Ricardo Mayorga, ironically nicknamed “El Matador” given his overwhelmingly bullish style, was on my mind this past weekend, both because of the Vernon Forrest match and because Mayorga’s September 8th bout with Fernando Vargas is growing ever closer. It’s a real shame that this is a PPV fight, because neither fighter is really PPV-caliber right now, and yet this promises to be a rock-em-sock-em robots kind of night that any fight-fan worth his salt will want to see for sure. I’ve no doubt that you’ve all seen the video of the Mayorga/Vargas brawl by now, so let me just take you back to a moment from that press conference to set up our Knockout of the Week. Before the fireworks started, Mayorga told the audience that he’d been training for two months already for Vargas and that he plans to be the same fighter that he was when he won his first world title. He then recommended that we all go back and look at the tapes to see just what kind of fighter he was back then.

So I’m taking him up on that. Here’s the KO from his win over Andrew Lewis in March of 2002 that won him his first legitimate belt, the WBA welterweight title. He and Lewis had met the year before and the bout was stopped as a no-contest after Lewis suffered an ugly cut from a headbutt in the second. In the rematch, Mayorga predicted that he would stop the champion in three – it ended up taking him two more rounds that that. And a beautiful, brutal knockout it was. It’s this type of wild-swinging savagery that has made such a mediocre, dubious athlete as Mayorga a major attraction for years now, and I can’t imagine that will stop anytime soon. He says he wants to get back to 147 and fight Cotto and Mayweather and Hatton, et al. Hear hear, says Large. I’d pay to see any of those guys out-matador El Matador.

Oh what a day it was for John Bull 41 years ago this afternoon when England won its first and only World Cup championship with a 4-2 overtime victory over West Germany. The match was all square at the end of 90 minutes and so went on into extra time, where a controversy occurred that is perhaps only equalled in World Cup lore by the Hand of God fiasco. Eleven minutes into overtime England’s Geoff Hurst brilliantly handled an Alan Ball cross in the German penalty area and turned with a laser shot that went over the German keeper, hit the crossbar and ricocheted downwards, bouncing (depending on your perspective) either on the goalline or beyond it into the goal before bouncing back out again. Referee Gottfried Dienst quickly conferred with linesman Tofik Bakhramov and the shot was ruled a goal, the deciding goal as it turned out (England would score again with less than a minute remaining after Germany moved all their defenders forward).

Debate has never really flagged about this episode. The video is below, so you can see for yourself – it’s a tough call. The linesman’s bizarre, immediate certainty that it was indeed a goal is worth some scrutiny without a doubt. Keep in mind that the entire ball must be over the goalline for it to count. It’s a head-scratcher. As if the whole England/Germany thing wasn’t a bit loaded before the bloody shot.

Seeing Andre Berto briefly hit the canvas last night, and do a step or two of The Dance before righting himself… it wasn’t quite in the “Oh shit Roy Jones just got KTFO” category of shocker, but it wasn’t all that distant either. There was NO WAY that I expected to see Berto dropped last night, and he was dropped clean, on a beauty of a punch too, a moving bolo-style uppercut from Cosime Rivera at the end of the sixth round that Berto clearly never saw coming.

What Berto and his team learned last night is something along the lines of what Irish John Duddy learned last year when he fought Yory Boy Campas – old Mexican battleaxes are no guarantee for an easy “step up in competition” kind of night. Going into the bout with Berto, Cosme Rivera was a 31-year-old with ten losses whose biggest claim to fame was getting pantsed by Zab Judah with a TKO in the 3rd. But still, there was reason to suspect Rivera was at least a potentially dangerous spoiler to Berto’s coming-out party, because last October he exposed similarly hyped Joel “Love Child” Julio in what was supposed to be Julio’s big “step-up” bout. Rivera gave as good as he got in that thing and knocked Julio down in the 12th before losing a split decision that seemed very suspect on the whole (I would have called it a draw).

