Zhilei Zhang and Deontay Wilder Meet at the Final Crossroads

Published

11 months ago

May 28, 2024

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Six feet six inches and 290lbs are our favourite statistics when it comes to Big Bang Zhang, out of Zhoukou, China. Here are two more: he’s forty-one years old and he has lost two of his last four, including a woeful shortfall against a rejuvenated Joseph Parker in the Kingdom Arena, Riyadh, in March.

Kingdom Arena, Riyadh is the site too of his next fight this weekend against Deontay Wilder as a major part of the Five vs Five card Matchroom and Queensberry promotions have developed. Our favourite Wilder stat: forty-three wins, forty-two knockouts. More pertinent though are his record for the 2020s, which stands at 1-3, and his thirty-eight years of age.

This is not just a crossroads fight; it is the place where someone finds out they’re no longer on the list to receive the riches of Riyadh – when someone finds out their time on the island of relevancy is over. It is impossible to imagine Wilder remaining a part of the title picture after posting his fourth loss in five matches in his thirty-eighth year; it is impossible, too, to imagine Zhang remaining a problem anyone on the world scene needs if he loses his third fight in five with his forty-second birthday in sight. For someone, the dance will be over this Saturday night – but who?

In trying to determine what Deontay Wilder has left, the most important statistic of all is 12-0. That was what my scorecard read after the twelve humiliating rounds Wilder posted against Joseph Parker last December. Wilder entered the ring dry and tight, and I expected him to move into the contest as he warmed up and loosened up, but the pattern of the fight did not change. A word here for Parker, a gentleman despite the questionable friendships he keeps: his boxing was excellent. Asked about Wilder’s performance afterwards he said that he felt that “inactivity has played a part” but that “sticking to the plan Andy Lee laid out” got him there. All of this sounds right to me. Parker was extremely disciplined and it was exactly what was required. He feinted Wilder with his left and sought the right hand, arraying himself against his foe’s greatest weakness, his balance. An ill-balanced fighter, Wilder was kept under disorganised control by a sparse but disciplined offence.

With that important point out of the way, we need to return to Wilder’s absolute inability to change the pattern of the fight. I do not think he won a single minute of a single round, he was as conclusively beaten by Parker as it is possible for a fighter to be on points, although it should be noted that two judges were generous enough to find two rounds for him (the third saw it as I did). Competence was the word that most expresses what undid him – competence in footwork, diligence in offence. Wilder looked, at times, a novice before Parker’s double-jab, travelling all the way to the ropes to escape a much shorter punch. His own jab, of course, was compromised by his gunslinger’s stance. Wilder often throws the punch from low down, lengthening the time the punch is in the air, shortening the required reaction time of the opponent. Parker was unamused by this punch, parrying it off his gloves or slipping outside the range – Wilder found himself falling over his front foot when what he wanted was to be on his back foot and the panic a miss could induce in him was apparent by the fourth, impeding his organisation still further. Wilder spent so much time leaning away, shuffling back, his offence was banished.

Allowing that the best answer is “a little of both” we must ask whether this was something that Parker did to Wilder or something that Wilder did to himself – or worse, is this who Wilder is now?

Wilder’s excuses for his awful performance against Parker were varied; some days it was the long flight to Riyadh; sometimes it was the improper use of a cryo-chamber. These are far from the strangest excuses that Wilder has produced for a loss, as Sweet Science readers well know. His more recent public musings have seemed even more cryptic, including an apparent obsession with his own death, not always entirely negative in the sense that he is curious about the afterlife, but still an interesting train of thought for an elite athlete. Through the gaps in the stream of consciousness though comes the things we want to hear. “The flame, the fire, has been relit inside of me. I fell out of love with boxing but I’m in love with it again…I went back to being a student of the game.”

More, Wilder always lost rounds – against the last southpaw opponent he met, Luis Ortiz, he lost almost every round he did not score a knockdown in, but this lack of ring generalship is counterbalanced by his overwhelming power. He never landed that shot on Parker because Parker, with the help of coach Andy Lee, decoded him. Wilder has clearly slipped, but it may be his general lack of form and balance, though savagely exposed on this occasion, means he is still a good chunk of what he used to be – and just because Parker decoded him, doesn’t mean Zhang can.

