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The Four Faces on the Mount Rushmore of Boxing: A New TSS Survey
In this survey we posed a hypothetical question: Suppose that there was going to be a Mount Rushmore of Boxing with the faces of four boxers carved on to a granite mountain

In this survey we posed a hypothetical question: Suppose that there was going to be a Mount Rushmore of Boxing with the faces of four boxers carved on to a granite mountain. Further suppose that a duly authorized panel decided that Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali would be three of the four, but could not agree on who warranted the fourth slot. Which fighter would you pick?
We posed this question to more than 30 respondents. As the person that ran the survey, I have the honor of going first. I gave the fourth slot to WILLIE PEP. He had an incredible record of 230-11-1 with 65 KOs and is considered one of boxing’s all-time great defensive artists. He turned pro in 1940 and won his first sixty-three fights. After serious injuries suffered in a plane crash in 1947, he came back and continued to win and win and win.
Here are the other picks. The respondents are listed alphabetically.
JIM AMATO, author, writer, collector: As much as I’d like to say my favorite fighter, Roberto Duran, I’ll have to go with HENRY ARMSTRONG. Hank’s accomplishments will never be duplicated.
RUSS ANBER, trainer, cornerman, and owner of Rival Boxing Equipment: You simply cannot add anyone to the Holy Trinity! There is the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. These three greats are undisputed. The fourth can never be! No other fighter in history transcended the sport as did these three. Nuff said!
MATT ANDRZEJEWSKI, TSS writer: HARRY GREB. In my opinion, Greb is the best pound for pound fighter of all time. He was known as a punching machine and for throwing punches at all sorts of differing angles that often overwhelmed his opposition. His resume and ring accomplishments speak for themselves. Incredibly, many of his best wins came after he suffered an injury to his right eye that caused vision problems.
JOE BRUNO, former New York City sportswriter; prolific author: ROCKY MARCIANO is the only undefeated heavyweight champion and he fought everyone who was around at the time. I’d have him there even before Ali. And what about Jack Dempsey, who was the leading figure in boxing in the Roaring Twenties, the Golden Age of Boxing? Say what you want about Ali, but he lost five fights, including one to Leon Spinks, who was fighting in only his eighth pro fight.
ANTHONY CARDINALE, former manager of several top fighters including John Ruiz: ROCKY MARCIANO, 49-0, heavyweight champion from Massachusetts. Enough said.
JILL DIAMOND, WBC/NABF supervisor and award-winning voice in female boxing: ROCKY MARCIANO would be my choice. My second would be Floyd. Both undefeated and, depending on your point of view, 49 or 50 wins.
CHARLIE DWYER, retired referee and member of the Marine Boxing Hall of Fame: WILLIE PEP. In his prime he was practically untouchable. A classic boxer personified.
BERNARD FERNANDEZ, journalist; one of only eight lifetime members of the Boxing Writers Association of America: Lots of possibilities and most are worthy of that fourth slot. But upon further reflection, I’m going with HENRY ARMSTRONG.
PEDRO PETE FERNANDEZ, former boxer and manager of Ring Talk: I select ROBERTO DURAN. Hands down.
JEFFREY FREEMAN, aka KO DIGEST, TSS writer: The fourth carved rockhead for the fantasy Mount Rushmore belongs to the immortal “Brockton Blockbuster,” ROCKY MARCIANO, an undefeated heavyweight champion who personified both toughness and sportsmanship. The name “Rocky” is synonymous with boxing like no other (okay, perhaps “Sugar Ray.”) Behold my Fab Four of Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and Rocky Marciano.
HENRY HASCUP, historian and long-time President of the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame: HENRY ARMSTRONG held three world titles at the same time. Armstrong defended the world welterweight championship a division record 19 times. Armstrong was 27-0 with 26 knockouts in 1937, 14-0 with 10 knockouts in 1938, and 59-1-1 with 51 knockouts from December 1936 to October 1940. Armstrong defeated sixteen world champions.
