Mayweather Wouldn’t Get Props For Beating Algieri Like Pacquiao Did

Published

10 years ago

December 16, 2014

I’ve heard it said that he’s never looked better or been more confident. I’ve read that he has the ideal style to beat Floyd Mayweather 47-0 (26). Some have implied and inferred that Mayweather hasn’t agreed to fight him because he fears being knocked out by him. Despite the inconvenient fact that he couldn’t put away a beginner like Chris Algieri in his last bout after having him down six times and he hasn’t won by stoppage in five years. Yes, I’m talking about WBO welterweight title holder Manny Pacquiao 57-5-2 (38).

It’s over three weeks since Pacquiao fought Chris Algieri in a 144 pound catch-weight bout. The fight was no contest; Manny won every round and did whatever he wanted to during the fight. His speed and accuracy were there, so was some of the old explosiveness and obviously his power. He did put Algieri down six times and Chris certainly wasn’t hitting himself. What’s shocking is how after dominating Algieri, who would probably lose to half a dozen other fighters between 140/147, Pacquiao is once again seen in many eyes as the supernova he was back in 2009, when he stopped Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto.

Floyd Mayweather has been excoriated for fighting hand-picked opponents and being too risk averse in the last five years, especially in this space. And Mayweather has been dominant in most of those bouts where you/me/we belabored him for fighting opponents who would make him look sensational. Yet, Manny Pacquiao can fight Chris Algieri, who I questioned before the fight as being PPV worthy, something the terrible buy numbers supported, and he gets major props for winning every round against him?

At first I thought Pacquiao beating Algieri didn’t fool anybody, but I think I was wrong. You’d think that the lousy PPV numbers would suggest that the public knew it wasn’t much of a fight. And that winning a decision, when he really needed a knockout, and didn’t get it over a novice wouldn’t restore the public’s sense that Pacquiao is now a killer again. But apparently it has?

I tried to explain before the bout how Pacquiao-Algieri was specifically made to create the illusion that Manny is back now and is as good as and smarter than ever. And you know what? Based on what’s scoured in the sports section of many newspapers and on the Internet, they were more successful than I thought they’d be. Because it seems Manny went from being the prohibitive underdog when matched up with Mayweather after being knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez two years ago, to now being almost even money based on him taking Chris Algieri to boxing school last month.

Based on the consensus, Pacquiao gets some breaks that Mayweather would never get in the eyes of the boxing public. And since 2009 I’ve maintained and have been consistent that Mayweather-Pacquiao hasn’t happened because of Mayweather’s reluctance more so than Pacquiao’s. Ever since the talk of them fighting each other became a hot topic, it’s been mostly because of Floyd why it didn’t happen. And I still stand by that.

But what’s fair is fair… I wonder how well Mayweather would’ve been received if he signed to fight Algieri and beat him as handily as Pacquiao did?

For starters, Floyd would’ve been excoriated by both boxing fans and the media for fighting a no hope opponent like Chris Algieri. Leading up to the fight we would’ve read about how Algieri barely beat Ruslan Provodnikov and the fight is just another hoax by Mayweather to pocket $30 million and avoid fighting Pacquiao.

Let us suppose that it was Mayweather who peppered Algieri for 36 uninterrupted minutes on November 23rd instead of Pacquiao, which of course isn’t much of reach. What would the post-fight chatter be? I can only speculate, but I’d be willing to bet that the loudest voices wouldn’t be declaring that Floyd is back and is as sharp as ever. Nor would the talk be centered on how quick and accurate he is and how impossible it is to lay a glove on, and you know I’m right. I think it would be more on the lines of, “Mayweather fought Algieri because he knew he couldn’t lose and how it says nothing as to how great he still is because he handled a beginner like Algieri.” And then every name fighter campaigning between 140-147 who was more deserving and dangerous than Algieri would be named and suggested as that’s who Floyd should’ve fought instead. And if that were the case, they’d be correct.

So why does Pacquiao get a pass?

For more than a decade critics and fans have ripped Mayweather up and down, and rightfully so, for being too judicious and fighting no hope opponents who resembled Algieri. Or to put it another way, for fighting and defending his titles against opponents who didn’t have tool-one to beat him with. The opponents he fought were either too old or too green (like Algieri), or they just didn’t have the skill or power (like Algieri) to concern Mayweather in the least.

I can’t envision a case being made on Mayweather’s behalf suggesting or reinforcing that he could beat Pacquiao based on how Floyd performed against Algieri had they fought. All that would be repeated over and over to rebuke that is, Algieri is inexperienced and Mayweather only did what he should’ve done against a limited opponent at the most elite level in professional boxing. And that’s all that Pacquiao did! And actually, Manny underperformed because he didn’t get the stoppage or come close to the first round kayo that his trainer Freddie Roach predicted he would score.

The overreaction to Pacquiao’s showing against Algieri is ridiculous. Maybe you are one who believes that Pacquiao will beat Mayweather when they eventually fight… fine. I happen to think Floyd will beat Manny and control the fight most of the way for reasons I’ll go into at a later time when the bout is closer to becoming a reality. That said, I fully get that there is a strong case to be made supporting why Pacquiao will come out on top. Again, I get it.

However, if you believe Pacquiao is the superior fighter to Mayweather and will be victorious when they fight, great. Just don’t base it on how Manny looked for 12 rounds against Chris Algieri. Because that was an illusion with the purpose of making you believe that Manny is as good as ever in case you were starting to wane in that belief. Algieri is nothing close to Mayweather and is a completely different animal. What afforded Pacquiao to look great against Algieri won’t apply to Mayweather. And the same holds true regarding Mayweather and how he looked against Marcos Maidana. Pacquiao is nothing like Maidana.

And to those who are basing everything off of how Mayweather looked against Maidana as to why Pacquiao will beat him, especially during their first meeting, remember, Maidana came in for that fight weighing over 160 pounds. That was Floyd’s biggest mistake. Pacquiao has to bulk up to weigh 145. And Maidana is much more aggressive than Pacquiao, and his aggression disrupted Floyd stylistically. Pacquiao attacks more in spurts so Mayweather’s legs, if they’re starting to go, won’t be nearly as important against Pacquiao because Manny isn’t as aggressive and he’ll be easier to time and counter than Maidana was.

Frank Lotierzo can be contacted at GlovedFist@Gmail.com

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Frank Lotierzo

Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

12 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-322-Super-Welter-Week-in-SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

Published

4 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Mekhrubon-Sanginov-whose-Heroism-Nearly-Proved-Fatal-Returns-on-Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.

He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.

Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.

“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.

“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)

Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.

During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”

He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.

He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.

On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.

Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.

If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.

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