Zhang looked lethal decoding his own Waterloo in smashing Joe Joyce to pieces twice. Slow-moving, big punching, and apparently lacking all survival instincts against a big-hitting southpaw, Joyce was perfect for Zhang, but the Chinese looked wonderful getting the big Brit out of there. Zhang, too, was badly exposed against Joseph Parker, but their fight was not nearly so one-sided. In fact, Zhang swept Parker in the early rounds, culminating in a third-round knockdown that put him firmly in charge of the fight. Zhang’s enormity was a part of the equation. He forced Parker out of ring centre (which Parker dominated against Wilder) simply by existing. Zhang two-stepped to the outside to land single shots while Parker struggled a bit with his backfoot range. Andy Lee noticed this and his advice to Parker after round two, felt, at the time, inadequate but he was quite correct: “He’s gonna slow, and slow, and slow.”

A Scene-from-Zhang-vs-Parker

What Lee recognised was Zhang’s stamina issue would be the definitive factor in the fight, in combination, of course, with Parker’s own excellent engine. The later the fight goes, the more Zhang feels those 270-290lbs. The disaster that was the second half of his fight against Jermaine Franklin victim Jerry Forrest is most illustrative of this. I thought Zhang was lucky to get away with a draw in that fight and he dropped every one of the final five rounds for me. Stories abound that Zhang’s kidneys went into failure in that fight, some claim, and one that has never been verified. Big Bang now apparently consumes two gallons of water every day. How then, to explain his second half collapse against Filip Hrgovic? Zhang did well through the early part of that fight but dropped a razor-thin decision after losing five of the final six on my card. Parker, though, seems the final proof of Zhang’s greatest weakness – dropped in the third, Parker came over his front foot in the fourth, showed head movement, and suddenly had a tiring Zhang circling. Brave, committed, Parker is all of that and Zhang did not like it in the late parts of the fight. He won eighth with another bomb, but apart from that he won not a single round on my card post the third. Zhang is a molasses in elite terms in the championship rounds. He seems to have no strategy to win rounds late against world-class opposition; rather he plods, and waits for the 180 seconds to pass, relying upon his size and chin to keep him out of serious trouble.

What a wonderful mesh this produces for the massive confrontation between Zhang and Wilder this Saturday night. Early, Zhang’s naturalised pressure will make a reluctant Wilder uncertain about throwing as Zhang does his best work. As the rounds grind by, Zhang will start to blow and the opportunity for Wilder to take over will present itself. Here, we will really find out what it is that Wilder has left. A handful of punches is enough to win rounds against Zhang in the second half of the fight, and I mean that literally. But Wilder threw fewer than fifteen punches per round in five of the twelve rounds he boxed against Parker, an incredible absence of activity – and he lands a low percentage anyway much of the time. He was essentially in hiding against Parker – Zhang hits harder and is more menacing generally. Does Wilder really have “the fire” back in his belly, and has he really fallen in love with boxing once again? If so, still the division’s best puncher, he will have no problems landing late on ranked heavyweight boxing’s juiciest target. If not, we could witness some of the dullest rounds boxing can deliver, a gun-shy former predator doing his best to avoid contact with a blown forty-one year old.

In boxing though, the round is always scored to someone. The prediction here is difficult because it is about how the two fighter’s malfunctions will intertwine, not their strengths. The bookies, rarely wrong, have made Zhang the favourite and that makes the most sense – his performance against Parker was less abhorrent than Wilder’s. But were Zhang’s struggles perhaps more fundamental? I think that even the Wilder we saw against Parker would have got moving against the iceberg that is late-fight Zhang and he still carries bazookas. It is not lost on me that Wilder’s busiest rounds against Parker were late in the fight when he came alive to the disaster that was unfolding. Wilder still has enough pride to be desperate whereas Zhang will find himself too exhausted for his desperation to matter.

