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The Hauser Report: The Strange Odyssey of Lopez-Kambosos and Triller (Part One)

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The Hauser Report: The Strange Odyssey of Lopez-Kambosos and Triller (Part One)

On Saturday night, November 27, Teofimo Lopez fought to defend his multiple 135-pound titles against George Kambosos at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The primary storyline coming into the bout wasn’t the fight. Lopez was a 9-to-1 betting favorite, and very few people expected Lopez-Kambosos to be competitive. The fight generated publicity in the nine months that preceded it because of its business backstory. But Lopez-Kambosos evolved into a tense, hard-fought, bloody spectacle with Kambosos emerging victorious on a 115-111, 115-112, 113-114 split decision.

Lopez, now 24, turned pro after the 2016 Olympics. Top Rank (his promoter) put him on a fast track, and Teofimo delivered. He won the IBF lightweight title with an impressive second-round knockout of Richard Commey in 2019 and added the WBA and WBO belts to his inventory with a unanimous decision over Vasyl Lomachenko in October 2020. That brought his record to 16-0 with 12 knockouts.

Kambosos had pieced together a 19-0 (10 KOs) record against pedestrian opposition and became the IBF’s mandatory challenger by virtue of a split-decision victory over Lee Selby last year. In theory, boxing’s mandatory-challenger rule is designed to ensure that champions go in tough against the best available challenger at least once a year. But it has been subverted to the point where, too often, the mandatory challenger is an easy mark.

When boxing fans talked about dream fights to be made at 135 pounds, the names were Lopez, Vasyl Lomachenko, Devin Haney, Gervonta Davis, and Ryan Garcia. Kambosos wasn’t even in the conversation. But Lopez was obligated to fight him if he wanted to keep his IBF belt.

Top Rank, which had several years left on its promotional agreement with Lopez, offered Teofimo his contractual minimum of $1.25 million for the bout. David McWater (who manages Lopez) countered with a demand for $5.5 million. With a divide that wide, Kambosos’s demands were irrelevant. Under IBF rules, the matter went to a purse bid with the proceeds to be split 65-35% in favor of Team Lopez.

Enter Triller.

Triller’s origins were explored on this site in a two-part series entitled “Triller, Holyfield, and Trump: Did Evander Get Hustled?” The company is largely under the control of Ryan Kavanaugh, a 46-year-old businessman with a checkered past. Kavanaugh made headlines and a lot of money when he founded an entertainment company called Relativity Media that purported to use sophisticated algorithms to eliminate the risk from film financing. There were some big early successes. Then things fell apart and Relativity Media filed for bankruptcy. There have been numerous other legal proceedings involving Kavanaugh since then.

Ryan Kavanaugh

Ryan Kavanaugh

As with Relativity Media, Triller’s foray into boxing started with a commercial success – the November 28, 2020, exhibition between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones. Tyson-Jones was a way to drum up interest in, and exposure for, Triller. But the extraordinarily popular reception that it received encouraged Kavanaugh to delve further into the boxing business. Things have gone downhill from there.

Triller holds itself out as “a vehicle for fighters to grow their brand, connect with fans, and build their social media following as they progress in their careers.” Boxing on Triller is largely a social media event, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the sport. These days, presidential elections are won and lost on social media.

But we’re living in an age when some businesses are operated as financial instruments to be built up and sold for a profit rather than being run as self-sustaining businesses that are profitable in and of themselves. Triller might fit that mold.

The purse bid for Lopez-Kambosos was held on February 25, 2021. Considerable behind-the-scenes maneuvering preceded the opening of the envelopes.

On February 11, according to a report in The Athletic, Top Rank president Todd duBoef sent an email to Kevin A. Mayer (who was about to become the CEO of DAZN). That email read in part, “This is a follow-up to our conversation. Attached is an article which quotes Matchroom’s Eddie Hearn’s desire to make a bid on DAZN’s behalf for Teofimo Lopez v George Kambosos. Top Rank signed Lopez out of the Olympics and is in the middle of a long term Promotional Agreement. Lopez has been a mainstay and anchor on ESPN and ESPN+. If the article is true, I was shocked to see this brazen act by DAZN, particularly after I cleared ESPN programming off of May 8 for DAZN’s Canelo v Saunders big event, moving our scheduled event (Ramirez v Taylor) to later in the month. I appreciate your attention to this and look forward to starting our conversations in the coming weeks.”

