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Don King: The Last Roar of the Lion in Winter?

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It has been a remarkable run for a remarkable character, truly an American original, unique even by boxing’s fast-and-loose, anything-goes tolerance and even compliant acceptance of outrageous behavior.

But Don King, he of the electrified hair, bombastic personality and streetwise cunning, has slowed down from full-throttle manipulation of boxing to a minor role that seems to shrink with each passing day. The “Teflon Don,” as he once was dubbed for his ability to unstick himself from the many lawsuits filed against him, is 83 now, a graying lion in winter. Forty-plus years of wheeling and dealing can sap the vitality from even the most driven of alpha males, and especially so if the aging go-getter is an octogenarian who no longer is dealing from a position of near-absolute control.

That familiar, bellowing roar – well, more of a heh-heh-heh cackle – now comes with the volume turned low. At least the message being barked out isn’t reaching as many listeners. Maybe that is because the man himself is simply tuckered out, and maybe because his depleted stable of fighters is basically down to one lead pony that, upon further inspection, is lacking the regal bloodlines and staying power of many of his predecessors. But regardless of their place in boxing’s pecking order, King’s fighters during his glory days were obliged to pledge fealty (and hefty percentages of their purses) to the boss as a condition of their servitude.

Some observers have made the mistake of writing off King in the past, but whenever it appeared he was becoming less relevant, he simply found a way to restock his talent pool with a fresh influx of elite attractions, more than a few of whom were lured away from rival promoters. If it is indeed possible for a slick enough huckster to sell sand to Bedouin tribesmen, it was a near-certainty that DK would find a way to run the largest, most profitable concession stand in the desert.

All of which makes tonight’s Showtime-televised pairing at the MGM Grand King’s last, best hope for an important toehold in the sport, WBC heavyweight champion Bermane “B. Ware” Stiverne (24-1-1, 21 KOs), and challenger Deontay Wilder (32-0, 32 KOs) more notable than it might be solely on its pugilistic merits. Should Stiverne – a 36-year-old Haitian, formerly based in Quebec City, Canada, now living in Las Vegas – lose a fight that is by no means a sure thing either way, it could have the effect of ushering King off to the side, once and for all.

But if King is indeed on his way out, he’s going the same way he came in, with heaping measures of defiance, bluster and bullspit.

”This program is America’s return to glory in the heavyweight division,” King harrumphed, ignoring the fact that only one fighter, the one he doesn’t control, is a United States citizen. “It’s going to be a great event. This is a fight to bring boxing back to where it should be, and the glory back to the heavyweight division that has been lacking for quite a while now.

“A guy named Bermane Stiverne is an extension to (Mike) Tyson – awesome, brutal, a devastating puncher.”

Perhaps Stiverne will be all of that on Saturday night, or at least show flashes of the form King has assured everyone he possesses in sufficient supply to be compared to iconic heavyweights Tyson, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, all of whom His Hairness promoted at one time or another. But it seems more plausible that Stiverne is a cut or two below that uppermost tier, more in line with such King roster-fillers as Tim Witherspoon, Greg Page, Bonecrusher Smith, Tony Tubbs and Tony Tucker, talented bench guys whom he had rounded up primarily to serve as opponents for his marquee attractions. It was standard practice for King to arrange title fights between two of his fighters, assuring that the only guaranteed winner after the last punch was thrown was … Don King.

It is a ploy also used by King’s longest-running and most-bitter competitor for promotional domination, Top Rank CEO Bob Arum, 83, who, on the surface, is everything that King is not. But while their pre-boxing experiences are hardly identical, their management objectives are eerily similar: Always, always be the one calling the shots and directing the play.

Forget Ali-Frazier; that series was a fleeting blip on the radar screen compared to the decades-long blood feud between Arum, the “master of trickeration,” as so dubbed by King, and his hulking, flag-waving nemesis with the mountain-range coif. But it says something about the arch-rivals that they occasionally got together to do business because, well, declaring intermittent truces was good business.

A couple of months prior to the April 8, 2006, matchup of King’s Zab Judah and Arum’s Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas, the enemies-turned-temporary-allies held a remarkable press conference in Atlantic City, N.J., to not only chat up the upcoming fight, but to turn their verbal guns on a nagging irritant, then-Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer, whom each considered to be a threat to their established turf.

