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Intriguing Fights in Croatia and Australia Enliven a Strong Boxing Weekend
The first weekend of September was a soft weekend for the sweet science, but things will heat up in a hurry. There are several major events

The first weekend of September was a soft weekend for the sweet science, but things will heat up in a hurry. There are several major events on tap this coming Saturday, Sept. 8, including a big welterweight showdown in Brooklyn between Danny Garcia and Shawn Porter, a tussle that will almost certainly be a crowd-pleaser. On the opposite coast, promoter Tom Loeffler unveils the third edition of his “Superfly” series and across the pond in Birmingham, Amir Khan, a big star in England, continues his march toward a hoped-for encounter with Manny Pacquaio with Samuel Vargas in the opposite corner. Vargas resides in Canada, as did Khan’s last opponent, Phil Lo Greco, who lasted all of 39 seconds.
Fight cards of lesser import in Croatia and Australia also warrant our attention. Both feature intriguing prospects who are taking a big jump up in class.
In Zagreb, Croatia, Filip Hrgovic (5-0, 4 KOs) makes his maiden appearance as a pro in his hometown, taking on Amir Mansour. A 2016 Olympian (he lost a narrow decision in the semis to eventual gold medalist Tony Yoka, a man he had previously defeated), the 6-foot-6, 230 pound (or thereabouts) Hrgovic comes well-touted by no less an authority than Matt McGrain.
“He moves as well as any man of his size I can remember,” said McGrain after watching Hrgovic take apart Tom Little in Hrgovic’s third pro bout. McGrain subsequently wrote that Hrgovic brought from the amateur ranks “a delicious one-two right out of the pages of How To Box by Joe Louis” and that he could have a brilliant career if he tightens up his defense.
Ay, there’s the rub (maybe). As a pro, Hrgovic has answered the bell for only 18 rounds. Could he have tightened up his defense enough in that short time to stave off a fighter as formidable as Amir Mansour (pictured on the right against Travis Kauffman)?
The first thing you need to know about Mansour, a southpaw, is that he is 46 years old. Although this reporter normally cringes at the thought of a man of Mansour’s vintage taking punches, I’m inclined to give Mansour (23-2-1, 16 KOs) a pass as he hasn’t taken much damage and he’s one rough customer.
Mansour, born Lavern Moorer, turned pro in 1997 age twenty-four. He had a reason for starting his career so late; he was in prison. After winning his first nine bouts, he was sent back to prison and served a longer stretch, resuming his career in 2010 after a nine-year absence. In 2012, another recess, this dictated by a parole violation – a gun and drugs were found in a house he shared with another felon – caused him to miss all of 2012.
When a fighter of Mansour’s description – i.e. a fighter with a good record, but generally thought of as a journeyman – goes overseas to meet a hot prospect in a hostile setting, strange things often happen. For example, the bout may end early because the visitor incurs an injury, a phantom injury by all appearances. But I seriously doubt this bout will take this tack. For one thing, Mansour, who took this fight on short notice, is hungry after squandering away the best years of his career. For another, he’s accustomed to fighting in hostile environments and has never mailed in a halfhearted effort. A case in point was his March of 2017 fight in Reading, Pennsylvania, with rugged but limited Travis Kauffman. Mansour wasn’t supposed to win that bout. Kauffman, who came in riding a 14-fight unbeaten streak, was fighting in his hometown on a show promoted by his father. But Mansour never stopped grinding and he walked away with a well-earned majority decision.
Mansour has twice failed to last the distance, but in both cases there were extenuating circumstances. Against Dominic Breazeale, he was forced to retire after five rounds after nearly biting off his tongue in the second stanza. He lost a copious amount of blood. His most recent fight, against 11-0 Sergey Kuzmin in Moscow, was called off in the third round by the ringside physician after both fighters suffered bad cuts after an accidental clash of heads. Prior to pulling out against Breazeale, Mansour had won every round. And he started off fast against Kuzmin.
It pains Mansour that two of his former opponents, Breazeale and Gerald Washington, used him as a steppingstone to a title fight with Deontay Wilder. Mansour fought Washington to a draw at a small casino in Shelton, Washington. The decision wasn’t malodorous, but neither was it popular. The attendees booed the score submitted by visiting Nevada judge Adalaide Byrd who had it 97-93 for Washington.
This is not a fight that I would bet. But if I were Filip Hrgovic’s manager, this is not a fight that I would take.
Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Bendigo, a city of about 95,000 approximately 100 miles from Melbourne, is an apt location for a prizefight. The city is named for Bendigo Creek which, lore has it, was named for the great 19th century bare-knuckle bruiser turned traveling evangelist William “Bendigo” Thompson.
The main go finds Andrew Moloney (17-0, 10 KOs) moving up in class to take on Panama’s Luis Concepcion (37-6, 26 KOs), a former two-time 115-pound world champion. Moloney, who won gold in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, will be risking his regional super flyweight title in a match scheduled for 10 rounds.
Moloney and his twin brother Jason, a bantamweight with an identical record, are hot commodities in the land down under. Andrew’s trainer Angelo Hyder describes him as a young Manny Pacquiao.
