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The Greatest Fighter Alive
The Greatest Fighter Alive – Forty-four years after swiping Ken Buchanan’s world lightweight championship and thirty-six years after shoving Sugar Ray Leonard off a gringo pedestal to take the world welterweight championship, Roberto Durán is back in the limelight. “Hands of Stone” is something of a corrective to 30 for 30’s “No Mas” episode (2013) in that it recognizes Durán as something far more than Leonard’s straight man, though it only touches the barely-restrained savagery that had become his persona by 1980, a persona that Al Pacino admitted was the model for the Tony Montana character in “Scarface.”
Ray Arcel is played by Robert De Niro despite the fact that the rough-hewn actor more closely resembles Duran’s “other trainer” Freddie Brown. It was Brown, not Arcel, who was most responsible for streamlining Durán’s savagery but if you scan the screen looking for Brown’s trademark green sweater you’ll get no more than a glimpse. The movie also perpetuates a fable about Leonard’s first defeat that is as carelessly tossed around as Durán’s shaggy locks at street parties. I borrowed Ray Arcel’s comb and straightened things out for the record and with the record, but writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz never got the memo.
Originally published on TSS as “The Fifth God of War,” what follows is closer to the truth than “The Hands of Stone” and carries a new title more to the point.
The Greatest Fighter Alive
A battered and bloodied world welterweight champion glowered at his corner men as the thirteenth round was about to begin. “If you stop this fight,” he said, “I’ll never talk to you the rest of my life.” In the opposite corner, a surging Henry Armstrong sprang out of his corner at the bell. Trainer Ray Arcel, a cotton swab in his mouth, watched the last three rounds with Barney Ross’s words echoing in his ears and a prayer on his lips. He prayed not that Ross would win, but that he would survive.
The vanquished champion was brought back to the hotel where Arcel put hot towels on his swollen face and tended to his wounds. He stayed with him four days and four nights.
That was 1938. Arcel had already been in the fight game two decades. He was at Stillman’s Gym from the beginning and taught hundreds of young men how to fight, including twenty world champions. His first was in 1923. His last was sixty years later.
Arcel met Freddie Brown at Stillman’s. Brown grew up on Forsythe Street in the Lower East Side not three miles from Benny Leonard’s house. He began training in the 1920s and had what A.J. Liebling described as the unmistakable appearance of old fighters: “small men with mashed noses and quick eyes” and a chewed-up stogie stuck on his lip that contrasted nicely with the clean cotton swab of Arcel.
Mangos
Twenty-year-old Roberto Durán’s American debut was at Madison Square Garden. Thirteen thousand, two hundred and eleven ticket-buyers watched him lay out Benny Huertas like a red carpet in less than a minute. Dave Anderson covered the fight for the New York Times. “Remember the name,” he advised.
Arcel was just sitting down when that stone fist crashed on Huertas’ temple. As the Panamanian left the ring on his way to the dressing room, he startled the old man again when he kissed him on the cheek. A month later Durán would be introduced to Brown and the triumvirate would be complete.
“When I came into his camp in 1972, he was just a slugger until I taught him finesse,” Brown said. A slugger? Durán was worse than that. He was a savage, a Roman wolf-child placed in a civilizing school where ancient masters taught the art of war. Agrippina summoned Seneca to tutor a young Nero. Durán’s manager summoned Arcel. Arcel brought in Brown. It took not one, but two eminent teachers to tame Durán, and Brown bore the brunt of it; camping outside his door to chase away the broads, dragging him out of bed at dawn for roadwork, locking up the pantry.
The two old men never did completely civilize their pupil, though they did better than Seneca. Nero, after all, used Christians as torches to light the streets of Rome. Durán listened, and because he listened, he lit up fighters in six weight classes.
In 1972, Durán indecently assaulted lightweight champion Ken Buchanan and snatched his crown. His reign of terror lasted six years and twelve title defenses.
“The only guy we had like him,” Brown told Pete Hamill, “is Henry Armstrong.” Brown and Arcel knew the combined value of explosiveness and intelligence in the ring. “Boxing is brain over brawn,” said Arcel whenever the subject came up. “If you can’t think, you’re just another bum in the park.” Durán was not only “one of the most vicious fighters we’ve ever had,” added Brown, “[he was] one of the smartest.”