Last night, Rivera proved the same kind of problem for Berto, exposing the depth of his inexperience. It’s a classic phenomenon in boxing – we witnessed it recently when Edison Miranda met up with the brick wall named Kelly Pavlik – what does a young, overpowering fighter do when they are faced for the first time with an opponent who is not afraid of them? Berto came out last night launching his bombs, those frightening lasers that seemingly explode off his shoulders, and obviously expected that, like just about every fighter before him, Rivera would lay down at the first opportune moment. Instead, Rivera bobbed and weaved and slipped and picked his spots to counter, of which there were many. Berto’s punches, for as impressive as they look, are not tremendously precise, and defensively he’s working with next to nothing. He does not move his head at all, nor his whole upper body for that matter. He doesn’t come in at angles, or time his attacks behind combinations. He doesn’t slip punches, he backs off them, and he backs up straight and tall (which is what landed him on the canvas last night). All in all, he is a counter-puncher’s dream, so much so that a third-rate talent like Rivera was picking him apart with ease.

That said, Berto cleanly won the fight. He was the aggressor, he landed the more damaging blows (excepting, obviously, the knockdown punch) and he may have won every round other than the one in which he was knocked down (he benefited greatly, however, from some tomfoolery about his glove in his corner after the knockdown, which allowed him precious seconds to get off Queer Street). Certainly the bloom is off the rose with the young Haitian-American, and it should be – Cosme Rivera is not someone that you can imagine a young Floyd Mayweather, or even a young Miguel Cotto, having much trouble with. But unlike say, Jason Litzau, whose loss last December exposed him as an overhyped young fighter, I didn’t feel last night that we were seeing the ugly truth of Berto. In fact, there was a lot to admire. He was in over his head experience-wise, he hit the canvas and was briefly in trouble, and yet he came back with fury and conclusively punished Rivera in the late rounds. What Berto now faces is a fact that has eluded many a supremely talented athlete before him – there’s more to this game than raw power and speed (for more on this, see Miranda, Edison). Unfortunately for Berto, he’s not exactly dealing with all the time in the world. He better get himself at least a loose grasp on some defensive fundamentals before his September bout with David Estrada, because as anyone who witnessed Estrada’s bout with Kermit Cintron will attest, holms can take a serious punch and definitely has what it takes to scratch that bagel out of Berto’s loss column.

We proudly introduce the first of what we hope will be many dispatches from our friend and co-conspirator Andrew Mason aka “DJ Monk One” , whose primary concern will be the will be the intersection between music and sports.

In 1983, twenty years before ‘electronica” would become a well-trodden section of HMV, the genre’s founding fathers were bored with it. Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk had taken up cycling, and were spending less and less time working on music in their Dusseldorf studio and more time adjusting the deraileurs on their custom-frame bikes. Wolfgang Flür, less bike-enamoured than his bandmates, remembers, ‘they would prefer to study cycling catalogues produced by Campagnolo, Shimano and other manufacturers of cycling accessories rather than think up ideas for new songs.” But with the purchase of one of the very first digital samplers (the E-mu Emulator), they found a way to merge obsession with profession.

The new technology enabled them to construct a song using the whizzing of the chains, clicking of the gears and even Schneider’s labored breathing to replace traditional percussion. The subject matter? What else but the Tour De France. The eponymous result, whose lyrics rapturously celebrate the peloton, Galibier, Tourmalet and other notorious stages of the race, was an immediate hit, even in the flatland of New York City, where it became a breakdance favorite.

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Andrew Mason aka ‘DJ Monk One” has spun in venues around the world, from the ritzy to the rusty. He maintains a spot on NYC’s longest-running hip hop radio show (The Underground Railroad on WBAI-FM) and weekly club residencies in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 2001, he helped found Wax Poetics Magazine, where he is a contributing editor. He has released several records of original music, the latest as Greenwood Rhythm Coalition. More importantly, along with CI and Buddy Schmeling he was a member of the immortal squad that captured the 2001 Williamsburg Three on Three Wiffle Ball Championship.

(In the midst of this year’s doping fiasco at the Tour de France, I thought I’d take us back to LAST year’s doping fiasco at the Tour de France, and a post I wrote about the Floyd Landis debacle and the future of sports that are increasingly crippled by doping)

I remember a cohort of mine in the NBC research room at the Athens Olympics getting unreasonably irate when he learned that weightlifting was one of the sports on the IOC’s chopping block for Beijing.

“But they can’t get rid of weightlifting,” he said. “It answers man’s eternal question to himself – can I pick this thing up?”

We laughed about that with the ardor of two dudes who had been averaging three hours of sleep a night for a month.

