This week, to get us all primed and ready for the biggest night that boxing has seen in years, our Knockout of the Week series will be the Knockout of the Day, as we will showcase daily a classic Oscar De La Hoya or Floyd Mayweather Jr. stoppage of the past in search of some clues as to what we might see in the ring this Saturday night.

We begin with Floyd’s second-round TKO of Angel Manfredy in 1998. Manfredy was riding high at that point, with stoppages of Jorge Paez and Arturo Gatti in the previous year. But he was no match for the preternatural Mayweather speed. This bout illustrates well how that speed makes it a very tricky business to try and approach Floyd aggressively. It’s generally taken for granted that you must pressure him, because if you let him set the pace, he will pick his spots all night, in and out, in and out, and because of that speed and his phenomenal defensive instincts, you’ll never, ever hit him with a meaningful punch. On the other hand, if you do pressure him and take the initiative, you have to deal with the fact that – 1. he is the best counter-puncher of his generation, and 2. like maybe no one since Ali, he fights brilliantly and powerfully stepping backwards.

Of course, Angel Manfredy is no Oscar De La Hoya. There is almost no chance whatsoever that Floyd stops Oscar in two – he just will not have that kind of power at 154, not to mention the fact that Oscar has proven his beard against much bigger bangers than Mayweather. Floyd gets his stoppages from accumulated punishment, usually in rounds seven to ten. He doesn’t have a KO on his record since Justin Juuko in 1999 (although he actually would have murdered Gatti if they hadn’t called that one). But the fact remains that if Oscar is going to follow the c.w. on Floyd and stalk him relentlessly, he’s going to have to eat a lot of clean shots, often in breakneck combinations. The question is, how long can he take two (or three, or five) to land one, and can he, somewhere along the line, make that one THE one?

The racial politics of high school basketball in 1950s Indiana sidestepped in the Oscar-nominated Hoosiers, appear front and center in Betsy Blankenbaker’s Something to Cheer About. Released in theaters last Friday (five years after its DVD debut), the documentary celebrates the on-court preeminence of Coach Ray Crowe’s all-black Crispus Attucks basketball team from 1951-1957 and the team’s community value as an academic and athletic success model for blacks and whites alike in Indianapolis.

In the 1954 state tournament, Attucks was upset in the semis by all-white Milan High (represented in Hoosiers as Hickory High) which used the cat-and-mouse delay game to successfully unhinge Attucks’s high-scoring attack. But Attucks’s nearly turnover-free fast break proved unstoppable during back-to-back, Oscar-Robertson-led state title runs in 1955 and 1956. The film reveals another layer of Attucks’s up-tempo approach: Coach Crowe pushed his team to rapidly build a big lead in the game’s early moments to weather the anti-Attucks bias of the referees down the stretch.

Something to Cheer About is showing at NYC’s Quad Cinema until Thursday. Do not hesitate: this short run will very likely be your one and only chance to see it on the big screen.
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Jeffrey Lane grew up playing basketball in New York City. As a high schooler in the mid-nineties, Lane captained a mostly white team playing against nearly all-black competition and realized then that basketball is an awesome forum for understanding race in America. Today Lane writes on the construction of race in sports and just published his first book, Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 6 right here in NYC.

The Kid From Brooklyn
AMC, 2 p.m.
No, this is not a film-length forum for that mamaluc who spouts his racist, xenophobic crap on YouTube – this is a 1946 movie starring Danny Kaye about a goofy milkman who accidentally knocks out a world-champion fighter, and then gets dragged into the fight game himself.

The Long Run
HBO2, 7 p.m.
I’ve had a few people write to me to suggest this for our Best Sports Movies You’ve Never Seen series, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it. It’s about an aging white track coach who discovers a black woman prodigy in South Africa.

Entourage
HBO2, 9 p.m.
This show is so freakin metrosezchuan that it makes me uncomfortable, but hey, I watch it, which I guess means that I’m as shallow as the next ponce with a head full of product. If you missed it last night, and you want to feel macho about watching this garbage, know that Chuck Liddell plays a starring role in the latest episode and on the whole he’s pretty awesome. (I’m primarily including this as a heads-up for Franchise, cause I know that ballbreaker doesn’t watch Entourage.)

WWE Raw
USA, 9 p.m.
The fallout from last night’s Backlash PPV where the 61-year-old Vince McMahon captured the ECW Heavyweight title. Somewhere Paul Heyman, one of ECW founding fathers, is cringing.

