The Hauser Report: Notes from Madison Square Garden

On December 10, Top Rank promoted a seven-bout card at Madison Square Garden designed to showcase and develop some of its young fighters. The one I was most interested in watching was Jared Anderson.

There’s an allure to heavyweights. But in today’s world of careful matchmaking and hype, it can be difficult to know who’s the real deal and who isn’t. Also, there’s the caveat from Mark Kriegel who wrote, “The typical American heavyweight has become a guy who already has failed as a ballplayer. Boxing was not his first sport. He has been recycled.”

Anderson has a solid amateur background, is listed as 6-feet-4-inches tall, and weighs 240 pounds. He turned pro in 2019 and entered the ring on December 10 with twelve knockouts in twelve fights against opponents whose records were better than they were. He sits patiently through interviews and answers questions politely but has a guarded (sometimes condescending) attitude toward the media. “They’ll pick you apart,” he says, adding, “They don’t understand what it is to be a fighter because they’ve never experienced it.”

“There’s nothing good about getting hit in the face,” Anderson noted during a sitdown before the final pre-fight press conference. “But that’s how I provide for myself and my family.”

One presumes that punching someone else in the face is more to his liking.

Anderson had fought at Madison Square Garden once before, knocking out Oleksandr Teslenko in the second round in December 2021. This time, the opponent was Jerry Forrest in Jared’s first scheduled ten-round fight.

Forrest (who entered the ring with a 26-5, 20 KOs record) had two losses and two draws in his most recent four outings. But he’d been stopped only once (by Gerald Washington nine years ago); fought to a draw against Mike Hunter and Zhilei Zhang, and went the distance in losing to Kubrat Pulev, Carlos Takam, and Jermaine Franklin.

In other words, Forrest wasn’t going to beat Anderson (a 20-to-1 favorite). But he was viewed as a credible measuring stick for Jared’s power and staying power given the fact that Anderson had gone past the second round only three times in his career and never past round six.

At the final pre-fight press conference, Anderson was the epitome of style. He wore charcoal-gray slacks, a light-gray sport jacket, black turtleneck, and black loafers accessorized by a white-gold Cuban necklace embedded with diamond fragments and Cartier sunglasses with buffalo-horn temples. The glasses are listed on Cartier’s website for more than $3,000.

For his ring walk – in a markedly contrasting image – Jared wore a blue Santa Claus suit with white faux fur and a mask from “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” His trunks were blue with white faux fur and cut in a manner that would have done Hector Camacho proud.

All of that was irrelevant once the fight began.

Forrest came out firing in round one and Anderson fired back. Before long, Forrest was pinned in a corner, taking a hellacious beating. He simply had nothing to keep Anderson off. Jared threw more than a hundred punches in round one, most of them “power” punches in the truest sense of the word. And he mixed them well, going to the head and body with brutal efficiency. There were no knockdowns, but it warranted being scored a 10-8 stanza. After more of the same in round two, referee David Fields stopped the slaughter at the one-minute-34-second mark.

Forrest is a journeyman nearing the end of his run. But Anderson handled him the way a legitimate prospect should and then some.

Boxing’s elite heavyweights are getting on in years. Deontay Wilder is 37, Oleksandr Usyk 35, Tyson Fury 34, and Anthony Joshua 33. At age 23, Anderson represents the next generation. How will his skills evolve? How will he respond when his will is truly tested? It will be a while before we know the answers to those questions. Meanwhile, he’s a formidable prospect and entertaining to watch.

The main event matched Teofimo Lopez (17-1, 13 KOs) against Sandor Martin (40-2, 13 KOs) in a ten-round junior-welterweight bout.

Two years ago, Lopez was riding high as the conqueror of Vasyl Lomachenko and boxing’s undisputed lightweight champion. Then he was outpointed by George Kambosos, moved up to 140 pounds, and scored a victory over unheralded Pedro Campa that did nothing to improve his resume.

Originally, Lopez had been slated to fight the shopworn Jose Pedraza on December 10. But Pedraza fell out and Martin stepped into the void. Sandor’s main claim to fame was that he’d won an upset majority decision over Mikey Garcia fourteen months ago. Teofimo was a 7-to-1 betting favorite.

It was a disappointing fight. Lopez spent most of the bout ineffectively stalking Martin. He had no respect for Sandor’s punching power (or lack thereof) but couldn’t hit him cleanly. Martin played almost non-stop defense out of a southpaw stance, circling away and throwing counterpunches with an occasional left-hand lead. It’s hard to look good against an opponent like that, and Lopez didn’t. Martin’s footwork was too good and his hands were too quick for Teofimo.

Near the end of round one, Martin’s nose was broken by a clash of heads. That was one of the few times that Lopez landed effectively (if not legally) during the fight. In round two, Sandor scored a flash knockdown with a check right hook. He appeared to score a second knockdown with a cuffing right hand in round seven, but referee Ricky Gonzalez ruled it a slip.

Martin gave Lopez a lesson in defensive boxing. But he didn’t do enough offensively on a round-by-round basis to win the fight. Guido Cavalleri scored the bout 95-94 for Martin. Max DeLuca had it 96-93 in Lopez’s favor. That left the deciding vote to Pasquale Procopio who ruled 97-92 for Lopez.

I thought Lopez won by a slim margin. I also thought that Procopio was wide of the mark. Pasquale’s record suggests a tendency to lean in favor of the house fighter. By way of example, he shockingly had Anthony Joshua ahead of Andy Ruiz by a 57-56 margin when Ruiz knocked out Joshua in their 2019 bout at Madison Square Garden.

After Lopez-Martin, Teofimo sought to excuse his performance against a fighter he’d been expected to dominate with the complaint, “It’s so hard to fight somebody like this when they’re running the whole time. This is not how we perform.”

But as a reader emailed me one day after the fight, “Domination means many things in the ring, but it does not mean complaining about the style of your opponent. A great fighter would have found a way to turn the fight into a brawl if that was what Teo wanted. Dominate and make it your fight.”

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There was talk in the press section on Saturday night about Kyrie Irving – the immensely talented guard for the Brooklyn Nets who recently served an eight-game suspension after voicing support on social media for a blatantly antisemitic documentary that, among other lies, claims the Holocaust never occurred and that its history has been fabricated as part of a conspiracy by Jews to conceal and protect their status and power.

Irving has courted ridicule in the past for his declaration that the Earth is flat and missed much of the 2021-2022 NBA season as a consequence of refusing to be vaccinated. His latest misstep is far more pernicious.

Kyrie’s defenders maintain that he should be free to speak his mind with regard to social issues without fear of reprisal. This raises the question of how these same defenders would feel if Tom Brady (or another superstar) tweeted support for a film that claims slavery never existed and that the history of slavery has been fabricated as part of a conspiracy by Black Americans to advance their own interests.

My guess is that they would call for a severe sanction – and appropriately so.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – In the Inner Sanctum: Behind the Scenes at Big Fights – 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, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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