Mayer, according to The Athletic, responded, “Thanks for sending this, Todd.” He then forwarded his response to DAZN Group COO Ed McCarthy with the notation, “Ed, let’s discuss, but I think Todd is making a fair point. He’s doing us a big favor on the Canelo fight. Let’s think hard about this please?”

“After the email exchange,”The Athletic reported, “McCarthy and duBoef spoke by telephone. Following that call, duBoef believed that Hearn wouldn’t bid on Lopez-Kambosos and that Top Rank could enter a bid that would win the rights to the fight without going far above its original offer that called for a purse of $1.25 million to Lopez.”

duBoef later told The Athletic, “Eddie can bid all he wants. But if you’re asking me to do things for you and we’re talking about business together and things that [DAZN] wants to do internationally, if you’re asking more to expand our relationship and ‘can you help me here?’ I find it to be a brazen act if you’re enabling Eddie. Is that collusion? No.”

But there was a school of thought that, if nothing more, it was an attempt at collusion.

Meanwhile, Peter Kahn (who managed Kambosos) had his own take on things. Kahn told The Athletic, “Top Rank in essence was attempting to bully DAZN into not bidding, which means Top Rank would have been able to come in and possibly steal that bid for a low number. And I really wasn’t gonna let that happen. So I basically threw a Hail Mary and I flew out to California. I met with Ryan Kavanaugh. I explained to him the situation. I said, ‘Ryan, if you want to show people that you’re serious about being in the boxing space, not just about influencers, not just about crossover fights and legends, but if you really want to make a splash, this is your opportunity.”

And made a splash, Kavanaugh did. Top Rank bid $2,315,000 at the February 25 purse bid ($1,504,750 of which would have gone to Lopez had the bid been successful). Matchroom, despite duBoef’s lobbying with DAZN, bid $3,506,000. Triller bid the outlandish sum of $6,018,000.

“He knows it was a premium,” Kahn said later of Kavanaugh’s bid. But Kavanaugh bought into Kahn’s logic; to wit, “In order to really secure that opportunity and show people that you want to make a statement, that you want to be disruptive, you’re going to have to bid this type of number.”

Pursuant to IBF rules, $3,911,700 (65 percent) of the winning purse bid was allocated to the Lopez side of the equation. Under the terms of Teofimo’s promotional contract with Top Rank, twenty percent of that ($782,340) would go to the promoter. Thus, Lopez and his management team were in line to receive $3,129,360 (far more than the $1.25 million they’d been offered by Top Rank to fight Kambosos).

Arum looked at the bright side of things, saying, “We made a lot of money in five minutes. Almost $800,000 is pretty good money. Sh**, that’s really great because Lopez vs. Kambosos is not a premier attraction.” But he was less philosophical when talking about DAZN and Eddie Hearn

“He lost and pissed us off at the same time,” Arum said of Hearn. “It sent a message to us. But he better watch out the next time he goes to a purse bid when the fighters have no connection to ESPN or Top Rank. Maybe we’ll jam a bid up Hearn’s ass. We’ll get back at them. I’m angry at them, yeah.”

Meanwhile, Triller issued a press release referencing itself as a “disruptive property” that was “reimagining the sport of boxing for a new, engaged generation.” And Kavanaugh proclaimed, “We are working to reshape the vision of excitement and storytelling in a sport we love. We’re here as a friend to the boxing world. We’re here not to attack it, but to bring entertainment to what has traditionally been a purist sport. Our view is that we want to make it look and feel different. We’re going to deliver a different experience that has something for everyone. We want to show we’re taking the sport of boxing seriously and respecting boxing. We’re not trying to make a mockery of it. That’s what this fight does for us.”

Triller’s purse bid for Lopez-Kambosos made it a player in legitimate boxing. It also meant that Triller was supplanting DAZN as the primary force in inflating license fees in the sport. And – temporarily, at least – it led to artificially high expectations from fighters as to what they might receive for future fights.