Durán was destined to invade the welterweight division. When he did, it was as deep as it ever was. Waiting for him were shock punchers in Pipino Cuevas and Thomas Hearns, defensive specialist Wilfred Benitez, technician Carlos Palomino, and the smiling celebrity who lorded over them all —boxer-puncher Ray Leonard.
Malice
By the end of 1979, a clash between Leonard and Durán was almost certain. Durán had already retired Palomino in a dominant performance, while Leonard stopped Benitez and took the title. They fought separately on the Larry Holmes-Earnie Shavers undercard and Leonard’s trainer Angelo Dundee watched the Durán bout very carefully. “Durán is thought of as a rough guy, but he’s not rough,” he observed. “He’s smart and slick.”
Arcel, eighty-one, and Brown, seventy-three, were watching Leonard as well, though they were very familiar with his style and how to beat it. They had already trained about thirty world champions between them. Fifty-eight-year-old Dundee had trained nine. In fact, Dundee’s novitiate was at Stillman’s Gym where he handed towels to the two masters he now matched wits with.
The posturing began soon enough. At Gleason’s Gym, Leonard was watching Durán skip rope when Durán spotted him and began lashing the rope with uncanny speed, while squatting. At a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, Durán cuffed Leonard, claiming that Leonard put his hand near his face. Two days before the fight, both men were at an indoor mall in Montreal, and Durán learned just enough English to yell, “Two more days! Two more days!” Leonard blew a kiss, and Durán charged at him and had to be restrained.
Durán was getting mean, but it was Leonard who had every physical advantage. He was younger, faster, taller, and bigger. “I’m not Ali,” Leonard insisted to the pundits. “Sure, maybe at the start I was trying to do his shuffle or his rope-a-dope, but not now.”
Durán looked pudgy in his last two outings, and the previous three welterweights he faced went the full ten rounds. Never before had three in a row gone the distance with him, and there was chatter about his motivation. Durán himself admitted that he was not always committed to training and his trainers did too, though a warning was attached: “When you’re fighting smear cases and you’re the best fighter around, it’s hard to be interested, but now he’s inspired, and when he’s inspired, he’s relentless,” Arcel said. “Leonard can’t beat this guy.”
The odds makers disagreed. Durán was a nine-to-five underdog.
Leonard was confident enough to ask permission from an aging Ray Robinson to borrow “Sugar,” but he couldn’t have anticipated how many lumps he’d get from Durán, who had more in common with fighters from Robinson’s era than he ever would.
As Leonard made his way toward the ring on June 20, 1980 Roberto Durán shadow boxed his own demons in the red corner. Both were in the best condition of their lives, though Durán exuded something like preternatural malevolence.
Arcel had already promised that we would witness “the darndest fight” we ever saw. And we did.
Durán had promised to use “old tricks” against Leonard. Old tricks. Freddie Brown’s fingerprints were all over the place. He trained him at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where he worked with Rocky Marciano in the 1950s and Joey Archer in the 1960s. Brown had more tricks than a cathouse. Durán could be seen holding Leonard in the crook of his arms to stop incoming shots and create the perception that Leonard was doing nothing. Then there was the “Fitzsimmons shift.” Dundee himself saw it: “. . . if [Durán] missed you with an overhand right,” he observed, “he’d turn southpaw and come back with a left hook to the body.” Durán executed it against Leonard in the fifth, seventh, and eighth rounds. Bob Fitzsimmons invented it and used it to implode Gentleman Jim Corbett in 1897. It’s a peach of a move.
The Hands of Stone controlled the action in this career-defining bout. His savvy was no less a deciding factor than his savagery but make no mistake, Sugar Ray pushed him almost beyond his limits.
There were over forty-six thousand witnesses. Every now and then, one of them, a thin and solitary Nicaraguan with a mustache could be seen standing up from his seat and waving a little Panamanian flag. It was Alexis Arguello.
Myths
Durán’s strategy was drilled into him. He was instructed to be elusive against the jab, close the distance, crowd Leonard, and hammer the body.
Leonard’s aggressive strategy made things more—not less—difficult to cope with for precisely the reason that Dundee had alluded to: good little guys don’t beat good big guys. “In this fight, Durán’s not the puncher,” he said. “My guy is.” The respective knockout percentages over their previous five fights confirm this: Durán’s was forty percent, Leonard’s one hundred.