The reason that weightlifting has been considered for removal from the Olympic program has nothing to do with its viability as a sport. As my friend so eloquently pointed out, it’s one of the truly classical events, man versus mass, as essential as sport can be.

But weightlifting has become so tainted by drug use that it’s competely lost its credibility. At every major event, winners are stripped of medals after positive drug tests. It’s reached the point where this elemental sport is in danger of extinction. In the war on drugs, drugs won and weightlifting lost.

(Above is Leonidas Sampanis, who won Greece’s first medal at the Athens Games, only to later break his countrymen’s heart when he was stripped of his medal after testing positive for excessive levels of testosterone.)

It seems that cycling now finds itself at a similar crossroads. The Beatitude of Lance dominated the cycling stories in the U.S. for the past seven years, but elsewhere in the world, especially Europe, the subject of doping is never far behind when the topic of cycling comes up. From my Olympic experience I can tell you this – in Olympic media circles, it is understood as fact that Lance doped his way to the top. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. If he were anyone else – if he wasn’t a cancer survivor with a bracelet empire, if he were just some other Texan shithead on a bike – the American media would have sold him down the river a long time ago.

Just as in weightlifting, the temptations to dope in cycling have moved beyond the realm of temptation. It’s now a question of survival, as basic as – do you want to be competitive or not?

The strange thing is that the reason we want drugs out of sports is to preserve the quixotic “level playing field,” and yet in both of these irredeemably tainted sports, the playing field is as level as can be. Everyone’s on dope. The august I-berg put it best yesterday – “so that means Lance was still better than everyone else.”

Yes it does. And that might be where we’re at with weightlifting and cycling and… shit, let’s just say it… the entire universe of track and field. It’s not an ideal situation by any means, but if it comes down to just letting the athletes do drugs or obliterating their sports entirely, I say let them eat cake.

I know that we don’t pay him much homage here on No Mas, but I can’t imagine that there is a more No Masian athlete in all of history than Gene Tunney. A Shakespeare-quoting fearless practitioner of the sweet science who twice slew the Tyson of his time and then walked away from the ring as if he hadn’t a care in the world to marry a billionairess? Christ, I can’t think of a way that I would rather be described, despite my utter ineptitude at boxing, memorizing Shakespeare, marrying billionairesses and knowing when I’ve had enough of a good thing.

Seventy-nine years ago today, Tunney fought his last professional bout. It was contested at Yankee Stadium, and his opponent was one Tom Heeney, a bag of potatoes from New Zealand destined to become the answer to a trivia question – “Who is the only man to face Gene Tunney in the ring after Jack Dempsey?”

The Manassa Mauler’s spirit hovered over this bout, for although Tunney had outpointed Dempsey for the second time less than a year beforehand, the public had never warmed to the high-falutin’ former Marine (Shakespeare-quoting never being noted as a big icebreaker amongst the pugilistic set). Meanwhile even in defeat Dempsey remained one of the oversized icons of the Jazz Age. When Dempsey attended a Heeney sparring session (one that featured a young sparring partner from Jersey by the name of Jim Braddock) and pronounced Heeney the favorite against Tunney, word began to circulate that Dempsey would be Heeney’s second in the fight, one that stoked a to-that-point unspectacular amount of hype surrounding the affair.

Come fight night, with the Dempsey rumors still swirling (Jack was indeed in attendance, but only as a spectator), the crowd at Yankee Stadium reached a disappointing 45,000, not exactly a banner gate for a heavyweight title fight at that time, but not bad for a fight that even Tex Rickard’s family must have known was a embarrassment to the spirit of competition. Tunney, one of the great technicians ever to ply his trade in the heavyweight ranks, gave Heeney a beating that sounds like it was remarkably similar to the one that Floyd gave Gatti. The bout ended by TKO in the 11th, and Tunney announced his retirement a few days later, claiming that there was no compelling opponent worth his while (which was undoubtedly true) and that he wasn’t interested in sitting around and waiting for one.

The truth of the matter evidently had more to do with a promise that he had made to a woman. Unbeknownst to the world, he was already engaged to Polly Lauder, a socialite from Greenwich who was the heir to the Carnegie fortune. Upon accepting his proposal, she had made him promise that the Heeney fight, his final contractual obligation to Tex Rickard, would be his last. And so it was. By all accounts, Tunney lived happily ever after as a miserable sort of bastard, rich as hell, pretentious, a stalwart pal of George Bernard Shaw, and thoroughly uninterested in boxing or sport of any kind for that matter.

