During the last decade covering boxing, Sean Nam has tackled, without fear or favor, many interesting and thought-provoking subjects.

Nam’s feature on Ukrainian ringmaster Vasiliy Lomachenko, which ran in May 2024 in The Sunday Long Read, falls into this category. “I had been hearing whispers, mainly from Internet chatter, that Lomachenko had something of a contested reputation in his native Ukraine,” said Nam, who found it curious that Lomachenko draped the municipal flag of his hometown over his shoulders rather than the national flag of his country after defeating Richard Commey at Madison Square Garden. “[Those whispers] piqued my interest because that was not the narrative boxing consumers in the United States were given. ESPN, which has long showcased Lomachenko, ran a spot touting his bonafides as a beloved war hero.

“I figured someone from our media establishment, or whatever remains of that shambolic, penny-click bazaar, would write it up, but a year passed, and I didn’t come across anything close to attempting to dissect what was going on with Lomachenko and his country’s people.

“The response [to my story] was overwhelmingly positive. The general reaction was one of shock. I even had a lot of native Ukrainians thank me for shedding light on an admittedly angst-ridden situation; many of them saw their frustrations with Lomachenko reflected in the piece. I am eager to see how it all plays out for Lomachenko, who seems to be on the verge of retirement.”

At the urging of a fellow boxing writer, Nam, whose work has appeared in such periodicals as (British) Boxing News, USA Today, The Sweet Science, and Boxing Scene, found time to write a well-received first book, “Murder On Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, The Black Mafia, Fixed Fights And The Last Golden Age Of Philadelphia Boxing.”

“My close friend and mentor, the writer Carlos Acevedo, suggested it one day in an attempt to get me to write a book,” he said. “Carlos is also the reason I started writing about boxing in the first place.”

“Tyrone Everett is a more or less obscure name in boxing history, but the fact he was part of not just one, but two unsettling tragedies in the sport makes him a standout case – and this is a sport in which there is no shortage of sad stories,” he said. “Here was an opportunity, in other words, to present a story that had legitimate intrigue and, crucially, had not been over-chronicled.”

Philadelphia, which spawned such fighters as Joe Frazier, Bernard Hopkins, Bennie Briscoe, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Danny Garcia and Jaron “Boots” Ennis, has long been a hotbed of boxing talent.

“For a brief spell in the mid-1970s, Everett was a hot property on the sports scene of Philadelphia. His lone title shot, in 1976, against Alfredo Escalera, has long been considered one of the greatest ring injustices: Everett lost a decision despite seemingly out-boxing the Puerto Rican champion for the majority of the 15 rounds,” Nam said. “Noted ringside observers like Harold Lederman had Everett winning handily on their scorecards.”

Nam, who double-majored in English and philosophy at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, went on: “Then there was the matter of Everett’s tragic death, six months later, at the hands of his live-in girlfriend, Carolyn McKendrick, who shot him in the face with a pistol. Everett was only 24 years old. The ensuing trial was a tabloid circus. Everett’s sexuality came under heavy scrutiny, as the lone witness to the shooting was a gay, crossdressing drug pusher, whom McKendrick and Everett had allegedly been in bed with on the morning of the shooting.…But Everett’s outré sexual habits were far from the only issues that were being dangled daily to the public. He was also accused of beating McKendrick and dealing drugs himself. In my book, I try to rectify some of the misconceptions that have come down to us over the years from that trial, while also playing up some of the street talk (i.e. the infamous Black Mafia) that most media at the time had snubbed.”

The fight game is a curious suitor but one that can entangle even the best and smartest of us.

“I suppose on some elemental level I enjoy watching people getting punched in the face, to put it somewhat glibly. (I don’t feel any need to over-intellectualize this.) If a poor schlub is getting the tar beat out of him by the proverbial favorite in the name of “good matchmaking,” I don’t see much there to enjoy, but when you have two skilled, evenly matched fighters, sometimes what happens inside the ropes approaches the sublime.

