Tyson’s Bludgeoning of Biggs Another Example of Boxing’s Crueler Side

Published

9 years ago

October 6, 2015

Compassion? Oh, sure, there is lots of it in boxing, if you know where to look. There is the memory of a concerned Floyd Patterson kneeling over the knocked-out Ingemar Johansson, Ingo’s left quivering uncontrollably, after the Swede had been felled by Floyd’s leaping left hook in the second of their three classic confrontations. There is WBC heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, in the process of stopping outclassed challenger Marvis Frazier in the very first round, signaling with his right hand to referee Mills Lane to step in and save Larry’s young friend from taking additional punishment.

“I met (Marvis) when he was a little-bitty kid,” Holmes, at the post fight press conference following the Nov. 25, 1983, bout in Las Vegas, said of the son of Joe Frazier, whom Holmes had long held in the highest esteem. “I was working with Joe as his sparring partner. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I was like a kid in a candy store. It gave me a great thrill, even when Joe broke my ribs. We remained friends until the day they put him in the ground.”

But while the crucible of the ring has forged much mutual respect and more than a few lasting friendships, it also must be noted that animosity also can be the unforgiving residue of the hardest sport. Some fighters enjoy inflicting pain if they dislike their opponent or believe he has somehow done them wrong. Sometimes there doesn’t even have to be a reason for intentionally prolonging a beatdown; some great champions simply have a sadistic streak that served them well, in a professional sense.

Case in point: the Oct. 16, 1987, meeting of undisputed heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and 1984 Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist Tyrell Biggs in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. Tyson was seething even before the opening bell, and determined to do as much damage as was humanly possible to Biggs until the referee or ring doctor intervened.

“I was going to make him pay with his health for everything he said,” Tyson said of the revenge motive that prompted him to ease off whenever it appeared the battered Biggs was ready to go. “I could have knocked him out in the third round, but I wanted to do it very slowly. I wanted him to remember this for a long time.”

Biggs remembered, all right. Decked twice, he suffered two cuts that required 22 stitches to close – 19 above his left eye, three in his chin.

“I didn’t say anything that should have angered him,” Biggs said, incredulous that Tyson had made his destruction such a personal matter. “All I said was that I was confident I could beat him.

“There’s good guys and bad guys in wrestling, like Hulk Hogan and Ivan the Terrible. Well, I think Mike Tyson is the Ivan the Terrible of boxing.”

Truth be told, Tyson’s resentment of Biggs far predated anything that went on in the weeks preceding their actual meeting in the ring. They both were at the Olympic Trials in 1984, when Tyson was a callow teenager still in the process of refining his skills. Henry Tillman, who would not make it out of the first round against Tyson as a pro, instead was the United States’ heavyweight representative in Los Angeles.

In Tyson’s book, “Undisputed Truth,” he claims that Biggs belittled him at the Olympic Trials. When a woman approached Biggs to wish him and his newly certified teammates luck in the Olympics, and Biggs, nodding at Tyson, allegedly said, “He certainly ain’t getting on that plane.”

Any resentment Tyson may have harbored toward Biggs bubbled up after the fight was announced, with Biggs and chatty cornerman Lou Duva expressing their belief that Tyson was overrated and beatable.

“He’s never fought anyone like me,” Biggs said at the final prefight press conference. “I don’t know this Tyson, the way you guys (media) talk about him. I know Tyson from way back when. He’s strong, but his strength will not hurt me.”

It might have been typical bluster on the part of Biggs and Duva to hype the event, but Tyson was building up a rage inside himself that would be unleashed like a volcano on fight night.

“I want to hurt him bad,” he said of his plan for Biggs. And so he did.

“When I was hitting him with body punches, I heard him actually crying in there, making woman gestures,” a smirking Tyson said. “I knew that he was breaking down. I was very calm and I was thinking about Roberto Duran, how he used to cut down the runners and just wear them down. I had that frame of mind when I was in the ring. I wasn’t even thinking about (targeting Biggs’) cut. I was thinking about hitting him to the body – softening him up.”

