Politics Aside, Passionate Boxing Fan John McCain was an American Hero

Definition of a “hero,” from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “A person admired for achievements and noble qualities; one who shows great courage.”

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Published

7 years ago

August 28, 2018

Bernard Fernandez

Definition of a “hero,” from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “A person admired for achievements and noble qualities; one who shows great courage.”

Sen. John McCain, the difficult-to-categorize, at least in a political sense, Republican senator from Arizona, was four days shy of his 82^nd birthday when on Aug. 25 he finally succumbed to the ravishing effects of gliobastoma, a rare form of brain cancer he was first diagnosed as having on July 14, 2017. Those with aggressive GBM, as it is known in its shortened form, have a median survival period of 14 months, meaning the combative former Navy pilot did not outlive normal projections for those similarly stricken. For those familiar with the incredible true story of a genuine American hero, Sen. McCain’s adherence to any kind of norm must seem odd. His admirers – and they are many, including those who often opposed his positions as a two-time presidential candidate, two-term congressman and six-term senator – can be excused for somehow believing that a man who had survived as much as John Sidney McCain III had could somehow do it again if only through the force of his will and, maybe, his genetic makeup. Among his surviving family members is his 106-year-old mother, Roberta.

“It’s been quite a ride,” McCain, acknowledging the inevitability of his latest confrontation with the specter of death, wrote in a memoir published in May. “I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make peace. I’ve lived very well and I’ve been deprived of all comforts. I’ve been as lonely as a person can be and I’ve enjoyed the company of heroes. I’ve suffered the deepest despair and experienced the highest exultation.

“I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”

A small place in the multifaceted story of John McCain, one that almost surely will not be mentioned this week by former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, among those expected to speak at McCain’s Thursday funeral service at Washington National Cathedral (a private funeral is planned for Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.), is the former USNA boxer’s unabashed love of the sport, and his relentless championing of its participants.

McCain co-authored, along with Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.), the Professional Boxing Safety Act, which became law on July 1, 1997, and he also sponsored the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, which became law on May 26, 2000. He would have preferred to go even further, but his vision of providing pension and unionized protections for professional boxers ran into the sort of legislative roadblocks that have become all too common in a political landscape marked by increasing partisanship. The biggest impediment to a boxers’ union and pension plan is the international aspect of boxing, with two of the four major world sanctioning bodies headquartered abroad: the WBA in Venezuela and the WBC in Mexico. It can be argued that the WBO, based in Puerto Rico, also is under “foreign” purview, although the Caribbean island is a territory of the United States.

“As long as there is not a pension plan or a union – and I say that as a conservative Republican – I don’t believe you in any way can compare what the fighters receive to that of other professional sports,” McCain said in 2000, during his first presidential run that ended with his party’s nomination going to George W. Bush. “Every other major professional sport in this country has unions and pension plans.”

McCain’s failed push for unionization in pro boxing ran contrary to the prevailing mood of the Republican hierarchy, and so was his advocacy for a bill that would have created the formation of a three-person commission within the Commerce Department to regulate the sport in America. On Nov. 16, 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, 233-190, against the proposed bill. Interestingly, Democrats voted for the proposed legislation by 146-50, but the GOP shot it down by a 183-43 margin. It is one of several instances where McCain, considered something of a political maverick, reached across the aisle on matters he considered to be of enough importance to transcend party orthodoxy.

But if Americans at large paid little heed to McCain’s hit-or-miss boxing crusades, the fighters whose circumstances he strove to improve took notice. Among those who lauded him was IBF middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins.

“Sen. McCain is a true hero in my eyes,” Hopkins said in July 2000. “I know his history. You have to know who you’re dealing with, right? This is a man who was in a prison camp and could have been released early, but he didn’t want to leave his friends. That tells me something.”