“If you were making a chart from zero to a hundred, Bob Arum – Harvard graduate, Kennedy raider, Jewish ethnic, got the complexion for the connection – would be the most likely to succeed,” chortled King as Arum sat close by, forcing a smile.

“Don King – African-American, ex-convict, served time in jail – on (a scale) of zero to 100, it would be 100 to zero for Bob Arum. But in reality, is hasn’t been that way because I’ve been extraordinary at what I do. Us playing off each other has been a blessing more than anything. At the end of the day, only the two of us are left standing. Collectively, the rest can’t tie our shoestrings.”

In the eight-plus years since that pronouncement, Arum has separated himself from King more than Dez Bryant putting a double-move on a confused rookie cornerback lacking top-end speed. Arum’s company remains a behemoth of the industry, with a deep roster ranging from the more-established likes of Manny Pacquiao, Timothy Bradley Jr., Nonito Donaire, Terence Crawford and Nicholas Walters to such emerging attractions Vasyl Lomachenko, Zou Shiming, Felix Verdejo and Jesse Hart … about 50 fighters in all.

And it’s not just the quantity and quality of Arum’s inventory that keeps Top Rank strong. Ever the globe-trotting entrepreneur, Arum has made Macau, China, boxing’s hot, new destination for major bouts, and the recent thawing of his company’s frosty relationship with Oscar De La Hoya and Golden Boy, facilitated in no small part by the departure of Schaefer, his King-like substitute as an object of derision, has further entrenched Top Rank as a major player going forward. Arum also has a successor waiting in the wings in Todd duBoef, his stepson, who for years has been groomed to keep the TR brand buffed and polished.

King’s operation hasn’t fared nearly so well by comparison.

The tried-and-true tricks King used to telling effect in the past – opening up a satchel of money, dumping it on a table, and telling a fighter raised in poverty that he had to sign multiple blank contracts with King if he wanted to leave with the booty, and maybe the keys to a new car – aren’t the guaranteed deal-closers that they once were. Nor is the race card King has been known to play with black fighters who were schmoozed into feeling more comfortable with one of their own.

Don King Productions moved from the Upper East Side of Manhattan – the tony section of New York that, rightly or wrongly, perceives itself as the center of the known universe – to Deerfield Beach, Fla., in the late 1980s. Once, DKP handled a Top-Rank-sized lineup of premier fighters, necessitating a staff of around 50 to keep the operation humming. Now, the number of employees has been pared to 10 or so, with many of King’s most trusted lieutenants having either died off or, sensing the seismic shift taking place within the organization, gotten out while the getting was good.

But the man himself remains in the game, even if marginalized, even if an increasing number of former employees and associates, having broken free from his iron grip, now excoriate him as a ruthless taskmaster whose public persona is as purposefully crafted as anything that has ever been sold to gullible consumers.

Bernard Hopkins was unhappily under contract to King when he won the middleweight unification tournament with a surprise (or so some thought), 12th-round stoppage of a King favorite, Felix Trinidad, on Sept. 29, 2001. It gnawed at Hopkins that the Sugar Ray Robinson Award, which had been commissioned to go to the ultimate victor, had been engraved with Trinidad’s name before the final. And if there is anything that can be said about B-Hop, it is that he files away all real and perceived slights, and draws upon them for inspiration as needed.

When Hopkins, no longer with King, was to take on King fighter Tavoris Cloud, the IBF titlist, on March 9, 2013, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., the then-48-year-old Philadelphian, who would go on to score a unanimous-decision victory, reveled in the notion that he was going to shovel the last spadeful of dirt upon the professional grave of his onetime promoter.

“I am surprised that King agreed (to make the fight) because Cloud losing to me will shut down what’s left of King’s company,” Hopkins said. “He’s pretty much down to Cloud. Cloud is Don King’s last big hope.

“Who would have thought that I would have stayed around long enough to destroy Don King? I started the process with Tito (Trinidad). Look, I made a history of beating Don King fighters. Robert Allen, John David Jackson, William Joppy, Keith Holmes, Trinidad. That’s five so far. There’s probably more.”