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Tyson would reference Duran, whose mercilessness as he went about his work had made him Tyson’s hero and role model. What Tyson had tried to do to Biggs, and largely succeeded in achieving, was what Duran, the “Hands of Stone,” had done to a pretty good lightweight named Ray Lampkin when he sought to dethrone Duran, the WBA 135-pound titlist, on March 2, 1975, in Panama City, Panama.

As was the case with Biggs a dozen years later, Lampkin had made some seemingly innocuous remarks about how he thought Duran might be ready to be taken. And, as Tyson did against Biggs, the imperious Duran, who once said, “I’m not God, but something similar,” had used that as fuel for his fury.

“They were trying to make Duran out to be this Superman character,” Lampkin had said in the lead-up to the fight. “He’s human, and when you cut him he bleeds, just like I do. They’re acting like he can’t be beat, but I saw Esteban (DeJesus) do it.”

Unfortunately for Lampkin, he wasn’t Esteban DeJesus on a night that he needed to be more than he was. Duran, who also was a master of backing off when an opponent was on the verge of toppling, finally closed the deal in the 14th round. So damaged was Lampkin that he was unconscious for over an hour, and remained hospitalized for five days.

“I was not in my best condition,” Duran said in assessing his brutally effective performance. “Today I sent him to the hospital. Next time I’ll put him in the morgue.” It was a quote that forever defined Duran as a remorseless assailant. And while Lampkin recovered enough to resume his career, he was never the same.

“That was the fight that sent me downhill into retirement,” he said. “I never recuperated. I wanted to make myself believe that I did, but I kept getting hurt.”

Before he did what he did to Biggs, Tyson worked faster but just as devastatingly against Marvis Frazier on July 26, 1986, in Glen Falls, N.Y., four months prior to the 20-year-old Tyson winning his first heavyweight championship. The fight lasted just a half-minute, with Tyson going after Frazier like a ravenous wolf going after a slab of raw meat. But that was just the way he always fought, right? Well, maybe so, but there are those who believed then, and still do, that Tyson had more motivation than usual to make a statement against the son of the great Smokin’ Joe.

An unfailingly polite sort who is now a minister, Marvis didn’t really say anything that might have served to inflame Tyson. But Joe did, although his comments on how Marvis would handle Tyson was interpreted by some as how the elder Frazier thought he would do if only he could go back in time and be the one swapping haymakers with the young Iron Mike.

“I don’t see who (Tyson) really has beaten,” Joe said is dismissing Tyson as a false creation of the Cus D’Amato/Jimmy Jacobs hype machine. “You need to sit him down and teach him things instead of having him fight all the time against somebody who ain’t nobody. Putting him in the ring and having him knock out somebody who needs to be in the house cooking, it don’t make any sense. I don’t know how that’s going to make him champion.

“Marvis will be moving all the time. When he jumps in to fight, he’ll fight. He won’t be standing there holding hands and playing around.”

Beau Williford, who had trained Tyson victims James “Quick” Tillis and Lorenzo Boyd, understood how Tyson would react to Joe’s taunting. There would be hell to pay, and Marvis was the one who would do the paying.

“Tyson will eat him alive, spit him out and step on him,” Williford said of what Marvis could expect. “And if the old man keeps running his mouth, Mike will knock him out, too.”

A prime-on-prime matchup of Joe Frazier and Tyson, so similar in style and physical attributes, would be on any fight fan’s list of dream fights, if only wishing could make it so. But Smokin’ Joe did get it on three times with Muhammad Ali, who also gets a couple of nods as someone who could find the darker recesses within himself as the occasion warranted.

One such instance was Ali’s 12th-round stoppage of Floyd Patterson in Nov. 22, 1965, in Las Vegas, Ali’s second defense of his heavyweight championship and the first after he had scored that controversial first-round knockout of Sonny Liston in their rematch in Lewiston, Maine.

Ali, of course, had changed his name from Cassius Clay at that point, although Patterson was unwilling to identify him as such.

