(Welcome to another edition of Sound & Fury, the boxing column that blackens eyes and skips clich?s. This week TCS takes a look at how some bad pay-per-view cards seem to get free passes from the media, checks in on RingTV.com and finds it lacking, offers a few thoughts about the Nonito Donaire-Fernando Montiel and Juan Manuel Lopez-Orlando Salido bouts, and wonders why writers only get tough with sanctioning bodies. )
It comes as no surprise to see another pay-per-view undercard?in this case the April 9th Morales-Maidana bonanza?puffed up as ?stacked? and ?loaded.? Dan Rafael, loathe to scrap any tidbit that might feed his prodigious ego, quoted Richard Schaefer on ESPN.com last week about the Morales-Maidana spectacular: ?I got the ?Fight Freak? card done,? Schaefer said, referring to the hardcore boxing fans he hopes to please with the lineup.?
Actually, this P-P-V is a smorgasbord of stinking sewage. A main event, Maidana-Morales, that might draw the interest of the American Medical Association, James Kirkland versus the dreaded TBA, and the ?comeback? of an often dull boxer, Winky Wright, who has failed to win a fight since 2006. In addition, he has scored one?one!?knockout since 1999?before Y2K even hit. His opponent is Matthew Macklin. Who? Exactly. The only good matchup is the Robert Guerrero-Michael Katsidis scrap, but the talented Guerrero has not exactly been a crowd-pleaser since joining Golden Boy Promotions. It looks like all it takes these days is one good fight for a card to be ?loaded? and ?stacked,? cheap clich?s trotted out by a crew with as much insight and critical acumen as a sea anemone.
How this card is any better than Cotto-Mayorga or Pacquiao-Mosley remains to be seen, except that some of the biggest cheerleaders in this industry are also some of the biggest name brands and are boosted by folks who like to take marching orders from logos. What matters is the work, of course, and not self-puffery or an unearned reputation.
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The Cruelest Sport almost never reads RingTV, but occasionally, in order to see suspicions invariably confirmed, TCS logs on to see what the biggest?but phoniest?name brand in boxing is up to. Sure enough, several backhand swipes at Pacquiao-Mosley and none at Morales-Maidana. Where was all this righteousness when the Floyd Mayweather?Juan Manuel Marquez fraud was announced? Even Bernard Hopkins-Roy Jones Jr. II failed to get the vapors from the self-esteemed website. And how is it possible to write about Fight Night Club and Solo Boxeo without mentioning the fact that 90 percent of the bouts aired are mismatches and plain outrages?
No doubt all of this is merely a coincidence. But the last time TCS checked in on RingTV, it was to see Michael Rosenthal give a big boost to Golden Boy Promotions when GBP was suspended by the New York State Athletic Commission. Rosenthal also made sure to get in as much slop as possible against George Kimball. (Needless to say, the ISBN of Four Kings is more insightful and interesting than anything Rosenthal, whose only real distinction as a boxing writer is a lack of distinction, has written.) It is nearly impossible to avoid conflict of interest in boxing, but it only takes a few steps to distance yourself from being accused of outright shilling. Unfortunately, some folks just do not appear to be the ambulatory type.
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On the other hand, it was a pleasant surprise to see Norm Frauenheim writing for RingTV.com. Frauenheim is a fine stylist with a sensibility most of the ego maniacs out there lack.
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Fernando Montiel is one of the best little fighters of the last decade or so. With only a few subpar performances over a 48-fight career?most notably against Mark ?Too Sharp? Johnson and Jhonny Gonzalez?Montiel is one of a vanishing breed?a true prizefighter. Defend a trinket in Germany? Okey-dokey. Face talented Z Gorres in the Philippines? Sure, why not? Travel to Japan to face Hozumi Hasegawa? All right. Take on Nonito Donaire as a huge underdog? Check.
And on Saturday night, Montiel will bring all of his skill and craft into the ring against ?The Filipino Flash.? But does that even matter? Donaire did not look quite human thrashing Wladimir Sidorenko a few months ago and the truth is Sidorenko is a solid fighter. When you do what Donaire did against a good professional, you are talking about a special talent, one whose flaws?iffy defense, for example?are hard to exploit because of an explosiveness not often seen in a boxing ring. Montiel is a world-class boxer. Pray for him, anyway.