The son and grandson of Navy admirals also named John McCain, there is a strong likelihood John III (one of his sons, John IV, is a fourth-generation Naval Academy graduate now serving as a Navy helicopter pilot) would have remained in the military until he reached mandatory retirement age and risen in rank to join his distinguished forebears were it not for the events of Oct. 26, 1967, when a surface-to-air missile struck his Skyhawk dive bomber on a mission over Hanoi. Its right wing destroyed, the crippled aircraft hurtled toward Truc Bach Lake when McCain parachuted to … well, not exactly safety. The force of his ejection from the plane broke his right leg and both arms, knocking him unconscious. Sinking to the depths of what might have been his watery grave, McCain came to, ignoring the pain as best he could, and somehow was able to kick his way to the surface with his good leg and activate his life preserver with his teeth.

Pulled ashore by some North Vietnamese, one of his captors slammed a rifle butt into his right shoulder, shattering it. Another bayoneted him in the abdomen and foot.

The severely injured McCain was then transported to Ho Loa Prison, which was derisively nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by its 500 or so prisoners of war. At first denied medical attention, McCain, who by that time was also suffering from dysentery, was described by one of his fellow POWs, Air Force Major George “Bud” Day, as looking “like he absolutely was on the verge of death.” His tale might have ended there, in that squalid setting, had not prison officials learned of his two-admiral lineage. The North Vietnamese, hoping to score a propaganda victory, not only provided him delayed if substandard medical attention – he underwent surgery on his broken leg, but several ligaments were damaged in the process – but offered him early release. Adhering to the military code of “first in, first out,” McCain said he would only accept if every man captured before him was released as well.

McCain’s refusal to take the accelerated release, as well as his steadfast refusal to give interrogators any more information than his name, rank, serial number and date of birth, so infuriated prison officials that they moved him into solitary confinement in March 1968, several months before his father was named commander in chief of all U.S. Pacific forces. Thus began the systematic torture he was to endure beginning in August 1968, during which time his once-dark-brown hair turned snowy white and his body weight dropped alarmingly, the result of being put on a diet of stale bread and thin pumpkin soup. But, he said, the torture ended around October of 1969 and his solitary confinement concluded in March 1970. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on Jan. 27, 1973, putting an end to the Vietnam War, McCain was released on March 14, 1973.

He came home with a body so irretrievably broken that he would walk with a limp for the rest of his days, and unable to raise his arms above his shoulders. There would be personal recriminations as well, with McCain, at the point of suicide and after four days of prolonged torture during the worst stretch of his incarceration, agreeing to write a confession of his “crimes” against the North Vietnamese people.

“I felt just terrible about it,” he recalled. “Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

Perhaps it was the forced signing of that confession that prompted Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, of whom Sen. McCain was not a fan, to take an egregiously distasteful shot at his tormentor from Arizona during an appearance at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, during the 2016 presidential campaign. Asked about McCain’s service to his country while in the Navy, Trump responded, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who aren’t captured.”

Although Trump — who never served in the military and received four deferments from 1964 to ’67 — quickly recanted, he was widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike for comments so seemingly inappropriate for someone aspiring to become Commander in Chief of all U.S. military forces. While it is not obligatory for a sitting president to have donned a uniform in defense of his country, to have done so would appear to be more beneficial than a deterrent; of the 45 individuals who have held the nation’s highest elected office, 22 saw combat or served in combat zones while another eight served in other capacities.

Although a frequent critic of Trump, McCain considered the late Ronald Reagan his hero and political role model. Thus was McCain paradoxical in many ways, forever, in the words of Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. To left-leaning boxing promoter Bob Arum, McCain was a “great American” and “terrific boxing fan” whose politics were a bit too conservative for his own taste, while to Trump backers he was a gadfly who too often strayed left of their preferred right-of-center moorings. He was in his own way that rarest of politicians, true to his own sometimes alterable beliefs, a fighter for the constituents who kept him in office and a steadfast proponent for that most under-represented minority, the boxers with whom he so readily identified.

“There are some issues that need to be tackled simply because it’s the right thing to do,” he once said of his obsession with eliminating or at least minimizing some of the ills linked to professional boxing. “I’m very proud to be involved in the movement to effect some real change in the boxing industry. I believe that boxers are the most exploited of all professional athletes. They come from the lowest rung, and generally are the least educated. They’re the only major sport that’s not unionized.

