MUST-SEE NO MAS TV
Ricky Hatton v. Jose Luis Castillo
HBO, 10 p.m.
Could be the fight of the summer, could be the fight of the year. Certainly, something of interest should transpire, because neither one of these guys is given to taken a backwards step in a fight, and defense is not a big part of credo. Large is a little stumped on who to back in this one. My instincts tell me Castillo – the guy is just indestructible and much more ring-savvy than Hatton. But it’s kind of like watching Curt Schilling on the mound. You’re loath to bet against the guy, but then eventually his arm HAS to fall off, right? Eventually all those shots have to show an effect on Castillo, and if this is the night, Hatton will finish him in eight or less. But I just can’t tell if this is the night or not. If it isn’t, Hatton’s straight-ahead approach seems tailor-made for him to take a horrific beating from Castillo. One nice thing about this fight – it’s hard to imagine a lackluster affair either way.

The Greatest Game Ever Played
Encore, 5:45 p.m.
Did any No Masians out there ever see this thing? It seemed like a seething cauldron of schmaltz, Bagger Vanceian-type shite – then again, it is a pretty good story, and when I was still with Classic Now, we had Bill Paxton (director) on the show and he definitely knew his shit.

Friday Night Smackdown
CW, 8 p.m.
The big Vengeance preview show.

Dwight Braxton v. Leonard Langley
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Classic must have some Dwight Qawi retrospective coming soon if they’re suddenly clearing his meaningless early bouts. This was The Camden Buzzsaw’s (then Dwight Braxton) tenth pro fight – he was still a year and a half away from taking the light heavyweight title away from Matthew Saad Muhammad in one of the great Philly/Jersey boxing showdowns of all time.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
ESPN2, 8 p.m.
Big night ahead in the outdoors – both the men’s and women’s 100m finals and 5000m finals.

Julio Cesar Garcia v. Troy Browning
ESPN2, 9 p.m.
Strange one headlines Friday Night Fights – the 20-year-old Mexican, Baby Face Garcia, versus a 39-year-old journeyman out of Philly, Troy Browning. Only thing is, the journeyman is undefeated. Hard to figure how that happens. Last I saw of Garcia, he was putting a beatdown on everybody’s favorite hardass step-up-in-competition bout (not to mention JCC’s Waterloo), Grover Wiley.

60 Minutes on Classic
ESPN Classic, 10 p.m.
Classic gets us primed for Wimbledon with a full hour of tennis segments from 60 Minutes past, including pieces on the young Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker and Agassi.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Sir Charles on with Dave in a repeat.

TNA Wrestling Impact
Spike, 12:35 a.m.
Rhino and Eric Young v. Robert Roode and James Storm; Chris Harris v. Raven; Kurt Angle’s “Victory Road” opponent is announced.

Bloodfist VII: Manhunt
Spike, 2 a.m.
Corrupt cops frame an ex-Special Forces man for murder. I can only imagine how that turns out. Somebody’s fist is going to get awfully bloody.

6/23
Sonny Liston’s Greatest Fights
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
I’ve seen this before but I can’t remember what bouts are included. I’m pretty sure Mike DeJohn and Eddie Machen are on the roster.

Ultimate Fighter
Spike, 9 a.m.
Starting at 9 on Saturday morning, Spike is going to run the whole season of Ultimate Fighter in succession to get everyone ready for the big Saturday night finale.

High Noon
AMC, 11:45 a.m.
It might be time that we all finally sat down and watched the actual move behind a million sports/gunfight/showdown metaphors.

Legendary Nights: Hagler/Leonard
HBO, 11 a.m.
I watched the Hagler/Antuofermo fight the other night and felt a retrospective pang for the plight of Marvelous Marvin. The decision in that fight was unconscionable, and knowing that immediately afterwards Sugar Ray won his first world title and fulfilled all of the Golden Boy predictions… man Marvin’s heart must have burned with envy and rage. And that it all came down to this bizarre affair eight years later – shit is like a 19th century revenge epic.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
NBC, 2 p.m.
Finals today include the men’s and women’s 400m, the men’s decathlon and the women’s heptathlon.

The Triple Crown of Polo
ESPN2, 1 p.m.
Dah… what? What the fuck is this? Do we have a t-shirt about this yet? I’ll have to speak to I-berg. We probably do.

