to. Landlord don’t accept tears in lieu of rent check. So Harrison (18-0, with 15 KOs) looks to lay the smack down on TBA on Dec. 20, on a card topped by Jesus MA Cuellar (25-1) vs. Ruben Tamayo (25-4-2), with an interim feather belt up for grabs. After talking to the kid for an hour, I went into my calender on my phone and set a reminder to make sure I checked out his performance. He made an impression on me, as he did Steward…
***
Tony Harrison has three brothers and four sisters and he came in last place in birth order.
The Detroit-based boxer, the former Emanuel Steward protégé who signed on with Al Haymon and has the sort of rumbling style that makes him a no brainer for main event gigs in the very near future, gave me some insight into what formed his way of fighting.
“It made me tougher than I was supposed to be,” the boxer, age 24, told me in a phoner. “Everyone was experimenting on me. I was the lab rat of the family. Pro wrestling came on the TV, they’d see a move, and they couldn’t try it on each other so they’d try it on me. Figure four, all the effed up moves!” Through glass tables, tossed off rooftops, lil Tony was the indestructible rat, and he believes that experience has, yes, left a few dents in his skull, but also helped him toughen up, so the in-the-ring battles aren’t quite as taxing as they’d otherwise be.
Don’t want to make it sound like it was every man for himself over there; mom and dad, Ali and Eisha Salaam, “are still together, and that’s rare.” But Detroit, it was an adult dose, an adult portion, and you saw and see stuff that will make you question man’s inhumanity to man. Such as when utilities are cut off on people down on their luck, while the cruel capitalist crowd plays it off like it’s tough love, say that all these folks are grifters, are just trying to be sneaky takers, and actually aren’t so without options that is why they aren’t paying their gas and electric or water bill.
“I was born here, grew up here, earned and hustled here,” he told me. “Sure, often it’s about a dollar. That love of the dollar matters too much when it’s 20 degrees and you cut someones’ electricity off, it’s too much, especially in cases where you you have adults with kids.”
So, talk to me, man. Are you a future star, or what?
“Oh, you found one for sure,” he said, without an unpleasant cockiness. “And why is that? Because I have a different mentality. I’m going into the fight win lose or draw, I’m coming to entertain. It’s not must win…it’s knock you out or you knock me out. I got to feed my family, you got to feed yours. Win, lose or draw, Arturo Gatti made money. It’s about my family eating. And it’s my job to inspire people, the people that come after me.”
Love it, love, love it. Music to my ears, in this era of boxer/businessmen. Here’s a throwback who gets it, and know what, it makes that much more sense when you know this kid was under Manny Steward’s wing. Manny came across Harrison when an 18-year-old Tony fought a Kronk kid, and lost to him. Maybe he didn’t lose, but he didn’t get the decision, and after, Manny told him he liked his way, that he should keep at it.
“My thinking was, eff Kronk. They had these nice jackets. It was before I really knew who Manny was. He told me I won the fight, against a guy with like 120 fights, and I had like 30. He invited me to his house, and asked if I wanted to turn pro.” Harrison wasn’t ready for that, and it took a few years for him to come back into the Steward orbit. He was sparring some guys at the Wild Card, like Paul Malignaggi, and promoters were sniffing around. Manny saw him at the WC, told him he’d call him, he did. Harrison was thinking about trying for the Olympics, but Manny set him straight about how far our amateur program had fallen. You might not even get the decision if you win, he said. It’s hard to be a minority and win at the Olympics, he said he told him. Turn pro on a Klitschko card, he promised. He got a passport, jetted to Hamburg and the rest was history. Of course, history took a turn when Manny got sick. The sting of his loss hurts worse than a million Micky Ward liver shots…
****
He’d have maybe been a bit sharper right now if he’d gone to camp with Wlad, as he usually does, Harrison tells me; he hops in with Wlad, shows speed, helps the big guy work on cutting off the ring, but a mouth issue kept him away from Germany this time around. Harrison said he’ll be in fine form on Dec. 20, though, and will again have his dad in his corner.
And check this out…you got to love this kid’s outlook. This is how he said he approaches his fights. “I’m coming out quick, it’s kill or be killed, it’s the only motto I have, I have always stressed it. Nobody wants to see ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ as Emanuel used to say.”
Me and Harrison share a chuckle as we fondly recall Steward’s penchant for profanity. I told Tony that I often find myself Tweeting out WWMD, ‘what would Manny do,’ during Wlad fights, and Tony laughed and said he could hear, in his head, Manny saying, “Emeffer, nobody wanna see this s—t, knock this emeffer out, you losing this crowd!”
“And so that’s me, in my fights, taking risks, trying to knock this emeffer out! When I miss, you feel the wind, in the crowd they see that and say, ‘that boy trying to knock him out, that’s what it’s about.’ People love to see Mike Tyson do his thing, no matter if it’s against an alley cat.”
Signing with Haymon was good, he said, because options were presented to him, work picked up, after the deal got signed. He told me he relies on a small circle of friends, among them fight photog Suzan Classen, who is married to the son of the late fighter Willie Classen, and offers Harrison her insight on how to negotiate life’s twists and turns. “She’s my home girl, that’s my homegirl till the end of the world. We met at an open workout at a gym in Manhattan last year and stayed in touch.”
