The situation in New York with Antonio Margarito’s license sunk very quickly into catastrophe status over the span of a few days to end the week, and has veered back toward salvageable since. As it stands, Margarito might still get a license for his junior middleweight fight with Miguel Cotto, if a doctor for, for instance, the New York Rangers says his eye — the object of multiple surgeries — is satisfactory. The fight is on Dec. 3. Boxing haz a silly.
Some moved to blame the New York State Athletic Commission, and statements from Melvina Lathan that the fight should be fine to go licensing-wise did look a bit incriminating at first, except that was about Margarito’s hand wrap scandal. In September — not long after she made those statements, apparently — she said she began pestering Top Rank to get the commission some papers, and only got them on Oct. 31. Perhaps Nov. 18 was the earliest they could meet for some reason or the other, but given the proximity to the fight, maybe they could’ve moved more quickly after getting the papers, and had some better situational awareness overall.
What this should do is convince whatever segment of the boxing world out there that thinks Top Rank knows what it’s doing… that it doesn’t. Why did they wait so long to get the commission the papers for such a big fight, if the commission was asking for them? They had to know that Margarito’s physical condition was such that they would need to take extra care. You can point out that boxers are sometimes licensed at the last minute, but Margarito isn’t at all an average boxer, from a licensing standpoint. And by the way, Top Rank — like all promoters — does some things very well; maybe it even does more things well more consistently than all of them. But let’s face it: No promoter out there has a very high batting average when it comes to knowing what it’s doing. This one’s a big swing and a whiff for TR.
Maybe the fight will be in New York. Maybe that’s what officials are lobbying for in New York. That’s where the fight belongs. If it’s somewhere else, it will be a monument to the kind of monumental failures boxing is capable of achieving. (Outside the ring, anyway. The card is likely to deliver good action regardless of whether it’s in Madison Square Garden or Mississippi. Also, what keeps getting lost in this is whether Margarito should be fighting at all, with his health issue and past cheating. But why should I be any different in neglecting it?)
I’m on the verge of taking a week-long vacation from TQBR, although the rest of the team will still be in business. That means one last chance to clear the deck. There’s not much Quick Jabbing with Manny Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez III sucking up all the news energy, and there isn’t much Round And Round because most of the fights in the works are on hold as HBO and Showtime transition to new leadership.
