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Looking Back at Willie Pep Through the Keyhole of a Stormy Night in the Orange Bowl

The Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, was built to house college football games, notably the post-season game that shares the name of the stadium. In 1982 it was the site of a storied fight, the first meeting between Aaron Pryor and Alexis Arguello.
The attendance, 23,800, didn’t quite measure up to the promoters’ expectations, but the event was a success, both commercially and artistically. The same could not be said of the previous title fight staged here, the Feb. 24, 1948 meeting between featherweight champion Willie Pep and Humberto Sierra. From an organizational standpoint, professional boxing, more so than any other sport, is bedeviled by Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And here was another classic example.
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Willie Pep, born Guglielmo Papaleo to Italian immigrants in Middletown, Connecticut, ranks third on many all-time pound-for-pound lists, trailing only Sugar Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong. His career arc bears an uncanny resemblance to the original Sugar Ray.
Heading into his Orange Bowl match with Humberto Sierra, Pep sported a record of 122-1-1 and was riding a 61-fight winning streak. His only defeat had come against a bigger man, Sammy Angott, a former world lightweight champion. Making his won-loss record more astounding, 14 of those 122 wins came after Pep was seriously injured in a plane crash. He suffered a broken leg and two chipped vertebrae in the crash of a DC-3 airliner in which three people were killed.
In 1948, Willie Pep was the unified featherweight champion, having knocked out Sal Bartolo to win the National Boxing Association diadem after previously holding the New York version of the title. He and Humberto Sierra had fought once before. On July 23, 1947, on Pep’s turf in Hartford, Pep boxed Sierra’s ears off, winning a 10-round decision. But then Sierra went and pulled a shocker, upsetting top-rated Sandy Saddler in Minneapolis, leapfrogging Saddler in the pecking order.
Supposedly 23 years old, two years younger than Pep, Sierra was born in Havana but had taken up residence in Miami where a young boxing promoter from the Northeast, Chris Dundee, had established a beachhead. He was tall for the weight class; at five-foot-nine he was four inches taller than Pep.
The promoter of the event was Clarence “Kay” Kantrowitz who hailed from Hartford where Willie Pep made his home. In the Hartford papers, Kantrowitz was identified as a film distributor, operator of a midget auto track, and a behind-the-scenes political operator.
Kantrowitz had never promoted a boxing match before, but on paper he had good instincts. Miami was a sporting town during the winter racing season when the Miami Beach hotels were crawling with wiseguys. The fight was potted between the two richest races of the Hialeah meet, the Widener Handicap and the Flamingo Stakes, at a time when horseracing was poised to surpass baseball as America’s leading spectator sport. The locals were expected to rally behind Sierra and it undoubtedly wasn’t lost on Kantrowitz that the Orange Bowl was situated in the Little Havana section of Miami.
Staging a boxing event in an outdoor arena is always risky because of the possibility of adverse weather. The days preceding the fight were sunny, seemingly a good omen, but as folks in south Florida will tell you, the weather down here can change on a dime.
The sky turned gray in the late afternoon and a light drizzle began falling as folks entered the arena. The drizzle turned into a hard shower during the semi-windup, a match between heavyweights Ollie Tandberg and Walter Hafer. In the fourth round of this contest, a 10-round snoozer, there was an unscheduled intermission when the flash bulb on a photographer’s camera exploded sending shards of glass into the ring. That was the only memorable moment.
During the Pep-Sierra fight, there were times when the hard shower was something more; a torrential downpour. In an action scene that ran in many newspapers, one can see a ringsider crouching under a chair that he had turned upside-down to serve as a makeshift umbrella.
Pep took control of the fight early, knocking Sierra to the canvas in the second round. Sierra wasn’t badly hurt – he was up in a jiff – but he was on the canvas again in round nine, compliments of a clean left hook, and saved by the bell later in the round when Pep caught him against the ropes with a vicious right uppercut. Sierra tottered back to his corner and the fight ended 22 seconds into the next frame when Pep knocked him down again with a scorching right hook. Referee Jack Dempsey (yes, that Jack Dempsey) waived it off without starting a count as Pep sloshed to a neutral corner.
During the previous year, the Orange Bowl was expanded to 58,750. Pep-Sierra II drew an announced crowd of 7,757. (One guesses that the crowd would have been somewhat larger if Miami’s darker-skinned citizens were free to sit where they pleased, but this was the Deep South and blacks were confined to a separate section of the grandstand.)