“I can’t force boxers to invest their money, but I sure think I can prevent them from being exploited by unscrupulous outsiders.”

Perhaps my most enduring memory of Sen. McCain is the one time I had a chance to speak to him, in a brief interview that was more like two fight fans having a chat, despite the fact I was holding a tape recorder. It was Aug. 25, 1998, and the senator and Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Tom Ridge, were part of a capacity-plus, sweat-soaked crowd of 1,350 at Philadelphia’s Blue Horizon for a sort-of notable event, the final USA Tuesday Night Fights telecast, which ended the cable network’s 17-year run. In the main event, heavyweight novelty attraction Eric “Butterbean” Esch blasted out journeyman Tim Pollard in the first round of a, natch, scheduled four-rounder.

It didn’t take long for the two politicians, who arrived wearing suits and ties, to doff their jackets and ties and to loosen their collars. But they nonetheless appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely; for Sen. McCain especially, this suffocatingly hot night was a chance to let his hair down and indulge his not-so-secret passion.

“It’s my first time here, but I’ve seen the place on television a hundred times,” he said. “I’d heard about the incredible atmosphere and everything I heard is true. This is one of the great, classic places for boxing.”

Rest in peace, Sen. McCain. The symbolic 10-count has sounded and you take your earthly leave having scored a couple of victories on points in the ongoing quest to make things better for fighters and those who care about them.

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Bernard Fernandez

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Floyd Mayweather has Another Phenom and his name is Curmel Moton

Published

2 days ago

April 22, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Floyd Mayweather has Another Phenom and his name is Curmel Moton

In any endeavor, the defining feature of a phenom is his youth. Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Bryce Harper was a phenom. He was on the radar screen of baseball’s most powerful player agents when he was 14 years old.

Curmel Moton, who turns 19 in June, is a phenom. Of all the young boxing stars out there, wrote James Slater in July of last year, “Curmel Moton is the one to get most excited about.”

Moton was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His father Curtis Moton, a barber by trade, was a big boxing fan and specifically a big fan of Floyd Mayweather Jr. When Curmel was six, Curtis packed up his wife (Curmel’s stepmom) and his son and moved to Las Vegas. Curtis wanted his son to get involved in boxing and there was no better place to develop one’s latent talents than in Las Vegas where many of the sport’s top practitioners came to train.

Many father-son relationships have been ruined, or at least frayed, by a father’s unrealistic expectations for his son, but when it came to boxing, the boy was a natural and he felt right at home in the gym.

The gym the Motons patronized was the Mayweather Boxing Club. Curtis took his son there in hopes of catching the eye of the proprietor. “Floyd would occasionally drop by the gym and I was there so often that he came to recognize me,” says Curmel. What he fails to add is that the trainers there had Floyd’s ear. “This kid is special,” they told him.

It costs a great deal of money for a kid to travel around the country competing in a slew of amateur boxing tournaments. Only a few have the luxury of a sponsor. For the vast majority, fund raisers such as car washes keep the wheels greased.

Floyd Mayweather stepped in with the financial backing needed for the Motons to canvas the country in tournaments. As an amateur, Curmel was — take your pick — 156-7 or 144-6 or 61-3 (the latter figure from boxrec). Regardless, at virtually every tournament at which he appeared, Curmel Moton was the cock of the walk.

Before the pandemic, Floyd Mayweather Jr had a stable of boxers he promoted under the banner of “The Money Team.” In talking about his boxers, Floyd was understated with one glaring exception – Gervonta “Tank” Davis, now one of boxing’s top earners.

When Floyd took to praising Curmel Moton with the same effusive language, folks stood up and took notice.