(Last year, you may or may not recall that I did a close reading of the epic 1980 Borg/Mac Wimbledon final – I called it Achilles vs. Hector. This year our resident tennis assassin Steve Tignor took the reins and interpreted for us in detail the greatest tennis match of all time. I know the Wimbledon moment has passed us by a little, but don’t blame Steve for that – he sent this to me and I was all on my honeymoon and shit and I couldn’t deal. But this post is so entertaining that better late than never for shizzle. Enjoy – L)

The week before Wimbledon this year, I popped the official DVD of the 1980 All England final,perhaps you’ve heard of it, Bjorn Borg vs. John McEnroe?,into my computer. I’d just seen Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play the French Open final and was anticipating a rematch in London, and I wanted to do a little compare and contrast. I had also never seen Borg-Mac 1980. I was a rabid Borg fan as a kid, but for some reason I had gone to a Little League practice the morning of that match. My only memory of it is the awe in my dad’s voice as he described it while driving me home. For some reason, I don’t remember being all that upset that I’d missed it, even though I’d sat transfixed the year before as Borg held off Roscoe Tanner in another five-set final.

So here was my chance after all these years, and it couldn’t have been more convenient. Borg, Mac, their headbands, and their short shorts appeared in the corner of my computer screen; I could check in on it as I worked. (The fact that my boss came by to see some of it with me is a definite perk of working at a tennis magazine.) Now that Federer and Nadal have given the world their own version of Borg-Mac, it seems like as good a time as any to look back at what I sometimes think of as the Match That Ruined Tennis. The sport has spent 27 years trying to recreate it, and only this Sunday did we get something even remotely comparable. It’s a lot to live up to. Was it really that special? How does it measure up to Fed-Nadal 2007? I’ll transcribe the notes I took as the match progressed.

Locker room before match: Borg and McEnore are the only guys in there,that must be a weird feeling after having the other players around for two weeks. Literally, in tennis the more you win the lonelier you get. They carefully avoid even a hint of eye contact even as they walk onto the court. This year I noticed Fed and Nadal did the same thing, except for the moment when Nadal offered to let Federer walk out first and Federer shook his head. Still, that’s more than Borg and Mac give each other. Even before he steps out there, Borg seems utterly detached and deep in some other place.

McEnroe’s clothes: These were the days of his red, white, and blue shoulder stripes. Thinking back to 1980, I remember seeing McEnroe’s ascendance and enthusiastic pro-American attitude as part of the move toward Reaganism (he’d be elected at the end of the year). McEnroe had the rat’s nest of hair and a punk’s reputation, but he was part of the general cultural trend as the 80s began away from the counterculture that had dominated the 70s. This was a patriotic, Davis Cup-playing, suburban kid at heart. I think when he won beat Borg the next year, on July 4th, he came over to Bud Collins and said Happy Birthday, America.

Borg’s clothes: This was his apogee,green Fila pinstripes, green-and-gold wristbands, Diadoras, black-and-orange Donnay, fingers covered in little bandages. He never looked more Borg. His physique would fit in well today; he must have been intimidating strictly as an athlete back then.

The broadcasters: This is the BBC tape, I believe of John Barrett and Dan Maskell (I know you know his deep, murky voice). The first word either speaks is at 40-15, and I think it’s just to say the score. It’s perfect.

Changeover: In those days, the two players would get water out of the same machine behind the umpire’s chair. It’s funny to see McEnroe and Borg wait, almost in line, for each other to get their drinks.

Crowd: The camera keeps finding a group of strange characters wearing Edwardian jackets, smoking cigars, and rooting loudly for Johnny Mac. There was a more rambunctious atmosphere in Centre Court than there is today.

Borg’s behavior: The announcers mention more than once that Borg is the ultimate gentleman and an exemplar of how tennis players should behave. This was obviously the way the world thought of him at the time. Do we still see his absolute silence and reserve that way? I feel like now we see it as a little odd and repressed, more about mystique than behaving like a gentleman,would we really school young players now to be as utterly impassive as Borg? Maybe I say that because while watching this, I know that in another 14 months or so he loses to McEnroe at the Open, pretty much snaps, and leaves the sport forever.