Clarence Kantrowitz reportedly needed $93,000 to break even. With no TV (there were very few sets in use), the fight generated little auxiliary income save for a stipend from the radio station in Hartford that carried the fight using local on-air talent. In a nutshell, the first-time promoter lost his shirt and he wouldn’t be the only one left out to dry. As widely reported, whatever money he earned after expenses would be donated to the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund.
Kantrowitz actually did write a check to the charity in the amount of $3,250 (10 percent of Pep’s guaranteed purse), but the check, said New York Daily Mirror sports editor Dan Parker, the treasurer of the fund, “bounced higher than a kid’s kite on a windy day.”
Willie Pep lost his title later that year to four-time rival Sandy Saddler, regained it from Saddler in 1949 with a brilliant display of boxing, only to lose it again to Saddler in 1950 when he retired on his stool after seven rounds with a dislocated shoulder in a fight that he was winning. In retirement, Pep stayed in the game as a referee and a deputy boxing inspector for the state of Connecticut. Humberto Sierra returned to Havana and died in obscurity. Heading into his title fight with Pep, the Miami papers listed his record as 75-3. Boxrec tells a different tale. It shows that Sierra was stopped eight times after his second encounter with Pep and left the sport with a record of 49-24-5. Clarence Kantrowitz suffered a fatal heart attack in 1961, passing away at age 57.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)

Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)
Boxing news has taken a weird arc.
For the past 20 years or so, social media has replaced newspapers, radio and television as a source for boxing news.
And one thing is certain:
You cannot truly rely on many social media accounts to be accurate. Unless they are connected to actual reputable journalists. There are not that many.
Claims of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Jake Paul reaching an agreement to fight each other this year were rampant on social media sites. No contracts had been signed between the two parties, but several social media accounts claimed the fight was happening. One claimed: “it was official.”
It is not happening as of Friday Feb. 7. 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
A statement by Most Valuable Promotions was sent Friday Feb. 7, to various boxing publications that emphasized the Canelo-Paul fight is not official.
“MVP was deep in negotiations for a blockbuster fight between Jake Paul and Canelo Alvarez on Cinco de Mayo weekend in Las Vegas…This situation is a reminder not to believe everything you read.”
The past few days numerous social media accounts were posting erroneously that Paul and Canelo Alvarez were fighting on a certain date and place. It was jumped on by other social media accounts like Piranhas and gobbled up and spit out as actual verified news.
Fake news is happening more and more. I hate that term but it’s becoming more common.
Many accounts on social media sites are not trained journalists. They don’t understand that being the first to spit out news is not as important as being accurate.
Also, there is no such thing as using the term “according to sources” without naming the source. Who made the claim?
Third, verification of a fight comes from the promoters. They are the most reliable methods of verifying a pending fight. It’s their job. Don’t rely on a fighter, a trainer or somebody’s friend. Call the promoter involved and they will verify.
Otherwise, it’s just rumor and exaggeration.
There are social media accounts with trained journalists. Find out which social media accounts are connected to actual news media sources and established by trained journalists. A real journalist verifies a story before it is published.
R.I.P. Michael Katz
Recently, a highly respected journalist, Michael Katz, passed away. He wrote for various newspapers including the New York Times and for various boxing web sites such as Maxboxing.com and a few others.
Katz covered prize fights beginning in 1968 with the heavyweight fight between Floyd Patterson and Jimmy Ellis. Read the full story in www.TheSweetscience.com by Arne Lang.
I first came across Katz probably in 1994 when I began covering boxing events as a writer for the L.A .Times. During media press conferences Katz was one of the more prominent writers and very outspoken.
The New York-bred Katz could tell you stories about certain eras in boxing. I happened to overhear one or two while sitting around a dinner buffet in the media rooms in Las Vegas. He always had interesting things to say.
Boxing writers come in waves during each era. Today this new era of boxing writers has dwindled to almost nothing. Writing has been overtaken by boxing videographers. The problem is during an actual fight, videographers cannot record the fight itself. The media companies sponsoring the fight cards don’t allow it. So, after a fight is completed, very few descriptions of a fight exist. Only interviews.
Written journalism is shrinking due to the lack of newspapers, magazines and periodicals. The only sure way to know what happened is by seeing the fight on tape. You won’t see many stories on a bulletin board at a boxing gym because there are fewer boxing writers today. The written history of a championship fight has shrunk to almost nothing.
Katz was one of the superb writers from the 1960s to the 2000s. It’s a shrinking base that gets smaller every day. It’s a dying breed but there are still some remaining.
Fights in SoCal
All Star Boxing returns with two female fights on the card on Saturday Feb. 8, at Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif.
Stephanie Simon (1-0) and Archana Sharma (3-2) are scheduled to headline the boxing card in a super lightweight main event. Others on the boxing event include Ricardo De La Torre, Bryan Albarran and Jose Mancilla to name a few.