Untidy, ugly, wildly entertaining rounds may be the fight fan’s reward for sticking with the turgid middle part of this crossroads combat.

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

Published

3 hours 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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Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

Published

3 days ago

April 12, 2025

David A. Avila

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In the showdown between undefeated welterweight champions Jaron “Boots Ennis walked away with the victory by technical knockout over Eamantis Stanionis and the WBA and IBF titles on Saturday.

No doubt. Ennis was the superior fighter.

“He’s a great fighter. He’s a good guy,” said Ennis.

Philadelphia’s Ennis (34-0, 30 KOs) faced Lithuania’s Stanionis (15-1, 10 KOs) at demonstrated an overpowering southpaw and orthodox attack in front of a sold-out crowd at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It might have been confusing but whether he was in a southpaw stance or not Ennis busted the body with power shots and jabbed away in a withering pace in the first two rounds.

Stanionis looked surprised when his counter shots seemed impotent.

In the third round the Lithuanian fighter who trains at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, began using a rocket jab to gain some semblance of control. Then he launched lead rights to the jaw of Ennis. Though Stanionis connected solidly, the Philly fighter was still standing and seemingly unfazed by the blows.

That was a bad sign for Stanionis.

Ennis returned to his lightning jabs and blows to the body and Stanionis continued his marauding style like a Sherman Tank looking to eventually run over his foe. He just couldn’t muster enough firepower.

In the fifth round Stanionis opened up with a powerful body attack and seemed to have Ennis in retreat. But the Philadelphia fighter opened up with a speedy combination that ended with blood dripping from the nose of Stanionis.

It was not looking optimistic for the Lithuanian fighter who had never lost.

Stanionis opened up the sixth round with a three-punch combination and Ennis met him with a combination of his own. Stanionis was suddenly in retreat and Ennis chased him like a leopard pouncing on prey. A lightning five-punch combination that included four consecutive uppercuts delivered Stanionis to the floor for the count. He got up and survived the rest of the round.

After returning shakily to his corner, the trainer whispered to him and then told the referee that they had surrendered.

Ennis jumped in happiness and now holds the WBA and IBF welterweight titles.

“I felt like I was getting in my groove. I had a dream I got a stoppage just like this,” said Ennis.

Stanionis looked like he could continue, but perhaps it was a wise move by his trainer. The Lithuanian fighter’s wife is expecting their first child at any moment.

Meanwhile, Ennis finally proved the expectations of greatness by experts. It was a thorough display of superiority over a very good champion.

“The biggest part was being myself and having a live body in front of me,” said Ennis. “I’m just getting started.”

Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn was jubilant over the performance of the Philadelphia fighter.

“What a wonderful humble man. This is one of the finest fighters today. By far the best fighter in the division,” said Hearn. “You are witnessing true greatness.”

Other Bouts

Former featherweight world champion Raymond Ford (17-1-1, 8 KOs) showed that moving up in weight would not be a problem even against the rugged and taller Thomas Mattice (22-5-1, 17 KOs) in winning by a convincing unanimous decision.

The quicksilver southpaw Ford ravaged Mattice in the first round then basically cruised the remaining nine rounds like a jackhammer set on automatic. Four-punch combinations pummeled Mattice but never put him down.

“He was a smart veteran. He could take a hit,” said Ford.

Still, there was no doubt on who won the super featherweight contest. After 10 rounds all three judges gave Ford every round and scored it 100-90 for the New Jersey fighter who formerly held the WBA featherweight title which was wrested from him by Nick Ball.

Shakhram Giyasov (17-0, 10 KOs) made good on a promise to his departed daughter by knocking out Argentina’s Franco Ocampo (17-3, 8 KOs) in their welterweight battle.

Giyasov floored Ocampo in the first round with an overhand right but the Argentine fighter was able to recover and fight on for several more rounds.

In the fourth frame, Giyasov launched a lead right to the liver and collapsed Ocampo with the body shot for the count of 10 at 1:57 of the fourth round.