Curmel made his pro debut on Sept. 30, 2023, at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on the undercard of the super middleweight title fight between Canelo Alvarez and Jermell Charlo. After stopping his opponent in the opening round, he addressed a flock of reporters in the media room with Floyd standing at his side. “I felt ready,” he said, “I knew I had Floyd behind me. He believes in me. I had the utmost confidence going into the fight. And I went in there and did what I do.”

Floyd ventured the opinion that Curmel was already a better fighter than Leigh Wood, the reigning WBA world featherweight champion who would successfully defend his belt the following week.

Moton’s boxing style has been described as a blend of Floyd Mayweather and Tank Davis. “I grew up watching Floyd, so it’s natural I have some similarities to him,” says Curmel who sparred with Tank in late November of 2021 as Davis was preparing for his match with Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz. Curmell says he did okay. He was then 15 years old and still in school; he dropped out as soon as he reached the age of 16.

Curmel is now 7-0 with six KOs, four coming in the opening round. He pitched an 8-round shutout the only time he was taken the distance. It’s not yet official, but he returns to the ring on May 31 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas where Caleb Plant and Jermall Charlo are co-featured in matches conceived as tune-ups for a fall showdown. The fight card will reportedly be free for Amazon Prime Video subscribers.

Curmel’s presumptive opponent is Renny Viamonte, a 28-year-old Las Vegas-based Cuban with a 4-1-1 (2) record. It will be Curmel’s first professional fight with Kofi Jantuah the chief voice in his corner. A two-time world title challenger who began his career in his native Ghana, the 50-year-old Jantuah has worked almost exclusively with amateurs, a recent exception being Mikaela Mayer.

It would seem that the phenom needs a tougher opponent than Viamonte at this stage of his career. However, the match is intriguing in one regard. Viamonte is lanky. Listed at 5-foot-11, he will have a seven-inch height advantage.

Keeping his weight down has already been problematic for Moton. He tipped the scales at 128 ½ for his most recent fight. His May 31 bout, he says, will be contested at 135 and down the road it’s reasonable to think he will blossom into a welterweight. And with each bump up in weight, his short stature will theoretically be more of a handicap.

For fun, we asked Moton to name the top fighter on his pound-for-pound list. “[Oleksandr] Usyk is number one right now,” he said without hesitation,” great footwork, but guys like Canelo, Crawford, Inoue, and Bivol are right there.”

It’s notable that there isn’t a young gun on that list. Usyk is 38, a year older than Crawford; Inoue is the pup at age 32.

Moton anticipates that his name will appear on pound-for-pound lists within the next two or three years. True, history is replete with examples of phenoms who flamed out early, but we wouldn’t bet against it.

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Arne’s Almanac: The First Boxing Writers Assoc. of America Dinner Was Quite the Shindig

Published

4 days ago

April 20, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-First-Boxing-Writers-Assoc-of-America-Dinner-was-Quite-the-Shindig

The first annual dinner of the Boxing Writers Association of America was staged on April 25, 1926 in the grand ballroom of New York’s Hotel Astor, an edifice that rivaled the original Waldorf Astoria as the swankiest hotel in the city. Back then, the organization was known as the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York.

The ballroom was configured to hold 1200 for the banquet which was reportedly oversubscribed. Among those listed as agreeing to attend were the governors of six states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland) and the mayors of 10 of America’s largest cities.

In 1926, radio was in its infancy and the digital age was decades away (and inconceivable). So, every journalist who regularly covered boxing was a newspaper and/or magazine writer, editor, or cartoonist. And at this juncture in American history, there were plenty of outlets for someone who wanted to pursue a career as a sportswriter and had the requisite skills to get hired.

The following papers were represented at the inaugural boxing writers’ dinner:

New York Times

New York News

New York World

New York Sun

New York Journal

New York Post

New York Mirror

New York Telegram

New York Graphic

New York Herald Tribune

Brooklyn Eagle

Brooklyn Times

Brooklyn Standard Union

Brooklyn Citizen

Bronx Home News

This isn’t a complete list because a few of these papers, notably the New York World and the New York Journal, had strong afternoon editions that functioned as independent papers. Plus, scribes from both big national wire services (Associated Press and UPI) attended the banquet and there were undoubtedly a smattering of scribes from papers in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Back then, the event’s organizer Nat Fleischer, sports editor of the New York Telegram and the driving force behind The Ring magazine, had little choice but to limit the journalistic component of the gathering to writers in the New York metropolitan area. There wasn’t a ballroom big enough to accommodate a good-sized response if he had extended the welcome to every boxing writer in North America.