Urban Cowboy
WE, 3 p.m.
Tony Manero moves from Brooklyn to Nowhere, Texas, marries Debra Winger, and gets obsessed with riding mechanical bulls in bars. All’s I have to say to that is… “Sissy! Git me a beer!”

Eight Men Out
ION, 7 p.m.
Look, champ. I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn’t let play. “Sit down, fat boy’. That’s what they’d say “Sit down, maybe you’ll learn something.” Well, I learned something alright. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands. Tell me, champ, all those years of puggin’, how much money did you make?

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Joe Louis is the featured subject. And you know what that means – “Pour some Bert Sugar on ME!”

Ultimate Fighter Finale
Spike, 9 p.m.
B.J. Penn and Jens Pulver meet at last in the Octagon.

British Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 1 a.m.
An hour recap of that most No Masian British Open, John Daly’s storming of the fescue at St. Andrews in 1995.

6/24
Bend It Like Beckham
IFC, 11:10 a.m.
Don’t laugh. I liked this movie. It warmed the cockles of my cockles, and was my first opportunity to get horny for Keira Knightley. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll clue you into something lest the suspense be too much for you – in the end, they let the girl follow her dreams.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
NBC, 1 p.m.
Men’s and women’s 200 and 800 finals featured.

Gold Cup Final: Mexico v. U.S.
Univision, 3 p.m.
Ah the Copa Oro, with a dandy of a final – a repeat of the Alamo. Canadians meanwhile are still scratching their ‘eads about that offside call today.

Vengeance: Night of Champions
PPV, 8 p.m.
Every WWE title is on the line. And Ric Flair is on the card. Big night.

Jack Dempsey
ESPN Classic, 12:30 a.m.
A half-hour on the career of the Manassa Mauler.

6/22/86

Maybe you saw the debate yesterday on ESPN.com about MMA versus boxing (MMA or boxing?). It’s certainly a hot-topic issue these days, and before Franchise defected to Cuba we were thinking about staging a similar debate.

It would have been sort of stupid though if we had, stupid for a similar reason that the ESPN debate was stupid – clearly both of those dudes are into MMA AND boxing, so what are they arguing about really? (Chise actually would have had me on that one – he’s much more of a boxing fan than I am into the MMA scene.) How interested are you in a debate as to which is better – basketball or baseball? It’s not quite the same thing, I know, but it’s in the ballpark, and it’s kind of a waste of time. They’re both good.

I infinitely prefer boxing, as you know, but that’s just my preference. I watch UFC pretty regularly, and I enjoy it. I’m glad it’s doing so well, and ultimately I think it’s success will help rather than hurt boxing. There’s enough bloodlust to go around. I admit that I don’t feel like I’m watching elite athletes when I’m watching UFC. Tough sons-of-bitches, yes, but I don’t really watch this shit to watch tough sons-of-bitches. I still think of boxing at its best as a display of athleticism of the highest order, which is to say that you give me a choice between Gatti/Ward I and Oscar/Floyd, I’ll take Oscar/Floyd in a second. Watching two mamalucs try to behead each other is fun, no doubt, but the whole experience of a fight is about much more than that for me.

Clearly the UFC dudes are good athletes, and god forbid I should ever have to fight any of them. But I think even the most diehard UFC fans would admit that as boxers they couldn’t compete at the highest level, and as wrestlers they couldn’t compete at the highest level. What MMA boils down to is some simulacrum of a streetfight, and yet it doesn’t go all the way, and that makes it less interesting to me, makes it seem like just a fusion of two sports in which the competitors really aren’t that good at either one of them. For UFC to really impress me it truly would have to be no-holds-barred. A legitimate streetfight with two dudes legitimately trying to kill each other. Obviously that’s not going to happen. Or maybe it will. With the way reality television is going these days, you do have to wonder how far away we are from sanctioned murder as popular entertainment.

But I digress. I still maintain that much of a debate on this score is meaningless. Franchise could come on here and rebut all the points I made above and I probably would not have much to say about it, because, as I said, I like UFC. I really doubt you’re going to find many fans of either sport who don’t enjoy the other at least somewhat, unless they’re being really stubborn about it.

