Graduation Night For Anthony Joshua?

Published

9 years ago

May 29, 2015

If you hail from the United Kingdom, you learn to suffer with your heavyweights.

Bob Fitzsimmons abandoned these shores so young that we can point to him, perhaps, as proof of the British heart and fighting stock even if we must admit that it was not our fighting culture that birthed him. Lennox Lewis was a great, great heavyweight and we clutched him to our collective bosom with a hunger that spoke of the hurt that lay between he and Fitzsimmons, and we still do – but his nationality is a complex issue, a fact betrayed by his accent, his dual British and Canadian nationality, the fact he boxed for the latter as an amateur and his persistent and understandable hailing of his Jamaican roots. Whatever we have to say to one another about the great Lewis now, it is a fact that we at no time counted him a hero in the same way that we did Frank Bruno, not while he was fighting.

Frank Bruno, big Frank, sometime pantomime dame and perennial contender, was a legitimate cross-over star in Britain. Beloved by all, he was brutalised into semi-consciousness while still standing by Lewis, “The Lion” preposterously interrupted in the middle of this ritual slaughter by referee Mickey Vann, who warned Lewis about heeling before letting him lose once more on a Bruno completely incapable of defending himself. Perhaps Vann, like the rest of us, had become used to the site of Frank being harpooned on the ropes by a venomous Pequod, having previously watched Tim Witherspoon, James Smith and most deadly of, Mike Tyson, brutalise him in a similar fashion. It would be hard, hard to call Bruno a failure, especially as he eventually raised a strap, if not the legitimate championship, but it is fair to say he did not do what we expected of him while we pretended to box his opponents in the school playground. Perhaps “glorious failure” is the best way to say it; a man who had the balls to try, try and try again despite his shortcomings.

In fact, by the time Bruno turned professional the glorious failure was the great tradition of the British heavyweight. Think of Welshman Tommy Farr and his spectacular effort versus Joe Louis, the only man to take the Bomber the distance in his first nine title fights. Beaten over the distance, Farr was lauded for his loss in Britain, just as Londoner Don Cockell was eighteen years later for his effort versus Rocky Marciano. Henry Cooper became the king of the glorious failures when he successfully dropped Muhammad Ali with a steaming left-hook before bursting all over him in a bloody geyser, his face torn to a mask of gore not once, but twice, by the man they call The Greatest. These men exceeded our low expectations against great champions.

Since Lewis, the exceeding of expectations is a distant and wondrous dream.

We were burned most badly by Audley Harrison. A six-foot-five Olympic gold-medal winning southpaw with an 86” reach and a line in patter which would have persuaded even the 1940s New York fight press of his credentials as a future world champion, Harrison first destroyed boxing in Britain on free-to-air TV by accepting millions from the publicly funded BBC and then proceeding to fight a series of what can only be described, politely, as total bums, before also undermining pay-per-view with a bizarre non-effort against David Haye on Sky Box Office. Harrison landed literally one punch in that fight. He was paid £1.5m.

Speaking of bizarre non-efforts, David Haye’s against Wladimir Klitschko was one of the more embarrassing of recent times. Haye could have just slinked off shamefaced after that fight, offering his physical and technical inferiority as an excuse for the most one-sided loss in HW boxing since Haye-Harrison a few months earlier, but instead he elected to stand on the post-fight press-conference table and display what can only be described as a mildly bruised pinky-toe – the real reason for the loss. Haye was a good fighter, but his confounding attempt at Klitschko failed even to reach the minimum standard of glorious failure during a world-title shot. In combination with Harrison’s mad antics it summarised a bleak time for British boxing.

Fortunately, a healing balm was warring its way through the British ranks in Liverpool: 6’8 scouser David Price weighed in at 250lbs and rescued us from Harrison with a first round knockout of that fraud in 2012. A confession: I never bought Harrison, but I bought Price. Massive like bridges are big, Price seemed to loom over the heavyweight division and this laid the scales across my eyes. When he was obliterated twice in back-to-back fights by evergreen veteran Tony Thompson, who stopped him first in two rounds and then in five, it came as quite a shock. When his promoter, Frank Maloney, later announced that he wanted to live as a woman and was to be referred to from then on as Kellie Maloney, I saw it as representative of the affect this final and most humiliating failure by a British heavyweight upon the British boxing establishment. It was enough to make me want to don a dress myself.

With all my hopes pegged upon Tyson Fury I at first refused to believe that Anthony Joshua would be anything other than the latest in a long line of disappointments.

I hope the reader will forgive the late arrival of Anthony Joshua into an article which purports to be about him, but I think a little context is warranted. Further to that, consider this: in no way is the competition matched by Anthony Joshua at this point better than the competition matched by David Price before he was destroyed by Tony Thompson. The creaking Russian Denis Bakhtov (38-9 going in) is his best opponent up until this point, although certainly he looked less than a world beater beating up poor old Danny Williams – another brave British heavyweight who was brutally annihilated in a tilt at a strap against Vitali Klitschko but who nevertheless likely falls into the “glorious failure” category for his one-armed efforts against Mark Potter, and the wonderful night he stopped Mike Tyson.

