Boxing Odds and Ends: Viva Eddy Reynoso, Viva Eddie Hearn and More

Eddy Reynoso was named the TSS Trainer of the Year for 2019 and 2020. He’s poised to three-peat.

Reynoso, who grew up watching his father Jose “Chepo” Reynoso train boxers in Guadalajara, will be forever linked with Canelo Alvarez. But lately he has been drawing raves for his work with other fighters.

Reynoso got a leg up on the 2021 competition when Ryan Garcia stopped Luke Campbell two days into the new year. “KingRy” had been knocked down and was behind on the cards when he stopped Campbell in the seventh round with a wicked body punch. The Englishman had gone 12 with Vasiliy Lomachenko in his previous fight and had never been stopped.

This was Garcia’s fifth fight with Reynoso. Likewise, Oscar Valdez was making his fifth start with Reynoso when he locked horns with Miguel Berchelt in Las Vegas on Feb. 20. Berchelt was 37-1 coming in, was making the seventh defense of his 130-pound world title, and hadn’t lost in seven years.

Reynoso devised a brilliant game plan which Valdez implemented with great presence of mind while turning in the best performance of his career. He stopped the heavily favored Berchelt in the 10^th frame to keep his undefeated record intact while gathering in a title in a second weight class.

Two heavyweights who are recent additions to Team Reynoso scored victories this month. In his first fight with Reynoso, Andy Ruiz dominated the second half of his fight with Chris Arreola and was returned the winner after 12 rounds. Cuban import Frank Sanchez, an impressive physical specimen at six-foot-four and 235 pounds, improved to 18-0 at the expense of Nagy Aguilera.

Then there’s Canelo who has been with the Reynosos since the advent of his pro career. At age 30, he seems to be getting even better.

Eddie Hearn

There were skeptics when British boxing promoter Eddie Hearn announced that he was crashing the U.S. market. But Hearn has silenced the skeptics after a pro-Canelo crowd of 73,126 turned out in Arlington, Texas, this past Saturday.

Some news stories said this was the largest crowd for at any sporting event of any kind since the advent of the COVID-19 era, but that’s not true. On April 24, 78,113 watched an Australian Rules football game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia. And that record, barring terrible weather, will shortly be obliterated. This year’s renewal of the Indy 500 on May 30 has been approved for 40 percent capacity. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the largest sporting venue in the world with permanent seating for 257,327 and has routinely attracted crowds of more than 300,000.

Regardless, the Alvarez-Saunders promotion was the largest crowd to attend a sporting event in the United State since the coronavirus takeover, surpassing the COVID-restricted crowd of 51,838 that attended the Kentucky Derby the previous Saturday. And the turnout in Arlington broke the U.S. record for the largest boxing crowd at an indoor venue, easily surpassing the old mark of 63,352 (Ali-Spinks II at the Louisiana Superdome), a mark that had stood for 42 years.

Hearn was presently surprised by the turnout. He had initially projected 60,000. And that bodes well for sports promoters of all stripes going forward. We could be looking at another Golden Era of Sports.

In 1918, when many sporting events were cancelled and the baseball season was truncated to 130 games because of the misnamed Spanish flu, attendance at baseball games fell off drastically. The pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 in the United States, lingered into the following year, but the constraints were lifted when the 1919 season commenced and attendance more than doubled over the previous year.

There were contributing factors such as the return of the soldiers from World War I, but economists in the main credited the sharp spike in attendance to pent-up demand. “After being deprived of being able to do something, when the constraints are lifted…people ravenously consume what was previously out of reach,” explains NPR journalist Greg Rosalsky.

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There’s nothing like attending an action-packed fight in a packed arena. The energy in the building is directly proportional to the percentage of seats that are occupied. However, if I could travel back in time, I would be reluctant to squeeze into a boxing show at Wonderland on a night that the joint was full.

Wonderland was the center of lowbrow entertainment in London’s gritty East End during the years straddling the birth of the 20^th century. The weekly bill of fare customarily included a boxing card. British author Brian Dobbs captures the ambience in his new book: Black and White: The Birth of Modern Boxing. When it was packed to capacity, says Dobbs, Wonderland was “a rich combination of Turkish bath, prison cell, and public urinal. Vendors clambered in and out of the packed rows, proferring glasses of beer, oranges, jellied eels, cigarettes, cigars and shag tobacco.”

I could handle the tobacco smoke, but I wouldn’t want to be sitting next to the fellow with the jellied eels.

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