Predictably, Hearn used the occasion to take a swipe at Arum.

“Teofimo Lopez took the chance for small money to fight Lomachenko because he believed he would win and he believed he would get the financial rewards he deserved,” Hearn said. “But guess what? When he won, they wouldn’t give it to him. This whole problem has been caused by Top Rank. Bob’s been out there, ‘Oh, Eddie Hearn, I’m f****** pissed off that he’s bid and he’s gotta watch himself now.’ F*** off! It’s an open market. If you can’t do a deal with your fighter and that comes into the open market, you pay the consequences. And the consequences is someone else has popped up from nowhere and taken one of your biggest assets on your platform, for ESPN, and put it on another platform. It’s a disaster for Top Rank. I told him I’d bid. You want no one to bid so you can get your guy cheap? It doesn’t work like that. Don’t tell us what we can and can’t do. It was arrogance, quite frankly. You think that I would phone a competitor and say, ‘Don’t bid on this fight’? They created this mess. And it went horribly wrong because we don’t get told what to do. The fight come up on the open market. Our broadcaster told us, ‘We’d like that fight.’ And we bid.”

Kavanaugh took a conciliatory tone toward Top Rank after the purse bid, stating, “We are in no way competing with Bob Arum. Eddie Hearn is Arum’s true competition. We’re just doing it to build a brand. We don’t compete with Arum or ESPN because we are a different model. We hope they see us as a way to create more marketing for their fighters. Teofimo will come in with a certain amount of followers and leave with, hopefully, three-to-four times that amount. That will be good for Bob too. We think we’re great for everyone in the sport.”

Todd duBoef also voiced a positive view, saying, “Triller is a social platform and they’re very good at that. If they can expose our asset, our fighter, Teofimo, to a different audience that expands his popularity, I think it’s terrific. We all benefit. I would like to have done the fight for our platform [ESPN], but it ends out working well for everyone.”

Still, the relationship between Top Rank and Lopez had been fractured. And there were people whispering in Teofimo’s ear – shouting is more like it – that Arum’s public statements and duBoef’s email exchanges with DAZN had given Lopez grounds to break his contract with Top Rank.

After the purse bid, Teofimo declared, “I love ESPN and the platform and everything they have done for Team Lopez. However, I am very thankful that my team and I stuck to our guns. We knew what we were being offered was disrespectful, and we expected the open market would value us differently. And it showed today. The six million dollars from Triller says that Top Rank doesn’t value the best fighter on their roster.”

In response, Arum noted that Top Rank had several years left on its contract with Lopez and said, “Teofimo has a contract with us. There will be regular negotiations on his fights. If he wins [against Kambosos] and comes back to us and wants the same money that he got before, the answer is ‘no.’ So he sits out for a while. You can’t pay what you don’t have. He either fights or he doesn’t fight. Maybe Triller is so happy with Lopez they will give us a big number and buy out our contract with Lopez, which is fine also.”

That earned a rejoinder from Lopez, who proclaimed, “If they can’t treat their fighters, or at least me, in a way of respect, then I’ll find it somewhere else because I know what I’m worth. Obviously, Triller knows my worth. It sucks, it really does, to have it go this way. So congratulations, Todd duBoef. You lost your best fighter from your stable.”

Then Teofimo Lopez Sr (who trains his son) got into the act, saying, “We already took a low rate for the Lomachenko fight. When we took less money to get those belts, I told my son, ‘Once you have those belts, you can do whatever you want.’ And that’s what we’re doing right now. This is big. This is like the Muhammad Ali era when Muhammad stood for his rights.”

That was an ill-considered remark. Ali gave up the heavyweight championship of the world and risked going to prison for five years to stand up for his religious beliefs. All Team Lopez did was maneuver to get more money. It had every right to do so. But Teofimo was sacrificing nothing. Indeed, Richard Schaefer (who has never been thought of as a fan of Bob Arum) told this writer, “Let’s be fair about it. Top Rank did a fantastic job of building up Lopez. And the fight against Lomachenko – which did the most to make Lopez what he is now – was promoted during a pandemic.”