“A corollary to this is upsets. Since so much of boxing is engineered to produce outcomes favorable to the house fighter, when upsets happen, they almost seem like a miracle – a momentary glitch in the machine. Like when Andy Ruiz dethroned Anthony Joshua in 2019. Or consider a far more humble proceeding, an eight-round contest that took place this past year between Kurt Scoby and Dakota Linger.”

Nam talked about the particulars of that super lightweight bout.

“Scoby, the clear-cut A-side, was a ballyhooed prospect touted by his veteran promoter Lou DiBella as a future world champion and Linger was a little-known ham-and-egger from West Virginia, as crude and unheralded as they come,” he stated. “But Linger ended up stopping Scoby, seemingly with nothing more than a decent chin, above-average power, and stubbornness. Guys like Linger cut through all the hype and bull.”

Long before Las Vegas was the boxing capital of the world, New York City held that title.

“At risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, boxing in New York City has not been elite for a long time. It’s a joke, really. You can see this decline in both the amateur and pro ranks. (Indeed, the problem is interconnected.) The Daily News ditched the Golden Gloves brand and promoters seldom stage fights here anymore. By my count there were only 16 fights in the entire state of New York in 2023.

“Anecdotally, I’ve had conversations with a few amateur coaches who tell me that there has been a demonstrative drop-off in the talent level of the average open-class amateur boxer compared to even just 10 or 20 years ago. This goes back to what the historian Mike Silver argues persuasively in his book, ‘The Arc Of Boxing: The Rise And Decline Of The Sweet Science,’ that there needs to be a culture and industry in place for boxing to thrive, and we simply do not have that anymore. What drives this home are the ubiquitous, white-collar boutique boxing gyms that have popped up around the city. In the neoliberal hellscape of Manhattan today, there is no place for Jimmy Glenn’s Times Square Gym or Cus D’Amato’s Gramercy Gym.”

For the most part, boxing is doing well but there are always issues that prevent the sport from fully flourishing.

“For years promoters and their apparatchiks insisted that boxing was on the upswing. There was Premier Boxing Champions and its audacious play to bring boxing back to network television. There was Top Rank and their own rights deal with ESPN. And there was the UK-based Matchroom, which barged its way into the United States market with the backing of DAZN, the streaming platform that pledged a billion dollars to this crusade. All three outfits have essentially failed to see their initial prognostications pan out. PBC is running (underwhelming) shows exclusively on Amazon Prime, Top Rank seems to be winding down its deal with ESPN and has few if any fighters on its rosters that are legitimate stars, and DAZN (along with Matchroom), after bleeding more than two billion dollars, shifted its priorities to the UK. Golden Boy, which also has a deal with DAZN, seems to be one Ryan Garcia meltdown away from tottering into oblivion.

“Now we’re seeing similar pronouncements made about Saudi Arabian chieftain Turki Alalshikh, who has quickly established himself as the savior du jour.

Major fights have been made under Alalshikh’s dictates, but is boxing healthy?

I fail to see how a sport that is being artificially propped up by a totalitarian state, with numerous human rights abuses can be considered healthy. Once the spigot is turned off – and I assure you, it most certainly will – the sport will be worse off than before.”

In year’s past, there was one champion for each weight class. Now there are multiple boxers holding titles in one weight class.

“Of course there are too many champions in a single division. It is also true that this problem, diagnosed and groused about by every forum poster, blogger, journalist, and talking head, is the biggest fig leaf in the sport. Of all the jeremiads one could come up with, the ones leveled at the alphabet soup organizations are the most fatuous and exist at this point none other than to flatter the fancies of would-be moralizers,” Nam said.

“Sanctioning bodies are a problem, sure, but they are simply a symptom of a larger predicament, the sport’s inherent fragmentation. I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, but boxing’s problems are not going to go away because the WBA decides to do away with their “interim” championship belts or that every major promotional outfit starts to adhere to the rankings of The Ring magazine.”