Bakhtov, at just 5’11, would have slipped neatly alongside the competition that allowed Price to deceive us so. 15-0 puncher Tom Dallas was 6’6 and had knocked out eleven of fifteen victims coming into his dust-up with Price but Price put him away in just two. When Price took on Sam Sexton, he knocked him out much more quickly than the only other man to stop him, Dereck Chisora who had beaten him in six and nine rounds. Chisora, a social cannonball more famous for his freakish February 2012 street-brawl with David Haye (“I will physically shoot you!”) than anything he actually did in the ring, is perhaps another brave British underachiever. A human non-sequitur, nothing Chisora says really makes sense, but he was all heart in the ring, taking his lumps from Vitali Klitschko and Tyson Fury alike. Mooted as a future opponent for Joshua, Chisora is more qualified than the man who is facing Britain’s latest heavyweight hope this Saturday night in London, Kevin Johnson; Chisora beat Johnson in twelve one-sided rounds early last year.

It was a steady, dull pressure that brought Chisora that win over “Kingpin”, as the American did what he did best: survive. Promoters of prospects and comebackers like him because he can’t punch (just fourteen stoppages in thirty-six fights, none of them in the world class) but he provides a good work-out in a distance fight (having never been stopped and the likes of Vitali Klitschko and Tyson Fury have both been successfully negotiated). A flicking, fast jab keeps opponents honest, a dipping, furtive head-movement, often in the direction of the inside where he seeks to smother his opponent’s best work, keeps him from the worst of the enemy’s violent attentions, a cute, mobile guard protects the most tender parts of his anatomy; but he doesn’t actually do much of anything. Sometimes he sends in a short right hand, and he can punch to the body well but in general he avoids risk. Technically sure single shots in nothing like the volume necessary to win rounds against competent opponents is the order of the day.

These shortcomings are the question mark in the title of this article; the body of the piece lies in Johnson’s ability to go the distance.

Joshua looks the part he is to play. Part Calvin Klein underwear model, part tombstone, the 6’6 245lb Joshua has a body carved from granite and has muscles in all the places that Johnson uses to store food. But those muscles burn fuel. They make demands upon Joshua’s intake of oxygen that in turns demands one of two other things: a great engine or an ability to control the pace. So far Joshua shows absolutely nothing of the latter; he is a seek and destroy missile, top tier ballistic offensive weaponry that looks more like it comes straight out of America’s cold war machine rather than a product of the British system.

Against the aforementioned Bakhtov he had only the most cursory of looks before he started dropping hurt. He comes square when he wants to kill something, alarming, but given his reach and speed, perhaps he will continue to get away with it; and oh, he is fast. If I take nothing else from watching him, I take that. His hand-speed is absurd for a man of his size and the speed with which the second punch joins a first is legitimately terrifying. He lands a very hard jab, and then before that message of pain is even absorbed by the opponent’s nervous system, a message of disaster joins it as the right-hand thunders in. Sometimes it’s to the chest – other times it’s to the top of the head. Bless poor Bakhtov, sometimes he eats it directly to the face, an experience that appears to me to be as shattering as any that can be enjoyed in a boxing ring. Obscenely, Joshua sometimes smiles as the opponent gives ground, the sound of the world, I’m sure, a distant echo to him.

Joshua is no choir boy, you see. There are dark strains. He talks openly of death. He was involved as a younger man in drug dealing. He sometimes smiles as he brutalises his opponents. He feints with his feet. This last speaks of artistry, not darkness, but it hints at real hope for fulfilment of what is still, at just 12-0, only potential.

Bakhtov went back to his corner at the end of the first, cut, swollen and in some deep cavern far away from the advice of his trainer. Joshua was on his feet bouncing, eight-pack rippling, before the bell for the second. Bakhtov finished the fight on his feet, but his final minute in the ring was disturbing to watch.

Jason Gavern and Konstantin Airich both managed three rounds against him but that’s as far as it has gone. In many ways, matching him with Johnson is as ambitious as matching Price with Thompson; Price did not have the naturalistic tendencies to deal with Thompson – Joshua clearly does, but does he have the stamina to do twelve?

The other question, of course, is for Johnson: does he fancy spending twelve rounds in the same ring with this animal; and if he does, can he do it?

In that sense, Joshua and his people are onto a win-win. If Johnson lasts the distance, their fighter has twelve rounds under his belt and a big tick in a very important box; if Joshua stops him, a feat beyond Vitali Klitschko, they know they have a legitimate destroyer on their hands. In that sense, yes, this can be seen as a graduation night for the twenty-five year old – as long as he doesn’t gas and fall down.

Of course, Johnson isn’t going to answer the other question, the one about whether our latest “future world champion” can get hit on the chin and keep his feet. That people who should know better are already naming him as such without having either of these questions answered is perhaps a little irresponsible but completely understandable, even if it is a little surprising given the lessons that should have been learned in the past decade. Joshua is not just special, he looks incredible; he looks like a fight-rat’s dream. Everything – everything a heavyweight should have, he has it. Apart from the most important things. Where those are concerned, sadly, we just don’t know yet – and we might get hurt in finding out.

But we British fight fans will chance it. After all, isn’t that what love is? Believing, with all your heart, in something that you just can’t know – until you do, by which point it is too late to get your hands up?

I’ll pick Joshua to stop Johnson in eight.

At which point we’ll know more.

But still not quite enough.

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Matt McGrain

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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