Leonard promised to stand and fight more than expected. “They all think I’m going to run. I’m not,” he said to New York Magazine. “I’m not changing my style at all . . . he’ll be beaten to the punch . . . those are the facts,” he continued. “What’s going to beat Roberto Durán is Sugar Ray Leonard.”
Dundee substantiated this in his autobiography. His strategy became certain from the moment that he watched the films and deconstructed Durán’s style. Dundee said that Durán was a “heel-to-toe guy. He takes two steps to get to you. So the idea was not to give him those two steps, not to move too far away because the more distance you gave him, the more effective he was. What you can’t do in the face of Durán’s aggression was run from it, because then he picks up momentum. My guy wasn’t going to run from him.”
So there you have it.
Leonard’s strategy in Montreal was deliberate and sound. After it failed, Dundee and Leonard revised history and a willing press has gone along with it ever since. We’ve been spoon-fed a fable that has long-since crystallized into orthodox boxing lore. It is the archetypal image of the Latin bully who “tricked” our all-American hero into an alley fight, and it sprang from the idea that Leonard “did not fight his fight” because Durán challenged his masculinity.
The problem is that the idea is at complete odds with Leonard and Dundee’s statements about Leonard’s clear physical advantages and the strategy that would be formed around those advantages. It contradicts Dundee’s earlier statements about Durán’s high level of skill, and it contradicts statements both had made immediately after the bout before they had time to think about posterity: “You’ve got to give credit to Durán,” Dundee told journalists. “He makes you fight his fight.” When asked why he fought Durán’s fight, Leonard said he had “no alternative.”
Since then, Leonard’s loss to Durán has been cleverly spun, re-packaged, and sold at a reduced price. It’s time to find our receipt and exchange a fable for the facts. And the facts begin with this: when both fighters were at their best, Durán was better.
Memento Mori
Durán’s record stood at 72-1 with fifty-six knockouts. As he simmered down in the aftermath of the fight, the magnitude of it all set in. He knew that Leonard was great. At the post-fight press conference, he was asked if Leonard was the toughest opponent he ever faced. Durán, his face scuffed and swollen, thought for a moment. “Si,” he said, “. . . si.”
And then something changed. Whatever it was that raged inside Roberto Durán —a legion of devils, his hatred of Leonard, the memory of a child begging on the streets of Chorrillo— faded from that moment. He became more sedate. After thirteen years of pasión violenta and after a victory that is almost without equal in the annals of boxing history, he fell like all who forget that they are mortal, and his humiliation would be so complete that it would obscure everything else.
Old embers would flare up only sporadically after the fateful year of 1980. Three times more he would remind the world of his greatness against men that no natural lightweight in his right mind would challenge. By then the two old men had walked away. Arcel and Brown joined us in the audience and watched a melting legend fight youngsters. As the curtain slowly descended on a career that would span five decades, there was little left that recalled what he was; just some old tricks in an arsenal ransacked by age and an unbecoming appetite.
But what he was should not be eclipsed. It should be remembered. When the splendor that was Sugar Ray Leonard entranced America, Brown and Arcel closed the blinds and applied old school methods in the shadow of Stillman’s Gym. They brought a Panamanian to a peak of human performance so perfect in its blend of science and ferocity that it would never be approached again — by Durán or anyone else.
After the final bell, a jubilant Durán leaps into the air. Before he lands he sees Leonard daring to raise his arms in victory and his eyes burn. He shoves and spits at his adversary, then stalks toward the ropes at ringside and grabs his crotch as he hurls Spanish epithets. Arcel tries to calm him down. The announcer shouts “le nouveau!” into the microphone, and victorious, the raging champion is hoisted up above the crowd —above the world— still cursing the vanquished.
This is Durán.
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Springs Toledo is the author of In the Cheap Seats (Tora, 2016) and The Gods of War (Tora, 2014).
Two Candidates for the Greatest Fight Card in Boxing History
Saturday’s fight card in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, topped by the rematch between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol for undisputed light heavyweight supremacy, was being hyped as the greatest boxing card ever. That was before Daniel Dubois took ill and had to pull out of his IBF world heavyweight title defense against Joseph Parker, yielding his slot to last-minute replacement Martin Bakole.
The view from here is that the card remains in the running for the best fight card ever, top to bottom. The public didn’t view Dubois as the legitimate heavyweight champion. That distinction goes to Oleksandr Usyk.
