Did Jennings’ Loss Mark Arum’s Last Hope to Again Taste Heavyweight Glory?

Published

6 years ago

January 19, 2019

For someone who promotes two fighters who are widely considered to be the world’s pound-for-pound best, what took place Friday night at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, N.Y., had to be a somewhat bitter pill for Top Rank founder and CEO Bob Arum to swallow.

The good news for the 87-year-old Arum is that his fast-rising featherweight prospect Shakur Stevenson (10-0, 6 KOs), a silver medalist at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, took another long stride toward possible superstardom with an impressive fourth-round stoppage of Filipino veteran Jessie Cris Rosales (22-2-1, 10 KOs) in the co-featured bout televised via ESPN+.

But while Stevenson could become a world champion in the 126-pound weight class as early as 2020, the reality is that the highly skilled little lefthander is not and never will be a heavyweight. Neither will lightweight champion Vasiliy Lomachenko or welterweight champion Terence Crawford, the current headliners of the Top Rank stable who already have outgrown a couple of lower-weight divisions but can never be heavyweights except in terms of their prodigious talent. Many knowledgable observers consider Lomachenko and Crawford, in whichever order, to be first and second among all fighters regardless of poundage, and certainly no worse than somewhere in the top three or four.

All of which means that the 12^th-round technical knockout of Bryant “By-By” Jennings (24-3, 14 KOs) by underdog Oscar Rivas (26-0, 18 KOs) in the main event could eliminate any chance, however slim it might have been, of Arum having another heavyweight champion before he retires. Jennings, a relatively recent addition (in the summer of 2017) to the Top Rank stable who went in ranked No. 2 by the WBO, No. 7 by the WBA and No. 8 by the IBF, likely will fall out of the top 10 of all three sanctioning bodies. That might have been the case even had Jennings not fallen victim to Rivas’ final-round surge. Although it appeared to the ESPN+ broadcast crew that the Philadelphian should have been comfortably ahead on points, he was on the wrong end of two of the three judges’ scorecards and would have lost anyway if he somehow made it to the final bell.

Although Jennings gave a credible account of himself in his only shot at a world title, losing a unanimous decision to IBF/WBA/WBO champion Wladimir Klitschko on April 25, 2015, his age is only one factor working against him now. There are simply too many hungry contenders standing between him and another shot at boxing’s biggest prize.

Prior to Jennings’ most recent bout before his meeting with Rivas, a ninth-round TKO of Russia’s Alexander Dimitrenko last Aug. 18 in Atlantic City, N.J., his trainer, John David Jackson, offered his opinion as to why the Top Rank honcho would ride the “By-By” train as far as it would go before it derailed.

“I think Bob wants one more heavyweight champion,” Jackson offered. “Yeah, he has a lot of great fighters, but if you have the heavyweight king, you rule boxing. It’s still the most prestigious and marketable division in the sport. That’s just how it works. And Bryant represents the last, best opportunity for Bob to get there before he retires.”

Arum, a former member of U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department in the early 1960s, has been promoting boxing matches – more than 2,000, and counting — for 52 years, and while some of his greatest successes have come with fighters from featherweight to middleweight, his promotional debut involved a heavyweight who was the biggest of them all. Introduced to Muhammad Ali by football great Jim Brown, Arum started at the very top, staging Ali’s winning title defense against rugged Canadian George Chuvalo on March 29, 1966, at Toronto’s Maple Leafs Garden. He would go on to promote 26 Ali fights, his most with any heavyweight.

“I didn’t know boxing,” Arum once said of his almost-accidental introduction to what would become his life’s work. “I didn’t even really know about divisions other than heavyweight. I only knew there were heavyweights. Then people started contacting me about promoting fighters in other divisions and believe me, it was a good four or five years after I started with Ali.”

After Arum’s long and fruitful association with Ali ended, he continued to build his company by showcasing such celebrated non-heavyweights as Carlos Monzon, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Julio Cesar Chavez, James Toney, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Miguel Cotto and, of course, Lomachenko and Crawford. But Arum pined for another thrill ride with a heavyweight attraction as compelling as had been his heyday with Ali, or as close an approximation to that as possible.

He found it in the unlikely person of George Foreman, who had been retired for 10 years. Arum took a flier on the old and plump Foreman as his improbable comeback gathered momentum, although initially doubting that he and the presumably cheerier version of Big George would click.

“I was not enthusiastic, realizing what a horrid person he had been,” Arum said of his expectation that Foreman’s personality makeover was false and contrived. “After spending an hour with him I said, `This is the greatest con man in history,’ because he was so different from what he had been before. But it wasn’t a con. He had really changed.”

It was one of Arum’s, and Top Rank’s, grandest moments when the 45-year-old Foreman, far behind on points, regained the heavyweight title he had relinquished to Ali so many years earlier with a one-punch, bolt-from-the-blue 10^th-round knockout of Michael Moorer on Nov. 11, 1994. But Foreman took a pounding in getting a gift nod over Axel Schulz in his next outing, and he retired again after losing a controversial majority decision to Shannon Briggs on Nov. 22, 1997. Arum’s dips into the heavyweight pool since then have been infrequent and generally less than satisfying. He has tried his hand to generate some of that old big-man magic with former champs Hasim Rahman and Ray Mercer, to no avail.

Top Rank’s relatively low-risk co-promotional signings of Jennings and then-WBO heavyweight champion Joseph Parker, who promptly lost his unification matchup with Anthony Joshua, again have failed to produce the desired results. Last month Arum worked out a co-promotional deal with the management of Bulgarian veteran Kubrat Pulev. More recently he inked a new heavyweight hope in Sonny Conto, a 22-year-old from South Philadelphia who was the silver medalist at the 2018 National Golden Gloves. The 6-foot-4 Conto, who turns pro against the ever-popular opponent to be named on Feb. 8, is being called “a superstar in the making” by his manager, David McWater, and maybe he might turn out to be just that. But it takes time for a newly minted pro to work his way up to champion or even contender status, and by the time Conto gets there – if he gets there at all – it is hardly a given that an already octogenarian Arum will be around to savor the moment.

Until then, we’ll all have to imagine what it might be like if there was a machine that could enlarge Lomachenko and Crawford by six or seven inches in height and a hundred pounds of heft.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

Bernard Fernandez is the retired boxing writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. He is a five-term former president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, an inductee into the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Atlantic City Boxing Halls of Fame and the recipient of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism and the Barney Nagler Award for Long and Meritorious Service to Boxing.

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

17 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

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

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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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 11^th 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

Published

4 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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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