Nontshinga vs Suganob is Worth Tracking Down This Weekend

Published

2 years ago

June 28, 2023

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“Sivenathi is supposed to beat Suganob,” according to South African boxing kingpin Andile Sidinile. “Suganob has no power to scare off Sivenathi. He’s just a good fighter.”

This is as succinct a summary of this weekend’s superb clash between elite 108lb contenders Sivenathi Nontshinga (11-0), out of South Africa, and Filipino Regie Suganob (13-0) as can be made. Nontshinga, ranked #5, has the makings of a special fighter. This Sunday, on home soil in East London, SA, he will make the first defence of a strap he won in the hostile territory of Mexico against Hector Flores Calixto, via decision. Aged just twenty-four, “The Special One” surprised in this fight, his coming of age, in choosing war over crafty boxing. Styled from the footwork up to a ramrod jab, he stopped throwing that punch in the fourth, a 2022 round of the year contender, arguably exceeded in some senses by the fifth before he and Calixto took turns brutalising each other in the sixth. Nontshinga received a complete gut, chin and stamina check all in one brutal Mexican evening.

Blood drenched even the ringside paperwork by the end of the fight; Nontshinga had his hand raised on a split. I saw the South African’s superior work edging him home by a narrow margin over the Mexican’s exhausted volume, but a card for Calixto would not have been a robbery. Right-handed quality in the early part of the fight is what brought him the decision on my card and perhaps he should be thankful to have been treated so fairly so far from home.

Pitching the Calixto win is key to understanding Nontshinga, who, after all, was taking a big step up in a difficult learning fight. It is a fact, however, that Calixto was stopped in ten by journeyman flyweight Mario Gutierrez earlier this year. It could be that Nontshinga brutalised the best out of Calixto, such was the violence of that encounter, but it could be that Nontshinga’s punches have been overestimated by the weaker company he kept before that step up. The punches look the part, certainly, but power can be difficult to appraise without the competition to provide the test. Enter Regie Suganob, who is actively looking for a rerun of the Nontshinga-Calixto war.

Manager Floriezyl Podot has repeated often in the build-up that he hopes Nontshinga doesn’t “run” while mysteriously referencing “two areas” they feel they can exploit. Goading the man who splattered ringsiders with Calixto’s blood is a brave strategy indeed, but Suganob is not a man unaccustomed to overcoming the odds.

Suganob was little more than a handy undefeated local in his elimination match with more colourful countryman Mark Vicelles, but it was clear from the very first that this was going to be something different. Vicelles won that first round, but Suganob demonstrated three fascinating traits – a skill at countering the Vicelles jab; a nice counter left hook; and most of all, a watchfulness, a stillness and composure that allowed him to make use of these. This last should be noted because if Suganob is to defeat Nontshinga that patience in reading is going to be the key. It breathes life into a foraging, improvised style.

In the fourth round of his fight with Vicelles, Suganob added a straight-right to his hook, and countered his bigger opponent to the canvas at which point he assumed control of both the round and the fight. By the sixth the fight was a technical mismatch. Suganob was landing lead right hands before a left hook finally finishing the combination on another right-hand, outrageous combination-punching against a favoured fighter but simply put, Suganob saw and read his man before punishing him accordingly. It took half of the scheduled twelve for him to unpick the opposition’s style and then correctly identify the punches that would most punish him. This is not the work of a 13-0 combat athlete.

But nor does Nontshinga box like an 11-0 combat athlete. There are, however, certain shortfalls in amongst his speed, fleet-footwork and apparent power that might make him vulnerable to an ad-libbed strategy built from a technically sure base. Nontshinga’s jab is a hurtful, well-formed punch but he does not use it with the variety of a veteran. Nor does Suganob, but the important difference here is that Suganob specialises in countering this punch. Suganob is no more proven against quality opposition, or quality jabs, than Nontshinga, but Nontshinga lost his jab in the Calixto win, too. This may have been a matter of choice rather than a forced adaptation, but I do feel that Nontshinga’s jab has been predictable and that might play right into the left-hook/straight right combination punching of Suganob. He might be able to time Nontshinga’s speed, and his jab, both.

“I don’t underestimate him, I respect him as a boxer,” Nontshinga has said of Suganob. “But we’re going to win this fight by knockout.”

I liked reading this. This, in combination with Podot’s jibe about Nontshinga “running” makes me wonder if perhaps we won’t see a re-run of Nontshinga’s last, thrilling fight, although it should be noted that brawling is not Suganob’s primary style, either. It is more likely that Suganob wants Nontshinga attacking because it gives him more opportunities to score high-class counter combos for points. It would be unusual and delightful both if Suganob elected to plant his feet and duke it out but this fight doesn’t need early drama to develop into a classic. Disputed early rounds could bait a war out of these two men in the second half of the fight and calling it would be difficult, not despite their inexperience but because of it. There is no way to know how Nontshinga would react to being out-sniped, and no way to know how Suganob would respond to the attack Nontshinga laid down upon Calixto.

In the final analysis, Nontshinga should probably be favoured but I think Suganob is a very live dog. Catching this one may be difficult. It is listed on the DAZN slate with first bell around 9 am ET/2 pm BST, but there remains some question about whether the streaming platform will pick it up at this late date. Personally, I am just happy to see it going ahead given how close it seemed to being cancelled. Already postponed once from mid-June, reportedly for South African broadcast purposes, it was alleged that the fight was in jeopardy due to money the IBF had not been paid by Rumble Africa Promotions who did work for Nontshinga. He has since signed with Matchroom.

If this one drops to politics it will be the third such fight to evaporate this year already, and a tragedy. I hesitate to suggest this will be another fight of the year contender, but it is also true that I slept on Nontshinga-Calixto. Whether on DAZN or another platform – and there are usually late carriers for these more minor title fights — this one will be worth tracking down.

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

Published

15 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

3 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

4 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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