Thereafter, an accord was reached. On June 12, it was announced that Top Rank and Lopez had extended their contract and that the new deal provided for an increase in Lopez’s minimum purses moving forward.

Meanwhile, Triller was forging ahead. On March 22, 2021, it announced that Peter Kahn would become Triller Fight Club’s chief boxing officer (a position he would hold until stepping down six months later). Jim Lampley was hired to handle blow-by-chores for at least four future Triller events (he has yet to call one). And the expectation in some circles was that, going forward, Triller would cherry-pick among high-profile boxing cards that were up for purse bid. But Arum sounded a cautionary note, saying, “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I’ll let them do their thing. I’m not going to get involved in the sideshow business.”

In other words, it was possible that Ryan Kavanaugh had figured out something that Arum, Hearn, Al Haymon, Frank Warren, and other top promoters hadn’t. But it was unlikely. And now that Triller was moving to a new level, it was worth asking, “Could Triller actually promote a major world championship fight? Or would the result be like hanging a painting by a kindergarten student in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two will appear on TheSweetScience.com tomorrow.

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 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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Notes and Nuggets from Thomas Hauser: Callum Walsh Returns to Madison Square Garden

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On Sunday, March 16 (the night before St. Patrick’s Day), Callum Walsh continued his move up the junior-middleweight ranks with a brutal first-round knockout of Dean Sutherland at the Hulu Theatre at Madison Square Garden. The seven-bout card promoted by Tom Loeffler featured seven Irish boxers. Walsh stole the show but two non-Irish fighters on the undercard caught the eye.

In the third fight of the evening, Cletus Seldin (known as “The Hebrew Hammer) took on Yeis Gabriel Solano. The last time Seldin fought at Madison Square Garden (March 15, 2024), he took the ring announcer’s microphone after a majority-decision win, dropped to one knee, held out a diamond engagement ring, and asked one Jessica Ostrowski to marry him. The future Mrs. Seldin (who was clad in black leather) said yes, and the happy couple paraded around the ring together. They were married on September 7.

“So I’ve got a ring now,” Seldin says. “And I love married life because I love Jessica.”

A cynic at ringside on Sunday night wondered if Jessica might serve Cletus with a summons and complaint for divorce in the ring after the fight. Not to worry. The couple seems happily married and, after Seldin eked out a majority decision over Solano (now winless in five fights dating back to 2019), Cletus and Jessica announced in the ring that they’re expecting the birth of their first child.

In the next fight of the evening, Irish heavyweight Thomas Carty (255 pounds) brought a 10-0 (9 KOs) record into the ring to face 409-pound Dajuan Calloway (10-3, 9 KOs, 1 KO by).

Carty-Calloway was a poor match for a prospect. A fighter gets relatively little credit for beating a 400-pound opponent. And the problems posed by a physical confrontation with a 400-pound mountain are considerable.

With fifty seconds left in round two, Carty collapsed to the canvas as Calloway spun him around on the inside. Thomas rose, limping badly on a clearly-injured left knee. And referee Jamil Antoine foolishly allowed the bout to continue.

Carty tried to circle away, fell again. And Antoine – more foolishly – instructed the fighters to fight on. There was a third fall that the referee ruled a knockdown. The bell rang. And then the fight was stopped. It goes in the record book as a knockout at 3:00 of the second round.

Worse for Carty, he now appears to be facing surgery followed by a long rehabilitation. There’s no way to know how much further damage was done to his knee in the forty seconds that he was clearly impaired and under assault by a 409-pound man who was trying to knock him unconscious.

But the night belonged to 23-year-old Callum Walsh.

Walsh is from Cork, Ireland, trains in California with Freddie Roach, and came into the ring with a 12-0 (10 KOs) record.

“He’s a pretty good fighter,” Roach says. “He’s getting better. And he works his ass off in the gym.”

Equally important in an age when social media and hype often supersede a fighter’s accomplishments in the ring as the key to marketability. Walsh has the enthusiastic backing of Dana White.

Callum seems more at ease with the media now than when he fought at Madison Square Garden a year ago. And he has a new look. His hair is shorter and no longer dyed blond.