Back in the Day
Speed, 9:30 p.m.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. hosts this show about classic races – this one goes back to the 1975 Carolina 500, won by good ole boy Cale Yarborough, the only NASCAR driver currently enshrined in the No Mas Hall of Fame.

Jimmy Kimmel Live
ABC, 12:05 a.m.
A double shot of sports love on a Kimmel repeat tonight – Clyde the Glyde (talking about Dancing with the Stars) and Vince Young (talking about Madden NFL ’08).

La Haine
FlixE, 2:30 a.m.
Known in English as “Hate,” this is an important, and great, French film from the mid-90′s about racial discord in the banlieues de Paris. The French equivalent of Boyz n the Hood, only better. Not a sports-oriented movie by any means, but one of the three main characters is a fighter and there are some scenes of him training, proving that even across the pond, the boxing still got cred in the hood.

The Bulls polished off a four-game sweep of the Heat earlier today, which, as you may have read, is the first time that a defending NBA champ has been swept in the first round of the playoffs since 1957.

Of course, they had to bring that up, and of course, it has something to do with the Illadelph.

There were only two rounds of playoffs before the finals in 1957 – the Eastern and Western division semis and finals. That year, the defending champion Philadelphia Warriors were swept in the Eastern division semis by the Syracuse Nationals, two games to none. The Nationals were led by their future Hall-of-Famer Dolph Schayes, while the Warriors boasted pretty much the same line-up that had won the title the previous year, including two future basketball Hall members, Paul Arizin (pictured above right) and Neil Johnston.

The Nationals then went on to be swept by the Celtics in the Eastern division finals, and then Boston won it all in a down-to-the-wire seven game series with the St. Louis Hawks, who were led by the immortal Bob Pettit. This was the first championship in Celtics’ history, and not coincidentally, it was also the rookie season of a certain center out of San Francisco. Surprisingly, not only was Bill Russell denied the MVP award that year (it went to teammate Bob Cousy) he didn’t even win the ROY honors, which went to another of his teammates, the great Tom Heinsohn (Russell would win his first of five MVP’s the following season).

Beginning with that iron-clad core lineup of Russell, Cousy, Heinsohn and Bill Sharman, Boston would go on to appear in the next 12 NBA Finals, winning ten of them. During that period, they would beat Philly teams in the playoffs a total of seven times. Just in case you were wondering why all those years I felt like Red Sox fans could shove the Curse of the Bambino right up their drunken Irish asses.

“What had happened was that the horn wound, the first real goring, had taken all his valor. He never got it back. He had too much imagination.”

In Hemingway’s great bullfighting history and meditation, Death in the Afternoon, he asserts that one can never know the true value of a matador until he has been seriously gored for the first time. The reason being that every matador worth his salt eventually will be gored – it’s part of the job description – and that the courage requisite to ply the matadoring trade is often in great abundance prior to that first horn-wound, and utterly fleeting after it. A truly great matador, Hemingway argues, returns from his first goring better than before, because the stakes have been raised, and that’s just how he likes it. But this, of course, is a rare breed of man.

Last night in Connecticut, Acelino “Popo” Freitas quit on his stool in his lightweight unification bout with Juan Diaz, refusing to answer the bell for the ninth round. It’s the second high-profile title bout that Freitas has opted out of early, the first coming in 2004 against Diego Corrales. Though Popo was heavily scorned in the boxing world for quitting in the Corrales fight, I myself thought he fought courageously in that bout and had no problem with his decision. He got up off the canvas twice under heavy fire, the second time so battered that he could barely stand. When he essentially TKO’ed himself after the third knockdown, I thought to myself, “good riddance.” He’d endured savage punishment, and nothing was left but for him to be severely hurt.

But I thought of Hemingway last night when I heard Max Kellerman’s assessment of Popo’s performance against the “Baby Bull” Diaz. Seeing that Freitas was not getting off his stool to begin the ninth round, Kellerman said something along the lines of, “he’s been there before, and once you go to that place, it’s hard to come back.”

