A Cut Eye Not Nearly Enough to Deter Marine Veteran Jamel Herring

Published

3 years ago

April 4, 2021

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The cut was in a troublesome spot, in Jamel Herring’s right eyelid, an area that had been bloodied before, in his most recent fight seven months earlier, against Jonathan Oquendo. Jamel Herring did win that fight, via eighth-round disqualification, as referee Tony Weeks had previously determined that the cut had been opened in the fifth round by an illegal head-butt. But Herring, who was well ahead on all three official scorecards and thus came away with a unanimous-decision victory, did not look as sharp as he might have preferred. Now here he was again, nicked up but clearly winning another fight, against two-division former world champion Carl “The Jackal” Frampton, who had to realize that his best chance at victory – maybe his only chance – was to target the area that was dripping crimson into Herring’s field of vision. The difference is that, this time, the cut had been opened by a punch in the fourth round, not a butt. Had Herring not been able to continue before the conclusion of the 12 scheduled rounds, he might have come away with a dispiriting TKO loss, regardless of what the scorecards might indicate.

There are more than a few fighters who have become overly cautious, to their detriment, when cut, especially if the blood flow limited what they could see of a suddenly emboldened opponent. Other fighters similarly affected went the other route, abandoning a sound tactical strategy to go all-in for the knockout, the better to eliminate any possibility of losing via stoppage due to a worsening cut. But Jamel Herring, a Marine Corps veteran of two tours of duty in war-torn Iraq, has seen blood before. Lots and lots of blood in places far more dangerous than the ring. He continued to do what he had been doing so capably since the opening bell, fully utilizing his advantages of five inches in height and seven inches in reach, flooring Frampton twice, in the fifth and the sixth rounds, the second knockdown leaving the clearly buzzed challenger reeling, so much so that his trainer, Jamie Moore, threw in the towel, prompting Italian referee Giustino Di Giovanni to wave things off at the 1:40 mark of the sixth of the ESPN+-televised bout from the Caesars Palace Dubai.

“It was just an emotional roller-coaster just to get here,” the 35-year-old Herring (23-2, 11 KOs) said after he had retained his WBC super featherweight title in impressive fashion. “My last outing wasn’t my best. People doubted me. They called me every name in the book. But even with the cut I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t going to quit.”

The disappointing outcome for Frampton, 34, who was attempting to become the first Irishman (he is from Belfast, Northern Ireland) to win world championships in three weight classes, also represented something of an emotional roller-coaster, except that his thrill ride had come to an end. The Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2016 Fighter of the Year, he announced his immediate retirement to spend more time with “my beautiful wife and kids,” in addition to complimenting the man who had just conquered him.

“I said before I would retire if I lost this fight, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Frampton announced with the class and dignity he has always demonstrated throughout his commendable career. “I just got beat by the better man. I really struggled to get inside him. He was sharp, shooting from a distance. A perfect game plan. I just got beat. Zero excuses. I had an amazing camp. I came into this fight to win it.”

So did Herring, who had to patiently mark time through two postponements, both owing to his testing positive for COVID-19. But they say all good things come to those who wait, some having nothing to do with his current occupation.

“Some of the criticism of Jamel Herring going into the fight was warranted,” offered two-division former world champ Andre Ward, one of the commentators for the ESPN+ telecast. “You’re only as good as your last performance, and his last performance against Jonathan Oquendo was not great. He didn’t respond the right way. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t respond the right way tonight. He did, and he deserves everything that’s coming his way.”

What could be coming next for Herring is a unification showdown with Mexico’s Oscar Valdez (29-0, 23 KOs), the WBC and lineal super featherweight ruler. It might be a move up to lightweight, which seems reasonable for someone of his elongated physical dimensions (5’10”, 72-inch reach) for a 130-pounder. But whatever awaits him, it has to be less harrowing than the path he already has followed to get to this point in a life marked by exhilarating highs and plunging lows.

Did Frampton say something about how Herring was “shooting from a distance”? How ironic that remark is, considering his two deployments to Iraq. Herring has seen fellow Marines killed or seriously wounded. He knows what it’s like to have RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) whiz over his head, to cringe when an IED (improvised explosive device) blew up the Humvee just ahead of the one in which he was the gunner, an exposed position that left him especially vulnerable to snipers with high-powered rifles that could cut him down from hundreds of yards away.

To have lived through that and twice to have come home whole, at least physically, reflects no small amount of good fortune. But that is not to say that Herring was not damaged in ways that are not readily discernible. He is the father of six children, one of whom, daughter Ariyanah, was only two months old when she died unexpectedly and without warning of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Her loss left a hole in her father’s heart that has yet to fully heal.

There are other unseen wounds to veterans of armed conflicts that never appear on X-rays or medical charts.

“Sniper fire. That was my biggest fear,” Herring said in a 2016 interview with ESPN’s Mark Kriegel. “Whenever we got stopped, I felt like I was a sitting duck, ’cause I’m on top of the Humvee.

“It’s rough over there. You’re deployed for seven, eight months out in the desert and it’s a different world where people are trying to kill you. You have to be watchful at all times.”

Back home and presumably safe, Herring – who had been the team captain of the USA Boxing Team at the 2012 London Olympics – had to cope with the death of his baby daughter and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). He began to drink heavily, and even now feels the need to sit in restaurants with his back to a wall with a view of all entrances. Some might call that a form of paranoia, but it is what it is. But, fortunately, Herring’s strong and controlled performance against Frampton offers proof, and hope, that the worst is increasingly behind him.

The story of Jamel Herring could easily be adapted into a feature-length or made-for-TV movie, but then isn’t that the case with so many fighters who dealt with issues that supersede anything they may have encountered inside the ropes? Boxing has always provided Hollywood with rich veins of material to be mined, from Jim Corbett to James J. Braddock to Rocky Graziano to Micky Ward to Muhammad Ali. Maybe the tale of Jamel Herring can be put into the future bin of inspirational scripts along with those of Matthew Saad Muhammad, Bernard Hopkins and Arturo Gatti, a select group of life underdogs who rose above their circumstances to achieve a form of glory reserved for those with enough gumption to defy the odds.

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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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