Masians, have you heard the recent rumors that Josh Clottey vs. Paul Williams looks like a make for November 29th? People, people, I think we have our welterweight appetizer for whatever becomes of Margs and Cotto in ‘09.
Man, I LOVE a PWill/Clottey fight, just love it, and it works well in the general scheme of the welterweights right now. Both of these guys have a legit claim on Margarito’s attentions - Williams, of course, because he beat him, but Clottey too because of their December ‘06 fight in which Clottey was blowing Margs away on the scorecards before suffering a hand injury.
Is it fair that both of these guys have to wait their turn while both Margarito and Cotto work their way towards what seems now to be an inevitable rematch next summer? Maybe not, although given the greatness of Margs/Cotto I, I don’t think anyone is complaining that the second installment is taking precedence over everything else out there. And the rationale for that is obvious. In the absence of a massive payday with Oscar or Floyd, Margarito and Cotto fighting each other again is the biggest event that can be made out there for either man, and so dangerous guys like Williams and Clottey are just not going to get their turn at bat until that Margarito/Cotto II check gets cashed all around. Dollars and sense, etc., etc.
(Brothers and sisters, Large here, just to tell you all that I’m back in black. I’ve been away for a while tending to my new arrival, Reggie Large, but I’m coming back strong on the mike to close out the rest of the year’s big fights. Thanks for standing by while I was on my paternity leave. And now on we go… -L)
I don’t know about youse, but though I didn’t think Shane Mosley needed to knock Ricardo Mayorga out in the 12th round last night, I did think he needed to win the round going in. Honestly, I think Lamps and Merchant stopped paying very close attention after Shane destroyed Mayorga in the fifth and sixth rounds, assuming that the inevitable was near. True to form, Manny Steward was on the ball and noted Mayorga’s rally in the seventh and eighth, and even as late as the tenth was intimating that he thought the fight might be close on points. But the other guys, well, they hate Mayorga (in their standard old-white-dude hatred of all self-styled “bad guys”), and they love Sugar Shane and they just decided that after Mosley tore the Matador a new one in the middle rounds that the fight was over.
It wasn’t. I had Mayorga winning the first three rounds on awkward ring generalship and the fact that Shane, baffled, wasn’t really doing very much to earn himself any points. Fourth, fifth and sixth Shane opened up, particularly in the sixth, when he gave Mayorga such a beating that it was nearly a 10-8 round.
But that can of asswhup cost Shane a little bit, and to my eyes he took the next two rounds off. Everyone, including Harold Lederman, agreed that he coasted through the eighth and lost the round, but I thought it was clear that he loafed through the seventh as well. Meanwhile, Mayorga, emboldened by Shane’s fatigue, got a second wind and started asserting his surrealist streetfighting mayhem all over the ring. He didn’t land too much, but he did a lot of crazyass shit while Shane just watched and jumped out of his way and generally tried not to lose the judo match that was taking place in front of him.
(No Masians, I confess that though I’ve been swamped of late, I possibly could have gotten around to posting something in the last week or so if I hadn’t been so enamored of seeing little Reggie Large in his Philly Phanatic onesie at the top of the page. But all things must pass. I promise that I will be back in the game in time to offer some thoughts on Mosley/Mayorga and Berto/Forbes in the next few days. In the meantime, bask in the glow of the almighty Bag and his favorite underwear model - L.)
Oh the sins of Kevin Keegan. He once launched a hair craze that still haunts a wide variety of 1970s British soccer stars, threw his Liverpool jersey onto the sacred Wembley sod after being sent off in a Charity Shield game, and had his photo taken kissing Margaret Thatcher outside 10 Downing Street. The soccer Gods’ can’t easily forget such offenses: and Keegan’s ill-fated second managerial spell with Newcastle United may have been his penance. But if you think “King Kev’s” had a rough go of it lately, spare a thought for Xie Yalong.
Xie is the chairman of the Chinese Football Association. It was reported last week that he has taken leave from his job to attend government management school. While his counterparts across the spectrum of Olympic sports are basking in the glow of enough gold to fill King Solomon’s Mines, continuing education beckons for Xie – or more likely, re-education.