Nor is Hopkins the only former King fighter who has told tales of chicanery and financial improprieties of a colossal magnitude, which served to mostly enrich the promoter instead of the guy eating the punches. Former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon filed a $25 million lawsuit against His Hairness in 1987, alleging that he had been bilked out of significant chunks of his purses. When Witherspoon, the WBA champ, fought Frank Bruno in London on July 19, 1986, for instance, HBO paid King $1.7 million to deliver “Terrible Tim,” and the Associated Press reported that his share of the pot would be $900,000, the same as Bruno’s. But although Bruno – a non-King fighter whom Witherspoon stopped in 11 rounds – received his full guarantee, ’Spoon was handed a check for $90,094.

“It’s like we’re racehorses,” Witherspoon, who after years of legal wrangling settled with King out-of-court for $1 million, said of his role as one of the King-controlled “Lost generation of heavyweights” in the 1980s. “They race us ’til we drop and then they shoot us. And if we win, they tie a blue ribbon around our neck.”

More damning accusations were cited, chapter and verse, in “Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King,” by Jack Newfield, which was published in 1995. In the book, Newfield, who died in 2004, wrote that Muhammad Ali was shorted about $1.2 million of his contracted $8 million purse for the horrific beatdown he suffered at the hands of Larry Holmes on Oct. 2, 1980. While a clearly diminished Ali was recovering, Newfield detailed how King got a trusted Ali associate, Jeremiah Shabazz, to bring “The Greatest” a suitcase filled with $50,000 and a contract that not only precluded him from pursuing punitive damages against King, but gave King the option to promote any of Ali’s future fights. Weary and confused, Ali signed the contract and took the cash.

By his own estimation, King has spent $30 million defending himself against lawsuits, and not only those filed by disgruntled fighters. The FBI went after him for tax evasion, among other things, but King beat the rap that landed Al Capone in Alcatraz. In 1995, he beat a nine-count indictment on insurance fraud. Almost without exception, King, claiming he was the target of jealous or unscrupulous adversaries, came away unscathed.

“They went down the list of every known charge conceivable to man,” he said after outpointing the feds on the tax-evasion beef. “Racketeering, skimming, kickbacks, ticket-scalping, fixing fights, preordaining fights, corrupting judges, all the way down to laundering money. Everything but the Lindbergh baby. Instead of using me as the true attestation of the American dream, they threw the book at me.”

The book missed King, as large as he is, but maybe Deontay Wilder will land the takeout shot to Stiverne’s jaw that will finish the job so many have taken upon themselves dating back to the 1970s. Then again …

There are two sides to every story, of course, and King has an array of accomplishments to counteract the impression that he is a shameless con artist who only takes and never gives anything back to the sport that made him a legend and instantly recognizable figure here, there and everywhere. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997, which is a pretty big deal, even though some critics said his enshrinement was akin to electing Willie Sutton or John Dillinger to the banking hall of fame. But, DK’s acknowledged warts aside, it is also undeniable that he has promoted more than 500 world championship fights and made millionaires (90 or so, at last count) of numerous children of poverty who were handy with their fists. OK, joke if you must about how he showed all those people how to make a small fortune: Start out with a large fortune, then watch as Don King chipped away at it with a laundry list of dubious deductions.

But even the most persistent snipers who have always taken aim at King would have to admit that boxing would seem, well, a little less interesting with him totally absent from the picture. And he was totally in the picture during his decades-long heyday, hogging more on-camera face time than even today’s most ubiquitous grandstander, Al Haymon associate Sam Watson, who is as out there as Haymon, boxing’s hermit-like Svengali, is not.

When King – who had been prohibited from doing business in Atlantic City for seven-plus years while his insurance-fraud case was pending (he finally was acquitted) – returned to the Jersey shore with a Dec. 5, 1998, show headlined by the matchup of WBA bantamweight champion Nana Konadu and popular challenger Johnny Tapia at the new Convention Center, the focus was on you-know-who. In King’s world, he is always the centerpiece, with the fighters playing support roles.

