HITS and MISSES: Boxing is Back!

After a slow start to the new year, boxing returned with a vengeance over Valentine’s Day weekend with three shows spread across our various American television and streaming platforms.

The two DAZN cards on Saturday featured Josh Warrington vs. Mauricio Lara on one side of the ocean and Jojo Diaz vs. Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov on the other.

Plus, Top Rank on ESPN returned to action with a scrapped main event but several solid fights anyway.

Here are the latest HITS and MISSES from another busy weekend on the boxing beat.

HIT: Fighting the Fights

Mexico’s Mauricio Lara wasn’t supposed to stand in the way of England’s Josh Warrington moving on to bigger and better things.

That was so much the case, in fact, that Warrington had preemptively dropped his IBF featherweight title in anticipation of having to vacate it anyway to pursue future fights against the likes of Gary Russell Jr. and Can Xu.

But Lara didn’t seem to get that memo. By the fourth round, the hard-hitting Mexican had the previously undefeated Leeds man in serious trouble, and five rounds later Lara secured the stoppage win.

All this to say that fighting the fights is an important part of boxing, which means one should never look past a present opponent to eye future things that might never be.

MISS: Jojo’s Weighty Matters 

Joseph “JoJo” Diaz was coming off the most important win of his career against Tevin Farmer for the WBO 130-pound title, but some weighty matters now seem to be pressing down upon the 28-year-old American.

First, Diaz lost his world title on the scale. That he missed the mark by almost four pounds and didn’t even seem to try all that hard to do so are serious concerns all by themselves. There are elite professional boxers all over the world that don’t get world title chances they probably deserve, and here’s one who couldn’t even be bothered to care about making weight.

Second, Diaz didn’t look the part of a world champion against Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov anyway. Judges scored the fight a majority draw, but they might as well have rendered the verdict that Diaz probably isn’t elite.

Diaz was coming off a huge win, but his failure to take this title seriously and the draw against Rakhimov destroyed all the momentum he earned last year.

HIT: ‘The Show Must Go On’

Being a combat sports promoter in the age of coronavirus is an incredibly difficult task. But that seems especially true for boxing promoters in comparison to the kinds of things UFC president Dana White can pull off during these troubled times, mostly because the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act forces a certain level of accountability to any given boxing card’s main attraction.

Top Rank on ESPN’s latest fight card was supposed to feature light heavyweight favorite Joe Smith Jr. vs. Maxim Vlasov, but it ended up being a showcase showdown of other fighters after the Russian tested positive for COVID-19.

The old adage remained true, though, the show had to go on.

The biggest hits from Top Rank’s card were literally the hits landed by undefeated heavyweight prospect Jared Anderson and former lightweight titleholder Richard Commey. Both knockouts were substantial enough to catch the attention of the segmented combat sports market on social media, and both will help Top Rank build followings for the two fighters moving forward.

Anderson stopped Kingsley Ibeh in the sixth, and his thunderous punch was a good reminder about the talent and ability the 21-year-old possesses. He’s legit.

Meanwhile, Commey decimated Jackson Marinez in the same round. He might not have been a serious threat to pound-for-pound talent Teofimo Lopez, but the 33-year-old Ghanaian is still a tough out at 135 for just about everybody else.

MISS: Boxing’s Math Problem Sometimes Isn’t Just Math

Perhaps the most troubling thing about boxing is that there is reason to complain about scorecards almost every single week.

While some of those mishaps can simply be explained away by how the 10-point must system works in general and that the system is really only designed to produce the winner of the fight and not necessarily how the victor won, there are plenty of cases where almost everyone watching the fight believe one thing happened while the judges saw it another way.

Such was the case of British junior lightweight Zelfa Barrett’s controversial victory over Spanish veteran Kiko Martinez. Even Barrett’s own promoter, Eddie Hearn, couldn’t believe all three scorecards were so wide in his fighter’s favor: 118-111, 118-111 and 116-113.

“How are we going to bring world-class fighters to this country if we see scorecards like that?” Hearn asked viewers watching the fight at home in the post-fight interview.

It’s a great question, but a better one might be this: When will boxing fix its most glaring issue?

HIT: Following In The Footsteps With Smaller Feet

Nobody likes nepotism.

Well, nobody likes nepotism unless they’re the people benefiting from the nepotism.

Regardless, boxing is a sport that sees lots of sons following in the footsteps of their fathers, but I don’t think the whole nepotism thing applies in these cases.

If anything, I’d argue it’s way harder for the likes of Shane Mosley, Jr. and Adam Lopez to make a name for themselves than it is for some other guy nobody has ever heard of before doing the same.

Mosley’s father, Shane Mosley Sr., was one of the best fighters of his era. Imagine trying to make your own way up the rankings with the weight of that expectation tied around your neck forever.

Lopez might have it a little easier than Mosley, but his father Hector Lopez won a silver medal for Mexico at the 1984 Olympics and challenged for world titles three times as a professional.

Still, both Mosley Jr. and Adam Lopez won their fights over the weekend. Neither man appears to have the same talent as his dad, but both seem okay making their own strides in the sport as professionals.

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