“I have been told Clay has every right to follow any religion he chooses, and I agree,” Patterson said. “But by the same token, I have the right to call the Black Muslims a menace to the United States and a menace to the Negro race … I do not believe God put us here to hate one another. Cassius Clay must be beaten and the Black Muslims’ scourge removed from boxing.”

Ali set out to not only defeat Patterson, but to humiliate him and to make him suffer for his temerity. Time and again Ali seemingly had Patterson teetering on the abyss, and time and again Ali backed off to allow the former champ time to recover and thus be pounded on some more.

By the 12th round, even Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, had tired of the cat-and-mouse game. “Knock him out, for chrissake,” Dundee implored his fighter, who decided to do as requested. That 12th-round stoppage could have and probably would have come much earlier had Ali not been toying with Patterson, or had Floyd not been so obstinate in the face of certain defeat.

“It was hurting me to watch,” said referee Harry Krause, who wanted to step in numerous times but was hesitant to do so because Patterson was doing all he could to try to fight back. “Patterson was hopelessly outclassed. He lobbed his punches like a feeble old woman.”

Another Ali opponent, Ernie Terrell, would discover, as Patterson had, that there were consequences to referring to Ali as “Clay,” even if it was mostly unintentional.

Prior to their Feb. 6, 1967, bout in Houston’s Astrodome, Terrell, the WBA heavyweight champion, said the name that could set Ali off as nothing else could.

“I wasn’t trying to insult him,” Terrell is quoted as saying in “Muhammad Ali” His Life and Times,” by author Thomas Hauser. “He’d been Cassius Clay to me all the time before when I knew him. Then he told me, `My name’s Muhammad Ali.’ And I said fine, but by then he was going, `Why can’t you call me Muhammad Ali? You’re just an Uncle Tom.’

“Well, like I said, I didn’t mean no harm. But when I saw that calling him `Clay’ bugged him, I kept it going. To me it was just part of building up the promotion.”

But what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander. Although Ali would say his calling Joe Frazier a “gorilla” and “ignorant” was simply a means of building up the promotion of their fights, Frazier didn’t think that should have been the case. And neither did Ali when Terrell made the mistake of calling him Clay. From the eighth round on, Ali taunted Terrell, shouting time and again, “What’s my name?,” followed by bursts of blows to Terrell’s badly swollen eyes.

Tex Maule, writing in “Sports Illustrated,” concluded that Ali had engaged in “a wonderful demonstration of boxing skill and a barbarous display of cruelty.”

It is both elements – the compassion and sportsmanship, to be sure, but also the undeniable element of meanness – that go into the bubbling brew that makes boxing so compelling a reflection of the human condition. As Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada once noted, “Violence is terribly seductive; all of us, especially males, are trained to gaze upon violence until it becomes beautiful.”

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Bernard Fernandez

Remembering the Macho Man, Hector Camacho, a Great Sporting Character

Published

3 days ago

November 23, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Twelve years ago tomorrow, on Nov. 24, 2012, Hector Camacho was officially declared dead. He was effectively dead before then, having suffered a heart attack in the hospital after his spinal cord had been severed by a bullet, but his attendants at the hospital in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, waited until his mother had arrived from New York to remove him from life support.

At the age of 50, one of the most charismatic personalities in the sporting life of America was silenced forever.

Hector “Macho” Camacho, the Macho Man, was flamboyant – boy was he ever – but he was also a great talent. A three-time New York City Golden Gloves champion, reputedly 96-4 as an amateur, he was undefeated in 31 bouts at 135 pounds and below and went on to conquer some of the sport’s biggest names – Boom Boom Mancini, Vinny Pazienza, Roberto Duran (twice), Sugar Ray Leonard – before the sun set on his long career.

Camacho was born in Bayamon but grew up in Spanish Harlem where his mother moved when he was four. He was 21 years old and 21-0 as a junior lightweight when he was first profiled in Sports Illustrated, then the best medium for enhancing the marketability of a young athlete. At this juncture in his life, Hector, who became a father at age 17, was still living in a Spanish Harlem housing project, sharing an apartment with his 38-year-old mother, his stepfather, three siblings, a niece and a nephew.

