Countdown To Mayweather-Pacquiao: MayPac Compares To Leonard-Duran I

Published

9 years ago

April 7, 2015

With the much anticipated super fight between welterweights Floyd Mayweather 47-0 (26) and Manny Pacquiao 57-5-2 (38) nearing, it’s been hard to find another super fight that it is most analogous to.

And that’s mainly because the dynamics that are bringing Mayweather and Pacquiao together are unlike any other super fight of my time following the sport of boxing.

In terms of anticipation and seeing two fighter’s names together on a marquee, I suppose Frazier-Ali I and Hagler-Leonard work best. From a style perspective, Ali 31-0 (25) was more offensive minded than Mayweather, and Frazier 26-0 (23) was much more aggressive and applied sustained bell-to-bell pressure, in contrast to Pacquiao, whose pressure is more sporadic. In addition to that, Joe, 27, and Muhammad, 29, were at or near their physical prime the first time they fought. And prior to the fight it was impossible to picture either Frazier or Ali losing, and that certainly doesn’t apply to Mayweather or Pacquiao.

Hagler-Leonard shares some interesting parallels because you have an aggressive southpaw (Hagler) fighting as the attacker going after a superstar boxer (Leonard). It also works because both Marvin, 32, and Ray, 30, were past their prime when they finally tangled back in 1987. The problem is, Leonard 33-1 (24) the boxer was moving up in weight to challenge the bigger man in Hagler 62-2-2 (52), who like Pacquiao is viewed as the bigger puncher. That doesn’t fit the Mayweather-Pacquiao template because Mayweather the boxer is clearly the bigger framed man compared to Pacquiao, the presumed aggressor and bigger puncher.

I suppose you have to go back 35 years to find the super fight that is most analogous to the upcoming welterweight clash between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. And that would be the WBC welterweight title bout between title holder Sugar Ray Leonard 27-0 (18) and former undisputed lightweight champ Roberto Duran 71-1 (55) on June 20th 1980. No, it’s not a perfect match because Ray, 24, and Roberto, 29 were close to their prime, as opposed to Floyd, 38, and Manny, 36, who are slightly on the decline……but it comes the closest regarding their personalities, boxing styles and the anticipated style clash between them. Also, the superstar boxer went into both bouts as the betting favorite. Leonard was 9-5 over Duran and Mayweather is between 13-5 and 3-1 over Pacquiao.

Let’s start with the similarities and contrast in their personalities. Sugar Ray Leonard was a superstar who exuded almost Muhammad Ali-like natural charisma, and he was covered like a rock star the moment he announced he was turning pro. As for Floyd Mayweather, he had to wait 11 years before he transformed himself into boxing’s biggest star. No, he’s not the media darling that Leonard was and he certainly doesn’t have the charm or magnetism that Ray still has, but he is the superstar in this fight and has called the shots accordingly. Also, it’s never mentioned but another difference between Ray and Floyd is Leonard went out of his way to be entertaining in the ring, which is something Mayweather really only pays lip service to.

As for Duran and Pacquiao, despite being foreigners both had/have a huge fan base in the United States and their fighting is what is most captivating about them. They aren’t the talkers or promoters that Leonard and Mayweather were/are, but the way they handle their business in the ring draws fans out to watch them whenever they fight.

Another correlation between Duran and Pacquiao is they’re both the smaller framed man and started their careers way below welterweight when they turned pro. Duran skipped the junior welterweight division and went right from lightweight to welterweight when he challenged Leonard. Pacquiao turned pro as a flyweight and has never weighed more than 145 for a welterweight title bout, two pounds below the maximum allowed for the division limit. Mayweather turned pro as a junior lightweight but as it was the case with Leonard, is a full-fledged welterweight by the time of the big fight.