“It’s a new year, so time for a new look,” Walsh explained. Later, he added, “I don’t want to be a prospect anymore. I want to be a contender. I expected the road to be tough. I’ve never had anything easy in my life. I’ve worked as a fisherman. I’ve worked on a cargo ship. I like this job a lot more. They have big plans for me. But I still have to do my job.”

Sutherland, age 26, was born in Scotland and has lived there his entire life. He came to New York with a 19-1 (7 KOs, 1 KO by) record and, prior to fighting Walsh, noted, “I’m under no illusions. Fighting an Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day in New York; it’s all being built up for him. If it goes to the scorecards, no matter how the fight goes, I’m unlikely to get the decision. But when the bell rings, it will be only me and Callum. I’ve watched his fights. I’ve studied his habits and rhythm. I’ve been through hard fights. He’s untested. This is my big opportunity. I’m not here to be part of Callum’s record.”

Talking is easier than fighting. When the hour of reckoning came, Walsh was faster, stronger, better-skilled, and hit harder than Sutherland. Indeed, Callum was so dominant in the early going that round one had the look of a 10-8 round without a knockdown. Then Sutherland was flattened by a right hook at the 2:45 mark and any thoughts as to scoring became irrelevant.

It was Walsh’s best showing to date, although it’s hard to know the degree to which Sutheralnd’s deficiencies contributed to that showing. What’s clear is that Callum is evolving as a fighter. And he’s the kind of fighter who fits nicely with the concept that Turki Alalshikh and Dana White have voiced for a new boxing promotional company. Whether they’ll be willing to put Walsh in tough is an open issue. UFC puts its fighters in tough.

****

There was a void at ringside on Sunday night. After more than four decades on the job, George Ward is no longer with the New York State Athletic Commission.

Ward was the model of what a commission inspector should be. I watched him in the corner and in dressing rooms countless times over the years. A handful of inspectors were as good as he was. Nobody was better. Later, as a deputy commissioner, he performed the thankless back-of-the-house administrative duties on fight night while other deputy commissioners were enjoying the scene at ringside.

George and Robert Orlando (who, like George, is a former New York City corrections officer) also normally presided over pre-fight weigh-ins. That’s worth mentioning here because it ties to one of the more unfortunate incidents that occurred during the tenure of former NYSAC executive director Kim Sumbler.

On November 1, 2019, Kelvin Gastelum weighed in for a UFC 244 match against Darren Till to be contested at Madison Square Garden. The contract weight for the fight was 186 pounds. It was known throughout the MMA community that Gastelum had been having trouble making weight. Before stepping on the scale, he stripped down completely naked and a towel was lifted in front of him to shield his genitals from public view. Then, to everyone’s surprise, his weight was announced as 184 pounds (two pounds under the contract weight).

How did Gastelum make weight? Video of the weigh-in showed him resting his elbow on his coach as he stood on the scale.

Why am I mentioning this now?

Ward and Orlando know all the tricks. While they were readying for the Gastelum-Till weigh-in, Sumbler told them that they were being replaced on the scales by two other commission employees who had been brought to New York City from upstate. They asked why and were told, “Because I said so.”

George Ward was one of the behind-the-scenes people who make boxing work. He’ll be missed.

****

Six years ago, Gene Pantalone wrote a traditional biography of former world lightweight champion Lew Jenkins. Now he has written – shall we say – a creative biography of lightweight great Freddie Welsh.

Welsh was born in Wales in 1886 but spent most of his ring career in the United States. He captured the lightweight crown by decision over Willie Ritchie in 1914 and relinquished it to Benny Leonard three years later. BocRec.com credits him with a 74-5-7 (34 KOs) ring record in bouts that are verified and were officially scored. If “newspaper decisions” are added to the mix, the numbers rise to 121 wins, 29 losses, and 17 draws. Many of the losses came when Welsh was long past his prime. He’s on the short list of boxing’s greatest fighters. The only knock out he suffered was when he lost the title to Leonard.

