The Inoue and Serrano Championship Watches

Published

11 months ago

June 7, 2024

The-Inoue-and-Serrano-Championship-Warches

Now and then, a feel-good story of particular interest surfaces in boxing. When Naoya Inoue and Amanda Serrano were presented with championship watches by the Boxing Writers Association of America on June 6 to honor their designation as the BWAA’s male and female Fighters of the Year for 2023, it continued a long history of championship adornments. And it was an important marker on the journey of a man named Bobby Ermankhah.

Boxing’s first championship belt belonged to Tom Cribb, the champion of England, who was given a lion-skin sash with silver claws after defeating Tom Molineaux of the United States in 1811. Seven decades later, Richard K. Fox (publisher of the National Police Gazette) introduced boxing belts to the United States.

Fox was engaged in a bitter feud with John L. Sullivan. When Paddy Ryan knocked out Joe Goss in 1880, the publisher presented “his” champion with a jewel-studded belt, Sullivan’s followers were so outraged that they raised $10,000 to give “their” champion a gold-plated diamond-studded prize bearing the words, “Presented to the champion of champions by the People of the United States.” Legend has it that, when John L. received his belt, he put it on and loudly proclaimed, “Fox’s is like a dog collar compared to mine.”

In 1922, Ring magazine began publication and entered the belt trade. Jack Dempsey was the first recipient of a Ring belt.

Craig Hamilton (the foremost boxing memorabilia dealer in the United States) continues the narrative, recounting, “Championship rings came into boxing with Muhammad Ali. I don’t remember seeing any before that, and relatively few fighters have had them since. As for watches, it was not uncommon for gold pocket watches to be given to fighters in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The earliest that I remember was a gold Tiffany pocket watch given to John L. Sullivan in 1907 by his fans in Boston long after Sullivan had retired from boxing. Most often, the watches were given to fighters by their manager or promoter. I know that Tommy Burns got one. And Tex Rickard gave one to Jack Dempsey around the time of the Carpentier fight. Nat Fleischer (founder of The Ring) had a collection of 93 watches that had been previously owned by fighters, But most of those were personal, not presentation, watches.”

Enter Bobby Ermankhah, the driving force behind the Inoue and Serrano championship watches.

Ermankhah was born in Tehran in 1971. His father was a high-ranking Army official during the Shah’s regime. Babak (as Bobby was known then), his older sister, and their parents lived well. Then, in 1979, the Shah was overthrown.

“After the revolution,” Ermankhah recounts, “everything changed for the country and, obviously, for my family. We went from having everything to the fear of having nothing. My father was put in prison. Eventually, he was released but he wasn’t allowed to leave Iran.”

“In 1980,” Bobby continues, “the Iraq-Iran War began. You were not drafted into the Army until you were eighteen. But after the age of fourteen, you couldn’t leave the country. My mother was against my serving in the Army and made plans for my sister and me to leave the country. We loved Iran but we didn’t like the new government. The way I was brought up; I believe in God; I believe in doing the right thing. But I don’t think you need religion to know right from wrong. For some people, it helps. But when a small group of people tell everyone else what to believe, that’s a problem for me.”

At age eleven, Ermankhah left Iran with his sister (who was three years older than he was). They spent four months in Turkey, four months in Switzerland, and eleven months in Italy. When Bobby was twelve, they arrived in the United States. After six months in New York, they got their own apartment.

“We were children, but we looked after each other the whole time,” Bobby says. “We were raised to be independent. My mother has visited us here in the United States since then. But I’ve never been back to Iran and my father isn’t allowed to leave the country, so I haven’t seen him in more than forty years.”

Ermankhah studied electrical engineering at Chelsea Vocational High School and graduated in 1990 as class valedictorian. After that, he worked as an electrician with several local unions and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But the electrical work dried up and he got a job as a teller for CitiBank.

“My sister had married by then,” Bobby says, continuing the saga. “Her husband had a small jewelry store in Flushing (an area of Queens, which is one of New York’s five boroughs). I’d saved some money, and I opened in Flushing a small Greek restaurant with my brother-in-law called The Greek Specialties. It did not do well. It lasted about a year-and-a-half, and I lost all the money I’d saved since I was fourteen years old. After that, I started working at my brother-in-law’s store, which was called King’s Jewelry and was also in Flushing. That was in 1994. I’d always loved watches. I bought a Rolex Datejust Twotone for $2,500. Everyone made fun of me. Who will go to Flushing to buy a Rolex? But I added some diamonds for $500 and sold it for $5,000. Then, with the $5,000, I bought two more Rolexes and sold them.”

In 1999, Ermankhah opened his own business, selling watches in a small booth in the back of an exchange at 45 West 47th Street in Manhattan. In 2005, he founded Azad.

The name “Azad” translates to “freedom” in Persian. The debut Azad collection was launched in 2008. In Ermankhah’s words, “An Azad watch is a luxury item and a statement. I start with the design and go from there. Any car can get you from one place to another, but some people like a different look. Most companies repeat what they’ve already done before and copy what everyone else is doing. Our customers want something different.”