When it comes to boxing styles, Mayweather, as it was the case with Leonard, is the more conventional boxer in the match-up. However, other than being fast and flashy, that’s where the similarity ends. Leonard could really punch to the head and body with both hands, and he went into the Duran fight thinking he could beat Roberto going toe-to-toe with him. On the other hand Mayweather will most likely only engage Pacquiao if he’s forced to. Mayweather is better than Leonard was defensively, but a lot of that has to do with Leonard being more offensively driven and that he sought to win by knockout, whereas Floyd is most content going the distance. This makes him less vulnerable to getting hit during exchanges because he usually only engages on his terms when he deems that it’s safe. Another thing Ray and Floyd share is both were physically stronger than they get credit for being, and neither had a shortage of confidence.

Pacquiao, as it was when Duran fought Leonard, is the perceived aggressor and puncher. But that’s where the similarity ends between them. Pacquiao is a southpaw who fights in spurts and is more prone to his feet sometimes being off the canvas when he attacks in spurts and waves. On the other hand, Duran of the lightweight/welterweight vintage, applied non-stop sustained pressure and cut the ring off much better than Pacquiao. Manny has quicker hands and feet than Duran did but he’s easier to hit and is nowhere near the inside fighter or body puncher Roberto was. Duran was a brilliant defensive fighter and his chin was much better than Pacquiao’s. Even though both of their high profile kayo losses were similar, there’s a big difference, and that is Duran got knocked out way over his best weight by one of the hardest one-shot punchers in boxing history, Thomas Hearns, not by a fighter who was chasing him up in weight who never dropped him once in their three previous fights, Juan Manuel Marquez.

There’s also an x-factor that was in play before the first Leonard-Duran bout that I don’t think is in play between Mayweather and Pacquiao, and that was Duran’s intense dislike of Leonard. Call it a hunch, but I don’t believe Manny could conjure up the borderline hatred for Floyd that Roberto harbored for Ray. Duran didn’t want to just beat Leonard, he wanted to humiliate and embarrass him in front of his wife and fans, and I don’t think Pacquiao is built like that. Duran was fiercely driven by his want to take Leonard down, because in his eyes Ray was receiving undue and unearned star treatment over him, on top of being further insulted that Leonard was earning roughly five times more money than he was for their fight. This is opposed to Pacquiao, who is getting a 40/60 split with Mayweather.

I’ve always maintained that I’ve never seen a fighter more prepared mentally, emotionally, physically and strategically who was on more of a mission to beat a particular opponent than “Smokin” Joe Frazier was to beat Muhammad Ali on March 8th, 1971….but if I had to pick a runner-up to Frazier it would be Roberto Duran of the first Leonard fight on June 20th, 1980.

As for the fight, if Mayweather-Pacquiao turns out to be half as good as Leonard-Duran I, it will be talked about for years to come. But that’s a high bar for it to clear. Leonard was awesome during that fight, and that’s because Duran wasn’t to be denied. Roberto’s sustained aggression along with his ability to never really let up for 15 fast paced rounds forced the young Leonard to raise his game, and he did. There were some tremendous exchanges during the bout and every time you started to think one of them was seizing control of the action, the other roared back and turned the tide.

The key to Duran’s unanimous decision victory was his ability to get Leonard to fight his fight. Duran taunting Leonard before the bout, insinuating that he wasn’t tough and how he would be forced to run, made it easier for him to lure Leonard into fighting more and boxing less. In addition to that, Leonard learned as the fight progressed just how versatile and slippery Duran was, something he wasn’t prepared for. It was a great fight and it was very close, but Duran nudged it out and both were the better for it.

If Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach can somehow get Manny to fight with the same non-stop aggression and tenacity that Roberto Duran did during the first Leonard fight, then Floyd Mayweather will be in for the toughest fight of his life and may depart the ring 47-1. But Manny Pacquiao is no Roberto Duran, but then again he won’t have to be because Floyd Mayweather is no Sugar Ray Leonard.

Frank Lotierzo can be contacted at GlovedFist@Gmail.com

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Frank Lotierzo

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

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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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