The career of Freitas has not been dissimilar to that of Roy Jones – a uniquely talented fighter known for thrilling knockouts and utter domination in the ring. Popo mixed it up a lot more than Roy ever did, but still, he owned his opponents in Roy-like fashion for years, once stringing together 29 straight KO’s. Then, much like Roy, his first real goring irrevocably changed his mettle. Freitas has not been the same since the Corrales debacle, his first loss, and last night we saw what I think was his own acknowledgement of that fact. Diaz was beating him soundly, but Popo was still very much in that fight, down maybe two or three points on the scorecards with four rounds to go. And yet, just as in the Corrales fight, he was running out of gas and his opponent seemed intractable. In the end, he feared the horns more than the ignominy of another cowardly exit.

Bizarrely, not long after he quit on his stool, Acelino’s handlers lifted him onto their shoulders and paraded him around, a beatific, beaten smile on his face. Later we saw him in passionate embrace with his painfully beautiful Brazilian wife. They left the ring together arm in arm, the beauty queen and her 31-year-old vanquished husband, 31 going on 60. Cheating death has always been a young man’s racket anyway. I think it’s safe to say that Popo Freitas has fought his last bull, baby or otherwise.

Twenty-Four Seven (1997)
Director: Bob Hoskins
Starring: Bob Hoskins, Bruce Jones
BBC, 96 minutes

Twenty-Four Seven, the low-budget debut from director Shane Meadows about amateur boxing, was shot in black and white in an industrial town in England – but let’s see if we can get through this without using the word ‘gritty”, shall we?

On paper the film might appear to have all the elements of a boxing ‘Billy Elliot’ – a tale of working-class lads escaping from the drudgery of their lives via a new-found discipline. But be warned – this is no ballet-loving granny-pleaser: this film is more likely to take you out the back and kick your teeth in.

‘Twenty Four Seven’ is the story of Alan Darcy’s (Bob Hoskins) attempt to open a boxing club in a dead-end town to give local kids something to do, away from a life of unemployment and petty crime. Darcy recalls the boxing club he visited as a boy and decides that he wants to provide the same for the youth of today. But before he can get them in the ring, he needs to get them to stop fighting between themselves. The boys are a bunch of misfits – they include a junkie, a mildly-psychotic fighter and the chubby son of the club’s dodgy financier. The turning point comes when Darcy arranges a trip to the Welsh countryside – this release for the boys from their housing estate environment inspires and motivates them to get into shape for a tournament against a local club.

The boxing scenes are brief and there is no magical transformation from bad lads to boxing greats – what this film shows more is the tenacity and guts of the boys who have at last found something to believe in. Beautifully shot, this is a great piece of British cinema which is genuinely funny and engaging, underpinned with those classic themes of self-respect and male bonding. The film never slips into sentimentality, nor is there a straightforward happy ending.

Darcy is a big-hearted, compassionate dreamer, whose philosophy of ‘Giving it, taking it, living it, making the best of what you’ve got… twenty four hours a day, seven days a week” gives the film its title. Bob Hoskins is tremendous as Darcy – if you only know him from ‘Mona Lisa’, then you MUST also see ‘The Long Good Friday’, which some would class as the greatest gangster movie ever.

A boxing film is nothing without a great soundtrack (‘Rocky’, ‘When We Were Kings’) – there’s all those tough training sessions that need some inspirational soul and this has it in spades; brilliant, heavy tunes from Tim Buckley, Van Morrison and The Charlatans.

I can’t commend this highly enough to No Mas readers – make an effort with what will be fairly impenetrable accents for those of you stateside and I guarantee that this brilliant bittersweet film will soon rank in your favourites. Just don’t call it gritty.

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After graduating from Oxford University, Jamie Fraser has worked as an intellectual property lawyer in London for the last 7 years. These details, among others, disqualify him from having his biopic shot in black and white.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 6 right here in NYC.

Forty years ago today, just over a month after his defeat of Zora Folley at Madison Square Garden, Muhammad Ali appeared at his scheduled induction ceremony to the army at the Houston Selective Service Induction Center. He successfully passed the physical, meeting all requirements for induction. But then three times he refused to take the symbolic step forward when his name was called to take the induction oath, refusing to serve in the U.S. Army and thus becoming liable for a $10,000 fine and a potential five-year prison sentence.

U.S. attorney Morton Susman immediately initiated criminal proceedings against Ali, and in a move that ultimately would prove more significant for the champ, the New York State Athletic Commission announced that same day that Ali had been stripped of both his heavyweight crown and his boxing license. The sport’s greatest title was up for grabs, and perhaps the greatest heavyweight fighter of the 20th century was out of a job. He did not have no quarrel with them Viet Cong, but he had himself a hell of a beef with ole Uncle Sam, one that would cost him three and a half years of the prime of his fighting life.