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Two erratic young fighters?Mike Alvarado and Vernon Paris? face off on the Juan Manual Lopez-Orlando Salido undercard scheduled for April 16th. Alvarado, who has been sidelined by legal troubles over the last few years, will probably expose Paris for the walking mystification he is. Paris, who has survived attempts on his life, has been suspended for drug use, and whose promoter, Carlos Llinas, is an unlicensed fraud, has found his career overshadowed by his tribulations. On April 16th, he has a chance to let a Showtime audience see if his talent measures up to his limited notoriety. In the end, perhaps the shadows suit him best. There is a reason, after all, that Paris has rarely emerged from the corrupt Michigan boxing scene.
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Grumbling has also been heard about Lopez meeting Salido in the main event. Lopez is a thrilling, two-fisted banger, one of the most exciting boxers in the ring today. His lack of defense and his swinging lantern jaw, however, means that any legitimate fighter will have his chances to score a KO against him. And Salido, 34-11-2, is a real prizefighter. Not the most talented, but capable of finding openings, and following a game plan. Salido is not Shelby Pudwill or one of these Solo Boxeo stiffs delivered fresh from the mausoleum after GBP matchmakers dial 1-800-CORPSES. Lopez is a danger to everyone in the ring when he fights, including himself, and Salido will do his best to fight through the maelstrom sure to beat down on him from the opening bell.
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Whenever boxing writers want to pretend they are muckrakers, they lampoon the contemptible sanctioning bodies, an easy target for folks too lazy to correct errors culled from PR materials, or to mention that a boxer scheduled for an upcoming bout has suffered a brain bleed. Some of these jokers act is if Bert Sugar didn?t excoriate the Alphabet Boys for years in the pages of The Ring and Boxing Illustrated. Mostly, however, they never seem able to provide any context or background for their sanctioning body kvetching. The WBC, WBA, IBF, and WBO are a much larger part of the boxing landscape than most people think.
Sanctioning bodies were propped up by television networks in the late 1970s after the corrupt U.S. Championship Tournament was exposed. In order to find some kind of organizational sense out of the chaos of boxing, ABC, CBS, and NBC, incredibly, turned to the WBC and WBA for order. From an article by Pat Putnam in Sports Illustrated: ?The irony is that both the WBC and the WBA were small-time operations, cadging nickels and dimes, until the urgent need of U.S. network television for ?respectable? fighter rankings catapulted the organizations into positions of power. Until 1977, boxing?s rating bible was The Ring magazine. In that year it was discovered that The Ring was supplying phony records and rankings for the Don King-promoted, ABC-aired United States Boxing Championships. Goodbye, Ring; hello, alphabet soup.?
But the real reason these organizations, which, for some reason, bring to mind the recent discovery of intelligent slime, thrive and keep popping up is simple: the fighters, networks, and promoters need them and court them. For fighters, in particular, the proliferation of belts means more opportunities for bigger paychecks. The boxing ring, to paraphrase a Deadwood expression, is a hell of a place to make a fortune, and most boxers leave that inhospitable place having lost the shirt off their backs.
Finally, networks and promoters get to play up the ?championship? angle because average boxing fans are not sophisticated enough, apparently, to deny the temptations of hype. The days of Harry Wills and Luis Firpo drawing 70,000 fans for a non-title no-decision fight are long gone. Now everything has to have bells and whistles attached to it: music videos, banshee wailing announcers, exclamation points, 3-D technology, Sniff-O-Rama, etc. And bogus belts are one of many gewgaws used to promote a bout.
And why, if these sanctioning bodies are all meaningless, do media types soil their diapers whenever a ?unification? is announced? And why do websites consistently mention that Kenny Last beat Willie Getup for the WBF Youthful Championship? Or print absurd press releases that mention who fights who for the Mestizo Championship of the Dakotas? Or how about the bozos who extol the virtues of the IBO? If not for fighters, promoters, networks, and third-rate hacks, sanctioning bodies would not exist. Plain and simple. Ragging on them only reveals a surface intellect, but maybe we ought to consider ourselves lucky to get even that.
