British Boxing 2021 Year in Review

Published

3 years ago

December 31, 2021

Last year, British boxing was left to sink or swim on its own.

While the British government could not wait to line up lucrative support packages for those sports traditionally beloved by the British upper-classes, including the millionaire’s playground that is horse-racing, boxing, traditionally a working-class pursuit, was left to sink or swim.

It swam, then ran a mile for good measure. British boxing has proven that it has the heart to match its lungs and even the doldrums of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disastrous economic damage that accompanied it could not take its measure.

Here, we will review the year in British boxing that was 2021.

British Fighter of the Year: Josh Taylor

Everybody keeps saying you’re up against an American with Mexican blood…But he’s up against a mad Scotsman. The Romans built a wall to keep us out because we’re mental.

What a year it has been for British fighters. The mighty Tyson Fury cemented his place at the top of boxing’s tree with a thrilling destruction of Deontay Wilder in their third fight, despite being stricken with COVID-19 and personal disaster; flyweight Sunny Edwards dethroned the iconic South African veteran Moruti Mthalane and then defended against the ranked Jason Mama at year’s end; Lawrence Okolie stepped up and thrashed Polish tough Krzysztof Glowacki to establish himself as one of the world’s premier cruiserweights.

Still, I did not have to think for long before selecting Josh Taylor as the British fighter of the year.

This is despite the fact that he only stepped out once in 2021 whereas Edwards and Okolie both managed two fights; if ever there was a clear-cut case of quality over quantity, however, this was it.

Jose Carlos Ramirez was the last hold-out in Taylor’s 140lb backyard, wielding two of the straps handed out by the various ABCs in exchange for cash. It is a sign of a true champion that he will brook no resistance, and so it was for Taylor, who set out for Las Vegas to make his extant number one status definitive.

Josh Taylor won “the fight boxing had been waiting for” but it wasn’t easy. The difference was Taylor’s spite, his innate ability to throw his humanity out of the window and enforce his will on his opponent. He did this by dropping Ramirez twice in middle-rounds, once in the sixth and once in the seventh. Here he married class to spite, stepping back for the first knockdown to bring Ramirez onto a hard southpaw left that dropped him and rattled him but from which he almost immediately recovered. It made the brutal left-uppercut that deposited Ramirez to his backside once more in the seventh more impressive. This time Ramirez was hurt and given Taylor’s finishing credentials, was probably saved by the bell.

insert 1

Ramirez fought back hard to make the fight very close, but it was satisfying that these knockdowns were the difference on each of the official scorecards, and to mine, all of which read 114-112 Taylor. The Scotsman now holds victories over both his number one and number two 140lb contenders, his position as the best fighter in this division unassailable.

British Fight of the Year: Troy Williamson vs Ted Cheeseman

Both fought to extreme levels of exhaustion there. You can only watch in awe and applaud. – Tony Bellew.

For the second consecutive year, Ted Cheeseman finds himself in the British fight of the year. Last year, Cheeseman won a thrill-a-minute decision against Sam Eggington; this year he dropped a violent loss that doubles as the British knockout of the year.

The two men met in October for the 154lb British title, a belt that continues to inspire a cult following among fighters and to generate more than its fair share of supercharged domestic combat as a result. Cheeseman, a Londoner, was in possession of the title and Troy Williamson, out of Darlington, wanted it.

Cheeseman (17-3-1) is the everyman here. He has seen everything the British fight game has to offer, good and bad. He has been robbed, afforded more chances than he might deserve but has generated the fandom that comes of delivering on those chances. He is consistently in good fights and sometimes in great fights and is grateful for the opportunity.

Williamson is not those things. 17-0-1, he believes himself better than British level and openly stated it to be the case. Cheeseman bristled and set out in the first round to dominate, to push “the better man” back with hard punches, determining to overcome his lack of speed with a power-attack to the body. Williamson met him. His corner begged him to “keep it at range” between the first and second round. Williamson tried and the second was quieter but these two had determined to dominate one-another. When Cheeseman rattled Williamson with power-punches at the end of the second, the equal and opposite reaction awaited only the bell to begin the third.

When does such strategy become attrition? Sometimes it happens almost in secret, you glance down at your scorecard, and you glance up and two men are at war. This one arguably didn’t catch fire in the same way as Cheeseman-Eggington had the year before, but every minute of every round was closely contested, with clean, hard punches landed in turn-and-turnabout, a pattern that soon became both alarming and inspiring.

Every time Williamson’s right-handed shots seemed about to decide matters, Cheeseman would find a risky uppercut or left-hook to the body; either the sixth or seventh could have been the British round of the year. By the tenth, both had been hurt and both were near the bottom of their respective wells.