CLARENCE GEORGE, boxing writer: So many worthies….John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, the absurdly untitled Sam Langford, Harry Greb, second only to Sugar Ray Robinson (and arguably his superior) in what has always been boxing’s richest division; and Henry Armstrong, the first three-division world champion at a time when there were only eight divisions. But I have to go with WILLIE PEP. I can’t help but be in awe of his justifiably legendary record and against a slew of amazing fighters, including the superb Sandy Saddler. What astonishing skill and technique, particularly in terms of defensive wizardry. The greatest featherweight of all time? To be sure. But more, so much more, than that.
IVAN GOLDMAN, author and boxing write: I wracked my brain, but all the names I tried were ultimately indefensible. I know of no fighter to equal the stature of these three men. But I don’t pretend to know everything, and perhaps someone will come up with a name that makes sense. Plenty of quality fighters never got the right fights at the right time.
LEE GROVES, author, writer and Wizard of CompuBox: Very difficult question. I choose HENRY ARMSTRONG because Mount Rushmore is supposed to embody the four greatest in a certain area, and I have him as the second greatest pound-for-pound fighter in history. At his best, there were few better and he holds the unique record of holding three divisional championships simultaneously, which is made much more impressive by the fact he did it during the one champ per division era. He also would be a terrific standard bearer for the smaller weight classes.
BRUCE KIELTY, boxing matchmaker, manager, and historian: JACK DEMPSEY because he represented the era that brought boxing into mainstream acceptance.
STUART KIRSCHENBAUM, former amateur boxer; co-founder of the National Association of Boxing Commissioners: JACK DEMPSEY is my choice. Other boxers have had more impressive records but talking about being enshrined entails social significance. Dempsey, a cultural icon of the 20’s…the golden age of sports, could also be considered the most popular athlete in American history for his media dominance of that era. During his reign from 1919-1926, Dempsey drew boxing’s first million-dollar gate and over 100,000 live for a single fight. He put boxing as the King of Sports.
JIM LAMPLEY, 2015 IBHOF inductee; centerpiece of the HBO broadcasting team: JACK JOHNSON because without him the lives of the other three could have been quite different.
ARNE LANG, author, historian and TSS editor-in-chief: The question becomes whether to choose someone who was indisputably great — someone like Joe Gans or Sugar Ray Leonard — or someone whose greatness is open to question but who transcended the sport. If the latter — and this is the way I lean — the nod goes to JACK DEMPSEY. No athlete was more celebrated during America’s Golden Era of Sports.
RON LIPTON, former fighter, boxing referee, boxing historian, retired police officer: If, in addition to Ali, Robinson and Louis, a recognizable iconic boxing figure should be chosen to be in their illustrious company and that would be JACK DEMPSEY. Only true boxing aficionados would recognize any of the other well deserving boxing legends from all weight classes which we could go on naming for hours.
FRANK LOTIERZO, former boxer, writer, and lead analyst for The Boxing Channel: I would give the open spot to HARRY GREB because he has the deepest and most complete resume and his accomplishments in the ring are more overwhelming than any other fighter I know of. Greb defeated the best quality of opposition and Hall of Fame fighters, often giving away height, reach and weight, more than any other fighter who has yet lived. He defeated 18 men who held, had held, or would hold world championships, and this at a time when there were only eight divisions in boxing and one champion in each division. He was a physical beast with power blended with non-stop aggression. He’s the only fighter to beat Gene Tunney who out-weighed him by 13 pounds. And did all that while being blind in his right eye.
PAUL MAGNO, author, writer and boxing official in Mexico: The logical choice is HENRY ARMSTRONG. He belongs for everything he accomplished and everything he could do. There’s a legit case for placing him number two or number three of all-time and, for me, he’s a no-brainer as the fourth face on boxing’s Mount Rushmore
ADEYINKA MAKINDE, author, boxing writer and UK barrister: I suggest JOE GANS, “The Old Master” himself, who was the first American of African descent to win a world title in the 20th century, thus paving the way for Louis, Robinson and Ali. He was a dominant fighter like they were and also a beloved figure because of his personality and his skills, achieving mainstream acceptance.
GORDON MARINO, philosophy professor, Wall Street Journal boxing writer, and trainer: The “Human Windmill” HARRY GREB. (107-8-3) but surely a lot more fights than that. At 5’8” and a middleweight, he fought and beat most everyone, including Gene Tunney.