By then he had already been expelled from six schools and was no stranger to the legal system, having spent 3 ½ months at New York’s notorious Rikers Island for — as Pat Putnam phrased it — borrowing other people’s automobiles without their permission.

The story in S.I. noted that Camacho’s reflexes were so quick that he could play two video games at once. Among his many physical attributes, it was his hand speed that attracted the most attention. When he ramped up his offense, his fists were a blur. But eventually, when folks thought of Camacho, what they remembered was his choirboy face with the spit curl in the middle of his forehead and his outrageous ring costumes which ran the gamut from a loincloth to a dress.

Hot-dogging came natural to Hector Camacho; it was embedded in his DNA. And in common with Muhammad Ali, he could be arrogant without coming across as arrogant. There was an impish quality to his bravado. He was fun to be around and, in his own words, could light up a room like a Christmas tree.

What Camacho lacked was any capacity for embarrassment.

Former WBA super bantamweight champion Clarence “Bones” Adams, who is now the proprietor of a Las Vegas gym that bears his name, became fast friends with the Macho Man when both trained in Las Vegas, the host city for their most lucrative fights. Mention Camacho’s name to Adams and a smile creases his face if he doesn’t burst out laughing.

“One day after Hector and I had gone jogging,” recollects Adams, “we drove over to the old White Cross Drugs [on the north Strip near the Stratosphere] to grab a bite to eat at their lunch counter. When we left and were standing outside by the car, Hector said, ‘Hold on a minute, I have to go pee.’ I said I’ll wait for you but then I noticed he was already peeing. Some cars honked as they passed by.

“Greg Hannely, my manager at the time, and I went to Detroit in 2000 to support Hector who was on the undercard of a show featuring Thomas Hearns. At the weigh-in, Hector wore a long shirt with nothing underneath it. This wasn’t apparent until he stepped off the scale and started doing jumping jacks.

“Hector,” continues Adams, “once had a Ferrari that he misplaced; he couldn’t remember where he parked it. He never did recover that car, but he wasn’t too bothered by it. His attitude was, ‘there’s always more where it came from.’” (Presumably this was the same Ferrari that Camacho was driving when he was ticketed for driving too slow with a suspended license on a Florida highway while being pleasured by a woman sitting astride him.)

Historians would compartmentalize Camacho’s career into two segments. Part One ended with his successful lightweight title defense against Edwin Rosario at Madison Square Garden on June 13, 1986.

Camacho kept his undefeated record intact, prevailing on a split decision, but ended the fight looking as if he had taken all the worst of it. Badly hurt in the fifth round and again in the 11^th, he repaired to his dressing room with a swollen nose and two black eyes.

This fight, reads a story in a Canadian paper, “persuaded him to scale back his ultra-aggressive style in favor of a more cerebral, defensive approach.” That’s a diplomatic way of saying that Camacho devolved into a runner.

In his next fight, Camacho proved too clever for Cornelius Boza-Edwards, winning a unanimous decision, but the crowd didn’t like it when Hector spent the last two rounds on his bicycle and there were boos aplenty as the match wended to its conclusion. This would be the Macho Man’s final fight as a lightweight. He moved up to 140 where a slew of attractive match-ups awaited, notably a showdown with Julio Cesar Chavez.

Camacho and Chavez touched gloves in Las Vegas on Sept. 13, 1992, before an announced crowd of 19,100 at the UNLV basketball arena in what reportedly was the fastest sellout in Las Vegas boxing history up to that date. Chavez, widely seen as the top pound-for-pound fighter in the sport, advanced his record to 82-0 with a lopsided decision, winning all 12 rounds on the card of one of the judges. The Macho Man, who had avenged his lone defeat to Greg Haugen, declined to 41-2.