As any first-class flying, five-star hotel staying, lobster dining, sponsors glad-handing, soccer apparatchik will tell you: “No Administrator Left Behind” is a program that every FIFA member country should enthusiastically endorse. But what should the standard curriculum be?
I would like to extend congratulations to my esteemed colleague, David “Large” Larzelere, and his lovely wife Nicole on the birth of Reginald Larzelere aka “Reggie Large”. I would also like to extend congratulations to both of them on the name Reginald. My two boon companions Large and Bud Schmeling, proprietor of Black Betty, both had their first children within weeks of each other. First Schmeling set the bar high by throwing Maximo (Max Schmeling) down on the birth certificate, then Large drops the A-Bomb of Reggie. Fellas, the pressure is on I-Berg big time. So right now I just want to let the world know that my first masculine child will be named Oscar in tribute to both Gamble and Madison. Don’t anyone go trying to Bogart my moniker.
With that said, Large is going to be on paternity leave for an unknown period of time. Right now he’s busy taping Reggie’s right hand behind his back so he can work on his lefty swing. In the meantime even though I am, as always, days late and dollars short, I do want to ask if anyone else noticed while Juan Diaz was dissecting Michael Katsidis, a certain resemblance between Katsidis cornerman Brendon Smith and Murray from “Flight of the Concords”.
During several round breaks as Smith doled out his insights and tips–”Michael you’re fighting a lovely fight. You’re looking fabulous in there. Keep up the great work.”–I actually wondered if HBO had staged some kind of cross-promotion where they actually put Murray in with Katsidis for a “Flight of the Cornermen” sort of thing.
This is the kind of boxing insight you can expect with Large laid up, so hopefully he finishes Reggie’s lefty drills soon and gets back on the stick.
After a Beijing-ian layoff of note, the professional wing of the sweet science gets back to the bigtime blackboard tonight with another notable Puerto Rico/Mexico smackdown of note, a junior flyweight contest between P.R.’s Ivan Calderon and Mexico’s Hugo Cazares for Calderon’s WBO title at 108 pounds. This is a rematch, as I’m sure you know, of the Calderon/Cazares bout that went down almost a year ago today, where Calderon won the WBO belt from Cazares in a hotly disputed split decision despite being knocked down in the eighth round. With the atmosphere of Margarito/Cotto still hovering around the fight game, and with Tony himself planning to be ringside to support Cazares (who calls Margs his personal hero), it seems likely that from the opening bell this thing will get all “el mas macho” to the nth degree of mas. What with the break, I have to say I’m more eager than I usually might be for a light-fly title fight.
The Margo/Cotto fallout hovered over the big boxing news of the week as well, which involved a Mexican from one of the most infamous P.R./Mexico showdowns in history, none other than The Golden Goose himself, who finally threw Manny Pacquiao whatever extra points on the package he needed to get that deal done once and for all. As I mentioned in my Friday boxing notes over at The Sporting Blog, the real news from the Golden Boy camp wasn’t the announcement of the Pac Man debacle, but the fact that Oscar has backed away from his retirement plans in no uncertain terms.
(Ladies and gents, I bring you Baggiesboy’s final installment of insider commentary on the Beijing Olympics, where he was, befitting his station, in a position of some considerable power. Many many thanks to the Bag for his always excellent work on the Games. No doubt he is in Zurich as we speak on some matter of espionage involving the Weltklasse Track Meet and the rising suspicions that Usain Bolt is a space alien. -L)
Tibet, Internet access and the protest application count would seem to be the burning questions of the Beijing Games. But that impression is drawn exclusively from reading newspapers and watching television newscasts. Inside the International Broadcast Center there was only one question on anyone’s mind: How do you say that name?
While prim, grim IOC spokesperson Giselle Davis was shooting dark looks and poorly scripted answers at the assembled media during the five-ring rulers’ ever more sporadic press conferences, I was offering advice on the age old question: is it ee-gor or I-gor? Like Ms. Davis, I rarely let my composure slip as I proffered an answer I wouldn’t like to have to repeat under oath.