The keynote speaker at the inaugural dinner was New York’s charismatic Jazz Age mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker, architect of the transformative Walker Law of 1920 which ushered in a new era of boxing in the Empire State with a template that would guide reformers in many other jurisdictions.

Prizefighting was then associated with hooligans. In his speech, Mayor Walker promised to rid the sport of their ilk. “Boxing, as you know, is closest to my heart,” said hizzoner. “So I tell you the police force is behind you against those who would besmirch or injure boxing. Rowdyism doesn’t belong in this town or in your game.” (In 1945, Walker would be the recipient of the Edward J. Neil Memorial Award given for meritorious service to the sport. The oldest of the BWAA awards, the previous recipients were all active or former boxers. The award, no longer issued under that title, was named for an Associated Press sportswriter and war correspondent who died from shrapnel wounds covering the Spanish Civil War.)

Another speaker was well-traveled sportswriter Wilbur Wood, then affiliated with the Brooklyn Citizen. He told the assembly that the aim of the organization was two-fold: to help defend the game against its detractors and to promote harmony among the various factions.

Of course, the 1926 dinner wouldn’t have been as well-attended without the entertainment. According to press dispatches, Broadway stars and performers from some of the city’s top nightclubs would be there to regale the attendees. Among the names bandied about were vaudeville superstars Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante, the latter of whom would appear with his trio, Durante, (Lou) Clayton, and (Eddie) Jackson.

There was a contraction of New York newspapers during the Great Depression. Although empirical evidence is lacking, the inaugural boxing writers dinner was likely the largest of its kind. Fifteen years later, in 1941, the event drew “more than 200” according to a news report. There was no mention of entertainment.

In 1950, for the first time, the annual dinner was opened to the public. For $25, a civilian could get a meal and mingle with some of his favorite fighters. Sugar Ray Robinson was the Edward J. Neil Award winner that year, honored for his ring exploits and for donating his purse from the Charlie Fusari fight to the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund.

There was no formal announcement when the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York was re-christened the Boxing Writers Association of America, but by the late 1940s reporters were referencing the annual event as simply the boxing writers dinner. By then, it had become traditional to hold the annual affair in January, a practice discontinued after 1971.

The winnowing of New York’s newspaper herd plus competing banquets in other parts of the country forced Nat Fleischer’s baby to adapt. And more adaptations will be necessary in the immediate future as the future of the BWAA, as it currently exists, is threatened by new technologies. If the forthcoming BWAA dinner (April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in mid-Manhattan) were restricted to wordsmiths from the traditional print media, the gathering would be too small to cover the nut and the congregants would be drawn disproportionately from the geriatric class.

Some of those adaptations have already started. Last year, Las Vegas resident Sean Zittel, a recent UNLV graduate, had the distinction of becoming the first videographer welcomed into the BWAA. With more and more people getting their news from sound bites, rather than the written word, the videographer serves an important function.

The reporters who conducted interviews with pen and paper have gone the way of the dodo bird and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A taped interview for a “talkie” has more integrity than a story culled from a paper and pen interview because it is unfiltered. Many years ago, some reporters, after interviewing the great Joe Louis, put words in his mouth that made him seem like a dullard, words consistent with the Sambo stereotype. In other instances, the language of some athletes was reconstructed to the point where the reader would think the athlete had a second job as an English professor.

The content created by videographers is free from that bias. More of them will inevitably join the BWAA and similar organizations in the future.

Photo: Nat Fleischer is flanked by Sugar Ray Robinson and Tony Zale at the 1947 boxing writers dinner.

A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.