DIEGO M. MORILLA, award winning bi-lingual boxing writer from Argentina: HENRY ARMSTRONG. He embodies his era like no one else: the fighter who had to take on all comers on short notice with no preparation and at any weight, and still succeeded in ways that we cannot even imagine today. His numbers are mind-boggling in every sense: his record defenses of the lineal welterweight crown, his fights in four of the original eight divisions with titles in three of them and a dubious draw against the middleweight champ Ceferino Garcia. Willie Pep and Jack Johnson deserve consideration as well, but “Homicide Hank” takes the laurel — and the marble — or whatever that big mountainside is made of.
JOHN RAFUSE SR., former professional boxer: My pick is ROCKY MARCIANO.
FREDERICK ROMANO, author, historian, formerly with HBO: Tough assignment. Henry Armstrong at his peak is a good choice in my opinion as is a prime WILLIE PEP.
LEE SAMUELS, Top Rank publicist emeritus: MARVIN HAGLER was the first star champion we ever worked with at Top Rank. Hagler’s firefight against Hitman Tommy Hearns at Caesars Palace was one of the greatest fights of all time. Hagler in the 80’s was all fighter, one of the greatest in boxing history. He was inducted into the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame a few years ago and when he went to the podium, he wept and said the Petronelli brothers – Pat and Goody – “were like my fathers who cared for me so much.”
ICEMAN JOHN SCULLY, elite trainer, former title contender, commentator: WILLIE PEP. No question.
PETER SILKOV, writer and manager of The Boxing Glove: I’m torn between Jack Johnson and Henry Armstrong; it’s a shame we can’t choose five! Overall, I choose JACK JOHNSON as his feat of securing his shot at the world heavyweight title is one of the greatest acts of courage and perseverance in the history of boxing, and without him there would have been no Louis or Ali.
MIKE SILVER, author, writer, historian: For me this is a no brainer. The fourth face should be HARRY GREB. His almost superhuman record speaks for itself. He was the ultimate fighter. I didn’t say boxer, for he was not a boxer, at least not in the traditional sense. Harry Greb was a pure fighter whose unorthodox windmill style has never been duplicated. All of the greats he fought spoke of him with awe and considered him their toughest opponent.
BRUCE TRAMPLER, Top Rank matchmaker; 2010 IBHOF inductee. I’d suggest Jack Dempsey who meant so much to the sport as Babe Ruth did for baseball, but I’ll go with the great HENRY ARMSTRONG.
GARY “DIGITAL” WILLIAMS, boxing writer and voice of Beltway Boxing: That’s a tough one but for me, it would be SUGAR RAY LEONARD. He’s a six-time world champion and he, after Ali, was the next boxer to go mainstream as far as commercial endorsements are concerned.
PETER WOOD, 1971 New York City Golden Gloves middleweight finalist and author: JOHN L. SULLIVAN is my choice. This bare-knuckle champion was a hard rock, a badass, and our glorious American Hercules. He could “lick any son-of-a-bitch in the house.”
Observations:
The final tally of votes yielded Henry Armstrong as a narrow winner with a secondary cluster around Dempsey, Greb, Marciano, and Pep following closely behind.
Some went as far back as Jack Johnson and Joe Gans, some went modern with Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard, and some simply could not come up with a selection that matched the three already on the mountain.
Peter Silkov and Jim Lampley had almost identical responses,
A sincere “Thank You” to all the participants.
Ted Sares is one of the oldest full power (raw modern) lifters in the world and is a four-time winner of the EPF’s Grand Master championship. He also is a member of Ring 4’s Boxing Hall of Fame.
Check out more boxing news on video at The Boxing Channel
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.
One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.
Take your pick.
The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.
Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.
Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.
If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.
He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.
During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.
Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.
Fundora
Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.
Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.
Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.
Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.
Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?
When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.
This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.
Commerce Casino
Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.
UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.
Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.
It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.
Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?
That’s a question for another day.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).
Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).
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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.
Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.
Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)
Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.
The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).
Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”
A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.
Other winners:
Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon
Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney
Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire
Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix
The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.
The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.
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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.
He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.
Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.
“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.
“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)
Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.
During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”
He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.
He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.
On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.
Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.
If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.
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