The Hauser Report: James Earl Jones and More

Published

7 months ago

September 28, 2024

The-Hauser-Report-James-Earl-Jones-and-More

A word of remembrance about James Earl Jones who died on September 9 at age 93.

Born in Mississippi during the height of segregation, raised by his grandmother after being abandoned by his parents, and plagued by a stutter so severe that he often refused to speak when he was young, Jones became one of the great actors of modern times. During a storied career on stage, in movies, and on television, he was honored with an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. He was the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars and Mufasa in The Lion King and known the world over for his iconic intonation “This is CNN.”

“Audiences,” Robert McFadden wrote, “were mesmerized by the voice. It was Lear’s roaring crash into madness, Othello’s sweet balm for Desdemona, Oberon’s last rapture for Titania. He liked to portray kings and generals, garbage men and bricklayers.”

Jones was recognized in theatrical circles as an extraordinary talent for years. But boxing propelled him to mainstream stardom.

In 1968, The Great White Hope opened on Broadway with Jones (6-feet-2-inches tall, 200 pounds) in the role of Jack Jefferson – a character modeled on Jack Johnson. Jones didn’t like boxing. “I’m not and never have been a fan of boxing,” he told me years later. “I had an unfortunate experience at a fight I went to long ago in Spain. A Nigerian fighter was killed in front of my eyes.”

But Jones played the role of Jack Jefferson to perfection and, two years later, reprised the role in the film adaptation. I had the honor of interviewing him when I was researching Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.

“I met Muhammad Ali for the first time backstage after a performance of The Great White Hope, “Jones reminisced. “Ali was still not allowed to fight, and meeting him was exciting, particularly given his response to the play he’d just seen. He said of Johnson, ‛That’s me. You take out the white woman, and that play is about me.’ Then he told me, ‘I want to go on stage and say those lines.’ He was referring to the scene where the Jack Johnson character is in exile in Europe. He’s been reduced to performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to earn a living, and the powers that be keep pursuing him, hoping to get him to agree to a title fight with a prearranged loss. Finally, they talk him into coming back to fight with the idea of turning the crown over to Jess Willard in Cuba. And the character says, ‘Come get me. Here I is!’

“We waited until the audience had left,” Jones continued. “Then Ali went out onto the stage and spoke to an empty theater. ‘Here I is! Here I is!’ He felt those lines expressed his life, and he spoke them with feeling.”

As for Ali’s own acting ability, Jones contemplated Muhammad’s extraordinary charisma and noted, “I wondered at the time, could he translate that into the craft of acting, which is using somebody else’s lines, which is the most difficult thing for any natural performer to do? I never saw him when he played in Buck White, because I was working somewhere else myself. I did see him on television much later in Freedom Road. And I played Malcolm X in two very short scenes in The Greatest, where Ali played himself but was essentially reading someone else’s lines. And what I found was, given his own words he was a great performer. But given somebody else’s words, there was a self-consciousness that he was unable to overcome. So he wasn’t a great craftsman in the art of acting, but that by no means takes away from his accomplishments. Ali represents America to me; power at its best, power well used, because real power is individual power. And each time we reconsider Ali, we realize there’s more to him and more value than we realized before.”

And there was a footnote to it all.

“Ali visited the set at Twentieth Century Fox when we were filming The Great White Hope,” Jones recalled. “We got in the ring together. We were both wearing boxing gloves. The photographers were busy flashing. Muhammad said, ‘Go ahead, hit me as hard as you can.’ Well, I’d played the Jack Johnson character since the play opened on Broadway. I‘d been put through my paces by real boxing trainers. So I gave Muhammad my best left hook. He blocked the blow. And in the process, quite accidentally, he broke my thumb. You know, when a fighter like Ali blocks a punch, the block is devastating in its own power. I felt the pain immediately.”

***

The main event at Madison Square Garden between Sandy Ryan and Mikaela Mayer didn’t start until Saturday morning at 12:45 AM. But it was worth the wait.

Ryan, age 31, came into the fight with a 7-1-1 (3 KOs) record. She won the WBO 147-pound title by decision over Maria Pier Houle last year, kept it on a draw against Jessica McCaskill, and stopped Terri Harper in four rounds this past March.

