NO MAS TV REVIEW

Mayweather-Hatton 24/7
HBO, 30 minutes
Sunday nights, 10 p.m.

I admit that I was looking forward to the debut of Mayweather/Hattton 24-7 last night. I’m a sucker for big-time fight hype when it’s done right, and the De La Hoya/Mayweather series, to my mind, was right as rain. It accomplished everything hype should and at the same time was compelling just as pure documentary. Not to mention that it was a straight-up knockout for the sport of boxing, always welcome in the land of Large.

Based on what I saw last night, Mayweather/Hatton is going to fall quite a bit short of that mark, which is perhaps not so much the fault of the show as the fault of the principals. Floyd is great television, but in small doses. In the De La Hoya series, he was electrifying, and yet it was for most of us a first journey into his strange universe of sociopathic would-be father figures and second childhood fueled by attention deficit disorder and conspicuous bricks of cheddar in every outstretched hand. Revisiting his tiny monarchy of mo’ money, even sitting one on one with the King himself in an intimate fireside chat, one can’t help but divine the bleeding obvious of Pretty Boy Floyd Mayweather – there’s no there there.

Meanwhile, over in Manchester (to borrow the show’s default transition), there turns out to be surprisingly less to Ricky Hatton than meets the eye. Watching his performance last night, I was reminded of Martin Amis’s Keith Talent from the novel London Fields, an East End swindler of note much enamored of petty larceny, lager and the vicissitudes of the dart-board. The narrator in London Fields ends up taking darts lessons from Keith, and at one point throws the darts to the ground in disgust with his own ineptitude. Instantly, Keith leaps on him and pins him to the dartboard by his neck. “You don’t never disrespect the darts mate,” he says.

In other words, yes, yes, we get it Rick – you’re a regular chap. Where’s the darts, innit? Christ has there ever been such a self-conscious Prince of the Pub in all the history of the Empire? Keith Talent was a flipping parody for darts’ sake – perpetrating this shtick as some version of reality is really, really not asking very much of your audience. On this score, I fault Hatton and his entourage first and foremost for being so beatifically enamored of his laddishness, but I also fault the producers of the show for letting him get away with it. The virtue of the De La Hoya/Mayweather affair was that it managed to probe beneath each fighter’s well-manicured self-presentation. In Floyd’s case, four episodes taught me all that I need to know. In that nothing much seems to have changed with him (money=good, dad=crazy), this current series is going to live and die with what Hatton brings to the table. And if that continues to be the documentarian’s equivalent of a warm pint and a chippie, well, we’re all in for a long fortnight lads, a long fortnight indeed.

Can you imagine what it was like as fight fan to wake up on a Saturday much like this one 25 years ago and to already have witnessed possibly the fight of the 80′s the night before, and have a fight ahead of you on Saturday afternoon that would be nearly as great, before becoming an era-defining tragedy destined to permanently change the sport of boxing?

Twenty-five years ago this week, there was indeed such a weekend, two fights in under 24 hours, one in Miami and one in Vegas, that would live forever in fistic lore – Alexis Arguello v. Aaron Pryor I, and Ray Mancini v. Duk Koo Kim.

Were there ever two fights of this historical magnitude in the same weekend? I am not the boxing historian to answer that question, but I would venture to guess that the answer is no. Pryor/Arguello is either the best fight of the 80′s or the second best depending on where you rate Leonard/Hearns I from 1981. In my greatest fights of my lifetime piece, I had Leonard/Hearns just above Pryor/Arguello, but it’s easy to argue that one either way.

As for Mancini/Kim, well, it’s hard to celebrate the greatness of a fight that resulted in a man dying – today is the 25th anniversary of Kim’s death from head-wounds endured at the hands of Mancini, a tragedy that would mark the great Boom Boom forever afterwards. ESPN Classic released a one-hour doc this week called Triumph and Tragedy about Mancini’s rise to fame and the Kim fight, and in it you must face a stark truth as a fight fan – watching the footage of the bout, it’s hard not to be aware that the fight that resulted in Kim’s death was a jaw-droppingly great contest, Graziano/Zale, Gatti/Ward, Castillo/Corrales-type material. If Kim had lived, it probably would be mentioned regularly with Leonard/Hearns and Pryor/Arguello as a contender for the greatest fight of the decade. It’s just one of those facts that we acolytes of the sweet science must live with in our hearts – we never want anyone to die, but inevitably what we call truly “great” flirts all too closely to the line of death, and sometimes crosses over. As someone once wrote, “I guess there’s just a meanness… in this world.”

