Blair Cobbs Took a Strange Route to his ‘Grand Arrival’ at the MGM Grand

The in-house pre-fight festivities for Saturday’s big boxing card at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas begin today (Tuesday, Oct. 29) with the Grand Arrivals. The main event fighters and the contestants in the major supporting bouts enter the hotel’s main lobby on a red carpet, a ceremony that harks to the the Academy Awards although the tradition dates back much farther.

The arrivals are staggered. Canelo Alvarez, being the A-side fighter in the main event, goes last. In the scheme of things, his grand arrival is the grandest. Blair Cobbs is in the vanguard.

For Cobbs, a flamboyant 29-year-old welterweight, the moment marks another milepost in his personal history, a history that could not be any more strange. Boxing has the best storylines of any sport and the Blair Cobbs’ saga ranks with the most bizarre.

Let’s begin by flashing back to the night of Dec. 19, 2004. A small airplane crash lands at a rural airport in Wheeling, West Virginia, where the plane is stopping to refuel on its way from Compton, California to Philadelphia. The pilot, the sole occupant, isn’t badly hurt and runs away, leaving behind his cargo.

When investigators comb through the plane, they find 525 pounds of cocaine with a reported street value of $24 million.

Eugene Cobbs, the courier, was indicted but ran off to Mexico before he was taken into custody. But he didn’t leave by himself. A widower, he wasn’t about to leave his two kids behind. So it was that Blair Cobbs found himself in Guadalajara where he resided for three years beginning at the age of 15.

Before he was uprooted, Cobbs was living in Hollywood in a home he describes as a beautiful mansion. Taking advantage of a multicultural waiver, he enrolled in nearby Beverly Hills High School, his dream school since seeing Stacy Dash in the movie “Clueless.”

As a freshman at BHHS, he hobnobbed with children of Hollywood celebrities, but aside from a few close friends, he felt like an outsider. It was awkward when someone asked “What does your dad do for a living?” — he really didn’t know – and staying aloof nipped the question in the bud.

In Mexico, where Cobbs discarded the name Blair in favor of his middle name, Romero, he was that much more of an outsider and had even fewer close friends. The boxing gym became his refuge.

As an amateur in Mexico, Cobbs once appeared on the same card with Canelo Alvarez. “He was on my undercard,” says Cobbs with a sly grin, noting that he, as the older boy, was accorded a more prestigious slot in the bout order.

The feds eventually tracked down Eugene Cobbs and brought him back to the United States to face the music. In 2010, he was sentenced to 151 months in prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and for operating an aircraft without a pilot’s license and was packed off to a penitentiary in New Jersey.

Blair Cobbs eventually returned to his birthplace, Philadelphia. From living in a fancy home in Hollywood, he went to living wherever he could, sometimes in his car, sometimes crashing on the sofa in the home of a good Samaritan. He took odd jobs, working as a delivery boy, as a helper in a boxing gym, “this and that.”

“I was totally unprepared for Philadelphia,” he says. He found a pillar in one of Philadelphia’s few bi-lingual churches, the Casa de Gloria, which he finds ironic as he isn’t fully fluent in Spanish despite having lived in Mexico.

Philadelphia is a great fight town, but Cobbs had trouble getting his pro career on track. “I had too much faith in my own ability to sign with just any promoter,” he says. His first and third pro fights were at a honky tonk in the unincorporated town of Ruffin, North Carolina.

In 2015, his career completely stalled and he was out of action for 30 months. During this period, he scooted off to Las Vegas for the express purpose of landing a contract with boxer-turned-promoter Floyd Mayweather Jr. – “my ‘Hail Mary’,” he says – but that didn’t work out and he returned to Philadelphia.

He wasn’t done trying, however. Somewhat later, he came west again, arriving in Las Vegas in a beat-up old Cadillac with his “motel,” a tent, in the trunk of the car, and this time his perspicacity bore fruit. He caught the eye of Greg Hannely, the driving force behind Prince Ranch Boxing, and finally had the support he needed to give boxing his full attention.

Cobbs’ career as a Prince Ranch fighter began inauspiciously with a 4-round bout at a dance club in Tijuana. It appeared that he was running in circles, back where he started on the honky tonk circuit, but Blair doesn’t look at it that way. “It broke the curse,” he says, referencing the drought, and indeed it has been almost all uphill from there, the lone flat note a technical draw resulting from an accidental clash of heads on a Golden Boy Promotions show in Los Angeles.

Golden Boy liked what they saw in Blair Cobbs. It wasn’t just his potential as a boxer, but his persona; he was a natural showman. He picked up the nickname “Flair” as an amateur in Philadelphia and it fits like a glove. “I have always been an oddball,” he says. “I’m thinking I may have been the youngest person that could do a double back flip. I was five or six years old.”

As a kid, Cobbs was a big fan of the “Power Rangers,” the animated superheroes in the children’s TV series and quite naturally became a fan of WWE. Ric Flair, he notes, was a little before his time, but Cobbs has mastered Flair’s signature “Woo!” which he uses in his ring walk and to punctuate his post-fight interviews. In the YouTube age, he has the “it” factor.

This gimmick obviously doesn’t sit well some boxing purists, but in person Blair Cobbs is affable and refreshingly down to earth. He is in his mischievousness mindful of the young fighter who would take the name Muhammad Ali. And he surprised this grizzled reporter when in recounting all the good breaks that came his way, he used the word “serendipitous.” (After interviewing dozens of boxers, this was a first.)

Blair Cobbs’ father was back in the news in 2014. Because of his good behavior, Eugene Cobbs was allowed to complete his sentence at a minimum security facility in West Virginia, a complex surrounded by a three-foot fence. One day he simply walked away and found his way back to Mexico where he had fathered a child with his girlfriend. But the feds caught up with him again and back to prison he went.

The good news for Blair is that his dad is now a free man, having just been released from a half-way house in Las Vegas. His father has never seen him fight as a pro and now has that opportunity.

Under the tutelage of co-trainers Bones Adams and Brandon Woods, Cobbs has made steady gains inside the ring. In March of this year and again in August, he was pitted against an unbeaten fighter who was fighting in his own backyard, specifically Ferdinand Kerobyan and Steve Villalobos. Blair passed both tests with flying colors. His record now stands at 12-0-1 (8 KOs).

On Saturday, Cobbs has been matched soft. His opponent, Carlos Ortiz, described in a press release as a battle-tested warrior, brings an 11-4 record but has lost three straight and those 11 wins were forged against opponents who were collectively 11-26. The guess is that Golden Boy, operating on the unlikely chance that Blair might be overwhelmed by the occasion – he will be performing before a worldwide television audience on DAZN, quite a departure from his early days in the boondocks – didn’t want to risk the chance that he would fail to wow (make that “Woo!”) the audience. Cobbs vs. Ortiz is compatible with a show that has a must-see main event hitched to a weak undercard.

Reporters in town for the show, in need of a story to complement their Canelo-Kovalev coverage, will be drawn to Blair Cobbs and he won’t disappoint. He’s a likeable young man whose life has been filled with high drama and improbable escapades (a few of which, I suspect, have been refracted through a vivid imagination).

Looking down the road, Cobbs can envision the day when his ring entrance will set a new benchmark. “I would like to come out on fire like a magic act,” he says. One doesn’t know if his career inside the ring will ever measure up to that hullabaloo, but he’s already a celebrity, and now a certified celebrity by virtue of getting the red carpet treatment at one of the world’s most glamorous resort hotels.

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