Radio host Rude Jude doesn’t score the cleanest, most effective blows in that widely examined and wildly amusing audio of him arguing with Floyd Mayweather, but he sure does win the rhetorical war. That means a lot, considering that Mr. Jude starts as a man who has the rhetorical handicap of deliberately calling himself “Rude Jude.” Mayweather rarely encounters anyone who calls him on his “win by inflammatory comment” argumentation technique. The more Mayweather flails to get the low-blow upper hand, the more Mr. Jude laughs at him, and the more the basic truth of the matter — that Mayweather is ridiculously insecure for such a rich and successful man — reveals itself. Whatever the case, it’s a fine piece of trash entertainment. Surely, Mayweather didn’t help his “I’m not a ducker” claim with his camp saying Wednesday they wanted to fight Manny Pacquiao, then having Mayweather be quoted Thursday saying, “Pacquiao? I didn’t even know I was fighting him.” At least he’s flirting with middleweight champion Sergio Martinez for a fight at 150 pounds, not the ideal weight for that fight but at least Martinez would be a next-best option.
In this edition of Quick Jabs, besides the items in the headline, we examine who’s to blame for boxing being out of the network spotlight, some trends in pay-per-view boxing in 2011, whether women who box must wear skirts, if Gary Russell, Jr. should get over himself or not and more.
Quick Jabs
There’s a certain crowd in boxing for whom promoter Bob Arum can do no wrong. Me, I look at him the way I do all promoters: He does some things very well, but other things terribly. That Arum engenders such loyalty has always been quizzical to me because more than any other promoter, he’s been the one who’s most explicit about telling the fans to “go fuck themselves,” literally, but maybe people are just grateful for him being more upfront about it than everyone else. Anyway, he said a bunch of hooey this past weekend about how Juan Manuel Marquez’ association with a known supplier of performance enhancing drugs didn’t matter a lick. He took it one further when he said, “The steroid problem is fading into the past.” (And as if to show how much it didn’t matter to him, he threw reporter Gabriel Montoya off a conference call for asking questions about it.) The steroid issue absolutely isn’t fading into the past. Three of my absolute favorite fighters — Marquez with Angel Hernandez, Andre Ward and Nonito Donaire with Victor Conte — have been canoodling with this sort. Maybe Conte and Hernandez have gone clean and maybe they haven’t. It doesn’t look very good to me that Marquez reached out to Conte before going to Hernandez; it’s almost like Marquez had a “type” of strength coach in mind, right? As long as the testing regime is as bad as it all is, a full-blown PED scandal could threaten to break out in boxing. It might take a set of more industrious reporters than boxing currently has, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some very bad stuff lurking beneath the surface…
