Lionell Thompson and the Afflictions of a ‘B-side’ Fighter

Published

2 years ago

April 13, 2023

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“Lionell ‘Lonnie B’ Thompson is a former professional boxer…” So reads the opening sentence of a blurb about him that popped up on the internet.

Except it’s wrong. Thompson isn’t a former boxer – his career isn’t dead, just dormant. It’s been dormant for more than three years, a prolonged gap in his boxing timeline that actually isn’t all that unusual for a “B-side” fighter. And the professional boxing career of Lionell “Lonnie B” Thompson has been quintessentially B-side.

Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, Thompson was a five-time New York State Golden Gloves champion and participated in the 2008 Olympic trials. He won his first 12 pro fights before being rudely introduced to the politics of boxing. It happened in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, where Thompson was matched against a local fighter, Nicholson Poulard.

When the bell sounded ending the tenth and final round, Poulard’s half-brother, Jean Pascal, entered the ring to congratulate Thompson who took the gesture as a sign that he had won the fight, a foregone conclusion in his mind. Alas, two of the judges differed and Thompson lost a split decision. (Ringside reporter Hans Olson and veteran Quebec judge Pasquale Procopio both had it 97-93 for Thompson.)

Four months later, Thompson found himself in the ring against Sergey Kovalev. The Russian was then in his prime, undefeated and rocketing toward a #2 ranking on the pound-for-pound list of The Ring magazine.

Thompson had no excuses after Kovalev bombed him out in the third round, but it’s worth noting that he took the fight on nine days notice when former title-holder Gabriel Campillo, Sergey’s original opponent, suffered a back injury in training.

Thompson rebounded with three wins, most notably a lopsided 10-round decision over 21-1 Ryan Coyne in Atlantic City, before misfortune struck again. His bout on HBO with Serbia’s then-undefeated “Hot Rod” Kalajdzic, truncated at the last minute from 10 to eight rounds, resulted in another narrow setback. In this bout, Lionell had a point deducted for losing his mouthpiece, without which the contest would have ended in a draw.

Thompson was inactive for the next 17 months, during which he moved to Las Vegas where he found work as a security guard and caught the eye of the big cheese while staying in shape at the Mayweather Boxing Club. He was 6-2 for Mayweather’s Money Team Promotions, advancing his record to 22-5. The last of those 22 wins came on Sept. 28, 2019, in what currently stands as his final fight.

On that date, he scored a big upset, winning a comprehensive 10-round decision over former world title-holder Jose Uzcategui.

Thompson had been a light heavyweight his entire career going back to his amateur days. For this fight, he scaled down to super middleweight (168). He says he shed 30 pounds in a few weeks without being weight-drained after accepting the match, a remarkable accomplishment for a man in his mid-30s.

Thompson says his purse for Uzcategui was $39,000. After the fight, he says, he spurned a $100,000 offer to fight WBC super middleweight champion David Benavidez.

“It wasn’t a fair offer,” he says, “not with a world title on the line. When all was said and done, I might have walked away with $50,000. My life has been hard since birth. I didn’t have a strong family. I have paid my dues and I deserve to walk away from this sport with some money.”

Indeed, his life has been hard. He spent most of his middle school years and high school years in a foster home. “It was the worst time in my life, like being incarcerated,” he says, while acknowledging that it was a blessing in one regard. Down the street was the New Mt. Ararat Temple of Prayer, a nondenominational church where Lionell found a sanctuary.

“B-side” fighters often need to work as a sparring partner to keep the wolf from the door while they wait for the phone to ring. Thompson is no exception. He has sparred more than a hundred rounds with Artur Beterbiev, and a fellow who touches gloves with Beterbiev, even in a simulated fight, certainly earns every penny he makes. “He’s a beast,” says Thompson of the Montreal-based Russian who owns three pieces of the world light heavyweight title and has won all 19 of his pro fights by knockout. “There are no words to describe how hard he hit me.”

Lionell Thompson can currently be found at the DLX boxing gym in Las Vegas where he helps manage the place. Caleb Plant trained there for his recent match with the aforementioned Benavidez and there’s a great irony in that.

Both fought Jose Uzcategui. Thompson had an easier go of it than Plant who toughed out a well-earned decision in a 12-round fight. And for Plant, who purportedly had the advantage of an 8-week camp, it opened the door to eventual seven-figure purses.

Although a few succeeded in shattering the glass ceiling and achieved great wealth (think Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Floyd Mayweather Jr), the deck has been stacked against black boxers since the very dawn of the Queensberry Era when John L. Sullivan drew the color line so that he wouldn’t be embarrassed by Peter Jackson. If Lionell Thompson had been active in the 1940s, he would have fit right in with the Murderers’ Row, the term that Budd Schulberg coined to describe a group of outstanding black boxers – (e.g., Charley Burley, Lloyd Marshall, Holman Williams) – who were too good for their own good and were thus never tendered a title shot.

Lionell doesn’t resent Caleb Plant for raking in the big bucks. To the contrary, he is happy for him. “I love Caleb,” he says, “I consider him a friend.” It is the boxing establishment, not any specific person, that has wronged him, making him, by his reckoning, the most avoided boxer in his sport.

In his spare time, Thompson reads the Bible and watches “The Equalizer,” the 2014 original starring Denzel Washington as a retired government assassin turned vigilante. Lionell identifies with Washington’s character Robert McCall, a “psychopathic sweetheart” who wipes out the bad guys as he pursues justice for the exploited.

Thompson’s attachment to the “The Equalizer” is less an infatuation than a full-blown obsession. He’s watched the movie on DVD more than a thousand times. It has cost him at least one girlfriend. He has never been married.

“I don’t believe there is a super middleweight out there who can beat me,” he says. “I know that with the right guidance I can become a world champion late this year or maybe next year. My faith is strong and I believe God will bring justice to my situation.”

That may be a pipe dream. On the day that we chatted with him, he allowed that he weighed 197 pounds. He isn’t ranked in the top 10 at 168 by any of the relevant sanctioning bodies and at age 37 it figures that his peak years are behind him. But if he never captures a world title, he can take solace in knowing that he had a career that harked to the Murderers’ Row and that puts him in good company.

Arne K. Lang’s third boxing book, titled “George Dixon, Terry McGovern and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910,” rolled off the press in September. Published by McFarland, the book can be ordered directly from the publisher or via Amazon.

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

Published

5 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

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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

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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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 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.

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

Published

3 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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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