Chasing The Great Gatsby is styled as a biography of Welsh and also an advocacy brief in support of the proposition that Welsh was the inspiration and model for the title character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal novel The Great Gatsby. I’m unsure how factually accurate Pantalone’s work is in some places. Also, too often, he uses big words when small ones will suffice. For example:

“He was a pugilistic virtuoso, a pummeling poet with fists of fury and a keen intellect. His duality was evident in every aspect of his being, an amalgamation of the vicious and the benevolent.”

Over the course of 349 pages, that weighs a reader down.

Still, there are some interesting observations and nuggets of information to be mined in Chasing The Great Gatsby. Among my favorites are Pantalone’s description of Jack Dempsey training for his historic 1921 fight against George Carpentier at a “health farm” that Welsh owned in New Jersey; Pantelone’s description of how the stadium that hosted Dempsey-Carpentier was built; and Pantalone’s evaluation of the fight itself, which he calls “a spectacle of titanic proportions,” before adding,” The truth was inescapable. The fight had not lived up to its grandeur, but the event did.”

****

Several of the books that Robert Lipsyte has written during his storied career as a journalist focus on boxing; most notably, Free to Be Muhammad Ali and The Contender (a young adult novel). Lipsyte’s most recent book – Rhino’s Run (published by Harper) – is a young adult novel keyed to high school football, not the sweet science. But the opening sentence bears repeating:

“Punching Josh Kremens didn’t feel as good as I thought it would, and I’d been thinking about it for five years.”

Be honest! Don’t you want to read more?

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and ME  is a personal memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

            In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Ever-Improving Callum Walsh KOs Dean Sutherland at Madison Square Garden

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Irish luck was not involved as Callum Walsh won the battle of hard-hitting southpaws over Dean Sutherland by knockout on Sunday.

One right hook was all it took.

“You’re never going to beat the Irish,” said Walsh.

In a contest between Celtic super welterweights Walsh (13-0, 11 KOs) retained the WBC Continental America’s title against Sutherland (19-2, 7 KOs) in quick fashion at the Madison Square Garden Theater in Manhattan.

Usually fights between southpaws can be confusing to both contestants. But Walsh had expressed a fondness for fighting lefthanders then vividly exhibited the reasons why.

Walsh, 24, a native of Cork, Ireland, now living and training in Los Angeles, quickly demonstrated why he likes fighting lefties with a steady flow of combinations from the opening bell.

He did not hesitate.

Sutherland, 26, had only lost once before and that was more than two years ago. Against Walsh the Scottish fighter was not hesitant to advance forward but was caught with lefts and right hooks.

After two minutes of scattered blows, Sutherland fought back valiantly and when cornered, Walsh tapped two jabs then unleashed a right hook through the Scottish fighter’s gloves that floored the Aberdeen fighter for the count at 2:45 of the first round.

“I’m feeling very good. Dean Sutherland is a very good opponent. I knew he was going to be dangerous. That was my best opponent,” said Walsh.

It was the fourth consecutive knockout win for Walsh who seems to improve with every single combat.

“I’m looking forward to the future. I’m getting stronger and stronger,” said Walsh who is trained by Hall of Fame trainer Freddie Roach. “Anyone that comes to me I will take him out.”

Other Bouts

Super featherweight Feargal McCrory (17-1, 9 KOs) survived a knockdown in the fourth to out-muscle Keenan Carbajal (25-5-1, 17 KOs) and batter down the Arizona fighter in the seventh and again in the eighth with volume punching.

Carbajal was deducted a point early for holding in round two, but regained that point when he floored the Irish southpaw during an exchange in the fourth.

Despite suffering a knockdown, McCrory continued stalking Carbajal and floored him in the seventh and eighth with battering blows. Referee Arthur Mercante Jr. stopped the fight without a count.

A rematch between two Irish super middleweights saw Emmet Brennan (6-0) remain undefeated by unanimous decision over Kevin Cronin (9-3-1).

Cronin started quickly with a pressure style and punches flowing against Brennan who resorted to covering and countering. Though it looked like Cronin was building up a lead with a busier style, the judges preferred Brennan’s judicious counters. No knockdowns were scored as all three judges saw Brennan the winner 98-92 after 10 rounds.

