Boxing’s Thrill Factory: Then and Now

Published

5 years ago

November 30, 2019

Ted Sares

Boxing’s Thrill Factory: Then and Now

Through the years — going back even before Jack Dempsey — some fighters included maximum aggression and violence in their repertoire. Max Baer’s contribution was manifested in his lethal right hand. Later, Chicagoan Bob Satterfield had a “get you or be gotten” style that tingled spines whenever he fought. It was chill-or-be-chilled and the fans loved it.

Charley Norkus and Danny Nardico possessed paralyzing power. When they met, they produced an incredible, although predictable, bloodbath—a ruthless, wild, pier six brawl yielding eight knockdowns and full-tilt boogie violence. Nardico went down six times and Norkus twice before the “Bayonne Bomber” was finally able to put away Nardico in the ninth with jackhammer blows. Only the first Moore vs Durelle fight could match this, though Foreman vs Lyle in 1976 came close.

Speaking of full-tilt boogie, Boom Boom Mancini and Art Frias gave the phrase new meaning when they engaged non-stop in less than one round in 1982. One would not give it up; the other wanted it, no matter what. David Tua and “The President” Ike Ibeabuchi did this for 12 amazing rounds in 1997. Holyfield and Bowe did it three times in the 90s.

Matthew Saad Muhammad and Indian Yaqui Lopez went to the brink, perhaps in a way that has yet to be matched. Danny “Little Red” Lopez was Saad before Saad and Gatti before Gatti.

Rocky Marciano, Tony Zale, Rocky Graziano, Carmen Basilio (pictured in his second fight with Sugar Ray Robinson), Gene Fullmer and Tony DeMarco were ultra-aggressive and later Jerry Quarry, Julio Gonzalez, Ricky Hatton, and Julian Letterlough picked up the mantle. Latinos Michael Carbajal, Humberto Gonzalez, Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera, Miguel Cotto, Johnny Tapia and Juan Manuel Marquez ran with it.

God knows, “Iron” Mike Tyson became the poster child for this, but Tony Ayala Jr. also made his mark. He was not beyond spitting on an opponent he had decked. Tony was bad Ju Ju. If Tyson was the heavyweight version of someone who brought the heat, then most assuredly Arturo Gatti and Irish Micky Ward were the lower weight versions. Of course, Hearns and Hagler kept things very hot in the middleweight class as did Gerald McClellan who was pure aggression at its most violent level.

Sugar Ray Leonard’s baby face belied a ring assassin who, once he had his man stunned, would finish matters with stunning closure.

Nigel Benn, Michael Watson, Chris Eubank, Carl Froch in the UK and Michael Katsidis in Australia carried forth with this “Bring the Heat” style but it proved nearly fatal for Watson and cost Katsidis in the end. Earlier, it cost the relentless Bobby Chacon terribly. Julio Chavez Sr. and Roberto Duran were both savage stalk-and-destroy types. The excitement their battles produced was truly memorable.

‘It was a tough fight, but that’s the way I like to win them … I said I was going to introduce new blood to the sport, and I guess you saw a lot of new blood.” —Michael Katsidis

Female great Holly Holm, active from 2002 to 2013, was just vulnerable enough to provide plenty of thrills. Lucia Rijker, in contrast, was probably too good for her own good, and dominated during a boxing career that ran from 1996-2004. Christy Martin is considered to have legitimized women’s participation in the sport of boxing during her thrilling run between 1989 and 2012. All things considered, she was the ultimate thrill provider.

Something or some combination of things set these boxers apart from the rest. None refused to stay down; some had to be saved by their corner. None had quit in their DNA. All had doggedness, tenacity, and a persistent determination to beat their opponent no matter what it took. Unfortunately, for some it took too much, for they did this with a total disregard for their wellbeing.

“A Quarry never backs up.” —Jack Quarry

There were many, many others but space does not allow for their inclusion.

Today’s Thrill Factory

Deontay Wilder has gotten to the point where the outcome of his fights is predicated on “when,” not “if.” His KO power is such that the “when” can come at any time. While his style leaves much to be desired, the one-punch power is what thrills fans. The “Bronze Bomber” is dangerous until the last second of the fight.

Dillian Whyte enjoys his reputation as someone who brings the heat and his results back up his boasts. He says, “…this is my time now. Crack another skull and get closer to fighting for a world title… I come with maximum violence.”

whyte

Adam Kownacki keeps on winning with a no back-up style that has his Polish fans in Brooklyn up and roaring throughout his fights. He’s not pretty but he’s 20-0.

Andy Ruiz has always been a guy who breaks his opponent down, but his atypical and explosive ambush of Anthony Joshua suggests he could be another worthy spine-tingler. The rematch will tell us what we need to know.

Light heavyweight Artur Beterbiev brings a heavy-handed excitement with his bludgeon-like power and deceptive technical skills.

Gennady Golovkin continues to be pure excitement, but now that he’s on the downward slope of his great career, the “if” has become equal with the “when.” He arguably has become a more modern version of the great Kostya Tszyu.

Manny Pacquiao has always been super-thrilling but his loss of KO power in recent years has taken much of the edge off. Nevertheless, when he fights it’s an event that draws massive attention much like Canelo today and Oscar De La Hoya in the past.

Terence Crawford’s ability to adjust and then close the show makes him compelling, but not necessarily more thrilling than other welterweights. The division is a hot one—as is the junior welterweight division with Josh Taylor and Regis Prograis leading another bunch of exciting fighters.

Vasiliy Lomachenko provides thrills with the unique things he does in the ring, reflecting his legendary amateur career and his “Hi-Tech” training. Teófimo Lopez has the potential to be included in today’s thrill house.

Gervonta “Tank” Davis is a modern-day prototype of an aggressive and violent fighter. He likely will move up in weight, leaving rugged Miguel Berchelt to remain king of an exceptional division

Naoya “Monster” Inoue has the right nickname but his showing against an aroused Nonito Donaire showed that he is human after all and that makes him even more exciting. “Monster” is today’s best example for inclusion in the Thrill Factory.

Nicaragua’s Roman Gonzalez used to be one of the most exciting fighters, but Father Time caught up with him. Filipino Donnie Nietes is a superb technical fighter, but not an exciting one, while Japan’s Kazuto Ioka, Mexico’s Juan Francisco Estrada and Thailand’s Srisaket Sor Rungvisai are the opposite. The junior bantamweight division is loaded.

And lest we forget, the exciting Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who has become boxing’s greatest attraction, continues to surge, finishing the decade with two grueling fights with Gennady Golovkin and a savage KO over Sergey Kovalev. His KOs of Baldomir, Kirkland, Khan, and Kovalev were frightening in their ferocity and finality.

While today’s boxing offers plenty of thrills, the facts suggest that the house of thrills and excitement is not nearly as full as it could be. There are plenty of potential occupants, particularly from Japan, Mexico and Eastern Europe, but they have yet to fully emerge.

Back in the day, you could throw a dart. It’s not like that today.

Or is it?

Ted Sares can be reached at tedsares@roadrunner.com

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

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-289-East-L.A.-A-Fight-Town-Claressa-Shields-and-More

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

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-Jake-Paul-and-Women's-Boxing-a-Curmudgeon's-Take

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

Former-World-Bamtamweight-Champion-Richie-Sandoval-Passes-Away-at-age-63

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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