This wasn’t a milquetoast performance by Camacho. He simply couldn’t deal with Chavez’s unrelenting pressure. LA Times scribe Alan Malamud wrote that Hector showed unexpected grit by trading with Chavez after his legs were gone, thereby reducing him to a stationary target. But more brickbats came Camacho’s way following setbacks to Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya. He lasted the distance in both bouts but was roundly out-pointed. By the third round of the De La Hoya fight, wrote Kevin Iole, it was a foregone conclusion that De La Hoya would win.

Between the Trinidad and De La Hoya fights, staged 44 months apart, Camacho had 21 fights and won them all. His victims were mostly journeyman with two notable exceptions. On June 22, 1996, he scored a 12-round unanimous decision over 45-year-old Roberto Duran. Eight months later, he defeated another faded legend when he stopped Sugar Ray Leonard in the fifth round. Leonard, who had been out of the ring for six years, was forever retiring and unretiring and Camacho retired him for good. Both bouts were in Atlantic City.

A wag wrote that Sugar Ray was 40 years old going on 41 and that Camacho was 35 years old going on puberty.

Camacho’s advisors kept him busy to keep his name in the news and Hector did his part by making the news for bad behavior outside the ring. In January of 2005, he was arrested for the November 2004 burglary of a computer store in Gulfport, Mississippi. He went there to retrieve a laptop that was being repaired but entered the property after hours by way of the ceiling. An illegal drug, ecstasy, was found in his hotel room when he was placed under arrest.

After serving five months in jail, Camacho was released with the understanding that he would be placed under house arrest for one year when he returned to Puerto Rico but, by all accounts, the authorities in Puerto Rico were never notified of this arrangement.

Camacho’s frequent misdeeds, once seen as the amusing antics of a fun-loving man-child, came to be seen in a different light as he grew older; as a pattern of behavior that betrayed a dark side in his personality.

In a 1985 conversation with New York Times boxing writer Michael Katz, Camacho’s estranged manager Billy Giles said, “someday he’ll wind up like Tyrone Everett, maybe worse,” the reference to a talented junior lightweight from Philadelphia who was murdered under sordid circumstances.

That proved to be eerily prophetic.

Camacho had 20 more fights after his hollow performance against Oscar De La Hoya, ending his career as a bloated middleweight. His only noteworthy opponent during this final phase of his boxing career was Duran who was then 50 years old when they clashed in Denver. In a bout that echoed their first meeting, Hector won a unanimous decision. This was Roberto Duran’s farewell fight. Camacho soldiered on for eight more bouts, winning five.

In November of 2012, thirty months after his last ring assignment, Hector Camacho and a companion were ambushed as they sat in a car in the darkened parking lot of a Bayamon, Puerto Rico bar. The companion died instantly in the hail of bullets. Police found nine packets of cocaine on the decedent and an open packet of cocaine in the car.

Camacho’’s funeral was held at Harlem’s landmark Saint Cecilia’s Church. Hundreds of mourners stood in the cold outside the church as his casket was being placed in the funeral car. They cheered and shouted Camacho’s battle cry, “Macho Time,” as the hearse pulled away.

They say you shouldn’t speak bad about the dead, so we will let Bones Adams have the last word. “Hector had his demons,” says Adams, “but he was a great friend, a nice, kind, and caring guy.”

—

Editor’s note: For more on Hector Camacho, check out Christian Giudice’s biography, “Macho Time: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of Hector Camacho,” published by Hamilcar in 2020.

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 304: A Year of Transformation in Boxing and More

Published

4 days ago

November 22, 2024

David A. Avila

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A subtle transformation in professional boxing is taking place with the biggest fights no longer placed in Las Vegas, New York or Los Angeles. Instead, they are heading to the Middle East.

Golden Boy Promotions joined the crowd last week with one of their stronger fight cards taking place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The main attractions were new unified cruiserweight champion Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez of Mexico along with Puerto Rico’s diminutive Oscar Collazo unifying the minimumweight division.

And there is more to come.

Matchroom Boxing seemed to lead the way in this rerouting of major boxing events. It goes as far back as December 2019 when Anthony Joshua fought Andy Ruiz in a rematch for the heavyweight championship in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia.

Little by little major fights are being rerouted to Saudi Arabia.

Is it a good thing or not?