“I don’t understand this. I’m the one who’s fighting, right?” a perplexed Tapia, who claimed Konadu’s title on a 12-round majority decision, said of the prefight press conference whose prevailing theme appeared to be “Don King makes triumphant return to Atlantic City!”

King has his familiar props and mannerisms, from the electrified hair to the little flags he always waves to the brandished stogie to the malaprops he sprinkles into his every turn at the microphone or even in casual conversation. Ask him a question, about anything, and a reporter is apt to get 15 minutes of stream-of-consciousness, with King randomly dropping such names as W.E.B. duBois, Frederick Douglass, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, occasionally making you chuckle with a misstatement that, upon further reflection, seems part of a well-rehearsed act.

This was – and probably still is, even in his dotage – one very shrewd dude. When I introduced my father to him at the second Mike Tyson-Razor Ruddock fight in Las Vegas, King immediately turned on the charm. “So you are the daddy of one of the boss scribes!” he bellowed, enveloping my 5-6½ father in a bear-hug.

“He must like you,” my dad said as we walked away.

“Depends on the most recent story I wrote about him or one of his fighters,” I replied.

But I wondered then, and still do, if King was playing me, the media being as susceptible to mind games and flattery as anyone else. And now Bermane Stiverne could be the last twitching fish on the end of King’s line, ready to be reeled in along with a new generation of willing and malleable reporters whose first rule of journalism is the insatiable need to find the most interesting story, and to ride it hard.

After all these years, Don King – Mr. Only in America – remains a story that can still be milked. He and I probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Avila Perspective Chap 320: Boots Ennis and Stanionis

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Jaron “Boots Ennis and Eimantis Stanionus are in the wrong era.

If they had fought in the late 70s and early 80s the boxing world would have seen them regularly on televised fight cards.

Instead, with the world’s attention span diluted by thousands of available programming, this richly talented pair of undefeated welterweights Ennis (33-0, 29 Kos) and Stanionis (15-0, 9 Kos) will battle in the smaller confines of Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on Saturday April 12.

Thankfully, DAZN will stream the WBA and IBF welterweight world title fight on the Matchroom Boxing card.

If not for DAZN these two elite fighters and the sport of pro boxing might be completely invisible to the sports entertainment world.

These welterweights are special.

Ennis, a lean whip-quick fighter out of Philadelphia, stylistically reminds me of a Tommy Hearns but not as tall or long-armed as the Detroit fighter of the past.

“Win on Saturday and I’m the WBA, IBF and Ring Magazine champion, and then we’ll see what’s next. But I am zoned in on Stanionis,” said Ennis the IBF titlist.

Lithuania’s Stanionis and his pressure style liken to a Marvelous Marvin Hagler who would walk through fire to reach striking distance of a foes chin or abdomen.

“Ennis is slick, explosive, and they say he’s the future of the division. That’s why I signed the contract. I don’t duck anyone—I run toward the fire,” Stanionis said.

When Hagler and Hearns met in Las Vegas on April 1985, their reputations had been built on television with millions watching against common foes like Roberto Duran and Juan Roldan. Both had different styles just like Stanionis and Ennis and both could punch.

One difference was their ability to take a punch.

Hagler had a chin of steel, Hearns did not.

When Ennis and Stanionis meet in the boxing ring this Saturday, each is facing the most dangerous fighter of his career. Whose chin will hold up is the true question?

“This isn’t gonna be a chess match. This is going to be a war,” said Stanionis who holds the WBA title. “I’m stepping into that ring to test him, break him, and beat him. Let’s see how he handles real pressure.”

Ennis just wants to win.

“I’m at the point right now where I don’t care what people say,” said Ennis. “I’m here to do one thing and that’s put hands on you, that’s it.”

Golden Boy in Oceanside, CA

Next week budding star Charles Conway (21-0, 16 Kos) meets Mexico’s Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 Kos) in the semi-main event at Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, California on Saturday April 19.

The two super welterweights are both ranked in the top 10 and the winner moves up to the elite level of the very stacked super welterweight division.

Conwell, who trains in Cleveland, Ohio, has been one of boxing’s best kept secrets and someone few champions and contenders want to face. Take my word for it, this kid can fight.

