Has the afterglow of the loaded/stacked/thunderous boxing weekend worn off yet? The Shane Mosley-Sergio Mora mega-event sounded exactly as bad it was intended to be. Rarely is such a bullseye accomplished in boxing.
The last two dreadful Golden Boy pay-per-views have, in part, been justified by comparing them to poor Top Rank fare. This is something about pay-per-views that some people do not seem to understand. ?Bad? Top Rank shows are produced independently and are buyer beware propositions. Period. Most Golden Boy extravaganzas are underwritten by HBO?produced by them, marketed by them, and distributed by them?and the amount of money GBP saves by not having to hire a television production crew and a broadcast team is significant. When Golden Boy does actually go solo?as it did with Hopkins-Jones Jr.?the results are disastrous. Why HBO is hell-bent on diluting its already watered-down brand by associating itself?again and again?with third-rate cards is another question altogether. After all, there are plenty of mediocre cards out there, why settle only for those of Golden Boy?
Speaking of great Golden Boy shows, I tried tuning into Solo Boxeo last Friday night and joined a fight, the ?co-main event,? allegedly, in progress. It was some 17-0 guy against some 7-6 guy, AKA palooka, ham n? egger, tomato can, Mr. Not-A-Chance-In-Hell, etc. I quickly changed the channel to ?Ghost Adventures.? Personally, I would rather spend the night in a crawlspace or lost somewhere on the Khyber Pass without shoes than watch most Golden Boy telecasts, a torment already rued over on The Cruelest Sport: Enjoy Your Slaughter.
If Top Rank can earn a reputation for hewing to in-house productions, why does Golden Boy not drag around a reputation for putting on garbage on a regular basis? Because GBP has the HBO brand rubber-stamped on its trash and because certain websites openly shill for Oscar & Company?
Anyway, for the record, 14 of the last 16 fighters on the two most recent GBP pay-per-views were Golden Boy fighters.
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?The Savior of Boxing,? Victor Ortiz continues to make an easy living out of the hardest sport of all. After quitting in the ring against Marcos Maidana last summer, Ortiz has faced the kind of competition that can give even a cynic a bleeding ulcer. The credentials needed to meet a Golden Boy house fighter in the ring are simple: be old, be shot, and have some sort of a obsolete name value to fool some of the dopier boxing fans out there. In that case, Vivian Harris was actually overqualified to answer the bell against Ortiz. He was one fight away from being carried from the ring on a stretcher by the time he staggered his way through two and a half rounds of futility against Ortiz. No one needs to be a boxing connoisseur to understand why Harris was as much as a 20-1 underdog on some books. By the way, the Ortiz-Harris bout was reportedly delayed while Ortiz had false chest hair applied to him in the dressing room.
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Carlos Baldomir, in strictly adhering to Golden Boy rules, was a spent shell?of Falkland Islands War vintage?by the time he answered the bell against Saul Alvarez. In fact, Baldomir moved in the ring like a man wrapped in concertina wire. Yet all we can hear about is the devastating KO Alvarez inflicted on Baldomir, a man old enough to be his father. There is nothing impressive about knocking out shot, arthritic men, but there seems to be an awfully lot of easily impressed folks out there.
Saul Alvarez has beaten up on a lot of journeymen and shot fighters. So has Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Yet one gets accolades and the other gets denigrated. Anybody out there wonder why? Talk has centered around Alvarez next facing Matthew Hatton, who has had his name linked over the past year to everyone from Stephen Hawking to Brock Lesnar. Has anyone with less talent ever been in so much demand before?
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It was interesting to see that Sergio Mora somehow lost nearly three and a half pounds in about an hour last week. If Mora, a natural middleweight, struggled to make weight and still showed up over by a substantial amount, he was probably dried out. So, how does a pared down fighter lose all that weight in about an hour? And why, allegedly, did Mora try to make the limit if he was going to be fined anyway? This would not be the first time suspicious weight issues were part of a Golden Boy show.
According to Compubox, Sergio ?The Latin Fake? Mora draws more boos per round than he lands punches. His boo to punch ratio is roughly 3 to 1.
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And where, exactly, was the Morality Squad during the Mosley-Mora Pay-Per-Snafu? With an admitted steroids user in the main event, Shane Mosley, facing an opponent who does not deserve to headline a $49.95 (HD) PPV event, Sergio Mora, in a catchweight bout that was strangely set exactly at the junior middleweight limit, you would think some of these moral arbiters would speak up a little. Not to mention there were two undercard fights with odds ranging from 12-1 to 20-1 on some books. If one had to hazard a guess, the Crocodile Tears Crew were probably either grooming their high horses or settled right in front of the television screen, wide-eyed with insincerity.
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The Penny-Click Kings have been in ecstasy over the last month with Kimbo Slice, James Toney, Antonio Margarito, Floyd Mayweather, and Ricky Hatton. These hot topics have enabled the usual suspects to pontificate about addiction, Mixed Martial Arts, domestic violence, retirement, ethics, law, and string theory. It would be nice if they just tried to write well about boxing once in a while.
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Them experts out there?the ones who try to sell you on the ?stacked? Golden Boy cards all the time?just how much slack do you cut them, anyway? A few weeks ago, for example, I read an expert who said Ji-Hoon Kim was robbed against Miguel Vazquez in a fight that was nearly a shut out for Vazquez. Somehow, this expert scored the bout for Kim. Now, boxing is, to an extent, subjective, but there are times when someone is just a blithering idiot. I no longer visit that website, and the number of websites I do visit dwindles by the day. The question here is: how many moronic ?opinions? does it take before someone can be disqualified as an expert?
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Another mystery surrounds the upcoming Hopkins-Pascal bout. Showtime quit the pay-per-view game a few years ago just to return to it to feature a fighter, Hopkins, whose last bout was one of the biggest bombs in years? This despite the fact that Gary Shaw has neither fighter under contract. Strange days, indeed.
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Two fighters who usually duck through the ropes with the best?Paul Williams and Sergio Martinez?meet in a rematch of their superb 2009 thriller in December. Although Williams blotched his ?fearless? reputation recently by hesitating so long to sign against Martinez, the fight is set and its delay is irrelevant at this point. Team Williams, however, has asked Martinez, the middleweight champion, for a catchweight of 157 pounds. Protests, anyone, or will there just be a lot of excuses thrown around? You know, how can Williams win the middleweight title while imposing artificial weight limits on the defending champion? Somebody start an online petition! Because Martinez is a true prizefighter and not Andre Berto or Alfredo Angulo, he readily agreed. As for the question of morality? It probably never crossed his mind.