Between points: McEnroe was Nadal-like in the amount of time he took. He was slow getting the balls, then in his service motion he rocked back and forth for an extended period before tossing the ball. One memorable and oft-repeated camera shot came from directly behind McEnroe when he was serving. His upper body would rock left and right as he stood sideways to the baseline, while Borg did the same as he waited to return, stepping back and forth on each foot as he went into his ready position,lots of nervous energy out there. But all that motion made McEnroe’s serve hard to read, like the herky-jerky motion of a baseball pitcher. Perhaps that accounts for the number of missed returns from Borg, despite the mediocre pace McEnroe was generating.

Borg trying to play Mac: The Swede is baffled by McEnroe in the same way that Federer often is by Nadal. It doesn’t look like Borg knows how to play this guy with the corkscrew lefty serve. The ball is always leaving his strike zone, and Borg is always trying to catch up with it, but it’s hard with that two-handed backhand.

Early play: I’m amazed by the amount of times Borg comes in. He seems to consider it a race to the net; whoever is stuck at the baseline is doomed to try to deal with the awful bounces on this worn-down Centre Court. But because Borg is at the net, where he’s only semi-comfortable, he doesn’t look like he’s playing his best tennis. Still, he’s more adept at winning points with volleys than he’s given credit for today, though his overhead was startlingly weak. He has trouble getting them past McEnroe, even on grass.

Borg’s serve: This was truly a thing of beauty, as relaxed as Federer’s but somehow even simpler. The story I’ve heard is that in 1976 Borg’s coach, Lennart Bergelin, made a very slight shift to Borg’s foot position, Borg worked hard at it for a couple weeks before Wimbledon that year, and then won the tournament for the first time, in part because his serve had improved so much.

As this match goes on, it’s clear Borg won it because of his serve. He was lights out on it that day, while the rest of his game was a little inconsistent. Grass really wasn’t his surface, and despite his stone face, he really did appear nervous much of the time. In the final set, I believe he won 26 of 28 points on his serve. In fact, the match as a whole shows that the serve has not become more important through the years; it was far and away the most crucial element of this match for both players. Neither guy could handle the other’s delivery.

Returns: These have become much more aggressive over the years. Neither Borg nor Mac took theirs early; Borg stood way behind the baseline and took a full swing. I’m surprised by the amount of times both guys shank seemingly makeable returns. The bounces on the grass must have had something to do with that.

Borg like Federer: McEnroe pretty much controls the first two sets but only comes away with one of them. At the very end of the second, Borg, who has been sluggish, comes to life, breaks serve for the first time, and sneaks out the set 7-5. The crowd also comes to life,it’s a match now; the sleeping giant has stirred. The whole thing plays out much like Federer’s 2004 final against Roddick, where he grabbed the second set with a couple surprise winners.

McEnroe like Nadal: Just like Rafa this year, McEnroe faltered when he could have taken a commanding lead,he still didn’t quite believe he could win. Serving at 5-6, 15-0 in the second, McEnroe flubs an ill-advised drop volley. Maskell wonders whether this could cost him the set. He’s exactly right, as Borg rips a passing-shot winner and goes on to win the game.

Linesman: They didn’t bend down to see the lines better; they sat in chairs in blue suits with their legs crossed. I thought they might start smoking.

McEnroe’s groundstrokes: They were longer than what I remember at this point. At his peak, he shortened them into little no-backswing flicks, but here they were full strokes and pretty inconsistent. As for his touch, he definitely had it, but mostly he hit straightforward volleys; he showed his skills off with a number of topspin lob winners, the same ones that would send Borg out of the U.S. Open and out of the game a year later.

Fourth set: The sun comes out at this point; it looks like a different day entirely. The early part of the match had been played in a sort of nervous gloom. Now it appears that Borg is going to win and all is right with the world. In fact, Borg very nearly wins much earlier than he eventually will. He serves for the title at 5-4 and goes up 40-15. His first serve wide appears to be in and McEnroe misses the return. But the line judge makes a late out call. The crowd is already screaming, but Borg just walks back to serve and eventually gets broken. If the linesman doesn’t make that call, this match is barely remembered today. (I’m certainly not writing this post.)