Nam continued: “A couple of years ago I broke a story that examined the conduct between the WBA and a promoter. Using legal transcripts and business documents, I showed how, by all appearances, a promoter was paying the sanctioning body to gain favorable rankings for his fighters in a brazen pay-to-play scheme,” he said. “What happened? In any other sport there may have been a reckoning of sorts. Maybe 30 years ago the federal government might have given this a looksee. I was informed that a remonstration of sorts was coming my way. But the WBA to my knowledge never ended up responding to the points made in the article. That turned out to be a canny move. Keeping quiet actually helped defang the story. The episode highlighted a few things, chiefly of which is that, in the absence of a legitimate judicial apparatus in boxing, there are simply no consequences in the sport.”

Perhaps someone to oversee boxing would help, but this isn’t likely to happen.

“Boxing needs more than a commissioner to cure it of its myriad chronic illnesses. Would it help? Maybe. But I have a hard time believing that any meaningful form of organization will materialize in the sport anytime soon, in part because all the key industry players, i.e. the promoters, managers, and network executives, are not interested in reforming it to begin with,” Nam said. “The appeal of the sport has to do with its fundamentally decentralized nature, the fact that there is no barrier to entry and that, in theory, anyone with cash to burn and some patience, can end up with a staggering windfall.

“Ironically, boxing, despite its increasingly marginalized status, still remains a capitalist juggernaut, capable of generating obscene sums of money in a single night, with very little regulatory oversight. It’s a breeding ground for lowlifes, not surprisingly. I don’t see any meaningful change happening in the sport on the structural level. Even though there are a ton of things the individual state commissions can do to shore up the sport, that really only goes for the strong ones, like New York or California. Promoters can simply bop over to a more lenient one, a regulatory backwater like Oklahoma or Florida. That’s exactly what Eddie Hearn did recently with Conor Benn.”

This is what boxing is and what boxing does, and despite its various and sundry problems, it still captures our imagination.

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The marquee match on this week’s fight docket takes place on Friday at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall where Natasha Jonas (16-2-1, 9 KOs) meets Lauren Price (9-0, 2 KOs). At stake are three of the four meaningful pieces of the female world welterweight title.

Price, an Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo and arguably the best all-around female athlete ever from Wales, holds the WBC and IBF versions of the title. Liverpool’s Jonas, unbeaten in her last seven since losing a narrow decision to Katie Taylor, holds the WBA belt.

Southern California native Mikaela Mayer owns the other piece of the 147-pound puzzle. If Mayer can get over her next hump – a rematch with Sandy Ryan – she would be in line to fight the Price-Jonas winner for the undisputed title. She and Ryan will collide on the 29^th of this month on a Top Rank card at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.

We caught up with Mikaela yesterday (Monday, Feb. 3) after she had finished a strenuous workout at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas to get her thoughts on the Jonas-Price encounter. Mikaela has a history with Jonas. They fought in January of last year on Jonas’s turf in Liverpool and Mayer came out on the short end of a very close and somewhat controversial decision.

Price is favored in the 4/1 range. To the oddsmakers, it matters greatly that there is a 10-year gap in their ages. Natasha Jonas turned 40 last year. However, Mayer, who would tell you that female boxers as a rule peak later than men (they take less damage because they don’t hit as hard and they absorb fewer punches fighting two-minute rounds) believes that the odds are askew.

“In my mind, this is a 50/50 fight,” she says. “Price’s former opponents were right there to be hit. Jonas doesn’t have a lot of wear and tear and I believe she has better spatial awareness inside the ring. The key will be if she can handle Price’s movement. I can see Price winning but, in my mind, she is no shoo-in. I think it will be a close fight.”

Carson Jones

Bobby Dobbs, the former manager of Carson Jones, has set up a Go Fund Me page in the name of Jones’ mother to defray the boxer’s funeral expenses. The Oklahoma City journeyman, active as recently as 2023, passed away on Feb. 28 at age 38 following an operation for achalasia, a rare swallowing disorder.