Terms like “greatest” are, of course, subjective. Are we referring to the most attractive match-ups or the greatest array of talent, or the card that gives the most satisfaction by churning out a multiplicity of entertaining fights?
We won’t know how satisfying this card is until after the fact. We won’t know whether the talent on display was the greatest ever assembled on one night until many years have passed. Contestants such as Shakur Stevenson, Vergil Ortiz Jr, and Hamzah Sheeraz are still in their twenties (Stevenson is the oldest of the three at age 27) and it’s too soon to gauge if they will leave the sport with a great legacy.
As for which fight card in history had the deepest pool of attractive match-ups, this is a query that is amenable to an operational definition. Betting lines are a useful tool for informing us whether or not a fight warrants our attention if the likelihood of witnessing a closely-contested bout is our primary consideration.
Based on these factors, I would submit that the current leader in the race for the best card ever assembled goes to Don King’s May 7, 1994 promotion at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Six future Hall of Famers – Julio Cesar Chavez, Ricardo Lopez, Azumah Nelson, Terry Norris, Julian Jackson, and Christy Martin — were on that card, an 11-fight, eight-hour marathon with five WBC world title fights, four of which were rematches.
These were the five title fights:
140 pounds: Julio Cesar Chavez (89-1-1, 77 KOs) vs. Frankie Randall (49-2-1, 39 KOs)
Odds: Chavez 3/1 (minus-300)
154 pounds: Terry Norris (37-4, 23 KOs) vs. Simon Brown (41-2, 30 KOs)
Odds: even (11/10 and take your pick)
160 pounds: Gerald McClellan (30-2, 28 KOs) vs. Julian Jackson (48-2, 45 KOs)
Odds: McClellan 7/2 (minus-350)
130 pounds: Azumah Nelson (37-2-2, 26 KOs) vs. Jesse James Leija (27-0-2, 13 KOs)
Odds: Nelson 17/10 (minus-170)
105 pounds: Ricardo Lopez (36-0, 27 KOs) vs. Kermin Guardia (21-0, 14 KOs)
Odds: none
Results
Chavez-Randall — Julio Cesar Chavez avenged his loss to Frankie Randall, but not without controversy. An accidental clash of heads in the eighth round left Chavez with a bad gash on his forehead. Ring physician Flip Homansky would have allowed the bout to continue if that had been Chavez’s preference, but El Gran Campeon wasn’t so inclined. A WBC rule specified that in the event of a significant injury accruing from an accidental head butt, the less-damaged fighter is penalized a point. The fight went to the scorecards where Chavez won a split decision that would have been a draw without the point deduction. The crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Chavez, but the big bets were mostly on Randall and the odds got nicked down on the day of the fight.
Brown-Norris — In their first meeting in December of the previous year, Simon Brown dominated Terry Norris from the opening bell before stopping him in the fourth round. It was a massive upset. Norris was in the conversation for the top pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. In the rematch, Norris opened a slight favorite, but the late money was on Brown. And, once again, the so-called “sharps” were on the wrong side. Terry Norris, the would-be avenger, won a comfortable decision.
McClellan-Jackson — A murderous puncher, Gerald McClellan bombed out Julian Jackson in 83 seconds, or four rounds quicker than in their first engagement. Jackson was also a murderous puncher and attracted money in the sports books, lowering the price on the victorious McClellan who yet remained a solid favorite.
Nelson-Leija – WBC President Jose Sulaiman mandated this rematch after the first meeting ended in a draw after an error was found in the tabulation of one of the scorecards, overturning the original verdict which had Nelson retaining his title on a split decision. Leija thought he was robbed and was the rightful winner in the do-over, outworking Nelson to win a unanimous decision. At age 35, Azumah was getting long in the tooth.
Lopez-Guardia – Before the digital age, bookmakers didn’t trifle to post lines on bouts that on paper were egregious mismatches, save perhaps a fight of great magnitude. Guardia, the Colombian challenger, overachieved by lasting the distance in a fight with no knockdowns, but “Finito” won a lopsided decision.
A Note on Odds
Betting lines serve a useful purpose for boxing historians; they quantify the magnitude of an upset. However, quoting odds is tricky because they are fluid and vary somewhat from place to place. What this means is that two journalists can quote different odds on the same event and they both can get it right – unless there is a significant disparity. The odds quoted above are the closing lines at the MGM Grand or, at the very least, a very close approximation.