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Gabriela Fundora KOs Marilyn Badillo and Perez Upsets Conwell in Oceanside

Published

5 days ago

April 20, 2025

David A. Avila

Gabriela-Fundora-KOs-Marilyn-Badillo-and-Perez-Upsets-Conwell-in-Oceanside

It was just a numbers game for Gabriela Fundora and despite Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo’s elusive tactics it took the champion one punch to end the fight and retain her undisputed flyweight world title by knockout on Saturday.

Will it be her last flyweight defense?

Though Fundora (16-0, 8 KOs) fired dozens of misses, a single punch found Badillo (19-1-1, 3 KOs) and ended her undefeated career and first attempt at a world title at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, California.

Fundora, however, proves unbeatable at flyweight.

The champion entered the arena as the headliner for the Golden Boy Promotion show and stepped through the ropes with every physical advantage possible, including power.

Mexico’s Badillo was a midget compared to Fundora but proved to be as elusive as a butterfly in a menagerie for the first six rounds. As the six-inch taller Fundora connected on one punch for every dozen thrown, that single punch was a deadly reminder.

Badillo tried ducking low and slipping to the left while countering with slashing uppercuts, she found little success. She did find the body a solid target but the blows proved to be useless. And when Badillo clinched, that proved more erroneous as Fundora belted her rapidly during the tie-ups.

“She was kind of doing her ducking thing,” said Fundora describing Badillo’s defensive tactics. “I just put the pressure on. It was just like a train. We didn’t give her that break.”

The Mexican fighter tried valiantly with various maneuvers. None proved even slightly successful. Fundora remained poised and under control as she stalked the challenger.

In the seventh round Badillo seemed to take a stand and try to slug it out with Fundora. She quickly was lit up by rapid left crosses and down she went at 1:44 of the seventh round. The Mexican fighter’s corner wisely waved off the fight and referee Rudy Barragan stopped the fight and held the dazed Badillo upright.

Once again Fundora remained champion by knockout. The only question now is will she move up to super flyweight or bantamweight to challenge the bigger girls.

Perez Beats Conwell.

Mexico’s Jorge “Chino” Perez (33-4, 26 KOs) upset Charles Conwell (21-1, 15 KOs) to win by split decision after 12 rounds in their super welterweight showdown.

It was a match that paired two hard-hitting fighters whose ledgers brimmed with knockouts, but neither was able to score a knockdown against each other.

Neither fighter moved backward. It was full steam ahead with Conwell proving successful to the body and head with left hooks and Perez connecting with rights to the head and body. It was difficult to differentiate the winner.

Though Conwell seemed to be the superior defensive fighter and more accurate, two judges preferred Perez’s busier style. They gave the fight to Perez by 115-113 scores with the dissenter favoring Conwell by the same margin.

It was Conwell’s first pro loss. Maybe it will open doors for more opportunities.

Other Bouts

Tristan Kalkreuth (15-1) managed to pass a serious heat check by unanimous decision against former contender Felix Valera (24-8) after a 10-round back-and-forth heavyweight fight.

It was very close.

Kalkreuth is one of those fighters that possess all the physical tools including youth and size but never seems to be able to show it. Once again he edged past another foe but at least this time he faced an experienced fighter in Valera.

Valera had his moments especially in the middle of the 10-round fight but slowed down during the last three rounds.

One major asset for Kalkreuth was his chin. He got caught but still motored past the clever Valera. After 10 rounds two judges saw it 99-91 and one other judge 97-93 all for Kalkreuth.

Highly-rated prospect Ruslan Abdullaev (2-0) blasted past dangerous Jino Rodrigo (13- 5-2) in an eight round super lightweight fight. He nearly stopped the very tough Rodrigo in the last two rounds and won by unanimous decision.

Abdullaev is trained by Joel and Antonio Diaz in Indio.

Bakersfield prospect Joel Iriarte (7-0, 7 KOs) needed only 1:44 to knock out Puerto Rico’s Marcos Jimenez (25-12) in a welterweight bout.

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