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Avila Perspective, Chap. 232: Fundora – Mendoza and More on a Deep Saturday of Boxing

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Is the West Coast the best coast?

Perhaps, perhaps not.

But a stacked deck of Western U.S. boxing saturates this weekend. It’s not a surprise when you realize Southern California alone has more than 100 boxing gyms.

That’s no exaggeration.

Undefeated super welterweight Sebastian Fundora (20-0-1, 13 KOs) meets Brian Mendoza (21-2, 15 KOs) for the number one spot on the WBC rankings on Saturday April 8, at Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles. Showtime will televise the TGB Promotions card.

The super tall Fundora has a towering six-inch height advantage. Thus, his nickname the “Towering Inferno.”

But height does not equate to wins or else NBA players would venture into the sport and dominate. “The chin does not discriminate” to borrow a quote from now retired knockout artist Randall Bailey.

So far, Fundora’s chin has held up and despite some rough encounters with contenders like Jamontay Clark and Erickson Lubin, he’s been able to remain unbeaten.

“It feels great to be fighting tough guys like Mendoza and that’s what I want to do again and again. I love fighting in front of these fans in Southern California,” said Fundora.

Fundora and Mendoza will be trading blows where many classic wars took place. Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez, Timothy Bradley and Ruslan Provodnikov, and Paul Williams and Antonio Margarito clashed here back when it was called the Home Depot Center.

New Mexico’s Mendoza has been training in Las Vegas and is primed to meet the tall challenge of Fundora, especially after defeating ex-world champion Jeison Rosario by knockout last November in Minnesota.

“In my last performance I was a big underdog and everyone saw the result. You can expect the same type of performance and result on Saturday night,” said Mendoza.

There are no sure things in boxing. Anything can happen from a broken clavicle to a sprained ankle.

Also on the extensive fight card Brandun Lee fights Pedro Campa, while Devon Alexander, Chris Arreola, Adrian Corona and female contender Gabriela Fundora, the sister of Sebastian Fundora, participate too.

Texas

Undefeated Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez (17-0, 11 KOs) is dropping down to his natural weight to meet Mexico’s Cristian Gonzalez (15-1, 5 KOs) for the vacant WBO flyweight world title on Saturday April 8, at San Antonio, Texas. DAZN will stream the Matchroom Boxing card live.

Bam

“Fights in San Antonio are just different for me,” said Rodriguez, a San Antonio native. “The last one against Sor Rungvisai in San Antonio was electric and exciting, so to get another opportunity to fight for another world title there in front of my fans is amazing.”

Bam Rodriguez already had the WBC super flyweight title but opted to move down to 112 pounds to capture a second division world title. His brother Joshua “el Profesor” Franco holds the WBA super flyweight title.

Gonzalez has a height advantage and despite lack of firepower, he’s managed to rise to the top of the rankings in the flyweight division.

“Gonzalez is ranked #2, he’s tall, he’s lengthy and he likes to move a lot. So, we’ve been working on how I will close the distance and cut off the ring,” said Rodriguez, 23, who trains in Riverside, Calif. with Robert Garcia. “I’ve been sparring taller guys so on April 8, there’s not going to be a problem for me to go in there and show what we’ve been working on.”

The co-main event is a super bantamweight world title clash that may steal the show.

WBA and IBF titlist Murodjon Akhmadaliev (11-0, 8 KOs) defends both titles against the Philippines Marlon Tapales (36-3, 19 KOs) in a battle between southpaw sluggers.

Akhmadaliev trains with brothers Joel Diaz and Antonio Diaz in Coachella. He’s made the transition from amateur star to pro fighter smoothly.

It’s a loaded card that also features former champion Jesse Magdaleno versus Raymond Ford; plus Israil Madrimov, Thomas Mattice, Ricardo Lopez and others.

Top Rank

Ultra talented Shakur Stevenson (19-0, 9 KOs) returns to his hometown Newark, New Jersey and meets Japan’s undefeated Shuichiro Yoshino (16-0, 12 KOs) in a lightweight contest set for 12 rounds at the Prudential Center on Saturday April 8. ESPN will televise the Top Rank card.

Stevenson, a two-division world titlist at the featherweight and super featherweight division, now fights at lightweight and gets a taste of the 135-pound fighters.

It gets tougher with lightweights usually as tall as six-feet in height.

Also, on the card, Keyshawn Davis a very talented lightweight who displayed great skills in the Tokyo Olympics in winning a silver medal. He should have won gold but that’s amateur boxing for you.

Davis might be as talented as Stevenson.

The Olympian faces Anthony Yigit who was stopped by Rolly Romero when they fought.

In an interesting heavyweight match, undefeated Jared “Big Baby” Anderson (13-0, 13 KOs) clashes with Dominican George Arias (18-0, 7 KOs) who has derailed seven undefeated heavyweights in his 18 fights. Will Anderson be a victim or the guy who stops Arias?

Anderson, 23, has a big height and weight advantage but nothing is guaranteed.

Fights to Watch

Sat. ESPN+ 4 p.m. Shakur Stevenson (19-0) vs Shuichiro Yoshino (16-0).

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Jesse Rodriguez (17-0) vs Cristian Gonzalez (15-1); Murodjon Akhmadaliev (11-0) vs Marlon Tapales (36-3).

Sat, Showtime 7 p.m. Sebastian Fundora (20-0-1) vs Brian Mendoza (21-2).

Fundora/Mendoza photo credit: Esther Lin / SHOWTIME

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

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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).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

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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 11th 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.

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

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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.

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