Saturday in Riyadh
One reason why tomorrow’s fight card is the best ever, said the tub-thumpers, is that the card (in its original conformation) included seven world title fights. But that’s no big deal There are so many title fights nowadays that the term “world title” has been trivialized. And what wasn’t acknowledged is that three of the title fights were of the “interim” stripe.
However – and this is a big deal — a glance at the odds informs us that tomorrow’s card is chock-full of competitive match-ups (at least on paper) and from that aspect, a blend of quality and quantity, it is a doozy of a boxing card.
The greatest boxing linemaker of my generation, now deceased, once told me that any fight where the “chalk” was less than a 3/1 favorite is essentially a “pick-‘em” fight. Yes, I know that makes no sense mathematically. However, I know what he was getting at. In a baseball game, for example, it’s very rare to find a team favored by odds of more than 3/1. In boxing, where self-serving promoters are constantly feeding us King Kong vs. Mickey Mouse, odds higher than 3/1 are the norm.
As this is being written, there are six fights on Saturday’s card where one could play the favorite without laying more than 3/1. I believe this is unprecedented. Moreover, the main event and a fascinating match-up on the undercard, Vergil Ortiz Jr vs Israil Madrimov, are virtual toss-ups with the favorites, Beterbiev and Ortiz, currently available at 5/4 (minus-125). Another very intriguing fight is the heavyweight contest between late bloomers Agit Kabayel and Zhilei Zhang which finds the less-heralded Kabayel cloaked as a small favorite. And kudos to Joseph Parker for accepting Martin Bakole when he could have held out for a lesser opponent. If Bakole is in shape (a big “if”), he will be a handful.
And so, where does tomorrow’s card rank on the list of best boxing cards ever? Right up there near the top, we would argue, and, if the bouts in large part are memorably entertaining, we would push it ahead of Don King’s May 7, 1994 extravaganza.
That’s the view from here. Feel free to dissent.
Postscript: If you plan to watch the entire card ($25.99 on DAZN for U.S. buyers), it would help to stock up on some munchies. The first fight (Joshua Buatsi vs. Callum Smith) is scheduled to kick off at 8:45 a.m. for us viewers in the Pacific Time Zone / 11:45 a.m. ET. If the show adheres tight to its schedule (no guarantee), Beterbiev and Bivol are expected to enter the ring at 3:00 p.m. PT/6:00 p.m. ET.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 314: A Really Big Boxing Show in Riyadh and More
One of boxing’s most spectacular fight cards takes place this weekend.
Think, Godzilla big.
It starts with an appetizer in California on Friday with 360 Promotions then on to the main course on Saturday morning in Riyadh Season with several promotions combined in Saudi Arabia.
Here is how it begins:
Undefeated “Sugar” Cain Sandoval (14-0, 12 KOs) leads a 360 Promotions card on Friday Feb. 21, at Chumash Casino as he faces Mark Bernaldez (25-6) in the main event. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card live.
360 Promotions is led by Tom Loeffler who knows a thing or two about promoting stars like Gennady “Triple G” Golovkin for example. He also backs Serhii Bohachuk and Mizuki “Mimi” Hiruta.
Then catch some sleep and wake up around 8 a.m. the next morning and prepare for a long day of world title fights.
Riyadh
A star-studded lineup of world titlists is led by the rematch between undefeated Artur Beterbiev (21-0, 20 Kos) and Dmitry Bivol (23-1, 12 KOs) for the undisputed light heavyweight world championship at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh. PPV.Com and DAZN pay-per-view will each provide streaming.
Bivol seeks to avenge his only pro loss.
“All athletes want to win. We’re like gamblers and of course I wasn’t a winner,” Bivol said.
Beterbiev made no predictions, but one.
“it’s going to be a good fight,” said Beterbiev the undisputed light heavyweight world champion.
It’s a hefty boxing card reminiscent of Don King’s mammoth cards of the 90s and early 2000s. I once covered a boxing card that began at 10 a.m. on Saturday and ended at 1 a.m. Sunday in Las Vegas. I was hearing bells in my sleep after that adventure.
Like that Don King card, this one is loaded with world title fights.
From lightweights to heavyweights, multiple world championships are being settled in the desert nation.
