Stephen Reid’s Night of Boxing at the former Las Vegas Hilton

Published

5 years ago

February 14, 2020

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The convention area of the Las Vegas Hilton – the hotel is now called the Westgate – harbored some of the greatest fights of the 20^th century. Mike Tyson captured his first title here and subsequently became the undisputed world heavyweight champion in this space. In 1990 (Chavez-Taylor I) and again in 1993 (Carbajal-Gonzalez I) this spartan arena was the setting for what became The Ring magazine Fight of the Year.

Boxing returned to the hotel’s convention area last night (Thursday, Feb. 13) with a show that in no way resembled the aforementioned. Stephen Reid, a 34-year-old Las Vegas attorney and transplanted Brit – he earned his law degree at Oxford – was the catalyst. It was his first venture as a boxing promoter. We were there.

Reid’s inaugural debut, in the words of ring announcer Sonny Franco, was a five-bout card topped by an 8-round welterweight contest between Ravshan Hudaynazarov and Cameron Kreal (aka Krael). The advance pub for the card on social media bespoke a deeper undercard, but filling in the “TBA blanks” proved problematic.

This reporter has a soft spot for grassroots promoters. Plus, a boxing promoter’s first venture is often a comedy of errors and there’s an inherent fascination in that.

There were a few glitches. The lines at the two box office windows moved at a snail’s pace because the freebies also picked up their admission passes there and the ladies working the booth were constantly on a cell phone checking with someone inside the arena to see if so-and-so was legit. The congestion created the illusion of a strong walk-up sale but the crowd could not have numbered more than 300.

Those that ponied up $25 to see the show got their money’s worth. “There won’t be ‘A sides’ and ‘B sides’ on my shows,” promoter Reid told me at the previous day’s weigh-in. That’s standard promoter-talk, a promise that’s invariably hollow, but on this particular night, it proved true. None of the 10 contestants was protected. Four of the five fights were both entertaining and competitive.

Two of the bouts, including the main event, produced a split decision. Another, a six-round middleweight contest, was ruled a draw. The stalemate speeded up the show as Lisa King, the attractive young lady hired to interview the winner of each bout in the ring, had no winner to interview and took a pass.

From a matchmaking standpoint, Stephen Reid’s “inaugural debut” earned a grade of “A.”

Back in October of 2017, a story on these pages identified Cameron Kreal as the sport’s best 23-year-old journeyman. At the time, his record stood at 12-12-3. The Las Vegas boxer is 26 now and his record heading into last night was 16-15-3, but the label still fits. He doesn’t pack a hard punch, but this kid can fight.

Kreal has been matched tough since the onset of his career. His former foes include Maurice Hooker, Jamal James, Egidijus Kavaliauskas and Keith Hunter, all of whom were undefeated at the time that he fought them. His opponent, who had his early fights in his native Uzbekistan, was likewise battle-tested. Hudaynazarov had lost three straight coming in, dipping his record to 17-3, but his opponents in those three fights were a combined 49-2.

Kreal knocked Hudaynazarov off his pins with a hard right in the third round, and although the Uzbekistani recovered nicely, that proved pivotal. In a fight that could have gone either way, the “due factor” kicked in for Cameron Kreal who finally finished on the right side of a razor-thin decision.

As this reporter sat watching the fights, he kept thinking of Royce Feour. The longtime Las Vegas Review-Journal scribe, who died at age 79 in December of 2018, covered every show in town, no matter how small, during his 25 years on the R-J boxing beat. A publicist for a small-fry Las Vegas promoter would reach out to Feour first as his patronage was the most highly prized.

Neither of the town’s two daily papers had a correspondent at last night’s show. The two big boxing journalists who make Las Vegas their home – Yahoo’s Kevin Iole and Tim Dahlberg of the Associated Press — were likewise no-shows although one would not have expected to see them there. But times have changed, of course, and the traditional print media doesn’t move the needle anymore, not to the same extent as the leading social media sites.

Stephen Reid boxed as an amateur in England. He sparred with Billy Joe Saunders, among others. “He was way better than me,” Reid concedes, “although Billy Joe was several years younger.” Before moving to Las Vegas in 2011 Reid made the acquaintance of Hall of Fame referee Richard Steele who has become a close confidant. Steele is listed as the president of Reid Promotions; Stephen holds the title of CEO.

Reid says he was inspired to become a boxing promoter when he realized that the local kids in the gyms weren’t getting many opportunities to display their wares.

This observation is spot-on. Las Vegas, the so-called Boxing Capitol of the World, is bursting with boxers and aspiring boxers who are hungry to fight but can’t get a booking. Only Floyd Mayweather’s company was promoting club shows here on a regular basis and kids who were not part of The Money Team stable were largely locked out. (In a touch of irony, however, Stephen Reid’s maiden show included boxers from Oregon, Ohio, Texas, and Mississippi.)

It’s not our custom to tell anyone how to run his business, but it so happens that we had lunch yesterday with an old friend who visits the Westgate Sports and Race Book every day and had no clue that a boxing event was taking place on the property that very night. There was no signage, either outside on the marquee or inside in a prominent place. The Westgate has nearly 3,000 hotel rooms and although last night’s show was pitched at locals with word-of-mouth the key to a good turnout, signage may have roped in a few strays. And in a low budget production, needless to say, every little dollar helps.

Reid, who has a small law practice specializing in personal injury, immigration, and criminal defense, told me that his nut was $65,000. A realist, he had no expectation of recouping his investment. “The goal is to lose a little less the next time, and then break even the third,” he said of his intention to promote shows on a monthly basis.

That may be optimistic. But grassroots promoters are the lifeblood of the sport and we wish him well.

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Arne K. Lang

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

Published

2 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

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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

2 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

3 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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