“I had a very hard camp because I lost my daughter,” Giyasov explained. “I promised I would be world champion.”

In his second pro fight Omari Jones (2-0) needed only seconds to disable William Jackson (13-6-2) with a counter right to the body for a knockout win. The former Olympic medalist was looking for rounds but reacted to his opponent’s actions.

“He was a veteran he came out strong,” said Jones who won a bronze medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics. “But I just stayed tight and I looked for the shot and I landed it.”

After a feint, Jackson attacked and was countered by a right to the rib cage and down he went for the count at 1:40 of the first round in the welterweight contest.

Photo credit: Matchroom

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Boxing Notes and Nuggets from Thomas Hauser

Published

3 days ago

April 12, 2025

Thomas Hauser

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Jack Dillon’s name doesn’t resonate with boxing fans today. But he was important in his time.

Ernest Coulter Price was born in 1891 and turned pro at age seventeen. According to legend, when asked his name by the referee before his first fight, he answered “Sidney Dillon” (the name of a racehorse in a stable where he’d worked). The referee misunderstood him, announced him as “Jack Dillon,” and Jack Dillon was his fighting name from then on.

Dillon stood a shade over 5 feet 7 inches tall. He earned renown as a small light-heavyweight, was known as “Jack the Giant Killer,” and compiled a 94-9-16 (65 KOs, 2 KOs by) ring record not counting an estimated 125 “newspaper decisions.” He defeated Battling Levinsky in 1914 to claim the world 175-pound championship and lost the title to Levinsky two years later. He fought Levinsky ten times, winning six with two losses and two draws.

Dillon was always willing to go in tough. But he fought too long, got hit too often, and drank too much. He died at age 51 in a state psychiatric hospital in Florida.

Jack Dillon by Mark Allen Baker (McFarland & Company) tracks Dillon’s life and ring career from beginning to end. To his credit, Baker has done an enormous amount of research. But his writing style is heavy. He falls short of recreating a long-ago era when boxing captivated America. The character portraits are one-dimensional. And the book reads as though, after studying hundreds if not thousands of newspaper clippings, Baker decided to insert every bit of information he found. There are descriptions of fight after fight after fight after fight after fight after fight. After a while, most of the fights no longer seem to matter.

And when Baker tries to liven things up, he lapses into hyperbole (e.g. writing of Dillon, “From the opening gong, it was clear to every opponent, regardless of size or skill, that they were destined for destruction . . . When he looked up [toward the heavyweight division], there wasn’t a heavyweight alive who didn’t fear for his life.”)

I also had the feeling that, to prove the case for Dillon’s greatness, Baker massages the facts a bit. For example, lobbying for the idea that Dillon was deserving of a shot at heavyweight champion Jess Willard, Baker argues that several fighters had beaten much larger men to claim the heavyweight crown. He then cites James Corbett’s victory over John L. Sullivan (a supposed 35-pound weight differential), Bob Fitzsimmons’s triumph over Corbett (26 pounds), and Tommy Burns over Marvin Hart (45 pounds).

The problem is, those numbers are suspect. Adam Pollack (a leading authority on boxing’s early gloved champions) says that there were no official weigh-ins for heavyweight fights way back when. Weights were sometimes announced by a fighter’s camp in the lead-in to a fight or otherwise shared with the public. But the numbers were often inaccurate.

Both The Ring Record Book and Pollack’s research point to far smaller weight differentials than the numbers put forth by Baker. That’s important because it goes to the issue of scholarship. And yes; when Jack Dempsey brutalized Jess Willard, he was outweighed by at least fifty pounds. But Jack Dillon was no Jack Dempsey.

Still, even with its flaws, Jack Dillon performs a service in that it brings attention to a forgotten fighter and puts a great deal of information at the fingertips of readers who want to know more about “Jack the Giant Killer.”

* **

Jody Heaps spent three decades as a senior creative director and executive producer for boxing-related projects at Showtime. In recent years, he has redirected his attention to projects of his own. His two most recent efforts are worthy of mention.