Dajuan Calloway (11-3, 9 KOs) emerged the winner by technical knockout over Thomas Carty (10-1) who was unable to continue after two rounds when his leg tangled and thereafter was unable to stand. Because he could not continue the fight was ruled a technical knockout win for Calloway in the heavyweight match.

Also

Cletus “Hebrew Hammer” Seldin (29-1, 23 Kos) defeated Yeis Solano (15-5) by majority decision after eight rounds in a super lightweight contest.

Donagh Keary (1-0) defeated Geral Alicea-Romero (0-1-1) by decision after four.

Light heavyweights Sean O’Bradaigh (0-0-1) and Jefferson Almeida (0-1-1) fought to a majority draw after four.

Photo credit: JP Yim

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Nick Ball Wears Down and Stops TJ Doheny Before the Home Folks in Liverpool

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Fighting in his hometown, Liverpool’s five-foot-two fireplug Nick “The Wrecking” Ball stopped TJ Doheny after 10 progressively more one-sided rounds to retain his WBA belt in the second defense of the featherweight title he won with a hard-earned decision over Raymond Ford in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Referee Michael Alexander, with the assent of Doheny’s corner, waived it off following the bell ending Round 10, much to the chagrin of the brave but mildewed Doheny who burst into tears. But then, Doheny’s right eye was closed shut and he was plainly exhausted. This may be the end of the line for the 38-year-old campaigner from Perth, Australia via Portlaois, Ireland who was 26-5 heading in following his first loss inside the distance which came against pound-for-pound king Naoya Inoue.

There were no knockdowns, but Ball (22-0-1, 13 KOs) was docked a point in round nine for throwing Doheny to the canvas after having previously been warned for this infraction. Earlier, both he and Doheny were warned for an incident that could have ended the bout prematurely. At the end of the first round, Ball extricated himself from a headlock by kicking Doheny in the back of his knee. The challenger’s leg appeared to buckle as he returned to his stool.

Going forward, Ball has many options. The 28-year-old Liverpudlian purportedly relishes a unification fight with WBC belt-holder Stephen Fulton, but the decision ultimately rests with Ball’s promoter Frank Warren.

Other Bouts of Note

In a 12-round bantamweight contest that was close on the scorecards but yet a monotonous affair, Liverpool’s Andrew Cain won a split decision over former WBC flyweight title-holder Charlie Edwards. The scores were 116-112 and 115-114 favoring Cain with judge Steve Gray submitting a disreputable 115-113 tally for Edwards. At stake were a trio of regional titles.

The science of boxing, they say, is about hitting without getting hit. Charlie Edwards is adept at the latter but the hitting part is not in his DNA. He was on his bicycle from the get-go, a style that periodically brought forth a cascade of boos. Cain, who trains in the same gym with Nick Ball, was never able to corner him – Edwards was too elusive – but Cain, to his credit, never lost his composure.

In improving to 14-1 (12), Cain achieved a measure of revenge, in a sense. In his last documented amateur bout, in 2014, Cain was defeated by Charlie’s brother Sunny Edwards, also a former world title-holder at the professional level. Heading in, Charlie Edwards (20-2, 1 NC) was unbeaten in his last 13 which included a comfortable decision over Cristofer Rosales in his flyweight title fight. Charlie relinquished that belt when he could no longer make the weight.

Showboating Cuban lightweight Jadier Herrera, who fought 13 of his first 14 pro fights in his adopted home of Dubai, advanced to 17-0 (15 KOs) with a seventh-round stoppage of spunky but outclassed Mexican import Jose Macias (21-4-2). The official time was 2:31 of round seven.

An all-Liverpool affair between super flyweights Jack Turner (11-0, 10 KOs) and Ryan Farrag (23-6) was over in a jiff. The match, which went next-to-last in the bout order, ended at the 42-second mark of round two. A barrage of punches climaxed by a left hook sent Farrag down hard and the referee waived it off.

The noted spoiler Ionut Baluta, whose former victims include Andrew Cain, forged another upset with a 10-round split decision over local fan favorite Brad Strand. The judges favored Baluta 98-91 and 96-94, out-voting the Italian judge whose 97-93 tally for Strand was deemed the most accurate by the TV pundits.

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