For promoters looking to cut costs it’s definitely welcomed. But what does it do for the fan base accustomed to saving their money to buy tickets for one or two major events?

Now there is talk of Shakur Stevenson, Devin Haney and Terence Crawford heading to the Middle East to fight on major cards sponsored by “Riyad Spring.” It’s a new avenue for the sport of pro boxing.

This past week Golden Boy and its roster of Latino fighters took its turn and showed off their brand of aggressive fights. Some like Collazo and Arnold Barboza made the best of their moments. And, of course, Zurdo proved he should have moved up in weight years ago. He could be the Comeback Fighter of the Year.

Benavidez vs Morrell

Interim light heavyweight champion David Benavidez accepted a challenge from WBA light heavyweight titlist David Morrell to meet on Feb. 1 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

Bad blood between the two tall fighters already exists.

Morrell claims Benavidez is over-rated.

“I’m getting the knockout. 100%. He’s all talk and no bite. He can’t do what he thinks he’s gonna do,” said Morrell. “He has no idea what he’s talking about, but he’s provoking me and now I want to go out there and beat the crap out of him. I’m here now and none of that talk matters.”

Benavidez begs to differ.

“Here we are again. I told you that I was going to give you the fights you want to see, and now we’re here,” Benavidez said while in Los Angeles. “Morrell has been talking about me for a while and disrespecting me. He wanted to make it personal with me, so I’m personally going to break his mouth. That’ll give him something to remember me by.”

Also scheduled to fight on the fight card are Isaac Cruz, Stephen Fulton, Brandon Figueroa and Jesus Ramos Jr.

Netflix

No surprise for me with the massive success of the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson event on the Most Valuable Promotions boxing card last week.

According to Netflix there were 108 million people tuned into the event last Friday that also featured the incredible Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor rematch. Another exciting card was the men’s welterweight clash between Mario Barrios and Abel Ramos that ended in a draw.

If fans weren’t satisfied with the Paul fight, they certainly got their fulfillment with the world title fights, especially Serrano and Taylor who were estimated to be viewed by more than 72 million people. No female fight in history can touch those numbers.

So, what’s next for Netflix in terms of boxing?

West Coast Blues

Southern California is usually a hotbed for boxing events no matter what time of the year. But this year only a few boxing cards are taking place within a driving distance until the end of the year.

Las Vegas is in slumber and Southern California has a few smaller boxing cards still on schedule. Arizona has a significant Top Rank fight card in a few weeks as does Golden Boy Promotions in the Inland Empire.

Here are some upcoming fight events worth noting:

Dec. 5 – at OC Hangar in Costa Mesa, Calif. Vlad Panin vs Sal Briceno by SOCA Fights.

Dec. 7 – at Footprint Center in Phoenix, Rafael Espinoza vs Robeisy Ramirez and Oscar Valdez vs Emanuel Navarrete by Top Rank.

Dec. 13, at Chumash Casino 360 in Santa Ynez, Calif. Carlos Balderas vs Cesar Villarraga by 360 Promotions.

Dec. 14 at Toyota Arena in Ontario, Calif. Alexis Rocha vs Raul Curiel by Golden Boy Promotions.

Turkeys in East L.A.

The 25^th annual Turkey Giveaway by Golden Boy takes place on Saturday Nov. 23, at Oscar De La Hoya Animo High School starting at 11 a.m.

It’s incredible that 25 years have passed since the inception of this yearly event. Many current and past fighters for the promotion company will be passing out turkeys and meeting fans. Among those expected to appear are Alexis Rocha, Victor Morales, Joel Iriarte, Bryan Lua and others.

Photo: Eddie Hearn, Frank Warren, and HE Turki Alalshikh at the Joshua-Dubois fight

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Philly’s Jesse Hart Continues His Quest plus Thoughts on Tyson-Paul and ‘Boots’ Ennis

Published

5 days ago

November 21, 2024

Luis A. Cortes III

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Jesse Hart (31-3, 25 KOs) returns to the ring tomorrow night (Friday, Nov. 22) on a Teflon Promotions card at the Liacouras Center on the campus of Temple University. During a recent media workout for the show, which will feature five other local fighters in separate bouts, Hart was adamant that fighting for the second time this year at home will only help in his continuing quest to push towards a second chance at a world championship. “Fighting at home is always great and it just makes sense from a business standpoint since I already have a name in the sport and in the city,” said Hart (pictured on the left).