One Night in the Many Deaths of Sonny Liston is a 40-minute play that imagines the last night of Liston’s life in December 1970 and his death at the hands of a “statuesque, provocatively-dressed, Las Vegas showgirl in her late-twenties” who visits his home unannounced with a “gift” from Sonny’s mob associates – a small packet of adulterated heroin that by design will kill him.

The writing flows exceptionally well. The play humanizes Liston in a credible way. And the tension builds nicely. But the narrative strains credibility with the plot twist that Liston accepts his death as inevitable and shoots up knowing that the heroin will kill him.

More recently, Heaps has written, directed, and co-produced a ten-minute play titled A Mop of Angels that can be seen in its entirety on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hImmcG2pivM

Rich O’Brien is wonderful in the role of Spencer Olrich (an aging actor who has been replaced as the star of a successful action-movie franchise) and is now reading a play for minimal pay in a ninety-nine-seat black box theater in the middle of nowhere.

Or is that really who Olrich is?

Two themes – aging and the magic of theatre – are intertwined throughout the narrative. Olrich’s thoughts include:

* “Old age is the most surprising event in a man’s life. And the cruelest. I thought that getting old would take a whole lot longer than it did. And the worst part, you never see it coming until it’s too late.”

* “Nobody knows what happens after we exit this mortal coil. And nobody’s in any hurry to find out. But that fear of the unknown; that’s not the scariest part. You know what is? Being forgotten. You may die when your heart stops beating. But you cease to exist when nobody remembers your name.”

* “This school board contends that theater is a luxury. And you’re right. Theater doesn’t stop wars or end famines or cure deadly diseases. Yet a life without theater would be no life at all. For theater is where we celebrate the joy of our humanity and mourn the pain of our existence; where we pretend to be others only to discover ourselves. To you school board members in your suits and your ties, theater may be a luxury. But for those of us who dream, theater is no more of a luxury than wings are to an angel.”

Theatrical writing is an often-thankless endeavor. But Heaps loves doing it and says, “I’ve gotten better as I keep plugging away at it. At least, I hope I have.”

Does Jody miss boxing?

“Not at all,” he answers. “I always had mixed feelings about boxing. I still enjoy conversations about it from time to time. But do I follow it? No.”

* **

If you’ve been to one final pre-fight press conference, you’ve been to all of them. That’s a slight exaggeration. But the comments do tend to be predictable. Herewith, an example of what you’ll hear from the promoter and main event fighters.

The promoter will speak longer than all of the fighters on the card combined. His opening remarks will be along the lines of:

“I’d like to thank [name of site] for hosting this great event. There’s a saying in boxing that you haven’t fought until you’ve fought at [repeat name of site]. I’d also like to give a shout out to [names of sponsors]. And most importantly, thank you to [insert name of entity or individual funding the fight card]. We have a massive stacked event on tap. This might be the best fight card in the history of [repeat name of site]. [Name of main event A-side fighter] is the fastest-rising star in boxing today. But he’ll be facing a huge challenge when he looks across the ring on [insert date] and sees [name of B-side opponent] standing across from him.”

Toward the end of the proceedings after almost everyone in attendance has lost interest, the B-side fighter in the main event will speak:

“What’s up, everybody. I’d like to thank [name of promoter], [name of network],[my whole team], and God. I had a great training camp. Fighting [name of opponent] at [name of site] is an opportunity I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’ve been through some things that wasn’t all my fault. But this is a dream come true. It means everything to me. From the time I was a little boy, I dreamed of seeing my face on posters. Not in the post office like my uncle was, but for a fight like this. I’m in the best career of my shape. Or whatever. You know what I mean. I’m looking forward to putting on a show and winning this fight for my fans. [Name of opponent] is a good fighter. I take my hat off to him. But I’m going to shock the world on Saturday night.”

And last, a word from the main event A-side fighter:

“I got nothing to say today. I’m tired of being disrespected by [names of offending entities]. I don’t listen to what people say about me. But what they say about me really pisses me off. You can all suck my [body part of choice].”

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is a personal memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

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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