Going into the premiere last night, I felt I had a lot of good reasons to be skeptical about “Chavez”, the feature doc directed by actor Diego Luna, the third side of the Y tu mamá también triangle. If my chief objection was rooted in envy, the crowd at the Clearview on twenty-third and ninth only added fuel to the player hating fire. As my movie-going compadre Bud Schmeling put it, ‘There was the whiff of Andalusian beauty in the air.” Okay probably the majority of the raven-haired throngs were from Mexico City, but that sounded better. And from the eager looks on their high-cheeked faces when a high-spirited Luna, all grown up in a sharp blue suit, came down to the front of the room to introduce his film, you got the strong feeling that his on screen adventures with Ana Lopez Mercado might actually pale in comparison to his real life.

If that wasn’t enough to get your hackles up, there was the more legitimate concern: how did this kid have the stones to try to tell the life story of Julio Cesar Chavez. Basically we are talking about the rough equivalent of a young Matthew Broderick deciding Ferris Bueller’s Day Off qualified him to direct the Muhammad Ali story. Luna is not an accomplished filmmaker (this was his first), he’s not any kind of boxing authority, and according to his father, who Bud got talking to at the after party at the Maritime, he hadn’t even been a huge Chavez fan growing up. For all these reasons, ‘Chavez” had all the ingredients to be the worst kind of exercise in celebrity dilettanteism–which would have been especially hard to stomach since Chavez’s story is so worthy of a good telling. In short, I had my doubts.

They weren’t all erased, but ‘Chavez” still won me over. There were stretches, especially a slow bit in the middle about Chavez’s relationship to Carlos Salinas and Mexican politics, where it seemed Luna had bit off more than he could chew, but they were more than balanced by some sublime revelations about boxing and about fathers and sons.

The centerpiece of the film is the September 2005 fight against Grover Wiley, which was not supposed to Chavez’s last. As Bob Arum tells it, he had dubbed the promotion ‘Adios Phoenix” and it was designed to be part of a larger ‘Adios” tour which started with ‘Adios Los Angeles” hit ‘Adios Texas” and ‘Adios Atlantic City” and then extended indefinitely towards ‘Adios, Adios”.

By this point in the farewell tour, Luna has managed to gain Chavez and his son’s confidence and is given complete and total access as both Chavez Sr. and Jr. prepare to fight on a card that was built to give the two of them easy wins and send the Mexican-American population of Phoenix home happy. Things do not go according to plan, and this is where Luna finds his film.

I won’t go too far and spoil it, but the part already long on record is that Chavez’s corner threw in the towel between the fifth and sixth round. It was an utterly humiliating way for one of the hardest men in the history of the hardest game to go out. But the rough poetry of boxing is wrapped up in the fact that no one seems to get to say Adios on their own terms: not Joe Louis, not Ali, and not Julio Cesar Chavez. The best storytelling about boxing,the reportage of Gay Talese and A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz’s ‘The Professional”, Scorcese’s Raging Bull–finds the beauty in those most terrible moments of failure and finality.

In the aftermath of ‘Adios Phoenix”, on the long trip back down the corridor and in the dressing room, there is no doubt that Diego Luna caught some moments that can stand in this canon. The mean-spirited may say he just got lucky. Fairer judges will know that whatever advantages his celebrity gave him, he made his own luck. It’s not easy for anyone to get the kind of access he did, or to know how to treat the fruit of that access. Luna caught something incredible and he knew both how to make the most of it and how to treat it with respect. For that, he earns our sincere congratulations and our recommendation. You should see Chavez.

4/22
Southpaw Jinx
A great day for lefties, the 13th anniversary of Michael Moorer’s victory over Evander Holyfield, making him the first southpaw heavyweight champion in history.

4/23
Large v. Plimp
Large examines George Plimpton’s candidacy for the No Mas Hall of Fame, quite unfairly influenced by Large’s one bungled trip to the Plimpton mansion. “There can be no finer looking set of nubiles at any Vogue party thrown last week than were at Plimpton’s house that night, and the master of ceremonies was trailed by an adoring gaggle of these shiny geese everywhere he went. To my eye, this was the point of the party, and anything else that transpired was incidental.”

