Boxing Writer Mike Marley Was a Colorful Character

Published

2 years ago

March 6, 2022

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Mike Marley wore many hats during a career in boxing that began when he was 13 years old. At various times, Marley was a PR man, a facilitator in all of its various permutations, a production assistant for Howard Cosell, and a boxing writer for several newspapers, most notably the New York Post. He was also as colorful as many of the sporting characters that he wrote about, a fellow who made friends and enemies in about equal measure. His death this past week from complications of Parkinson’s left his friends ruing the loss of a great raconteur.

As a boy growing up in Boston, Marley became infatuated with the boxer then known as Cassius Clay. He started a fan club for the up-and-coming heavyweight, the spawn of which was an annual newsletter he sold for $5.

Marley got to meet his hero when Ali came to Boston in the spring of 1965 to finish up his training for his rematch with Sonny Liston slated for May 25 at Boston Garden. Marley tracked Ali down to the hotel where he was staying and became a regular visitor. Ali took a shine to the 14-year-old fanboy and young Michael became something of a mascot.

Ali-Liston II would be kicked out of Boston — the District Attorney was sending a message to Liston’s underworld associates – and re-positioned in the neighboring state of Maine where it played out on the originally scheduled date at an armory in Lewiston. Mike Marley was there as a guest of Ali and he would also have a choice seat at Ali-Frazier I, the Fight of the Century in the new Madison Square Garden.

During his teen years, Marley hooked up with Sam Silverman. Best remembered for promoting the early fights of Rocky Marciano, “Subway Sam” was Mr. Boxing in New England. With an office in Chelsea and an annex in the trunk of his car, Silverman promoted big-budget and low-budget shows, but mostly the latter, during a career that was in its fifth decade when he died in a car crash in 1977.

Marley designed little programs for Silverman’s little shows and delivered envelopes to sports editors, honorariums much appreciated, especially by scribes toiling in the hinterland.

Mike Marley ventured a long way from home to attend college. He chose Nevada’s flagship university in Reno because of the school’s prominent boxing team.

Mike wasn’t too bad with the mitts. Competing mostly at 165 pounds, he was purportedly 7-2-4 in inter-collegiate competitions, a record highlighted by a first-round knockout of an opponent from Stanford.

Marley wasn’t completely done with fisticuffing when he left college. In 1991, he scuffled with Patrick Flannery, the manager of Hector “Macho” Camacho, in the lobby of Reno’s Clarion Hotel. The fracas, which started around 3:00 in the morning, was a nasty little spat. Marley emerged with a swollen forehead and a busted lip. Flannery suffered a broken kneecap.

The scuffle had its roots in a story that Marley wrote for the New York Post following Camacho’s loss to Greg Haugen in their first meeting. Marley blamed Flannery. “If he’s a manager,” he wrote, “then I am an astronaut.” But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

At the University of Nevada, Marley wrote a weekly column called “Campus Chatter” for the school newspaper, which led to work with the Nevada State Journal, a paper with a small circulation, and then to the regionally transcendent Reno Gazette-Journal. Like most sportswriters, he initially covered high school sports and then transitioned to covering sports of national interest; in his case, mostly boxing.

From the Gazette-Journal, Marley moved to the Las Vegas Sun, the city’s afternoon paper (remember afternoon papers?) where he scored a big coup, by his recollection, when he followed up on a tip that led him to a greasy spoon in Flagstaff, Arizona where Roberto Duran’s long-lost biological father was working as a short-order cook. A former seaman, the man was revealed to be of Mexican descent which increased Roberto’s popularity 10-fold in the Latino community. (For the record, this story actually originated in a Flagstaff paper. In the pre-internet days, news didn’t circulate as freely.)

From the Sun, Marley moved to the New York Post where he had two stints as the boxing writer. He first left the paper to serve as an executive producer with ABC’s “SportsBeat.” The show, which won an Emmy Award, was hosted by Howard Cosell who was famed for his work on Monday Night Football and for his interviews with Marley’s hero Muhammad Ali.

Marley left the paper the second time to work for Don King. His business card may have identified him as King’s Public Relations Director but in the company of old friends he snarked to a different title: Minister of Propaganda.

This reporter recalls seeing Marley standing alongside his boss at a boxing press conference where he was reduced to brushing dandruff from the shoulder of King’s one-of-a-kind denim jacket. Why he was there was a mystery as no one ever got a word in edgewise when King had the floor.

The scene didn’t redound well to Marley who had written a lot of negative stuff about King, but perhaps he and the flamboyant promoter were destined to join forces. As boxing writer Robert Mladinich noted, they had a lot in common: “unlimited energy, tremendous egos, and chutzpah.” (Don King wasn’t an easy man to work for. He fired many people only to rehire them the next day. But King paid well and a man caught up in his vortex knew he was alive.)

During his days with the Post, Marley somehow found time to earn a law degree. He graduated from Fordham University Law School at age 40 and became a criminal defense attorney. But he never wandered far from boxing.

He took to managing and co-managing fighters, the list of which included Shannon Briggs, Terry Norris, Derrell Coley, and Julian Letterlough. He also wangled a job as a consultant to California’s Sycuan Indian tribe which ran occasional boxing shows at their casino near San Diego. And he continued to write, his articles appearing on various boxing web sites.

Mike Marley was at his best, it says here, when he was with the New York Post. The tabloid with its lurid front-page headlines that were calculated to boost sales at newsstands (remember newsstands?) was the perfect fit for him and he amped up his game, his stories becoming breezier and more jaundiced.

Marley was part of Muhammad Ali’s inner circle before he was old enough to drive, but in time he came to see the Ali circus in a sobering light. Check out this description of Muhammad Ali’s entourage from a 1979 Post story that was picked up by the Atlanta Constitution:

They moved from city to city, from continent to continent, like a plundering herd. They were boxing’s version of the Foreign Legion.

They came in two categories – those with a real or imagined function, and the hustlers. From Malaysia to Houston, from Zaire to Lake Tahoe, they went first class. Their brush with fame was purely guilt by association. They ran up outrageous tabs and phone bills and charged gifts to Ali. They flimflammed merchants from Manila to Lewiston.

Good stuff.

Mike Marley was 71 years old when he passed away on March 2 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He led a very interesting life. May he rest in peace.

—

Arne K. Lang’s latest book, titled “George Dixon, Terry McGovern and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910,” will shortly roll off the press at McFarland’s. The book may be pre-ordered direct from the publisher (click here) or via Amazon.

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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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