In the co-main, rising junior middleweight Tim Tszyu (10-0, 8 KOs) opposes Marcos Jesus Cornejo (19-3, 18 KOs), a 37-year-old Argentine. Hopefully Cornejo will render a better effort than Tsyzu’s last opponent, Indonesia’s Stevie Ferdinandus, who went down for the count in the opening round from a punch that carried the force of a mild breeze.
Reports on the 23-year-old Tszyu are very favorable. If he turns out to be as good as his dad, he would really be something. The great Kostya Tszyu was ushered into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2011.
Yes, the Porter-Garcia collision in Brooklyn on SHOWTIME is the juiciest bill of fare on next Saturday’s deep menu. It’s a fight I wouldn’t miss for the world. But the fights in Croatia and Australia also merit our attention.
Photo credit: Ryan Greene / Premier Boxing Champions
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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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Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

In the showdown between undefeated welterweight champions Jaron “Boots Ennis walked away with the victory by technical knockout over Eamantis Stanionis and the WBA and IBF titles on Saturday.
No doubt. Ennis was the superior fighter.
“He’s a great fighter. He’s a good guy,” said Ennis.
Philadelphia’s Ennis (34-0, 30 KOs) faced Lithuania’s Stanionis (15-1, 10 KOs) at demonstrated an overpowering southpaw and orthodox attack in front of a sold-out crowd at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It might have been confusing but whether he was in a southpaw stance or not Ennis busted the body with power shots and jabbed away in a withering pace in the first two rounds.
Stanionis looked surprised when his counter shots seemed impotent.
In the third round the Lithuanian fighter who trains at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, began using a rocket jab to gain some semblance of control. Then he launched lead rights to the jaw of Ennis. Though Stanionis connected solidly, the Philly fighter was still standing and seemingly unfazed by the blows.
That was a bad sign for Stanionis.
Ennis returned to his lightning jabs and blows to the body and Stanionis continued his marauding style like a Sherman Tank looking to eventually run over his foe. He just couldn’t muster enough firepower.
In the fifth round Stanionis opened up with a powerful body attack and seemed to have Ennis in retreat. But the Philadelphia fighter opened up with a speedy combination that ended with blood dripping from the nose of Stanionis.
It was not looking optimistic for the Lithuanian fighter who had never lost.
Stanionis opened up the sixth round with a three-punch combination and Ennis met him with a combination of his own. Stanionis was suddenly in retreat and Ennis chased him like a leopard pouncing on prey. A lightning five-punch combination that included four consecutive uppercuts delivered Stanionis to the floor for the count. He got up and survived the rest of the round.
After returning shakily to his corner, the trainer whispered to him and then told the referee that they had surrendered.
Ennis jumped in happiness and now holds the WBA and IBF welterweight titles.
“I felt like I was getting in my groove. I had a dream I got a stoppage just like this,” said Ennis.
Stanionis looked like he could continue, but perhaps it was a wise move by his trainer. The Lithuanian fighter’s wife is expecting their first child at any moment.
Meanwhile, Ennis finally proved the expectations of greatness by experts. It was a thorough display of superiority over a very good champion.
“The biggest part was being myself and having a live body in front of me,” said Ennis. “I’m just getting started.”
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn was jubilant over the performance of the Philadelphia fighter.
“What a wonderful humble man. This is one of the finest fighters today. By far the best fighter in the division,” said Hearn. “You are witnessing true greatness.”
Other Bouts
Former featherweight world champion Raymond Ford (17-1-1, 8 KOs) showed that moving up in weight would not be a problem even against the rugged and taller Thomas Mattice (22-5-1, 17 KOs) in winning by a convincing unanimous decision.
The quicksilver southpaw Ford ravaged Mattice in the first round then basically cruised the remaining nine rounds like a jackhammer set on automatic. Four-punch combinations pummeled Mattice but never put him down.
“He was a smart veteran. He could take a hit,” said Ford.
Still, there was no doubt on who won the super featherweight contest. After 10 rounds all three judges gave Ford every round and scored it 100-90 for the New Jersey fighter who formerly held the WBA featherweight title which was wrested from him by Nick Ball.
Shakhram Giyasov (17-0, 10 KOs) made good on a promise to his departed daughter by knocking out Argentina’s Franco Ocampo (17-3, 8 KOs) in their welterweight battle.
Giyasov floored Ocampo in the first round with an overhand right but the Argentine fighter was able to recover and fight on for several more rounds.
In the fourth frame, Giyasov launched a lead right to the liver and collapsed Ocampo with the body shot for the count of 10 at 1:57 of the fourth round.
“I had a very hard camp because I lost my daughter,” Giyasov explained. “I promised I would be world champion.”
In his second pro fight Omari Jones (2-0) needed only seconds to disable William Jackson (13-6-2) with a counter right to the body for a knockout win. The former Olympic medalist was looking for rounds but reacted to his opponent’s actions.
“He was a veteran he came out strong,” said Jones who won a bronze medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics. “But I just stayed tight and I looked for the shot and I landed it.”
After a feint, Jackson attacked and was countered by a right to the rib cage and down he went for the count at 1:40 of the first round in the welterweight contest.
Photo credit: Matchroom
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