Cheeseman was absolutely deboned in that fateful tenth, rendered senseless by uppercuts and then a winging left-hook. Williamson delayed his celebration until Cheeseman’s disastrously failing nervous system could be brought under control. He was walked from the ring before the winner was announced and would have been passing out of the auditorium as news of Williamson’s victory reached his ears. His thoughts in that moment remain private.

“I wasn’t backing down from no tear up,” were the thoughts of the winner.

Quite.

British Breakthrough Fighter of the Year: Lerrone Richards

The future’s bright. I just can’t wait. – Lerrone Richards.

There is very little excitement about Lerrone Richards.

This is odd given that he currently ranks number five to the super-middleweight championship martialled by Canelo Alvarez. Richards had a huge year, and it makes no sense that he continues to fly below so many radars.

Lerrone

Twenty-nine years old, Richards is out of Surrey, England and is on the short side at 5’11 with a 71” reach. Sporting both a physique and a flattop that recalls the prime of one Chris Eubank Snr., Richards is working on a line in patter to match. Stop-start in the early part of his career, he seemed in danger of stalling, but a chance meeting with trainer Dave Coldwell has led to a hound-like commitment to fighting and seemingly to excel in fighting. Last week, on the undercard of Joseph Parker’s second meeting with Dereck Chisora, Richards landed in earnest, defeating number seven 168lb contender Carlos Gongora.

Gongora, who holds a 2020 victory over the much-touted Kazak Ali Akhmedov, was in possession of a strap but Richards, a former British, Commonwealth and European champion seemed in no way intimidated by the occasion. This is the benefit of what is known in Britain as “doing it properly”, of fighting an apprenticeship at three defined title levels before stepping up to match a boxer from the top ten. Richards is massive across the back and huge across the shoulders, a man of real strength, but he uses footwork and quick-handed forays to score points. It was Gongora who seemed the more bemused of the two by the midway point, while Richards hoovered up points.

No puncher, Dave Coldwell has promised that the stoppages will come as Richards evolves, but now 16-0 with zero stoppages, that seems unlikely. But he is learning his trade and despite the bizarre split decision the judges found, he dominated Gongora with skill.

At the end of 2020, Richards was boxing an eight-rounder against a fighter called Timo Laine. At the end of 2021, he is one big win away from joining the conversation as to Canelo’s next opponent. A breakout year indeed.

I’ll sneak him one more gong before we bid him farewell: Lerrone “Sniper the Boss” Richards also has British boxing’s best nickname.

British Prospect of the Year: Galal Yafai

Being a world champion, it might financially be better in the long run, but being Olympic champion is something I can live with forever. – Galal Yafai.

British boxing, then, is healthy, despite the odds and despite the ravages that have afflicted it not. We sport two men in the pound-for-pound top ten and three of the world’s four premier heavyweights – most of all though, the sport is festooned with prospects of both genders and in many weight-classes. A short list of honourable mentions would have us here for a while but fortunately there is a standout prospect who will emerge as a professional in the coming year having conquered the world as an amateur in 2021.

Galal Yafai, one of three fighting brothers, will turn professional in early 2022, at either 112 or 115lbs.

His path to an outstanding gold medal in the Tokyo Olympics was not an easy one. Yafai drew Cuban legend Yosbany Veitia, a 190-fight veteran, in his opening match. A victory saw him rewarded with a semi-final against Kazakh nationals finalist (Sweet Scientists will know the true meaning of that sentence) Saken Bibossinov. In the final, he dropped Carlo Paalam to his haunches among the ropes in the first round and cantered home to win the gold.

“I’m at the top of the tree now with [my] brothers,” he told a British newspaper this year. “I think so, I won’t tell them that though!”

In truth, Galal has a long way to go to emulate Khalid, who held a belt and measured one of the best superflies in the world before running into all-time great Roman Gonzalez in 2020.

At the cusp of 2022 with a record of 0-0, anything seems possible.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Matt McGrain

Up Next

For Whom the Bell Tolled: 2021 Boxing Obituaries PART ONE (Jan.-June)

Don't Miss

Canelo Alvarez is the 2021 TSS Fighter of the Year

Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

15 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-322-Super-Welter-Week-in-SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

TSS-Salutes-Thomas-Hauser-and-his-Bernie-Award-Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

Published

4 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Mekhrubon-Sanginov-whose-Heroism-Nearly-Proved-Fatal-Returns-on-Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.

He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.

Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.

“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.

“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)

Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.

During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”

He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.

He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.

On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.

Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.

If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!