Doors open at 6 p.m. No one under 14 will be admitted. For more information call (323) 816-6200.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 10:30 a.m. Derek Chisora (35-13) vs Otto Wallin (27-2).
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Biyarslanov TKOed Mimoune at Montreal; Jalolov Conspicuous by his Absence

It was a cold and snowy night in Montreal, depressing the turnout at the Montreal Casino where Camille Estephan’s Eye of the Tiger Promotions presented a six-fight card that aired in the U.S. on ESPN+.
The match-up that had the most intrigue, although not the main event and not expected to be remotely competitive, centered around heavyweight Bakhodir Jalolov who would be returning to the professional ranks after an absence of almost 14 months during which he fattened his extraordinary amateur profile. But the Montreal Commission nixed the match, ostensibly because Jalolov took sick after the weigh-in.
Main Event
The main event was a 10-round junior welterweight contest between well-acquainted southpaws Arthur Biyarslanov (pictured) and Mohamed Mimoune. The Toronto-based, Russian-born Biyarslanov, nicknamed the Chechen Wolf, had no trouble with his 37-year-old French opponent, taking Mimoune out in the second round.
Mimoune did not appear to be badly hurt after Biyarslanov knocked him to the canvas, but he had no antidote when Biyarslanov swarmed after him. With nothing come back Biyarslanov’s way, the referee sensibly waived it off. The official time was 2:16 of round two.
Biyarslanov (18-0, 15 KOs) looks like he can make some noise in the talent-rich 140-pound division. Mimoune, who had been stopped five times previously, declined to 24-7.
Co-Feature
Albert Ramirez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan, ranked in the Top Five by all four relevant sanctioning bodies, moved a step closer to a title fight with a third-round stoppage of Marco Calic.
As an amateur, Ramirez, who improved to 20-0 (17 KOs), defeated Cuban stalwarts Erislandy Savon and Julio Cesar La Cruz in 5-round fights. Tonight, he put his opponent away with a fusillade of punches. After rising from a knockdown, Calic got a brief respite when Ramirez was warned for an illegal punch behind the head, but Cacic’s body language informed us that the end was near.
The official time was 2:10 of round three. A 37-year-old Croatian making his North American debut, Calic lost for the second time in 17 starts.
More
In a match-up between former Olympians contested at the catch-weight of 178 pounds, Montreal-based Mehmet Unal, who represented Turkey in the 2016 Games, scored a third-round stoppage of Ezequiel Maderna. The final punch was a looping right hand that knocked Maderna off his pins, leading to what some would argue was a quick stoppage. The official time was 1:41 of round three.
It was the second knockdown scored by Unal, the first coming in the previous round, a knockdown that was more of a push. But Maderna was holding his own in what was an entertaining fight for as long as it lasted. Unal, although rough-around-the-edges, is undefeated (12-0, 10 KOs) as a pro. Maderna, a 38-year-old Argentine, saw his ledger dip to 31-14.
Fast rising welterweight Christopher Guerrero scored the best win of his career with a fourth-round stoppage of Swiss journeyman Dennis Dauti. A two-time Canadian amateur champion, born in Mexico, Guerrero channeled Julio Cesar Chavez and ended the bout with a left hook to the body. Dauti made it to his feet although he was in obvious pain. Guerreo then tossed him to the canvas (officially a slip) and the referee waived it off before Guerrero (13-0, 8 KOs) had the opportunity to land another punch. The 31-year-old Dauti (25-6-2) hadn’t previously been stopped.
Super middleweight Moreno Fendero who has drawn comparisons with stablemate Christian Mbilli, had an easy workout with Edison Demaj, stopping the German-Albanian trial horse in the third round.
The 25-year-old Moreno, a former member of the French Army, scored three knockdowns before the match was halted at the 1:36 mark of the third round. The final knockdown was a looping right hand that landed high on Demaj’s temple. He beat the count, but the referee waived the match off with the approval of Demaj’s corner. Fendero improved to 9-0 (7 KOs). The overmatched Demaj falls to 13-4-1.
In the TV opener, lightweight Avery Martin-Duval, a local product, advanced to 13-0-1 (7) with an 8-round unanimous decision over French import Keshan Koaly (6-1-2) The scores were 77-74 and 77-73 twice
From Nice with roots in the French territory of Guadalupe, Koaly knocked Martin-Duval to his knees in the second frame with a jab to the midsection. Two rounds later, the local lad landed the best punch of the fight, staggering Koaly with a counter right hand that immediately caused a purplish welt to develop under his right eye. From that point on, Martin-Duval controlled the action.