Hart’s view of where his career currently resides in relation to the landscape in the light heavyweight division leads you to believe that, at the age of 35, Hart is realistic about how far he can go before his career is over.

“Make good fights, win those fights, fight as much as I can and stay busy, that’s the way the light heavyweight division won’t be able to ignore me,” he says. Aside from two losses back in 2017 and 2018 to current unified cruiserweight champion Gilberto Ramirez at super middleweight, Hart’s only other defeat was to Joe Smith during Smith’s most successful portion of his career.

When attempts to make fights with (at the time) up-and-coming prospects like Edgar Berlanga and David Benavidez were denied with Hart being viewed as the typical high risk-low reward opponent, it was time to find another way. So, Hart decided to stay local after splitting with Top Rank Promotions post-surgery to repair his longtime right-hand issues and hooked up with Teflon Promotions, an upstart company that is the latest to take on the noble endeavor of trying to return North Broad Street and Atlantic City to boxing prominence.

In essence, it is a calculated move that is potentially a win-win situation for all parties. Continued success for Hart along with some of the titles at light heavyweight eventually being released from Artur Beterbiev’s grasp due to outside politics, and Jesse Hart just may lift up Teflon Promotions into a major player on the regional scene.

Tickets for Friday’s show are available on Ticketmaster platforms.

As we entered November, a glance at the boxing schedule made me wonder if it was possible for the sport to have a memorable month — one that could shine a light forward in boxing’s ongoing quest to regain relevance in today’s sports landscape. Having consecutive weekends with events that could spark interest in the pugilistic artform and its wonderful characters was what I was hoping for, but what we got instead was more evidence that boxing isn’t immune to modern business practices landing a one-two punch on the action both inside and outside of the ring.

Jaron “Boots” Ennis was expected to make a statement in his rematch with Karen Chukhadzian on Nov. 9, a statement to put the elite level champions around his weight class on notice. What we witnessed, however, was more evidence of how current champions in their prime can be hampered by having to navigate a business that functions through the cooperation of independent contractors. Ennis got the job done – he won – but it was a lackluster performance.

It’s time for Ennis to fight the fighters we already thought we would have seen him fight by now and I do believe there is some truth to Ennis rising to the occasion if there was a more noteworthy name across the ring.

—

Some positives emerged from the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul event the following week. Amanda Serrano, Katie Taylor, and women’s boxing are finally getting the public recognition they deserve. Mario Barrios’s draw against the tough Abel Ramos, also on the Netflix broadcast, was an action-packed firefight. So, mainstream America and beyond got to witness actual fights before being subjected to Paul’s latest circus.

Unfortunately for fans, but fortunately for Paul, the lone true boxing star in the main event dimmed out from an athletic standpoint decades ago. In this instance modern business practices allowed for a social media influencer to stage his largest money grab from a completely unnuanced public.

As Paul rose to the ring apron from the steps and looked around “Jerry’s World,” taking in the moment, it reminded me of an actual fighter when they’re about to enter the ring taking in the atmosphere before they risk their lives after a lifetime of dedication to try and realize a childhood dream. In this case though, this was a natural-born hustler realizing as he made it to the ring apron that his hustle was likely having its moment of glory.

In boxing circles, Jake Paul is viewed as a “necessary evil.” What occurs in his fights are merely an afterthought to the spectacle that is at the core of the social media realm that birthed him. Hopefully the public learned from the atrocity that occurred once the exhibition started that smoke and mirrors last for only so long. Hopefully Paul’s moment of being a boxing performer and acting like a true fighter comes to its conclusion. But he isn’t going away anytime soon, especially since his promotional company is now in bed with Netflix.

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