At a casino in the middle of Connecticut, eight little known but hungry boxers will lace up their gloves and hope to get lucky on Friday the 13th.
The eight junior middleweights, from Armenia, Ukraine and Guyana, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Newark, will compete in a tournament known as Boxcino (ESPN2 Friday Night Fights, 9 p.m. ET at the Mohegan Sun), with the winner being awarded a top-10 world ranking.
Boxcino 2015 ? which will resume a week later with the heavyweight quarterfinals and culminate on May 22 with the finals in both divisions ? is the brainchild of longtime boxing promoter Artie Pelullo, who conceived the tournament in 1997 and sold it to ESPN.
“I came up with the idea and that’s how I found (future two-division world champion) Acelino ‘Popo’ Freitas,” said Pelullo, whose Banner Promotions has been successful in the land of the giant promoters over the years. “In those days it was a seven-country tournament. It took about six months to put it together, and literally it was Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Panama, the United States, Puerto Rico and we were in Costa Rica, and then Miami and then Baton Rouge.”
FOR THE WIN
Floyd Mayweather has turned the wait for a fight announcement into a promotion for his app
Pelullo is not even sure how it came to be known as Boxcino. “I don’t (bleeping) remember,” he said. “I guess we thought it sounded Spanish.”
While the names of the fighters are not likely to ring a bell ? Friday’s matchups pit Vito Gasparyan (14-3-5, 8 KOs) vs. Simeon Hardy (13-0, 10 KOs); Cleotis Pendarvis (17-4-2, 6 KOs) vs. Ricardo Pinell (10-1-1, 6 KOs); Brandon Adams (14-1, 9 KOs) vs. Alex Perez (18-1, 10 KOs), and Michael Moore (13-0, 6 KOs) vs. Stanyslav Skorokhod (8-0, 6 KOs) ? Pelullo says that won’t matter once they get in the ring.
“It’s unbelievable,” Pelullo told USA TODAY Sports by telephone this week. “It’s six rounds and they fight their butts off, these kids. And then it goes to eight rounds (semifinals), and then 10 rounds (finals). It really does something for young boxers’ careers, giving them an opportunity where they wouldn’t otherwise get it.”
What sets Boxcino apart it is how it handles draws.
“If it’s a draw, we’ve made arrangements with all the boxing commissions that it goes to the draw-breaker seventh round,” Pelullo says. “If it’s still a draw after the seventh round, then it becomes a draw on both of the athletes’ records, but social media will determine who they want to move on. It’s pretty cool. We do the same thing for the eight-round fights and the 10-round finals.”
Pelullo credits Brian Kweder, ESPN’s head of boxing programming, with reviving the tournament on ESPN2 last year after its one-time shot 17 years ago and turning it into a success story.
“When he got the job, I went to visit him and told him what we wanted to do and what we did before, and within two weeks he said, ‘We’re doing this’, and boom! Right there,” Pelullo says. “Last year the five Boxcino shows were some of the highest-rated (boxing) shows on the network. They renewed for this year and they’re going to renew it next year, too. They’re very happy with it.”
The matchups are made through a random drawing, which, Pelullo says, has kept some more familiar fighters and their managers from signing up. They want to know who they will be fighting before they commit.
“We had a lot of guys who didn’t want to roll the dice and see how it works out,” Pelullo says. “That’s why you really have to commend these kids. They don’t know who they’re going to fight when they enter the tournament. But they all want to try.
“They all want to do better so they get better. They want to figure out what they can do and how much money they can make and advance their families.”
The winners will be world-rated at the end of the tournament, a significant reason, Pelullo says, for doing it.
One of last year’s winners, Willie “The Mongoose” Monroe Jr., is now the WBA’s No. 3-ranked middleweight, and last month defeated veteran contender Bryan Vera.
The other, Russian-born Petr Petrov (35-4-2, 17 KOs), is the WBA’s No. 2-ranked lightweight. Although his scheduled January bout against Hank Lundy was canceled when Lundy missed weight, Pelullo expects Petrov to be in the co-feature against Jorge Linares for the March 27 light welterweight slugfest between Ruslan Provodnikov, who Pelullo discovered in Siberia, and Lucas Matthysse.
Boxcino, Pelullo insists, does not represent a fighter’s last hope, but more of an opportunity that might not come their way again.
“A lot of these guys, they’ve never been on television, they’ve never been on ESPN,” the promoter says. “So they hope to give a good showing.”
Even on Friday the 13th.