But there were problems. In 2008, the year of Azad’s launch, the economy tanked. “It was a very difficult time for us,” Bobby acknowledges. “We didn’t sell a thing the first six months. But over time, the pace picked up.”

Azad now has eighteen different basic models that have been released in editions of twenty to five hundred pieces. Each model can be made with dozens of variables (e.g. different stones, colors, metals, bands, etc). The watches are assembled in New York. The parts come from Switzerland, Japan, and Germany, except for the cases, which are made in Hong Kong. There are ten to fifteen different suppliers of parts for each watch, which makes them harder to counterfeit. The key corporate players are vice president Cedric King and creative director Anna Zakrepine.

Meanwhile, Ermankhah is still at 45 West 47th Street in the heart of New York’s diamond district. But the Azad booth is now in the front of the store, encompassing four-and-a-half showcases and the front window. And the company recently opened a 2,000-square-foot showroom and factory on the third floor of the same building.

Insofar as the sweet science is concerned, Azad has been involved with boxing for years. It has had sponsorship deals with Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center. The first fighters to wear Azad patches on their trunks were Paulie Malignaggi, Paul Williams, Chris Arreola, and Kendall Holt. Since then, it has had relationships, among others, with Gennady Golovkin, Sergio Martinez, Jermain Taylor, Andre Berto, Danny Garcia, Deontay Wilder, and John Duddy.

“Boxers work hard to get what they get,” Ermankhah says. “They deserve recognition, but only a few champions are recognized on the street. You can’t walk around wearing your championship belt to show that you’re a champion. But you can always wear a watch.”

That brings us to the championship watches presented to Naoya Inoue and Amanda Serrano at the June 6 BWAA awards dinner. The design and red-and-white color motif of Inoue’s watch are evocative of the Japanese flag. It’s inner movements are visible from both the front and back. The stainless steel case is encrusted with more than two hundred diamonds. On its back, the watch reads, “Naoya Inoue, 2023 BWAA Fighter of the Year.”

Serrano’s watch is from Azad’s prestige Zada collection and, like Inoue’s, has a stainless steel case encrusted with diamonds.

“I’d love to make a one-of-a-kind watch for every BWAA Fighter of the Year in the future,” Ermankhah says. “It would be an honor.”

Is this the start of a new tradition?

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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Thomas Hauser

Thomas Hauser is the author of 52 books. In 2005, he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, which bestowed the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism upon him. He was the first Internet writer ever to receive that award. In 2019, Hauser was chosen for boxing's highest honor: induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Lennox Lewis has observed, “A hundred years from now, if people want to learn about boxing in this era, they’ll read Thomas Hauser.”

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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Published

2 days ago

May 6, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-(mostly)-Ugly-A-Weeend-Boxing-Recap-and-More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.

In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.

Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.

CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.

****

Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.

Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”

And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.

Joey Archer

Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer

Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.

Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.

Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.

In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.

When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.

Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.

May he rest in peace.

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Bombs Away in Las Vegas where Inoue and Espinoza Scored Smashing Triumphs

Published

4 days ago

May 4, 2025

David A. Avila

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Japan’s Naoya “Monster” Inoue banged it out with Mexico’s Ramon Cardenas, survived an early knockdown and pounded out a stoppage win to retain the undisputed super bantamweight world championship on Sunday.

Japan and Mexico delivered for boxing fans again after American stars failed in back-to-back days.

“By watching tonight’s fight, everyone is well aware that I like to brawl,” Inoue said.

Inoue (30-0, 27 KOs), and Cardenas (26-2, 14 KOs) and his wicked left hook, showed the world and 8,474 fans at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas that prizefighting is about punching, not running.

After massive exposure for three days of fights that began in New York City, then moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then to Nevada, it was the casino capital of the world that delivered what most boxing fans appreciate- pure unadulterated action fights.

Monster Inoue immediately went to work as soon as the opening bell rang with a consistent attack on Cardenas, who very few people knew anything about.

One thing promised by Cardenas’ trainer Joel Diaz was that his fighter “can crack.”

Cardenas proved his trainer’s words truthful when he caught Inoue after a short violent exchange with a short left hook and down went the Japanese champion on his back. The crowd was shocked to its toes.

“I was very surprised,” said Inoue about getting dropped. ““In the first round, I felt I had good distance. It got loose in the second round. From then on, I made sure to not take that punch again.”

Inoue had no trouble getting up, but he did have trouble avoiding some of Cardenas massive blows delivered with evil intentions. Though Inoue did not go down again, a look of total astonishment blanketed his face.

A real fight was happening.

Cardenas, who resembles actor Andy Garcia, was never overly aggressive but kept that left hook of his cocked and ready to launch whenever he saw the moment. There were many moments against the hyper-aggressive Inoue.