The tiebreaker: This is when the great shots start coming, terrific running passing shots and stab volleys at absolutely crucial times. No Wimbledon men’s final had been decided in a tiebreaker (the breaker had only been introduced at the tournament a few years earlier) and there does seem to be an almost novel tension to the whole thing,as if everyone is asking, ‘Can Wimbledon really be won like this?” For the record, the famous shot of McEnroe flat on the ground came at 8-8, after he lost a set point. McEnroe also saved a championship point with a net-cord winner,no apology given or expected at the time. (Imagine if that happened today?) After dumping the final volley in the net to lose the set, Borg flashed a look at his box for the only time all match; it’s barely perceptible and lasts about a nanosecond, but you can feel the emotion coming from him.

Borg questioning call: He just looked up at the chair umpire for a second, wordless, like a mute.

Fifth set: The play is very high now and the service games go quickly until Borg goes up 7-6. Then it ends just as quickly and severely, with Borg hitting two backhand pass winners and suddenly dropping to his knees. The crowd is on its feet in that I-can’t-help-it-I-have-to-stand way that’s usually reserved for team sports.

Borg drops to his knees in spontaneous emotion,really, has there ever been, in any sport, a cooler victory celebration than this? it’s raw emotion in a contained and elegant form,but then he’s back in total control of himself a second later. He walks to the net looking down at the ground, walks around the net post, sits down, and flashes just a bare smile to the camera. It looks like he says one word, but I don’t know what it is (somewhere I’ve heard that it’s ‘incredible” in Swedish).

Overall, the level of play was far more primitive than Federer vs. Nadal,points were quick and almost perfunctory, up and back rather side to side, quick and clipped rather than long and loopy. But watching this I get the feeling that it was essential that new racquet technology come along soon. These guys were changing the game,Borg with his topspin, McEnroe with his all-court touch,but they didn’t quite have the tools to do all they could with their skills.

Whatever deficiencies it seems to have today, Borg-McEnroe makes up for in theater, and the drama comes across 27 years later. These guys were perfect adversaries and iconic personalities; they made tennis matter more than it ever has before or since. Will we look at Federer and Nadal the same way when we watch their Wimbledon DVD in 2034? I’m going to say yes.

I, Large, am officially prepared to announce the return of Large today from my wedding and honeymoon Mexican adventure. The picture on the right is of me drinking coffee at the hotel in Vallodolid where Montezuma eventually caught up to me after some very suspicious (but admittedly tasty) chicken soup.

Down in Tulum I pretty much experienced, for the first protracted period in my life perhaps, A World without Sports. Not that sports aren’t everywhere in Mexico – Franchise would be heartened to know about the apparent popularity of the old-school supercheesy mask-and-cape variety of professional wrestling on television, and I did on my last night at the hotel mentioned above manage to catch some Winky/Bernard highlights. But on the whole I ignored the entire universe of professional athletics during our trip, which is something that I haven’t done… well, probably ever now that I think about it.

In doing so, I must confess that I experienced a different, heretofore unknown version of myself, possibly a better version – who knows about that. Fever Pitch is the best book I know of in capturing the unique brand of OCD that afflicts the sports fanatic, and though I can’t say that I am anywhere near the class of Phillies or Eagles fan that Hornby is with Arsenal, I more relate to his book on the level of an obsession with the entire panoply of sporting occasions. I think the average No Mas reader will understand that concept – it’s just the literal need to be on top of shit from table tennis to judo to the FINA World Championships to… whatever. Thumb-wrestling. Just to check out whatever exciting action there is to be checked out, and ESPECIALLY if it involves a fight of some kind.

The internet and proliferation of cable sports coverage has made this type of obsession all-too-easily a 24-hour pursuit, and for as many joys as it visits upon us, let’s be truthful – it can start to wear on a man. It was a sincere goal of mine to let it all go the past two weeks, to consciously resist even the tiniest submission to the gravitational pull, and but for one slip late in the game (seeking out the Bernard/Winky highlights) I succeeded. Let me tell you something friends – it’s not so bad on the other side. The world does in fact continue to orbit the sun whether you read the morning boxscores or not, and when you miss a big pay-per-view fight featuring a Hall-of-Fame boxer from Philly, you do not spontaneously die. That might seem like an obvious statement to some, but my people out there… I know you feel me, and I hope you are reassured.