On the main event is undisputed female flyweight world champion Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 Kos) defending all her titles against Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 Kos).

Fundora is quickly becoming the most feared champion in boxing.

360 Promotions

Super welter prospect Sadridden Akhmedov (15-0, 13 Kos) meets Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 Kos) in the main event on Saturday April 19, at the Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif. The 360 Promotions event will be streamed on UFC Fight Pass.

Also, Roxy Verduzco (3-0) meets Jessica Radtke (1-1-1) in a six rounds featherweight battle.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Jarron Ennis (33-0) vs Eamantis Stanionis (15-0).

Photo credit: Mark Robinson

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Dzmitry Asanau Flummoxes Francesco Patera on a Ho-Hum Card in Montreal

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Dzmitry Asanau Flummoxes Francesco Patera on a Ho-Hum Card in Montreal

Camille Estephan’s Eye of the Tiger Promotions was at its regular pop stand at the Montreal Casino tonight. Upsets on Estephan’s cards are as rare as snow on the Sahara Desert and tonight was no exception.

The main event was a 10-round lightweight contest between Dzmitry “The Wasp” Asanau and Francesco Patera.

A second-generation prizefighter – his father was reportedly an amateur champion in Russia – Asanau, 28, had a wealth of international amateur experience and represented Belarus in the Tokyo Olympics. His punches didn’t sting like a wasp, but he had too much class for Belgium’s Patera whose claim to fame was that he went 10 rounds with current WBO lightweight champion Keyshawn Davis.

Two of the judges scored every round for the Wasp (10-0, 4 KOs) with the other seeing it 98-92. Patera falls to 30-6.

Co-Feature

Fast-rising Mexican-Canadian welterweight Christopher Guerrero was credited with three knockdowns en route to a one-sided 10-round decision over Oliver Quintana. A two-time Canadian amateur champion, Guererro improved to 14-0 (8).

The fight wasn’t quite as lopsided as what the scorecards read (99-88 and 98-89 twice). None of the knockdowns were particularly harsh and the middle one was a dubious call by the referee.

It was a quick turnaround for Guerrero who scored the best win of his career 8 weeks ago in this ring. The spunky but out-gunned Quintana, whose ledger declined to 22-4, was making his first start outside Mexico.

After his victory, Guerrero was congratulated by ringsider Terence “Bud” Crawford who has a date with Canelo Alvarez in September, purportedly in Las Vegas at the home of the NFL’s Raiders. Canelo has an intervening fight with William Scull on May 4 (May 3 in the U.S.) in Saudi Arabia.

Other Bouts of Note

In a fight without an indelible moment, Mary Spencer improved to 10-2 (6) with a lopsided decision over Ogleidis Suarez (31-6-1). The scores were 99-91 and 100-90 twice. Spencer was making the first defense of her WBA super welterweight title. (She was bumped up from an interim champion to a full champion when Terri Harper vacated the belt.)

A decorated amateur, the 40-year-old Spencer has likely reached her ceiling as a pro. A well-known sports personality in Venezuela, Suarez, 37, returned to the ring in January after a 26-month hiatus. An 18-year pro, she began her career as a junior featherweight.

In a monotonously one-sided fight, Jhon Orobio, a 21-year-old Montreal-based Colombian, advanced to 13-0 (11) with an 8-round shutout over Argentine campaigner Sebastian Aguirre (19-7). Orobio threw the kitchen sink at his rugged Argentine opponent who was never off his feet.

Wyatt Sanford

The pro debut of Nova Scotia’s Wyatt Sanford, a bronze medalist at the Paris Olympics, fell out when Sanford’s opponent was unable to make weight. The opponent, 37-year-old slug Shawn Archer, was reportedly so dehydrated that he had to be hospitalized.

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Remembering Hall of Fame Boxing Trainer Kenny Adams

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The flags at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, are flying at half-staff in honor of boxing trainer Kenny Adams who passed away Monday (April 7) at age 84 at a hospice in Las Vegas. Adams was formally inducted into the Hall in June of last year but was too ill to attend the ceremony.