We are reminded that among Jones’ 38 wins was a match that originally went into the books as a “no-decision.” Nowadays, it’s no big surprise when a victory is amended to a “no-decision” – the adjudication usually comes after the fact because of a failed drug test – but the opposite is very uncommon.

The bout in question happened on May 5, 2011 in a hotel ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jones was defending his USBA welterweight title against Ohio campaigner Michael Clark.

In the second round, Jones landed a punch that hit Clark in the family jewels and Clark wasn’t able to continue. The Oklahoma commission overturned the “no-decision” upon learning that Clark had forgot to bring his groin protector.

Fighter of the Month

The TSS Fighter of the Month for February is Keyshawn Davis who unseated WBO lightweight champion Denys Berinchyk on Bob Arum’s Valentine’s Day card before a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater. It was the first world title for Davis, the former Olympic silver medalist who had the noted trainer Brian “Bomac” McIntyre in his corner.

Davis was a solid favorite. At age 36, his Ukrainian opponent had a lot of mileage on his odometer (Berinchyk purportedly had in the vicinity of 400 amateur fights). However, Berinchyk was also undefeated (19-0) and wasn’t expected to be such an easy mark.

Davis decked Berinchyk with a left hook to the liver in the third round and ended the contest with the same punch, only harder, in the next frame.

A pre-fight story in Forbes called Keyshawn Davis a mega-star on the cusp. It remains to be seen if he has the personality to transcend the sport, but one thing that’s certain is that he has made great gains since his Oct. 14, 2023 bout in Rosenberg, Texas with Nahir Albright. That fight went the full “10” and although Davis won, it transmuted into a “no-decision” after he tested positive for marijuana, a substance banned by the hidebound Texas commission.

Ketchel

A note from matchmaker, booking agent, and boxing historian Bruce Kielty informs us that the Polish Historical Society of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is $1,025 short of the $2,000 required to produce a new concrete base at the tombstone of Stanley Ketchel at Grand Rapids Holy Cross Cemetery.

Ketchel, the fabled “Michigan Assassin,” was born Stanislaw Kiecel in Grand Rapids in 1886. A two-time world middleweight champion, he was the premier knockout artist of his era, scoring 46 of his 49 wins inside the distance.

Ketchel was murdered in 1910 while staying at the ranch of a wealthy friend near Springfield, Missouri. The great sportswriter John Lardner revisited the incident and Ketchel’s tumultuous career in a widely anthologized 1954 story for True magazine. Lardner’s opening sentence is considered by some aficionados to be the best lede ever in a sports story: “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

The collar of Ketchel’s tombstone is cracked, weather-damaged, and falling apart. Any donation, however small, is welcomed. Contributions made by check should include the note “Ketchel Monument.” The address is Polish Historical Society, P.O. Box 1844, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

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Lamont Roach holds Tank Davis to a Draw in Brooklyn

They just know each other, too well.

Longtime neighborhood rivals Gervonta “Tank” Davis and Lamont Roach met on the biggest stage and despite 12 rounds of back-and-forth action could not determine a winner as the WBA lightweight title fight was ruled a majority draw on Saturday.

The title does not change hands.

Davis (30-0-1, 28 KOs) and Roach (25-1-2, 10 KOs) no longer live and train in the same Washington D.C. hood, but even in front of a large crowd at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, they could not distinguish a clear winner.

“We grew up in the sport together,” explained Davis who warned fans of Roach’s abilities.

Davis entered the ring defending the WBA lightweight title and Roach entered as a WBA super featherweight titlist moving up a weight division. Davis was a large 10-1 favorite according to oddsmakers.

The first several rounds were filled with feints and stance reshuffling for a tactical advantage. Both tested each other’s reflexes and counter measures to determine if either had picked up any new moves or gained new power.

Neither champion wanted to make a grave error.

“I was catching him with some clean shots. But he kept coming so I didn’t want to make no mistakes,” said Davis of his cautionary approach.