Sons of Sakhnin
I-Berg reviews Roger Bennett’s Sons of Sakhnin, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. “Sakhnin casts new and interesting light on the greatest political, cultural, and religious struggle of our time, while simultaneously giving up all the David vs. Goliath sports documentary goodness we require. Basically we are in the territory of Bad News Bears meets “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, which is some pretty rarified air.”

The O’Brien Glide
No Mas bids a sad but swarthy farewell to the great Parry O’Brien, legendary shot-putter and inventor of the groundbreaking O’Brien glide, who died this past Saturday at the age of 75.

K.O.W. – Sturm und Drang
To get us all primed for the Felix Sturm/Javier Castillejo rematch tomorrow night, our No Mas Knockout of the Week goes back to the first fight, where Castillejo prevailed with a TKO in the 10th. “Crumpling forward into Castillejo, Sturm received three whipping uppercuts to the head before the ref could mercifully put an end to the proceedings. I tell you people, those last three punches were like killing a mockingbird.”

4/24
No Mas Caption Contest
A caption contest for tickets to last night’s premiere of Chavez at the Tribeca Film Festival.

2007 New York Golden Gloves
Our man No Mas Nick Strini, who has been covering the Golden Gloves this year, congratulates the winners and offers up a spectacular slideshow of the proceedings.

4/25
The Milan Debacle
We reprint an excerpt on the movie Hoosiers from Jeffrey Lane’s excellent new book, “Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball.” “The movie Hoosiers captures both the enormous pride Indiana takes in its basketball tradition and the throwback aestheticism routinely attached to this pride. Two former Indiana University students, director David Anspaugh and writer Angelo Pizzo, collaborated to recreate an immortal slice of Indiana folklore, the “Milan Miracle,” which is considered by many the greatest Cinderella story in all of hoops history.”

The Sports Guy Also Thinks Boxing Is Dead
Bill Simmons’ recent piece on De la Hoya/Mayweather and the decline of boxing gets Large’s blood up. “His boxing column boils down to the firm grasp of the blatantly obvious that I’ve come to expect from him: in short, boxing used to be good, now its not. He throws in the blanket assertion that De la Hoya/Mayweather will be the last big fight, unlike his memories of the good old days when he and his buddies evidently watched a fight of this caliber every weekend (I can only imagine how The Sports Guy and his posse whooped it up for the likes of Zaragoza/Morales).”

4/26
Sharpshootin’ with The Franchise
For this week’s Sharpshootin’, Franchise gives his column over to a trip down memory lane, a reminiscence of the greatest wrestling move of all time, Beyond the Mat.

Deal or Shit Deal
And ah, what a shit deal it was – the Tribe sent Chris Chambliss and Dirt Tidrow to the Yanks for four crash test dummies on this day 23 years ago. “…the moustache parity between the two teams was not disrupted in this deal, as Tidrow and Buskey’s liprugs cancelled each other out and those Zapatas that Peterson and Chambliss had going were of equal measure.”

4/27
The Best Sports Movies You’ve Never Seen
Baggiesboy continues our series on unheralded sports films with On a Clear Day, which follows that grand tradition of mid-life-crisis-go-swim-the-English-Channel movies that were all the rage a few years back.

Three for the Money
With the recent Cuban boxing defectors set to debut professionally tonight, longtime friend of No Mas Bud Schmeling, a.k.a. Morty Bravo, ruminates on what it means to leave the Socialist island for the lure of the big payday. “Every potential defector is faced with a harrowing decision; remain, compete as an amateur and continue the great struggle with his fellow countrymen, or leave and possibly subject family and friends to various persecutions to pursue the dreams that are the birthright of all world-class athletes outside of Cuba.”

As you may or may not know, we here in Nomaslovokia have a soft spot in our heart for most things Cuban. So, naturally, the recent defection of three of the tiny island’s most lauded fighters got me thinking about the immense gravity of their decision and the rippling ramifications it will have on the boxers, the boxing world and their native country.

