WHY WLAD ISN'T KING

Published

12 years ago

November 12, 2012

The empty throne by Vajrasimha Wladimir Klitschko is the premiere heavyweight of this era. With a six-foot six-inch frame that looks like a replica of Bourdelle’s Hercules the Archer and a disposition that evokes Rodin’s The Thinker, he casts an imperial shadow over everything beneath him. His record stands at 58-3 with 50 knockouts and it shines bright enough to bring to mind diadems and golden scepters. It has been over eight years since he lost—since the spirit of Jack Dempsey possessed Lamon Brewster and turned him inside out, and he has gone on to defeat nearly every rival in the division. As a result, his well-earned status as the premiere heavyweight in the world has been upgraded to an unearned status as heavyweight champion of the world.

THE RING was behind his coronation.

On June 20^th 2009, Wlad, then ranked number one, induced a global epidemic of narcolepsy when he waltzed to victory in a fight HBO wisely declined to broadcast. His opponent was third-ranked Ruslan Chagaev, a late substitute who lost every round and quit on his stool. Nevertheless, The Ring recognized Wlad as its champion.

Why would the most prestigious ratings body since the 1920s, a ratings body that sought to determine “the true champions” in every division, allow a shortcut to the throne?

In its April 2002 issue, THE RING announced a new championship policy that sought to validate a surge of marquee fighters who had been unifying the alphabet belts, among them Lennox Lewis, Roy Jones, and Bernard Hopkins. While the overriding goal was to return integrity to championship boxing, then managing editor Eric Raskin said, “there’s no denying that we wanted to fill vacancies whenever we felt it was justifiable.” So, in addition to the perfectly sensible criterion of crowning champions after “a box-off” between the number one and number two contenders, the editors stretched the logic a bit: “Or, in certain instances,” they added, “a box-off between our number one- and number three-contenders.”

“We talked it over, and we agreed it made sense,” Raskin said. “If there wasn’t much to separate #2 from #3, if it felt like #2 didn’t have some strong claim to needing to be involved in a title fight, we could sometimes recognize #1 vs. #3.”

At the time Wlad faced Chagaev, the second-ranked contender was elder brother and fellow giant Vitali Klitschko. Despite the obvious fact that there was much to separate him from Chagaev, then Editor-in-chief Nigel Collins buffed up THE RING magazine belt. “A match between Wladimir and No. 3 contender Chagaev meets THE RING'S criterion,” Collins said, because “the brothers have stated many times that they will never fight.”

“We promised our mom not to fight each other,” Wlad said. “I wouldn’t do it, even for $1 billion…you can’t put a price on your mother’s heart.” In other words, the flagship division is being held hostage by Ma Klitschko. Her sons are dutiful all right but the whole thing is hard to fathom in certain neighborhoods where brothers fight like LaMottas every Sunday or so. The Toledo brothers spent years swapping pleather in the parking lot, stone-deaf to Ma in the window and we’re better for it.

The first application of the provision is harder to defend. In February 2004, Lennox Lewis retired and THE RING was eager to fill his throne, no doubt believing it was in the best interest of the sport. A semi-retired Corrie Sanders had stopped Wlad and so advanced to number three in a division as deep as a puddle. Vitali, then number one, vowed to avenge Wlad and THE RING declared this gesture of brotherly love a championship bout. Ignored was Chris Byrd, who owned a stoppage win over Vitali and was ranked number two.

It should be noted that THE RING acted in good faith despite the controversy; and at least one former editor has had second thoughts. “If we had it to do over,” Raskin said recently, “we probably wouldn’t include that provision.”

In May 2012, that provision was expanded into absurdity by a new, Golden Boy-installed editorial board. THE RING, they said, failed to determine boxing’s true champions because so many thrones remain unfilled, which is akin to claiming that coastal erosion is the fault of the lighthouse keeper or smog is the fault of the traffic cop. Their response does away with the concept of “true champions” altogether and suspiciously advances the secondary objective of filling vacant thrones. And who is the beneficiary? Fans fed up with the glut of make-pretend champions? Certainly not. The beneficiary behind the change is the promotional company behind THE RING.

Here’s an eye-opener. If the editors apply the revised policy allowing first or second-ranked contenders to face third, fourth, or fifth-ranked contenders, THE RING can indeed fill more of its vacant championships, but would that be in the best interests of the sport? Look closely: If Floyd Mayweather (#1) fights either Saul Alvarez (#3) or Erislandy Lara (#4) at junior middleweight, if Mayweather (#2) fights Paulie Malignaggi (#4) at welterweight, if Chris John (#2) fights Daniel Ponce De Leon (#4) at featherweight, and if Anselmo Moreno (#1) fights Leo Santa Cruz (#5) at bantamweight, the end result could be four more Golden Boy champions no matter who wins. The plain fact that every one of them is a Golden Boy fighter placed in position by a Golden Boy-owned ratings body makes any presumption of good faith naïve.

The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board is picking up where THE RING fell down. We begin with a corrective: The provision that installed the Klitschkos on the throne has no standing. “When a champion retires or vacates the championship, the first-ranked contender must fight the second-ranked contender to fill the vacancy,” the charter states. “Lesser contenders do not constitute the best, and the fact that they are allowed to compete for vacant championships by other organizations does not make them so. The gravitas of the true championship will be vitiated no longer. Therefore, no allowances for third, fourth, and fifth-ranked contenders will be made.”

Light heavyweight Chad Dawson, super middleweight Andre Ward, middleweight Sergio Martinez, junior featherweight Nonito Donaire, and flyweight Toshiyuki Igarashi are kings who earned their thrones the hard way—the only way that makes sense in a combat sport. Seventy claimants crowd them, propped up by the so-called sanctioning bodies and Golden Boy’s magazine. The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board defies any notion that claimants are anything more than contenders; and this includes the Klitschko brothers, who have indeed defeated nearly every rival in the heavyweight division but have yet to defeat the only one that matters. We will not refer to any of them as “belt-holders,” “title-holders,” “titlists” or other terms suggesting that they are what they are not. We will not rubber-stamp shortcuts or confuse the premiere fighter in a division with royalty. A throne must be seized, never assumed.

Whether the twelve remaining thrones will be seized or even recognized amid the false glitter of yesterday’s belts depends on the fans’ willingness to seize the future.

The stakes are high. Boxing has become a sport without universally recognized champions—and a sport without universally recognized champions recedes into irrelevance. The consequences are plain to see. Go to ESPN.com’s main page to find your boxing update; you won’t see it mentioned in the menu bar; you’ll have to click on “More Sports” and then scroll down to find it—under women’s basketball. We have devolved into an odd and insulated subculture unable to separate sense from nonsense, rightfully ridiculed by the rest of the sports world. Keyboard critics aren’t helping. Too many attack WBC President José Sulaimán as a little tin god and then turn around and acknowledge the WBC belt as if it meant what Sulaimán says it means.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t little tin gods. It isn’t THE RING either, despite their hopelessly compromised ratings. The problem is us. Will we keep sitting around with spit buckets over our heads or stand up in the corner?

—The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board has already come out fighting.

________________________________

The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board’s website is at www.tbrb.org.

Graphic: “The Empty Throne” by Vajrasimha. http://vajrasimha.deviantart.com/art/The-empty-throne-139743853

Thanks to Eric Raskin for his assistance and honesty.

Springs Toledo is a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board and can be reached at scalinatella@hotmail.com.

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

Published

14 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-322-Super-Welter-Week-in-SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

TSS-Salutes-Thomas-Hauser-and-his-Bernie-Award-Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

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

Published

4 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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

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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