The Hauser Report: Boxing Through Young Eyes

Published

3 years ago

November 1, 2021

The Hauser Report: Boxing Through Young Eyes

My uncle died in early-October. As per his request, he was cremated and the family converged in New York at the end of the month for the interment of his remains. Reece Chapman (my 13-year-old great-nephew) lives in Montana and was here for the ceremony.

There was a time when boxing was a bonding force between generations. Fathers and sons sat down in front of a television set and watched Gillette Friday Night Fights together. The first fight I went to was the 1965 bout between Floyd Patterson and George Chuvalo at the “old” Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street. Patterson was on the comeback trail after consecutive first-round knockout losses to Sonny Liston and beat Chuvalo on an 8-4, 7-5, 6-5-1 decision.

My uncle took me to that fight.

Reece’s three favorite sports to watch on television are football, basketball, boxing. The closest he’d been to a live professional fight was when I brought him to Gleason’s Gym before the pandemic and he saw two fighters sparring.

Not much of what Top Rank has accomplished over the decades is on Reece’s radar screen. He watches their shows regularly on ESPN. But the fact that Bob Arum has promoted more than two thousand fight cards in more than three hundred cities around the globe (including 675 world title fights) is ancient history to him.

On October 30, Top Rank promoted an eight-bout card at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. Reece had never been to a fight. I decided to bring him.

Not many people who go to a fight sit close enough to the ring that they can see the anger, fear, hurt, and other emotions that cross fighters’ eyes. Television cosmeticizes the violence. Sitting in the press section, there’s no filter. Either a person is drawn to the spectacle or repulsed by it.

Reece is a people-person with empathy for others. I wondered how he’d process the reality of boxing. I asked Top Rank media relations director Evan Korn if Reece could be credentialed for the October 30 fight card. Evan said yes, and event access manager Katie Neff helped implement the plan.

Reece and I arrived at Madison Square Garden on fight night at 6:40 PM. Our seats were second row center in the ringside press section. The arena was virtually empty. Most of the eight bouts had a clear favorite. Top Rank has two matchmakers – Bruce Trampler and Brad Goodman – who are on the short list of best matchmakers ever. I explained to Reece that a big part of their job is to select opponents for fighters that Top Rank is trying to build. Each fight should be a learning experience for the favorite and end with a “W” on his record. Some fighters are handled with more care than others. Some need less protection than others.

Reece took his status as a credentialed member of the media seriously. Over the next four-and-a-half hours, he would fill an old spiral-bound HBO Boxing notebook I’d given him with eleven pages of notes.

The lights went on and rap music played as the first boxers made their way to the ring. Viewed from our vantage point, the ring ropes seemed suddenly evocative to me of horizontal prison bars.

At 7:10 PM, the bell for round one sounded. Kasir Goldston (3-0, 1 KO) vs. Marc Misiura (2-1, 1 KO). Misiura’s two wins had come against opponents with 1 win in 13 fights. Against Goldston, he was aggressive until he got hit, at which point he opted for a less confrontational strategy. Later in the fight, he got chippy and lost a point for an intentional head butt. The judges’ scores were 40-35, 40-35, 40-35 in Goldston’s favor.

Fight #2 – Ray Cuadrado (1-0, 1 KO) vs. Michael Land (1-3-1, 1 KO). Land was game but didn’t have the skills to compete. Cuadrado won a 40-36, 39-37, 39-37 decision.

Fight #3 – Jahi Tucker (4-0, 2 KOs) vs. Jorge Rodrigo Sosa (3-2, 3 KOs). Sosa was tough. But tough is different from good. In round two, Tucker started putting a beating on him. Sosa was taking too many clean punches and getting hurt. At 2;18 of the stanza, referee Shawn Clark stopped it.

Reece’s first knockout. Three fights down, each one ending as expected.

Now the arena was filling up. The crowd was becoming part of the drama.

Fight #4 – Pablo Valdez (4-0, 4 KOs) vs. Alejandro Martinez (2-1-1, 2 KOs). How did Martinez get to 2-1-1? His previous opponents had compiled a composite ring record of 6 wins, 70 losses, and 1 draw. That’s how.

Valdez was a heavy favorite. But as Lennox Lewis once observed, “A punch in the face; that changes everything. All the things you practiced can suddenly stop working.”

In round two, Martinez staggered Valdez and had him holding on. Thereafter, Martinez was the hunter and Valdez was the hunted. At the end of round four, the ropes kept Valdez from going down, but referee Eddie Claudio failed to call a knockdown. Claudio also warned Valdez about holding multiple times but failed to take a point away long after a deduction seemed warranted. If Claudio’s work left something to be desired, the scoring of the judges was even more dubious – a 59-55, 59-55, 57-57 majority decision in Valdez’s favor.