Real people, and decency, is important to Harrison. He needed to find those people when his family was evicted from their residence when he was 16. “I lost everything, my clothes, shoes, everything. And my cousin, Graham Hester, he was 24, he said, ‘Stay with us.’ He had kids, and that stayed with me. And my mom, she’d be walking to work in the snow, sub zero, and the heat was turned off in the house. That’s when I decided, no more partying, no more clubbing. I grew up faster. Then my cousin, his landlord wasn’t paying the taxes, so he had to move, and we were staying at my other cousins. So, so many people have played a big part in my life, that’s why I am who I am. Money don’t make or break me. Loyalty is worth more than a hundred million dollars. My cousin believed, and I believe, I never lost faith, I’m never giving up on God. I know everything going to be alright, and that it was time to lose the itty bitty Spidey drawers and put the big boy boxers on.”
I can hear Manny chuckle, make a crack about the drawers, and I sense that he’d like if we kept eyeballs glued on this kid, because I think Steward saw something in him, something more than boxing skills, and I think I owe that to Steward, such an asset to the sport, to comply.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke

Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke
Years ago, I worked at a newsstand in the Beverly Hills area. It was a 24-hour a day version and the people that dropped by were very colorful and unique.
One elderly woman Eva, who bordered on homeless but pridefully wore lipstick, would stop by the newsstand weekly to purchase a pack of menthol cigarettes. On one occasion, she asked if I had ever been to San Diego?
I answered “yes, many times.”
She countered “you need to watch out for San Diego Smoke.”
This Saturday, Top Rank brings its brand of prizefighting to San Diego or what could be called San Diego Smoke. Leading the fight card is Mexico’s Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1, 32 KOs) defending the WBO super feather title against undefeated Filipino Charly Suarez (18-0, 10 KOs) at Pechanga Arena. ESPN will televise.
This is Navarrete’s fourth defense of the super feather title.
The last time Navarrete stepped in the boxing ring he needed six rounds to dismantle the very capable Oscar Valdez in their rematch. One thing about Mexico City’s Navarrete is he always brings “the smoke.”
Also, on the same card is Fontana, California’s Raymond Muratalla (22-0, 17 KOs) vying for the interim IBF lightweight title against Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (20-1, 12 KOs) on the co-main event.
Abdullaev has only fought once before in the USA and was handily defeated by Devin Haney back in 2019. But that was six years ago and since then he has knocked off various contenders.
Muratalla is a slick fighting lightweight who trains at the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy now in Moreno Valley, Calif. It’s a virtual boot camp with many of the top fighters on the West Coast available to spar on a daily basis. If you need someone bigger or smaller, stronger or faster someone can match those needs.
When you have that kind of preparation available, it’s tough to beat. Still, you have to fight the fight. You never know what can happen inside the prize ring.
Another fighter to watch is Perla Bazaldua, 19, a young and very talented female fighter out of the Los Angeles area. She is trained by Manny Robles who is building a small army of top female fighters.
Bazaldua (1-0, 1 KO) meets Mona Ward (0-1) in a super flyweight match on the preliminary portion of the Top Rank card. Top Rank does not sign many female fighters so you know that they believe in her talent.
Others on the Top Rank card in San Diego include Giovani Santillan, Andres Cortes, Albert Gonzalez, Sebastian Gonzalez and others.
They all will bring a lot of smoke to San Diego.
Probox TV
A strong card led by Erickson “The Hammer” Lubin (26-2, 18 KOs) facing Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0, 6 KOs) in a super welterweight clash between southpaws takes place on Saturday at Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida. PROBOX TV will stream the fight card.
Ardreal has rocketed up the standings and now faces veteran Lubin whose only losses came against world titlists Sebastian Fundora and Jermell Charlo. It’s a great match to decide who deserves a world title fight next.
Another juicy match pits Argentina’s Nazarena Romero (14-0-2) against Mexico’s Mayelli Flores (12-1-1) in a female super bantamweight contest.
Nottingham, England
Anthony Cacace (23-1, 8 KOs) defends the IBO super featherweight title against Leigh Wood (28-3, 17 KOs) in Wood’s hometown on Saturday at Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, England. DAZN will stream the Queensberry Promotions card.
Ireland’s Cacace seems to have the odds against him. But he is no stranger to dancing in the enemy’s lair or on foreign territory. He formerly defeated Josh Warrington in London and Joe Cordina in Riyadh in IBO title defenses.
Lampley at Wild Card
Boxing telecaster Jim Lampley will be signing his new book It Happened! at the Wild Card Boxing gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Saturday, May 10, beginning at 2 p.m. Lampley has been a large part of many of the greatest boxing events in the past 40 years. He and Freddie Roach will be at the signing.
Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)
Sat. DAZN 11 a.m. Anthony Cacace (23-1) vs Leigh Wood (28-3).
Sat. PROBOX.tv 3 p.m. Erickson Lubin (26-2) vs Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0).
Sat. ESPN 7 p.m. Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1) vs Charly Suarez (18-0); Raymond Muratalla (22-0) vs Zaur Abdullaev (20-1).
Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.
It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.
In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.
Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.
It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.
“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”
Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.
Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.
Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.
Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.
We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.
Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”
But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.
“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”
Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.
Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”
If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.
Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”
Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.
Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.
On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.
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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More
It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.
In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.
Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.
CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.
****
Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.
Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”
And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.
Joey Archer
Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer
Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.
Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)
Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.
Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.
In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.
When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.
Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.
May he rest in peace.
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