The main issue to me is the perception of the respective sports’ momentum with fans – boxing as the flabby, old, corrupt instituition, and UFC as the exciting, new, fan-friendly phenomenon. This divide is basically a question of the amount of money involved, and the amount of money the athletes themselves expect to make. UFC is a relatively new attraction, and although the sport has its big names for sure, to this point the real star of the sport is the sport itself, the octagon, the fact of its existence. Over time, this will change. The uniqueness of the events themselves will wear off, and then, like every other sport, it will become a star-driven economy. Gone will be the days when people will watch any two mooks go at it in the octagon, and gone will be the days of the cards packed with great fights and great fighters, because it just won’t be financially feasible. You can’t have Bernard/Winky, Cotto/Judah and Oscar/Floyd on the same card – there’s too much money involved, you have to pay each fighter too much. I guarantee that UFC eventually will face the same problem, and fans then will have the same complaints as boxing fans. But until then, I think the competition UFC gives to boxing is only good news for fight fans of all kinds, and the inevitable boxing/UFC showdown that someday will transpire is certainly going to be an enjoyable evening for all of us.

Zab Judah v. Micky Ward
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m. & 12 a.m.
Now that it seems like His Zab-ness is an ESPN fighter for life (his next bout already has been announced for September 7th’s Friday Night Fights) the Worldwide Leader is showering him with love in the repeats. This one features a 21-year-old Zab against Irish battleaxe Micky Ward. Good action, not great.

Alexis Arguello v. Ray Mancini
VS., 9 p.m.
Arguello/Mancini – pretty much the Alamo here in No Mas-land. It’s certainly one of the defining fights of my life, two of my heroes as a young boxing fan in a war to the finish. We featured this one as a Knockout of the Week in December.

Last Call with Carson Daly
NBC, 1:35 a.m.
Stanley Cup-winning headhunter Chris Pronger is on with Carson. Which makes me wonder, is he like in a band or something?

Most of us remember Freddie Patek as the diminutive (5’4″) shortstop of the great Kansas City teams of the late 70′s, the little guy with the squeaky voice who ultimately lost his job in the middle of the Royals’ infield to the toothpick-chewing U.L. Washington.

One thing that none of us remember Patek for, however, is power-hitting. And yet, 27 years ago today, Lil Fred went big. Over the course of his 14-year career, Patek hit 41 total home runs, but on June 20, 1980 he hit three in one game. He was with the Angels at the time, and California blew out the Red Sox at Fenway, 20-3. Patek, batting eighth, went 4-7, with three dingers and a double and seven RBI’s. At the time he was only the second shortstop in history, after Ernie Banks, to hit three long balls in a single game. Today he remains undoubtedly the most unlikely player ever to achieve that feat.

Angels/Red Sox boxscore – 6/20/80 (Baseball Almanac)

Michael Nunn v. John Scully
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Ole Second-to-Nunn has been largely forgotten by history, and yet round about 1990 he was a legitimate PFP candidate. Until he met up with a much younger, much skinner James Toney that is (for a little bit of that action, click here). By the time of this Scully fight, Nunn was pretty much shot (I guess Classic wants to prove that Scully, their D-list boxing announcer, actually was a boxer once), but he was a great fighter who doesn’t get his due and he’s not on TV too much anymore, so here you go.

Peter Manfredo Jr. v. David Banks
ESPN2, 10 p.m.
Wednesday Night Fights – what a load. Let me just say here that I have had it with the Contender chumps. People want to dig that show, fine, but don’t keep trotting the dudes out afterward against real fighters and wasting our time. These cats CAN’T FIGHT. I mean, yo, did you see Manfredo/Calzaghe? Jesus. That looked like what I imagine would happen if Winky fought me.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Dave has Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti in a repeat from right after the race.

Sixty-one years ago tonight, televised sports made a leap forward in its inevitable march into every living room in America with RCA’s broadcast of the very first televised heavyweight fight, the Joe Louis/Billy Conn rematch at Yankee Stadium. It’s estimated that about 150,000 people saw the fight that night on just under 5,000 sets across the country. A year and a half later, over a million people would see the first Louis/Walcott fight on TV.

