Randy Gordon’s Love Of Boxing Shines Through in ‘Glove Affair,’ His Memoir

Published

5 years ago

July 9, 2019

Sean Nam

Randy-Gordon's-Love-Affair-With-Boxing-Shines-Through-in-Glove-Affair-His-Memoir

As far back as he can remember, Randy Gordon always wanted to be in boxing. To do what, exactly, he had little clue. All that mattered to this peppy Jewish kid from Long Island was gaining, by any means, a toehold into “this crazy and beautiful sport,” in which men he idolized, like the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, roamed the earth with a hint of the invincible.

As it happens, Gordon never got a chance to brush shoulders with “The Brockton Blockbuster.” In 1969, when Gordon was a college junior, Marciano met his death in a plane crash flying over an Iowa cornfield. He was a day away from his forty-sixth birthday. Ironically, the tragedy would become the very catalyst for Gordon’s entry into the sport which he had hitherto only viewed from afar, mainly through the pages of The Ring, the iconic boxing magazine. Distraught by his hero’s untimely demise, a young Gordon sought out the wisdom of the publication’s founder.

How could ‘The Rock’ be gone? I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to know more about Marciano. How great was he? Where did he fit in among the great heavyweights of the past? I decided I had to speak with Nat Fleischer himself. I decided to call him later that morning. Then, I decided I wouldn’t give a secretary a chance to make up an excuse he was busy. I decided to go to his office and sit there for as long as I had to in order to meet him and talk with him.

So early one morning, Gordon strode into Manhattan via the LIRR and made his way to the seventh floor of 120 West 31st St., the former address of The Ring headquarters, where, by dint of moxie alone, Gordon was able to score a meeting with “the man whose opinion in the sport was heard and worshipped the way Moses heard and worshipped his Lord in front of the burning bush more than 2,000 years ago.” It is safe to say that with this encounter, Gordon had effectively crossed the boxing threshold, shifting from plebian onlooker to soon-to-be tireless participant. Within a decade this giddy neophyte would become the editor-in-chief of the very same magazine, the self-proclaimed Bible of Boxing, working in tandem with the raffish, stogie-chomping Bert Sugar. He would strike up relationships, friendly or otherwise, with some of the most compelling figures in the sport, from Nicaraguan great Alexis Arguello to the irascible and incomparable Mike Tyson. And he would do so in capacities beyond his journalistic beginnings, most notably as the head of the New York State Athletic Commission under the Mario Cuomo regime. Gordon also fought as an amateur, dabbled briefly as a professional (for all of two fights), and refereed a few bouts. Today he is the host of the SiriusXM boxing radio program, At the Fights, which he helms with Gerry Cooney, the Hardy to his Laurel. The ultimate fanboy, it turns out, got to live the dream.

No surprise, then, that a current of unflagging gratitude courses through Gordon’s new memoir, Glove Affair: My Lifelong Journey in the World of Professional Boxing, a wide-ranging, if hodgepodge, collection of the ex-commissioner’s most memorable moments in the sport. Boxing, from Gordon’s viewpoint, appears less as “The Sweet Science” or “The Cruelest Sport” and more like “The Providential Hobby,” if Gordon’s frequent attestations to his good fortune are anything to go by. He tells the reader, “I am, without question, the luckiest boxing aficionado the good Lord ever created.” Gordon’s indebtedness also extends to his friends and colleagues in the boxing business, as evinced by the long-winded acknowledgments section that includes more names than the entirety of the Pentateuch. (So all-encompassing is the list that an interesting exercise would be to suss out who from the industry isn’t on it. A hint: one absentee is a former Ring magazine editor).

“I’m addicted,” Gordon confesses at one point. “I’m hopelessly in love with the sport. I still read every word about boxing I can find. I read every press release, every article, every column, every website, every result.” Gordon’s zeal is writ large in these pages and, no doubt, the source of the book’s unmistakable charm. For readers of a certain ilk expecting passages of deep philosophical probity and lyrical turns-of-phrases, however, this is the wrong place to look. The prose here is fairly straightforward, relies heavily on cliches and is driven mostly by jaunty dialogue that has the unintended effect of making Gordon’s chronicles appear exaggerated, even cartoonish, at times. Still, it gets the job done.

Given Gordon’s high-ranking positions in the industry and the access that they afforded him, Glove Affair offers plenty of interesting material to engage fellow aficionados. Not many in the sport can say that they were called on by Bill Cayton and Jim Jacobs, the managers of a juvenile Mike Tyson, to select sparring partners for the Catskill menace, as was the case for Gordon.

Particularly engrossing is the chapter that hones in on the Billy Collins Jr.-Luis Resto fight, one of the most scandalous debacles of the 1980s. On that night of June 16, 1983, the undefeated Collins dropped a brutal and unexpected decision against journeyman Resto, whose gloves were discovered afterward to have had the padding removed by his trainer, Panama Lewis. (Decades later, Resto would admit that he had also dipped his wraps in plaster prior to the fight).

Collins, having sustained a serious injury to the iris, would never box again and roughly a year later, alcoholic and depressed, he spun off the road and crashed to his death. Though Gordon himself did not attend the fight, the event shook him to his boots, as anyone who has read his fiery Ring editorial — “Murder, Plain and Simple” read the headline — can attest. His subsequent involvement with Collins’ disconsolate father and years later, with the disgraced Resto, offers intimate insight into the darker excesses of the sport. Throughout his tenure at the NYSAC, Gordon repeatedly rejected Resto’s applications to have his boxing license reinstated. More than thirty years later, Gordon remains convinced that he did the right thing, his anger still undiminished. “Luis Resto remains in jail — his basement apartment is his jail cell,” Gordon writes. “Unlike jail, he is allowed to go out into the world. Only, Luis Resto has no place to go, other than to a boxing card with the owner of the gym. Then it’s back to his jail cell. Sleep must be his only solace, but only if he doesn’t dream. For Resto, dreams must all turn into nightmares.”

The bar for moral rectitude may be exceptionally low in a lurid sport like boxing, but Gordon never compromised his integrity, as he so persistently maintains chapter after chapter to the point, indeed, that he risks coming across as priggish. Of the one week when WBC boss Mauricio Sulaiman and huckster emeritus Don King both tried — and failed — to bribe him with wads of cash, he says, humblebragging, “I returned home, proud of how I had handled two situations that have put many politicians and executives on the unemployment line or even in jail.” Of the time he was yanked off the air after snubbing the promoter’s pre-approved script during a broadcast, he reflects solemnly, “I didn’t believe I was 75 percent right, or 85 percent, or 99 percent. I believed the choice I made was 100 percent the correct one.”

Such remarks, in the end, however self-aggrandizing, are not what define Glove Affair. Gordon’s ebullience for fighters and for fighting make sure of that.

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Sean Nam

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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