But look, enough. I’m back like MacArthur motherfuckers. Baldomir/Forrest? On it. Tour de France? On it. Gambling referees, doping cyclists, the abomination of Bonds, Ricky Fatton vs. Everybody, the rise of the Phillies… Yo check it out, I am on that shit. The blissful beaches of Tulum are all but purged from my muscle memory, and not without a pang I admit. But if I’m being completely honest I have to tell you… it’s good to get back in the hunt.

(Large here – I’m back, married, tan, but a little beleaguered at the moment. I’ll be back in the No Mas hunt in the next few days… haven’t seen that Winky/Bernard fight, very curious about that… but until I have my feet under me, I thought I’d run a few Classic No Mas pieces, starting with this one from last July)

July 25th, 1902. James J. Jeffries, The Boilermaker, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, fights Ruby Robert Fitzsimmons in a much-anticipated rematch at the Arena in San Francisco. They touch gloves, and it’s on.

Jeffries, a Goliath of a man, had won the heavyweight title from Fitzsimmons three years prior, developing what became known as the Crouch to counter Bob’s lanky, long-armed left hook. It worked like a charm. He finished Fitz in the eleventh of a bout scheduled for twenty.

Three years later, Fitzsimmons, a fiery Cornishman, was out for revenge. Rumors abounded before the bout that Fitz planned to fill his gloves with Plaster of Paris. “Let him do it,” Jeffries replied. “I’ll flatten him anyway.”

In retrospect, such confidence was understandable. Jeffries went into the fight a solid 219 pounds of muscle, while The Ruby One weighed in at 172, which was heavy by his standards.

Still, Fitz gave a good account of himself, fighting with fury in the earlygoing of what was a surprisingly bloody affair. Neither man much cared for the other. Fitz in particular loathed Jeffries and yearned to regain the title that he had taken from Gentleman Jim Corbett back in 1897.

But it was not to be. Jeff was too big, too strong. He had his way in the middle rounds before unceremoniously disposing of Fitzsimmons in the eighth.

Ruby Robert would continue fighting until 1914, winning the light heavyweight title and, towards the end, the much sought-after Australian heavyweight crown. Meanwhile, Jeffries had only two more bouts in his prime, retiring undefeated before his comeback in 1910, at the age of 37, to try and unseat Jack Johnson for the honor of the white race.

But that’s another story.

On this day 53 years ago, the career of arguably the most talented women’s tennis player ever to pick up a racket was tragically and prematurely ended, as 19-year-old Maureen Connolly, Little Mo, was thrown to the ground while horseback riding. Her right leg was completely crushed. She would never play competitive tennis again.

Little Mo was the tennis phenom of phenoms – she won the U.S. Championships in 1951 at the age of 16, and would remain the youngest player ever to win that title until Tracy Austin bested her in 1979. After her auspicious debut, there was simply no stopping Connolly, and one can only imagine what she might have achieved had she not been injured. In her brief time as a professional, she won three straight U.S. Championships (1951-53) and three straight Wimbledons (1952-54) and in 1953 she became the first woman ever to win the Grand Slam. In all, she won nine straight majors before her accident.

The nickname “Little Mo” was a reference to a famous battleship, the U.S.S. Missouri, known as “Big Mo” – the point was that Connolly, 5′4″ and 115 pounds, packed a hell of a punch. I became fascinated with the Maureen Connolly story as a young boy because of a popular TV movie, “Little Mo” that first aired in 1978. It featured some big-time stars in early incarnations – Mark Harmon, Anne Baxter and Leslie Nielson – and Tony Trabert made a cameo appearance as himself. The movie, as did many a TV movie of that period (for some reason it is linked in my mind with a Jan and Dean TV biopic), presented Connolly as a determined and super-talented but also bratty, self-centered adolescent who ultimately is humbled, first by her famous coach (the great Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, played by Michael Learned) and then by fate. I remember that the end of the movie shows a once-embittered Connolly coming on to a court to help a young player who is struggling with her serve, a scene which is evidently not too far from the truth – Connolly went on after the accident to become a great coach herself and guide the career of many a young player at the time.

But tragedy stalked her like a u-boat. She died of cancer at the age of 34. Today, sadly, in the era of the Williams and with Steffi and Martina in our rear-view mirrors, you rarely hear much talk about Little Mo, although there is a tournament named in her honor, The Maureen Connolly Brinker Cup, an international team competition between the U.S. and Great Britain.