IBF heavyweight titlist Daniel Dubois scratched against Joseph Parker because of a virus.
The former champion Parker (35-3, 23 KOs) will now face Martin Bakole (21-1, 16 KOs) who was last seen battering American contender Jared “The Real Big Baby” Anderson last August in Los Angeles. Despite the change of foes Parker may still be in a very intriguing fight. It could be explosive.
Another very intriguing clash pits former super welterweight champion Israil Madrimov (10-1-1) against undefeated Vergil Ortiz Jr. (22-0, 21 KOs). No world title is at stake, but reputations will be made or demoted after these two meet in the boxing ring.
Madrimov recently lost a close decision to Terence Crawford in Los Angeles. No shame there.
“I always chase at big fights. I have another big fight,” Madrimov said.
Ortiz had problems making weight after battling Covid-19 and moved up from super lightweight to super welterweight. That’s a big jump regardless of talent. The Texas-bred fighter has never been defeated but this is his first time facing a real super welterweight of championship caliber. It’s a daring test but Ortiz has never shied away from a battle.
“There’s not much to say. In my opinion, this is the best fight on the card,” said Ortiz.
Golden Boy Promotions backs Ortiz and Matchroom Boxing has Madrimov who is trained by the brothers Joel and Antonio Diaz in Indio, Calif. They formerly trained Ortiz years ago. Robert Garcia now trains Ortiz in Riverside, Calif. There are rivalries and there are rivalries.
In another sparkling match WBC middleweight titlist Carlos Adames (24-1, 18 KOs) defends against Hamzah Sheeraz (21-0, 17 KOs) a tall lanky power-hitter who looks like the real deal. I don’t expect this to reach the final bell.
Adames is a slick fighter out of the Dominican Republic and Sheeraz is a British puncher. Both train in the U.S. It’s a don’t-blink type of fight and could end early.
Others on the card are heavyweights Zhilei Zhang (27-2-1, 22 KOs) versus Germany’s Agit Kabayel (25-0, 17 KOs). The Chinese heavyweight seems to have the skills but lacks the stamina as his loss to Joseph Parker showed. Kabayel has never tasted defeat and has wins over Russia’s Arslanbek Makhmudov, Cuba’s Frank Sanchez, and England’s Derek Chisora.
Plus, Shakur Stevenson found a replacement for Floyd Schofield who dropped out due to illness. And light heavyweight contender Joshua Buatsi fights former champ Callum Smith whose only losses were to Beterbiev and Canelo Alvarez.
Get ready for a long day of title fights.
Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)
Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Cain Sandoval (14-0) vs Mark Bernaldez (25-6).
Sat. PPV.COM or DAZN ppv 7:30 a.m. Artur Beterbiev (21-0) vs Dmitrii Bivol (23-1); Vergil Ortiz Jr. (22-0) vs Israil Madrimov (10-1-1); Joseph Parker (35-3) vs Martin Bakole (21-1); Carlos Adames (24-1) vs Hamzah Sheeraz (21-0).
Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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Lucas Bahdi Paid His Dues, Quite Literally, and Now his Boxing Career is Flourishing
Lucas Bahdi Paid His Dues, Quite Literally, and Now his Boxing Career is Flourishing
In boxing, one punch can dramatically alter the trajectory of a fighter’s career. This is true for both the perpetrator and the unfortunate recipient.
On July 20 of last year in Tampa, Florida, Lucas Bahdi, a lightweight from Niagara Falls, Canada, rucked himself out of obscurity with a frightening knockout of Ashton “H2O” Sylva. Bahdi has fought once since then, sharing the bill at an event attended by an announced crowd of 72,300 and will be returning to the ring in a more conventional setting at Toronto on Friday, March 7.
Bahdi’s knockout of Sylve came in the final minute of the sixth frame. Although it wasn’t a classic one-punch knockout, it came out of the blue with the suddenness of a thunderclap on a clear day. Down 5-0 on all three scorecards through the five completed rounds, Bahdi unleashed a fast, three-punch combination that left poor Sylve splattered face-first on the canvas. The final punch of the trio, a sweeping left hook, was superfluous. Sylve was out on his feet. It would be named the 2024 TSS Knockout of the Year.