A native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Adams was a retired Army master sergeant who was part of an elite squadron that conducted many harrowing missions behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War. A two-time All-Service boxing champion, his name became more generally known in 1984 when he served as the assistant coach of the U.S. Olympic boxing team that won 11 medals, eight gold, at the Los Angeles Summer Games. In 1988, he was the head coach of the squad that won eight medals, three gold, at the Olympiad in Seoul.

Adams’ work caught the eye of Top Rank honcho Bob Arum who induced Adams to move to Las Vegas and coach a team of fledgling pros that he had recently signed. Bantamweight Eddie Cook and junior featherweight Kennedy McKinney, Adams’ first two champions, bubbled out of that pod. Both represented the U.S. Army as amateurs. McKinney was an Olympic gold medalist. Adams would eventually play an instrumental role in the development of more than two dozen world title-holders including such notables as Diego Corrales, Edwin Valero, Freddie Norwood, and Terence Crawford.

When Eddie Cook won his title from Venezuela’s 36-1 Israel Contreras, it was a big upset. Adams, the subject of a 2023 profile in these pages, was subsequently on the winning side of two upsets of far greater magnitude. He prepared French journeyman Rene Jacquot for Jacquot’s date with Donald Curry on Feb. 11 1989 and prepared Vincent Phillips for his engagement with Kostya Tszyu on May 31, 1997.

Jacquot won a unanimous decision over Curry. Phillips stopped Tszyu in the 10th frame. Both fights were named Upset of the Year by The Ring magazine.

Adams’ home-away-from-home in his final years as a boxing coach was the DLX boxing gym which opened in the summer of 2020 in a former dry cleaning establishment on the west-central side of the city. It was fortuitous to the gym’s owner Trudy Nevins that Adams happened to live a few short blocks away.

“He helped me get the place up and running,” notes Nevins who endowed a chair, as it were, in honor of her esteemed helpmate.

No one in the Las Vegas boxing community was closer to Kenny Adams than Brandon Woods. “He was a mentor to me in boxing and in life in general, a father figure,” says Woods, who currently trains Trevor McCumby and Rocky Hernandez, among others.

Akin to Adams, Woods is a Missourian. His connection to Adams comes through his amateur coach Frank Flores, a former teammate of Adams on an all-Service boxing team and an assistant under Adams with the 1988 U.S. Olympic squad.

Woods was working with Nonito Donaire when he learned that he had cancer (now in remission). He cajoled Kenny Adams out of retirement to assist with the training of the Las Vegas-based Filipino and they were subsequently in the corner of Woods’ fighter DeeJay Kriel when the South African challenged IBF 105-pound title-holder Carlos Licona at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 2019.

This would be the last time they worked together in the corner and it proved to be a joyous occasion.

After 11 rounds, the heavily favored Licona, a local fighter trained by Robert Garcia, had a seemingly insurmountable lead. He was ahead by seven points on two of the scorecards. In the final round, Kriel knocked him down three times and won by TKO.

“I will always remember the pep talk that Kenny gave DeeJay before that final round,” says Woods. “He said ‘You mean to tell me that you came all the way from across the pond to get to this point and not win a title?’ but in language more colorful than that; I’m paraphrasing.”

“After the fight, Kenny said to me, ‘In all my years of training guys, I never saw that.’”

The fight attracted little attention before or after (it wasn’t the main event), but it would enter the history books. Boxing writer Eric Raskin, citing research by Steve Farhood, notes that there have been only 16 instances of a boxer winning a world title fight by way of a last-round stoppage of a bout he was losing. The most famous example is the first fight between Julio Cesar Chavez and Meldrick Taylor. Kriel vs. Licona now appears on the same list.

Brandon Woods notes that the Veterans Administration moved Adams around quite a bit in his final months, shuffling him to hospitals in North Las Vegas, Kingman, Arizona, and then Boulder City (NV) before he was placed in a hospice.

When Woods visited Adams last week, Adams could not speak. “If you can hear me, I would say to him, please blink your eyes. He blinked.

“There are a couple of people in my life I thought would never leave us and Kenny is one,” said Woods with a lump in his throat.

Photo credit: Supreme Boxing

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