“What?” Reece said in disbelief. “That’s crazy.”

In other words, a thirteen-year-old attending his first fight card ever saw Valdez-Martinez more clearly than the judges.

Now Reece was into the scene.

“It’s really cool,” he told me. “The lights; how fast the fighters’ hands are; how focused they are; the way they move around the ring.”

Fight #5 – Mathew Gonzalez (12-0, 8 KOs) vs. Dakota Linger (12-5-2, 8 KOs). All of Linger’s wins had come in West Virginia or North Carolina. In the previous three years, he’d won twice and suffered five losses. The wins came against DeWayne Wisdom (1 win in his last 38 fights) and Darel Harris (2 wins in his last 23 outings).

12-0 from New York City vs. 12-5-2 from Buckhannon, West Virginia. Guess who won?

Wrong.

Linger came out throwing punches with the sophistication of a toughman contestant and kept throwing. Everyone in the arena could see the punches coming except Gonzalez.

When a young fighter is pressured, either he forgets what he has learned about boxing or he uses it. Gonzalez forgot. The result was a totally entertaining, all-action brawl between a boxer and a toughman in what devolved into the equivalent of a toughman contest. The crowd cheered loudly for much of the bout and was on its feet at the end. The judges ruled it a majority draw – a reasonable verdict although the nod could have gone to Linger.

Once in a while, boxing fans get lucky.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Reece said. “This is really really cool.”

Fight #6 – Jonathan Guzman (24-1, 23 KOs) vs. Carlos Jackson (17-1, 11 KOs) brought the fans back to earth. Eight technically-fought rounds. Guzman was the more passive of the two. Jackson tried periodically to pick up the pace, but Guzman had the skills to blunt his attack. When it was over, Jackson was on the long end of a 78-74, 77-75, 75-77 decision.

Then came the co-feature bout – Carlos Caraballo (14-0, 14 KOs) vs. Jonas Sultan (17-5, 11 KOs). Things got interesting in a hurry when Sultan (a decided underdog) knocked Caraballo down with a right uppercut in round two (Reece’s first official knockdown). He did it again in round three but was badly hurt himself in round four.

The action got even better from there. It was a sensational, brutal, back-and-forth fight. By round eight, Caraballo was unloading, landing shot after shot to Sultan’s head. The carnage continued in round nine with cries of “stop the fight” reverberating through the air. Then, out of nowhere, Sultan dropped Caraballo again with a left hook.

All told, Caraballo was knocked down four times and Sultan once. Each man suffered more damage than a fighter should. It was a legitimate fight of the year candidate with all three judges scoring the bout 94-93 in Sultan’s favor.

“WOW!” Reece said. “WOW! WOW! WOW!”

The last fight of the evening – Jose Zepeda (34-2, 26 KOs) vs. Josue Vargas (19-1, 9 KOs) – was memorable in its own way. Zepeda has come up short in two previous title opportunities and is best known for a fifth-round knockout of Ivan Baranchyk in an exciting slugfest that was the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2020 “fight of the year.” Vargas was stepping up his own level of competition to take the bout. At the Friday weigh-in, the fighters’ camps had gotten into one of those stupid shoving matches with punches thrown at the close of the staredown. Now it was time to fight for real.

Midway through round one, Zepeda smashed Vargas to the canvas with a perfectly-timed overhand left that landed flush. Vargas rose on wobbly legs, and Zepeda finished him off at the 1:45 mark of the stanza.

Maybe someday, years from now, Reece will remember that I took him to his first pro fight.

—

When Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let us kill all the lawyers,” he wasn’t thinking about Mike Heitner.

Mike represented Top Rank for decades and was as good as any contract lawyer in the business. Hundreds of championship fights bore his imprint. He was also one of the nicest people in boxing.

One of pleasures that came with going to a Top Rank press conference or a Top Rank fight was the opportunity to sit and chat with Mike. He died suddenly in his sleep on October 19 at age 82. A lot of people who were at Madison Square Garden this week missed him. I was one of them.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – Broken Dreams: Another Year Inside Boxing – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, he was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Thomas Hauser

Thomas Hauser is the author of 52 books. In 2005, he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, which bestowed the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism upon him. He was the first Internet writer ever to receive that award. In 2019, Hauser was chosen for boxing's highest honor: induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Lennox Lewis has observed, “A hundred years from now, if people want to learn about boxing in this era, they’ll read Thomas Hauser.”

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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

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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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