Upsets are extremely rare on Eye of the Tiger events. Tonight was no exception.
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Bakhodir Jalolov Returns on Thursday in Another Disgraceful Mismatch

How good is Bakhodir Jalolov? Some would argue that in terms of pure talent, the six-foot-seven southpaw from Uzbekistan who has knocked out all 14 of his opponents since turning pro, is better than any heavyweight you can name. Others say that this can’t possibly be true or his braintrust wouldn’t keep feeding him junk food. Jalolov has been brought along as gingerly as Christopher Lovejoy who was exposed as a fraud after running up a skein of 19 straight fast knockouts,
One thing that’s indisputable is that Jalolov was one of the best amateurs to come down the pike in recent memory. A three-time Olympian and two-time gold medalist, Jalolov won 58 of his last 59 amateur bouts. The exception was a match in which he did not compete which translated into a win by walkover for his opponent, countryman Lazizbek Mullojonov.
The circumstances are vague. Was Jalolov a no-show because of an injury or illness or a technicality? Amateur boxing, save in a few places or in an Olympic year, is the quintessential niche sport. The mainstream media does not cover it.
What we do know, thanks to boxrec, is that Jalolov caught up with Mullojonov in May of last year in the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk and won a split decision. And Mollojonov was no slouch. He too won a gold medal at the Paris Games, winning the heavyweight division to give the powerful Uzbekistan contingent the championship in the two heaviest weight classes.
Jalolov, whose late father was a champion free-style wrestler, has answered the bell as a pro for only 35 rounds. The Belgian-Congolese campaigner Jack Mulowayi came closest to taking the big Uzbek the distance, lasting into the eighth round of an 8-round fight. But when Jalolov closed the show, he did it with a highlight reel knockout, knocking Mulowayi into dreamland with a vicious left hook.
The KO was reminiscent of Jalolov’s most talked-about win as an amateur, his first-round blast-out of Richard Torrez Jr at a tournament in Ekaterinburg, Russia, in 2019. Torrez, knocked out cold with a left hook, left the ring on a stretcher and was removed to a hospital for evaluation.
This was the first AIBA-sanctioned international tournament in which pros were allowed to compete and WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman was incensed, calling the match-up “criminal” in a tweet that was widely circulated. (Jalolov then had six pro fights under his belt.) They would meet again in the finals of the Tokyo Olympiad with the Uzbek winning a unanimous decision.
Perhaps there will be a third meeting down the road. When Jared Anderson was roughed-up and stopped by Martin Bakole, Torrez Jr (currently 12-0, 11 KOs) vaulted ahead of him on the list of the top home-grown American heavyweights. But Torrez Jr, a short-armed heavyweight who overcomes his physical limitations with a windmill offense, would be a heavy underdog should they ever meet again.
Bakhodir Jalolov’s last bout before heading off to Paris was against the obscure South African Chris Thompson. His match on Thursday at the Montreal Casino in Montreal pits him against an obscure 33-year-old Frenchman, David Spilmont.
Spilmont’s last two opponents were the same guy, an undersized Lithuanian slug who has lost 36 of his 41 documented fights. It seems almost inevitable that Spilmont will suffer the same fate as Thompson who was KOed in the first round.
There’s talk that Jalolov doesn’t really care how far he advances at the professional level; that he has his sights set on the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles where he would have an opportunity to become only the fourth boxer to win three Olympic gold medals, joining the immortal Teofilo Stevenson, Hungarian legend Laszlo Papp, and Cuban standout Felix Savon. Were he to accomplish the hat trick, they would build monuments to him in Uzbekistan. But, if that is his mindset, he’s skating on thin ice. There’s no guarantee that boxing will be on the docket at the Los Angeles Games and, if so, the powers-that-be may choose to roll back the calendar to the days when the competition was off-limits to anyone with professional experience.
While it’s true that Jalolov needs to work off some rust, a pox on promoter Camille Estephan and his enabler, the Quebec Boxing Commission, for not dredging up a more credible opponent than the grossly overmatched David Spilmont.
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Jalolov vs. Spilmont is ostensibly the co-feature. The main event is a 10-round junior welterweight clash between Movladdin “Arthur” Biyarslanov (17-0, 14 KOs) and Spilmont stablemate Mohamed Mimoune (24-6, 5 KOs). Undefeated light heavyweights Albert Ramirez and Mehmet Unal will appear in separate bouts on the undercard. The Feb. 6 event, currently consisting of seven bouts, will air in the U.S. on ESPN+ starting at 6:30 p.m. ET / 3:30 p.m. PT.
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