Mayer, age 34 (and now 20-2 with 5 KOs), once held the WBO 130-pound belt but lost a close decision in a title-unification bout against Alycia Baumgardner two years ago. She has since moved up to welterweight and was narrowly defeated by Natasha Jones in an IBF title fight in January of this year.

An element of bad blood was injected into the proceedings when trainer Kay Koroma (who had previously worked with Mayer) began working with Ryan, leaving Mayer in the hands of Kofi Jantuah. Then, as Team Ryan was leaving its hotel for Madison Square Garden on fight night, an attacker wearing a hoodie splashed Sandy with red paint and escaped in a waiting car with an accomplice.

Ryan was a slight betting favorite. The encounter shaped up as a competitive fight but turned out to be much more than that. It was an exceptionally good, non-stop action battle.

Ryan moved inexorably forward and Mayer couldn’t keep her off. But it wasn’t always effective aggression and Mikaela held her own on the inside. Each woman went effectively to the body which is a weapon often absent from the arsenal in women’s boxing. Both fighters were in good shape. Ryan was physically stronger.

It was a hard fight to score. According to CompuBox (which is an inexact science) Mayer landed 186 punches to Ryan’s 185. All three judges gave rounds eight and ten to Mayer. Those were the only rounds they scored alike.

I thought each woman clearly won three rounds with the other four up for grabs. The judges scored the bout 97-93, 96-94, 95-95 for a majority decision in Mayer’s favor.

A rematch is definitely in order.

***

Question: What do Hall of Fame promoter Bob Arum (who oversaw the fights that stretched from 6:40 on Friday evening till 1:20 on Saturday morning), Mae West, Bobby Fischer, and Barbra Streisand have in common?

Answer: They all went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.

Erasmus was founded in 1786 as a private institution and became part of the New York City public school system in 1896. Arum graduated in 1949 and is one of the school’s many famous alumni.

Erasmus graduates who made a mark in the National Football League include Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman, owner Al Davis, and coach Sam Rutigliano. Jerry Reinsdorf (who owns the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox) and baseball hall of fame pitcher Waite Hoyt went to Erasmus, as did NBA all-star forward and championship coach Billy Cunningham.

Bobby Fischer (arguably the greatest chess player of all time) attended Erasmus. So did former New Jersey governor James Florio and author Mickey Spillane.

Then we come to the world of entertainment. Oscar winner Susan Hayward and opera diva Beverly Sills (whose original name was Belle Miriam Silverman) are on the list of Erasmus attendees. So is Mae West (the quintessential sex symbol of the 1920s and 1930s who at one point was the highest-paid woman in the United States and starred in films opposite Cary Grant).

“I never met Mae West,” Arum says. “But I enjoyed watching her movies; that’s for sure.”

Record company executive Clive Davis (who graduated from Erasmus and counts Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, and Billy Joel among his signees) is a lifelong friend of Arum’s.

“Neil Diamond, I know because he wrote Sweet Caroline,” Arum adds, referencing another Erasmus alumnus. “That’s boxing’s new anthem, and my granddaughter’s name is Caroline.”

And finally – drumroll, please – there’s Barbra Streisand (Erasmus, Class of 1959). “I’ve met her,” Arum recounts. “But she wasn’t very friendly.”

***

The New York State Athletic Commission took a step in the right direction on Saturday when Matt Delaglio was named executive director.

Delagio served as director of boxing during the rocky tenure of Kim Sumbler who resigned as executive director in May of this year. He was then designated as acting executive director, but there were fears in boxing circles that he would be passed over for the job on a permanent basis in favor of a less qualified political appointee. Those fears have now been laid to rest.

The next thing Governor Kathy Hochul needs to do is upgrade the NYSAC at the commissioner level.

In theory, the NYSAC is overseen by five commissioners. Two of these positions are currently vacant. Too often, NYSAC commissioner appointments are made as trade-offs for political favors. The result is that, because of uninformed leadership, the NYSAC has been known to embarrass itself.

Delagio is a hard worker and conscientious public servant who understands the sport and business of boxing. It would be nice if Governor Hochul appointed two new commissioners who understand the sport and business of boxing as well as he does and have the same commitment to public service that he has.

PICTURED: James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander, his co-star in the Broadway and film versions of “The Great White Hope.”

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

Published

4 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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