Unfortunately, the first big television fight night was a dud and a half. Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid, was a hard-nosed light heavyweight champ who nearly had upset Louis in 1941 at the Polo Grounds. In that bout, leading on two scorecards and tied on another, most experts felt that hubris got the better of Conn and led him to brawl with Louis in the late rounds, a mistake that caught up to him in the 13th when the Bomber put him down for the count. Despite the loss, his heroic effort and damn-the-torpedoes attitude made him a boxing folk hero, and that first Louis/Conn fight still tops many a boxing pundit’s list of the greatest fights of all time.

The sequel, held five years later almost to the day, was an utter disappointment. Since their first bout in ’41, the fighters had fought sparingly, not out of choice, but because they both served in the war. The break was not kind to either of them, and particularly not to Conn, who was nowhere near the float-like-a-butterfly-punch-like-a-gorilla force he had been five years prior. Nowhere near his own best, Louis nevertheless was pitching a near-shutout rounds-wise when he knocked Conn out in the eighth. Today the bout is almost universally forgotten, and it lives on in boxing lore not for being the first televised heavyweight fight but for Louis’s legendary quip in an interview beforehand when asked about Conn’s famous elusiveness in the ring. “He can run,” the champ said, “but he can’t hide.” It’s a line that’s been so often repeated you’d think the source was Shakespeare.

Syracuse v. Virgina Tech 1998
ESPN Classic, 2 p.m.
Some DMac heroics for the Orangemen in his senior year, winning the game on the last play from scrimmage with a 13-yard touchdown pass.

The Electric Horseman
Sundance, 1:30 p.m.
Oh this movie is so freakin 70′s. Robert Redford stars as a former rodeo star who is now slutting himself out to Wild West shows. Jane Fonda is the city-slicker reporter who falls in love with him. It’s a little Crocodile Dundee, a little Urban Cowboy, a little Horse Whisperer. And the title – it really should have been a porn movie.

SportsCenter Flashback
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m
On the 21st anniversary of the death of Len Bias, Classic shows an hour of the SportsCenter coverage from the weeks after the tragedy.

Jose Luis Ramirez v. Pernell Whitaker
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Exhibit A in the “Pernell wuz robbed” story of Whitaker’s life. The bout was held in France, which was probably the problem. French judges are known for their blindness.

Haven’t had a Knockout of the Week in a while, so I wanted to get us back in the game with a dandy. This here is from Friday Night Fights in 2002, a huge upset in which Juan Valenzuela stopped Julio Diaz in the first round. Diaz was a legitimate lightweight contender at the time with only one loss on his record, a tight split-decision loss to Angel Manfredy in an IBF title-shot eliminator two bouts prior. Valenzuela (nickname, Pollo – bad nickname) was just another one of those hordes of young badass Mexicans out there in the world waiting for their shot to beat the shit out of someone on TV. Ill-advisedly, Diaz got a little sloppy with this kid, and paid the price dearly with a left-hook out of nowhere that completely sleep-ified his ass. As Diaz did the unconscious bobblehead, Valenzuela laid another overhand right on him just to emphasize the visit from Mr. Sandman, and the ref got in there quick, thank Christ, cause this one had Benny Paret written all over it.

Twenty-two years ago today, the 1985 NBA draft was held, the first seven picks of which had been decided by the league’s first draft lottery held a month prior. It was a unique situation, because the jackpot was so dearly prized – a seven-foot center out of Georgetown almost universally acknowledged to be the type of player that comes along once in a generation.

As we all know, the Knicks won the top pick and the right to Ewing, and a lot of words have been wasted ever since suggesting that the whole thing was rigged (note the infamously folded corner of the Knicks’ envelope in the video below). If it was, it was rigged by someone who hated New York. Who else would saddle the city with such high hopes, with such near-certainty of future glory, when a first-year player was already in the league who would personally guarantee that those Olympian hopes would never be realized?

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Mark your calendars for the No Mas Lottery show in Manhattan on Wednesday, June 27th, 7:30 p.m. at 31 West 19th Street. Portraits of all the 105 original “lottery picks” (1985 – 1995) will be given away to members of the audience in a one-time-only lottery and art draft. RSVP: lottery@nomas-nyc.com

The rules of the show are below (click on the image to read it):