I was on even less solid ground with India’s first Olympic gold medal winner in an individual event. Abinav Bindra just had to be Ab-hee-nav Been-dra, right? The shooting star of the Indian team not only struck gold in the 10m air rifle: he earned a free rail pass for life courtesy of Indian Railways and a serious stash of rupees from the Indian Cricket Board. Me, I got some strange looks from my colleagues.
The Undercard is up on Nomas.TV in high-resolution splendor. Four episodes you may already have seen on youtube (Kid Chocolate, Gary Stark I and II, and Gotham Boxing) plus a brand new profile on Cedric Kushner, which gets into the game from the promoter’s point of view. We are working on a way to integrate commenting into the video site, but until then would love to hear any feedback from true school No Masians here. Hope you enjoy.
(To get you all riled up for tonight’s Nigeria/Argentina gold-medal men’s soccer game (CNBC, 12 midnight, but then you already knew that because you read Large Screens TV), Baggiesboy brings us some of his thoughts on the Argy/Brazil semi this past Tuesday night. Was he there, you ask? Obviously you don’t know The Bag. It was a bit of an ordeal, but true to form, he got the job done… -L)
The budding USA-China sports rivalry is going through a growth spurt at these Games, but frankly it has a long way to go. Watching the uneven bars gymnastics final on Monday, I was a tad disappointed that Cold War-style bad blood did not permeate the film of hairspray and chalk dust that hung in the air. Tuesday night, the Games of the XXIX Olympiad saw the real thing: Brazil versus Argentina.
No manufactured buzz was needed for this encounter. For the first time in my experience at these Games the media lane was clogged all along the main drag to the stadium. The thousands of people milling around the Worker’s Stadium needed no introduction to the names on the marquee: Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi replica jersey’s dominate the knockoff emporiums of the Pearl and Silk Markets. The Holy Trinity of sports merchandizing was completed by the presence of Kobe Bryant. My arrival coincided with his. Make no mistake though dear reader, the explosion of popping flashbulbs was all for him. Right then, I should have realized this was going to be no ordinary evening.
The penny began to drop when I encountered the rugby scrum at the foot of the stairs leading to the media seats. There’s a certain sense of entitlement among the Olympic press corps (any press corps for that matter) that extends to automatic observer seats for any, and all events. Alas, every scribe worth his salt knew that the recently renovated remnant of the Mao-era along the Gongti Road was the place to be on Tuesday. What followed was my first glimpse of a crack in the Great Wall of congenial hospitality that has been ever present here in Beijing. Mandarin is not my language, but body language is universal. A squat, thick-necked man with a short fuse to match his stature suddenly appeared to scream something, to me at least, that sounded a good bit stronger than: “No observer seats for you.” When the jostling continued a non-Chinese venue official informed an intrepid newshound: “You can talk to me or you can talk to the police.” I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and bid what I hoped was a graceful retreat. It was the best thing I’ve done at these Games.
A bunch of you have written me asking for some thoughts about the boxing in Beijing and so at long last, I am weighing in. I apologize that I’m weighing in through a piece at another site, but I think you all are aware that I have a monthly nut to meet over at The Sporting Blog, and so forgive me for routing you over there yet again. But I think you’ll get the gist of my general thoughts from my opening couple of grafs below, and then you can check out the full piece over there or just weigh in with your opinions. Very curious to hear what everyone is thinking out there.
I’m pretty passionate about the fight game… and I’m more than familiar with the role the Olympics has played in launching the careers of some of the biggest fighters of all time — Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield, Oscar De La Hoya, not to mention a certain young loudmouth from Louisville named Cassius Clay.
So it pains me to have to venture forth with this piece. But I have no choice but to call it as I see it, and admit that Olympic boxing is a disaster. Such a disaster, in fact, that they might as well get rid of it. As sport, it’s highly dubious to the point of being near ridiculous…
No Mas is featured on page 154 of the September issue GQ. We have now been written up in GQ, Esquire, and the Sporting News. SI hurry up and get some of this so I can die happy. Special thanks to GQ transplant and former Fader man Will Welch, who did us very right.
