Boxing Odds and Ends: ‘Paint-Gate,’ the Haney-Garcia lawsuit and More

This reporter chanced upon Manny “Flick” Savoy yesterday afternoon at a boxing gym in Las Vegas. That afforded me an opportunity to get his take on “paint gate.”

In case you missed it, Sandy Ryan was splashed with red paint on Friday as she left her hotel for Madison Square Garden where she would be defending her WBO world welterweight title against Mikaela Mayer. Manny Savoy was roughly 10 feet away from her when the incident happened. It happened so fast and was so unexpected that Savoy – who would be Ryan’s chief voice in her corner — never got a good look at the perpetrator who was wearing a hoodie.

A security camera captured the attack and Savoy keeps the little video on his cell phone. In the video that Savoy shared with me, one can see a late-model vehicle pull up and double-park. The man with the hoodie emerges from the passenger side holding a receptacle of some sort and then, moments later, rushes back without it and the car speeds off.

The paint-splashing was part of a multi-pronged assault. Sandy Ryan was defamed in leaflets that appeared around her hotel and near Madison Garden. The leaflets had Ryan’s image and the text, among other things, called her a whore. (We were shown a screenshot of one of the leaflets tacked to a pole, but it was not a close-up and we were only able to make out a few words.)

Who would do such a thing and why? Let’s rule out the possibility that the assault was random; that’s too far-fetched. Someone had to have been tipped-off when Sandy Ryan would emerge from her hotel. The defamatory leaflets, coupled with the paint attack and threatening messages from anonymous callers that Ryan says were left on her phone, are compelling evidence that this was a premeditated and well-thought-out scheme of attack.

Sandy Ryan and Mikaela Mayer were well-acquainted. They had known each other since their amateur days. Mikaela had sparred with Sandy in preparation for the 2016 Olympics. But what had been a warm relationship soured when Ryan hooked up with Mikaela’s coach Kay Koroma in Las Vegas at the same gym where Mayer regularly trained. Mikaela didn’t think that was kosher and eventually ditched Koroma in favor of Kofi Jantuah, a sundering that left hard feelings on both sides.

Ryan is firm in her belief that Mayer’s team was behind the attack. “What else could it be?” she says. Manny Savoy won’t go that far, but notes that Ryan, a British citizen with a home in Portugal, never spent enough time in New York to make any enemies there. Her fight with Mayer was her second fight in the U.S. and her first fight in the Big Apple.

Mikaela Mayer’s manager George Ruiz was quick to respond to Sandy Ryan’s veiled accusation: “Let me be clear. No one associated with Team Mayer had anything to do with the paint assault on you or the leaflets and the alleged anonymous threatening messages you say you received….Mikaela and Team Mayer want the perpetrator(s) found, caught, and punished to the full extent of the law.”

(The view from here is that while it seems logical that someone associated with Mayer orchestrated the attack, we would be shocked if Mikaela had any foreknowledge of it. The lady has far too much common-sense to get involved in a scheme that could ruin her boxing career and her promising post-boxing career as a TV boxing pundit.)

The presumed intent was to psychologically unsettle Sandy Ryan to where she couldn’t bring her A-game. (Sandy was a short favorite and the odds wavered only slightly, diluting the theory that the assault was orchestrated as part of a betting coup.)

As for the fight itself, it was outstanding. If Ryan was rattled, she didn’t show it although she came out on the short end of a majority decision, a decision that was somewhat controversial. (ESPN’s Mark Kriegel had Ryan winning six rounds to four.)

Ryan’s promoter Eddie Hearn has called on the WBO to mandate a rematch. “[Sandy] had to go back to her room, take all her clothes off, take all the paint off her body. [She had to be] emotionally shocked to pieces and yet she gave an incredible performance. The WBO, if they have any compassion, must order an immediate rematch.”

The rematch, if it happens, won’t be in New York. Advised to leave the city for her own safety, Sandy Ryan got out of town in a hurry.

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In an article published here on June 23, Thomas Hauser wrote about the possible ramifications to Ryan Garcia’s failed PED test beyond the sanctions imposed upon him by the New York State Athletic Commission. Garcia’s victory over previously undefeated Devin Haney at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on April 30, 2024, was a changed to a no-contest when ostarine, a banned substance, was discovered in Garcia’s urine samples.

Hauser speculated that Team Haney might file a lawsuit against Garcia. By using a performance-enhancing substance, Garcia denied Devin a level playing field, yielding a result that adversely affected Devin’s future earnings, or so it would be argued.

Team Haney was paying attention. Six days ago, on Sept. 27, they filed a lawsuit in New York seeking compensation for “battery, fraud, and breach of contract.”

If successful, the lawsuit, which has polarized the boxing community, may benefit the sport. “Win, lose, or draw in court, I think this is actually a good thing to deter fighters from using performance enhancing drugs because the [current] penalty is not strict enough,” said Eddie Hearn in a conversation with Boxing Social.

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This is a boxing site, but kindly indulge me as I go off-topic and say a few words about Pete Rose who passed away at his home in Las Vegas on Monday, one day after appearing with several of his former Cincinnati Reds teammates at a sports memorabilia show in Nashville.

I never felt sorry for Pete because he was an a-hole. Ask some of the veteran blackjack dealers here in Las Vegas and you will be hard-pressed to find one who has a nice word to say about him. However, whether his lifetime ban from baseball should have been lifted so that he could go into the Hall of Fame while he was still alive…well, that’s a horse of a different color.

Pete Rose was baseball’s all-time hit king, but forget the stats; he transcended the sport.

News of Pete’s death transported me back more than three decades to a conversation I had with my young son who hadn’t yet started kindergarten. He had become a fan of the Atlanta Braves, one of two teams (the other was the Cubs) whose home and away games were nationally televised.

One day, when he was watching baseball and I was in the next room, he came in and said, “dad, so-and-so [the player’s name eludes me] just did a Charlie Hustle.”

I have no idea where he got that from and he likely wouldn’t have recognized Pete Rose if he had bumped into him on the street – Pete had been out of baseball for some time – but I knew exactly what he was talking about. He had just witnessed a player on the Braves beat out an infield hit or maybe a bunt by sliding head-first into first base.

A friend e-mailed me yesterday from North Carolina and said, “From my view, the Hall is diminished by not having him in there rather than the other way around.”

I share that sentiment. If you disagree, we can still be friends.

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