By the third round Davis opened-up with a more aggressive approach, especially with rocket lefts. Though some connected, Roach retaliated with counters to offset Davis’s speedy work. It was a theme repeated round after round.

Roach had never been knocked out and showed a very strong chin even against his old pal. He also seemed to know exactly where Davis would be after unloading one of his patented combinations and would counter almost every time with precise blows.

It must have been unnerving for Davis.

Back and forth they exchanged and during one lightning burst by Davis, his rival countered perfectly with a right that shook and surprised Davis.

Davis connected often with shots to the body and head, but Roach never seemed rattled or stunned. Instead, he immediately countered with his own blows and connected often.

It was bewildering.

In a strange moment at the beginning of the ninth round, after a light exchange of blows Davis took a knee and headed to his corner to get his face wiped. It was only after the fight completed that he revealed hair product was stinging his eye. That knee gesture was not called a knockdown by the referee Steve Willis.

“It should be a knockdown. But I’m not banking on that knockdown to win,” said Roach.

The final three rounds saw each fighter erupt with blinding combinations only to be countered. Both fighters connected but remained staunchly upright.

“For sure Lamont is a great fighter, he got the skills, punching power it was a learned lesson,” said Davis after the fight.

Both felt they had won the fight but are willing to meet again.

“I definitely thought I won, but we can run it back,” said Roach who beforehand told fans and experts he could win the fight. “I got the opportunity to show everybody.”

He also showed a stunned crowd he was capable of at least a majority draw after 12 back-and-forth rounds against rival Davis. One judge saw Davis the winner 115-113 but two others saw it 114-114 for the majority draw.

“Let’s have a rematch in New York City. Let’s bring it back,” said Davis.

Imagine, after 20 years or so neighborhood rivals Davis and Roach still can’t determine who is better.

Other Bouts

Gary Antuanne Russell (18-1, 17 KOs) surprised Jose “Rayo” Valenzuela (14-3, 9 KOs) with a more strategic attack and dominated the WBC super lightweight championship fight between southpaws to win by unanimous decision after 12 rounds.

If Valenzuela expected Russell to telegraph his punches like Isaac Cruz did when they fought in Los Angeles, he was greatly surprised. The Maryland fighter known for his power rarely loaded up but simply kept his fists in Valenzuela’s face with short blows and seldom left openings for counters.

It was a heady battle plan.

It wasn’t until the final round that Valenzuela was able to connect solidly and by then it was too late. Russell’s chin withstood the attack and he walked away with the WBC title by unanimous decision.

Despite no knockdowns Russell was deemed the winner 119-109 twice and 120-108.

“This is a small stepping stone. I’m coming for the rest of the belts,” said Russell. “In this sport you got to have a type of mentality and he (Valenzuela) brought it out of me.”

Dominican Republic’s Alberto Puello (24-0, 10 KOs) won the battle between slick southpaws against Spain’s Sandor Martin (42-4,15 KOs) by split decision to keep the WBC super lightweight in a back-and-forth struggle that saw neither able to pull away.

Though Puello seemed to have the faster hands Martin’s defense and inside fighting abilities gave the champion problems. It was only when Puello began using his right jab as a counter-punch did he give the Spanish fighter pause.

Still, Martin got his licks in and showed a very good chin when smacked by Puello. Once he even shook his head as if to say those power shots can’t hurt me.

Neither fighter ever came close to going down as one judge saw Martin the winner 115-113, but two others favored Puello 115-113, 116-112 who retains the world title by split decision.

Cuba’s Yoenis Tellez (10-0, 7 KOs) showed that his lack of an extensive pro resume could not keep him from handling former champion Julian “J-Rock” Williams (29-5-1) by unanimous decision to win an interim super welterweight title.

Tellez had better speed and sharp punches especially with the uppercuts. But he ran out of ideas when trying to press and end the fight against the experienced Williams. After 12 rounds and no knockdowns all three judges saw Tellez the winner 119-109, 118-110, 117-111.

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