Early last month, 25-year-old superbantam Yuriorkis Gamboa, 26-year-old heavyweight Odlanier Solis and 27-year-old flyweight Yan Barthelemy bolted Fidel Castro’s socialist utopia. While training for the Pan-Am games in Venezuela, the trio, along w/their respective gold medals from the Athens Olympics, slipped away for the team complex, made their way to Colombia, signed six figure deals with a Hamburg-based promoter and will make their professional debuts tonight. These three fighters (all smart-money favorites to repeat with gold in Bejing) are certainly not the first Cuban Athletes to leave behind family and friends and seek fortune and freedom outside their intoxicating yet oppressive homeland. What is more compelling is the fact that a large majority of the greatest sportsmen ever churned out by the potent academies of the revolution chose to stay – three-time gold medalists Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon, track and field legend Alberto Juantorena, the greatest men’s high jumper in history Javier Sotomayor and the Ted Williams of Cuba, Omar Linares. Each man eschewed staggering paydays (by Cuban standards, where the average salary clocks in at about 30 bucks a month) to remain at home and compete not for the riches bestowed on professional athletes around the world, but rather to serve as role models, exemplars of the pure spirit of the Socialist man which has been hammered into every Cuban since the heady days of 1959. When Teofilo turned up his nose at a five-million-dollar offer to fight Ali ( a dream match-up that had every boxing aficionado salivating) he reportedly quipped “what’s a few million dollars compared to the love of eleven million Cubans?”

All Cubans are poor. But when one travels through the Eastern province of Guantanamo, hopefully en route to the knee-buckling beauty of Santiago, the concept of poverty is poignantly illuminated. Both Joel Casamayor and Yuriokis Gamboa were reared in the penumbra of the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. In one of the first interviews he gave after his defection, Gamboa recounted how he had to sell his gold medal to pay for his young daughter’s birthday party. Every potential defector is faced with a harrowing decision; remain, compete as an amateur and continue the great struggle with his fellow countrymen, or leave and possibly subject family and friends to various persecutions to pursue the dreams that are the birthright of all world-class athletes outside of Cuba. To a man, the three fighters stated that they had accomplished all that was possible within the amateur ranks and wanted to test themselves against the best in the world, knowing that it could be many years before they saw their families again.

Despite the best efforts of the Castro regime, this recent trend (much to the delight of the Miami crowd) of the best and the brightest plying their trades elsewhere, is gaining considerable momentum, in stark contrast to the legends of past, many of whom were, or still are, high ranking members of the party, devout, committed. The present-day Cuban athlete does not concern himself much with politics, and it is probably a safe bet to say that none of them would punch out an anti-Castro protester in a Miami airport like Teofilo once did. That is not to say that they, like every other Cuban, aren’t impressively, vehemently nationalistic. They probably consider Che Guevera a god, and would lunge at the opportunity to have their photo taken with” El Jefe.”

But they also probably reserve their political opinions only to be shared in hushed tones with their closest allies. I do not portend to know the political leanings of the three Olympians, but there has been no rationale other than sport and economics offered for their defection. To the great chagrin of the government, who do everything possible to insulate its citizens from the ever encroaching evils of Capitalism, the dam is beginning to break. Many Cubans have access to the internet, have seen MTV Cribs and are infatuated with Hip Hop culture. Like so many young athletes, these extremely talented olympians probably aspire to live like Floyd Mayweather Jr., and that alone I imagine to be their inspiration.

What is to become of them remains to be seen. But what is certain is that they have much to live up to. From what I have gleaned they all possess the flair, acumen and passion that their predecessors were known for. Boxing annals are ripe with the heroic and innovative exploits of the great Cuban fighters. Perhaps, in the group there is the next Kid Chocolate, of whom Sugar Ray Robinson was such a fan. Or another Luis Rodriguez, who trained with Ali at the legendary 5th Street gym. What about the great middleweight Florentino Fernandez, or Benny Paret, or the master of the bolo punch, the great Kid Gavilan? Just by invoking these names, I’m probably asking too much, but it doesn’t hurt to dream. In any case, I wish them and their families well and feel secure that they will do proud both those who preceded them and those who are sure to follow.
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Bud Schmeling, aka Morty Bravo, is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute where he still holds virtually every single-season demerit record in the school’s history. A former zamboni driver and wiffle-ball legend, Bravo has contributed to the Village Voice and Frank 151 as well as reporting on the Caribbean World Series, the Cuban League Series and the Dominican Winter Leagues. Presently, he presides over the Black Betty in Brooklyn and is a member of their championship softball team. He resides in Williamsburg with his Mojito-making Cuban dog. Do not challenge either of them to a drinking contest.