The match, slated for 10 rounds, was on the undercard of a Jake Paul promotion co-starring Paul and the boxer he sponsors, the great Amanda Serrano. Although Lucas Bahdi was more seasoned than Ashton Sylve and he too had an unblemished record, the conventional wisdom was that he would be just another stepping-stone for Jake Paul’s precocious house fighter.
A decorated amateur from Long Beach, California, Ashton “H2O” Sylve signed with MVP Promotions, Jake Paul’s company, when he was 18 years old. In the press release announcing his signing, Paul predicted that Sylve (who happens to be Snoop Dogg’s nephew) would become “a massive, massive superstar…not merely because of his [fistic talent], but because of his charisma.” And through his first 11 pro fights, during which he scored nine knockouts, Sylve did nothing to temper that opinion.
Meanwhile, Lucas Bahdi was building a nice record, but toiling in obscurity. Prior to meeting Sylve, he had fought exclusively in Mexico and Canada. He took the Sylve fight on three-and-a-half weeks’ notice, subbing for Floyd Schofield. Filching the title of an Oscar-contending movie that is currently making the rounds, Bahdi was “A Complete Unknown,” at least outside his native habitat.
Bahdi’s prize for knocking out Sylve was an MVP Promotions contract and a slot on the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson show at the home of the Dallas Cowboys on Nov. 15. Paul vs. Tyson was a predictable farce but it was a mega-event, purportedly the most streamed global sporting event in history. On the card, Bahdi won a 10-round decision, advancing his record to 18-0 (15 KOs).
Lucas Bahdi’s risky investment paid off. By his reckoning, he spent more than $100,000 of his own money seeding his professional boxing career before linking up with Jake Paul. About those early fights in Mexico: There was no financial reward; to the contrary, he paid the purse of his opponents.
Of Palestinian and Italian heritage, Bahdi grew up in comfortable circumstances. His father George Bahdi is a prominent builder in Niagara Falls. Away from the gym, Lucas can be found at Niagara Falls’ Olympia Motors, his used car dealership. Buying and selling cars is more than a job, he says, it’s also a hobby. His personal preference is for late 1990s, early 2000 Jaguars.
We caught up with Lucas Bahdi last week at the Top Rank Gym in Las Vegas. With him were his coach Stevie Bailey, the head trainer at Toronto’s West End Athletic Club, and Stevie’s wife Sara Bailey.
Ms. Bailey, who competed all over the world as an amateur under her maiden name Sara Haghighat Joo, happens to hold the WBA’s female light flyweight world title, a diadem she acquired in her fourth pro fight. In Las Vegas, the team stays in an AirBnB roughly a mile from the gym, but doesn’t keep a rental car handy. “We walk everywhere,” says Bahdi, “sometimes 10 miles a day. It keeps my weight in check and, besides, there is a lot to see around here.”
Bahdi reflected on some of the adversity he faced as he was toiling in the shadows. At a November 2020 fight in Cuernevaca, Mexico, he left the ring with two broken hands and both of his eyes badly swollen. “I couldn’t think straight while I was in there; I couldn’t focus” he says. And oh by the way, he knocked out his tormentor in the fourth round.
“A lot of people thought my career was over right there,” says Bahdi while noting that both of his damaged hands required surgery. He was out of action for 17 months as boxing activity slowed because of the COVID pandemic.
Bahdi, who like Ashton Sylve had a notable amateur career, takes umbrage with those that would characterize his stoppage of Sylve as a fluke. “The kid is an amazing talent,” he says, “but we adhered to our game plan. Mentally I knew I was ready. In boxing, timing beats speed.”
Fighting on the Paul-Tyson card at an NFL stadium was quite a departure from all those little fights in Mexico and Canada, but Bahdi wasn’t overwhelmed by the moment. “Knowing that I was finally the ‘A’ side, was helpful,” he concedes.
Bahdi’s forthcoming fight on March 7 at the Great Canadian Casino in Toronto marks the first incursion of MVP Promotions into Canada. Bahdi will headline against an undefeated Filipino southpaw, Ryan James Racasa, who will be stepping up in class in his North American debut. Sara Bailey is also penciled in, but her opponent hasn’t yet been determined. According to a press release, the fight card will air on DAZN for free with no subscription required.
Now 31 years old and the father of a 16-month-old son, Lucas Bahdi has taken an unconventional path to what he hopes will culminate in a world title. With a lot of sweat and a little luck, his risky investment is paying dividends.
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