It won’t win me any new friends in Pacland but I’m going to say it anyway.
Can we stop the madness. As Rodney King put it, “Can’t we all just get along?”
Guess not but it’s past time to stop labeling undefeated multiple time world champion and extraordinary amateur boxer before that Floyd Mayweather a coward.
He is quite selective as to opponents but no man who has walked up those ring steps as often as he and performed so magnificently is any sort of feckless coward.
I can understand why Mayweather, who wears the villain’s mask, is denigrated and despised but when I question his manhood, I do it only in a jocular Kentucky Floyd Chicken way, not seriously.
Which brings me to Atlas and Smith, or if you prefer, Smith and Atlas.
They’ve made the Paclanders dart board for reporting, Smith in print for New York Daily News and never was a journalist Atlas over the ESPN airwaves, that an anonymous (but not to them surely) source informed them separately that someone representing Manny Pacquiao sent an email asking a Mayweather agent what would happen if the Pinoy Idol came up dirty on a drug test.
Tim Smith, NY Daily News Photo
No one, including Smith or Atlas, has yet to see the purported email which would drop Pacquiao from falsely accused to almost convicted concerning usage of PEDs.
Apparently the email has, poof, disappeared or is empty like when Geraldo Rivera, a real reporter, opened up Al Capone’s secret vault.
There’s been no substance then to illegal substance use charges against Manny.
But neither Atlas nor Smith is the issue and it’s time they stopped being used as speed bags by Pacquiao advocates.
I have to call low blow, a flagrant foul, on Ryan Arguelles, a Pinoy reporter who I just met Wednesday at the Pacman-Clottey presser at Madison Square Garden. Scribbling for BoxingInsider.com, Arguelles virtually describes Tiny Tim, who covers pro football, sometimes baseball and boxing for the Daily News, as gutless for not showing up at the Garden.
Smith, the implication is, must be cowering in fear of exposure of false reporting or is just averse to looking Megamanny in the eye and asking him if he’s a drug user who cheats in boxing.
ESPN commentator, trainer Teddy Atlas
(Btw, a couple of people told me Atlas was in attendance although I did not see him. Of course, I sat in the “Lowlife” seating area.)
Aruguelles means well, I suppose, but he needs to get a grip.
Smith wasn’t there just like George Willis of The New York Post wasn’t there. Willis is also a boxing scribe but, like Tiny Tim, he’s had both hands full this week covering a little football story, something about the Cinderella Jets going to Indianapolis to play the favored Colts for the AFC title and a trip to the Feb. 7 Super Bowl in Miami.
To say this a bigger story in New York than a Pacman-Clottey presser is as obvious as saying Democrats in Massachusetts did not cover themselves in glory Tuesday night when Republican Scott Brown TKO’d hapless Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, a post the donkeys held down for only 46 years.
As one radio wag in Beantown said, “Scott is not going up to President Obama and saying, ‘What can Brown do for you?’ The reference, of course, to the UPS commercial tag line.
News flash for Arguelles: Smith reports to a sports editor named Leon Carter. You can be sure Carter has and had all hands on deck for Jets reportage all week.
Like you, I’d still like to know who lied to Smith and/or Atlas in case their source or sources are if not the one and same lying liar with pants on fire.
But Arguelles’ anger is misdirected, he is misfiring here.
You want to know who lied to the newspaper and to ESPN as represented by Smith and Atlas?
Al Haymon, you could ask but he avoids the media like the plague.
Richie Rich Schaefer or Oscar de la Hoya, ask them but you will find their lips locked.
And Mayweather minder Leonard Ellerbe, you could inquire of him also.
It’s a cinch he’ll stay with radio silence.
But leave Smith and Atlas alone. One guy showed up at the presser, the other was occupied on a different assignment.
The shooting of the messengers is beyond ridiculous.