Both fighters pack power and both looked to find the right moment. But after Inoue was knocked down by the left hook counter, he discovered a way to eliminate that weapon from Cardenas. Still, the Texas-based fighter had a strong right too.

In the sixth round Inoue opened up with one of his lightning combinations responsible for 10 consecutive knockout wins. Cardenas backed against the ropes and Inoue blasted away with blow after blow. Then suddenly, Cardenas turned Inoue around and had him on the ropes as the Mexican fighter unloaded nasty combinations to the body and head. Fans roared their approval.

“I dreamed about fighting in front of thousands of people in Las Vegas,” said Cardenas. “So, I came to give everything.”

Inoue looked a little surprised and had a slight Mona Lisa grin across his face. In the seventh round, the Japanese four-division world champion seemed ready to attack again full force and launched into the round guns blazing. Cardenas tried to catch Inoue again with counter left hooks but Inoue’s combos rained like deadly hail. Four consecutive rights by Inoue blasted Cardenas almost through the ropes. The referee Tom Taylor ruled it a knockdown. Cardenas beat the count and survived the round.

In the eighth round Inoue looked eager to attack and at the bell launched across the ring and unloaded more blows on Cardenas. A barrage of 14 unanswered blows forced the referee to stop the fight at 45 seconds of round eight for a technical knockout win.

“I knew he was tough,” said Inoue. “Boxing is not that easy.”

Espinoza Wins

WBO featherweight titlist Rafael Espinosa (27-0, 23 KOs) uppercut his way to a knockout win over Edward Vazquez (17-3, 4 KOs) in the seventh round.

“I wanted to fight a game fighter to show what I am capable,” said Espinoza.

Espinosa used the leverage of his six-foot, one-inch height to slice uppercuts under the guard of Vazquez. And when the tall Mexican from Guadalajara targeted the body, it was then that the Texas fighter began to wilt. But he never surrendered.

Though he connected against Espinoza in every round, he was not able to slow down the taller fighter and that allowed the Mexican fighter to unleash a 10-punch barrage including four consecutive uppercuts. The referee stopped the fight at 1:47 of the seventh round.

It was Espinoza’s third title defense.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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Undercard Results and Recaps from the Inoue-Cardenas Show in Las Vegas

Published

4 days ago

May 4, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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The curtain was drawn on a busy boxing weekend tonight at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas where the featured attraction was Japanese superstar Naoya Inoue appearing in his twenty-fifth world title fight.

The top two fights (Inoue vs. Roman Cardenas for the unified 122-pound crown and Rafael Espinoza vs. Edward Vazquez for the WBO world featherweight diadem) aired on the main ESPN platform with the preliminaries streaming on ESPN+.

The finale of the preliminaries was a 10-rounder between welterweights Rohan Polanco and Fabian Maidana. A 2020/21 Olympian for the Dominican Republic, Polanco was a solid favorite and showed why by pitching a shutout, punctuating his triumph by knocking Maidana to his knees late in the final round with a hard punch to the pit of the stomach.

Polanco improved to 16-0 (10). Argentina’s Maidana, the younger brother of former world title-holder Marcos Maidana, fell to 24-4 while maintaining his distinction of never being stopped.

Emiliano Vargas, a rising force in the 140-pound division with the potential to become a crossover star, advanced to 14-0 (12 KOs) with a second-round stoppage Juan Leon. Vargas, who turned 21 last month, is the son of former U.S. Olympian Fernando Vargas who had big money fights with the likes of Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya. Emiliano knocked Leon down hard twice in round two – both the result of right-left combinations — before Robert Hoyle waived it off.

A 28-year-old Spaniard, Leon was 11-2-1 heading in.

In his U.S. debut, 29-year-old Japanese southpaw Mikito Nakano (13-0, 12 KOs) turned in an Inoue-like performance with a fourth-round stoppage of Puerto Rico’s Pedro Medina. Nakano, a featherweight, had Medina on the canvas five times before referee Harvey Dock waived it off at the 1:58 mark of round four. The shell-shocked Medina (16-2) came into the contest riding a 15-fight winning streak.

Lynwood, California junior middleweight Art Barrera Jr, a 19-year-old protégé of Robert Garcia, scored a sixth-round stoppage of Chicago’s Juan Carlos Guerra. There were no knockdowns, but the bout had turned sharply in Barrera’s favor when referee Thomas Taylor intervened. The official time was 1:15 of round six.

Barrera improved to 9-0 (7 KOs). The spunky but outclassed Guerra, who upset Nico Ali Walsh in his previous outing, declined to 6-2-1.

In the lid-lifter, a 10-round featherweight affair, Muskegon Michigan’s Ra’eese Aleem improved to 22-1 (12) with a unanimous decision over LA’s hard-trying Rudy Garcia (13-2-1). The judges had it 99-01, 98-92, and 97-93.

Aleem, 34, was making his second start since June of 2023 when he lost a split decision in Australia to Sam Goodman with a date with Naoya Inoue hanging in the balance.

Check back shortly for David Avila’s recaps of the two world title fights.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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