Let me begin by saying that I kind of wish it was Lance. Of course, Lance isn’t embroiled in any doping controversy at the moment, and maybe I’m wrong – maybe Lance, like Marion Jones, is too far removed from the public clamor at this point to make the kind of impact that I am looking for in the whole worldwide doping debacle. And what is that impact, you ask? Well, in short, if the steroids-in-sports situation is World War II, right now I’m waiting for Pearl Harbor, and I’m afraid that, huge as it is, the Barry Bonds indictment feels a little more like the Soviet Invasion or the conquest of the Balkans. In other words, big news here in the ole U.S. of A., but not quite big enough to mobilize the Joint Chiefs, not time yet for “we have nothing to fear…”

So much for the military analogy. In plain language, I don’t think Bonds resonates enough with people right now to make this the kind of soul-searching, era-defining moment that the steroids epidemic begs for. On that score, it’s a shame he’s such a dick, because if he provoked any sympathy at all in the public, his whole evil saga would have shocked the shit out of people. As it is, it’s merely the whimper of an ending that we’ve known was coming all along. The helmet’s off Darth, big whoop. He’s dirtier than dirt, and we all made our peace with that a long time ago, home-run-king or not. That MLB ad that was running seven or eight times an hour all throughout the playoffs, the one with the jingle that still resonates faintly in my ears sometimes and tells me in no uncertain voice to go out into the street and start killing little children and small fluffy animals… that ad carried a not terribly subtle message about Bonds and the home-run record and the state of the national pastime. It began with a child putting a Hank Aaron baseball card up on a ledge and staring at it with all the wonder that his CGI-enhanced eyes could summon. And we all know what the wonder of a child means in the visual vernacular of television. THIS is the real and true legacy of baseball. This is the innocent integrity of our game. For MLB to choose that ad and that image to run incessantly during the postseason while behind the scenes rumors of the Bonds indictment were legion… it was no accident, no indeed.

So who, I wonder, WHO is it that’s going to test positive for steroids and by the mere shock of the revelation prompt a paradigm shift? Michael Phelps, right before he wins his eighth gold medal in Beijing? Peyton Manning, right after the Super Bowl? Katie Couric? Oprah? It’s hard for me to imagine at this point. Marion Jones came about seven years too late, and the overwhelmingly underwhelming response proves only how short the American attention span is when it comes to track and field and the Olympics. And as I said, the time when a big Lance revelation might have rocked the nation is probably long past as well. In the end, I just don’t know who it could be, other than the fact that it ain’t Bonds. But I guess that’s the way it should be. The knockout punch is almost always the one you don’t see coming. Plus, if we’d known the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, we would have done something about it, right? Right?

An eclectic crew of birthdays today – two high-scoring now retired footballers, two pioneers of hip hop, two tennis players (one the best and hottest Indian women’s player of all time, one the second hottest and second best Spanish men’s player alive today), one Australian gold-medal-winning cyclist, one Lebanese rugby legend, one relief-pitching son of a No Mas hero, one point guard turned talking head, one both fine and formidable Mexican golfer, one professional wrestler that many would say is the greatest of all time, and finally, one frail but ferocious female poet who likewise many might say was the greatest of all time, and who once wrote a poem with, well, The Greatest of All Time.

November 14, 1943, sixty-four years ago today, two quarterbacks had remarkable afternoons and set records that still stand to this day.

At the Polo Grounds, Sid Luckman led his Chicago Bears to a 56-7 defeat of the New York Giants, at that point the worst drubbing in Giants’ history. In the process, Luckman threw seven touchdown passes, a record astonishing for its time, an era of the game when the running game still reigned supreme. Four more quarterbacks have thrown seven TD’s in a game, but none have thrown more, and oddly, despite the ascendancy of the air attack and the West Coast offense, no one has done it since Minnesota’s Joe Kapp in 1969.

The record that Luckman broke, six touchdown passes in a game, had been set just two weeks prior by Washington’s Sammy Baugh. But while Luckman was breaking Baugh’s record in New York, Slingin’ Sammy was working on a new record of his own down in D.C.’s Griffith Stadium. In the Redskins 42-20 lambasting of the Lions, Baugh threw for four touchdowns and intercepted four passes. Football’s greatest generation played the game both ways, and Baugh was not only one of the best quarterbacks of his era, but one of its best defensive backs as well. This 4-and-4 performance is an NFL record that cannot be broken, as much relic as record really, but nonetheless astonishing.

Such is how his Royal Ricky Hatton-ness feels about the fact that David Beckham has announced that he will be in attendance at the Hatton/Floyd fight in December. Evidently it’s the first major fight in the life of Prince Beckham. So will Ricky let Becks pop his cherry by carrying the Hatton belts into the ring the way Wayne Rooney did for him in the Castillo fight? Not on, mate, not on. Look, it’s not a publicity stunt, is it? Great ‘onor ‘avin Becks at the fight, but he’s not my mate, is he? Wayne Rooney is my bloody good mate, mate. Innit.

All around entertaining Ricky Hatton interview on BBC Sport today, in which he sings his own praise along with those of British boxing in general (the Empire is ascendant, no doubt) and on the whole drops his h’s with the working-man’s aplomb to which we are accustomed from our Rick. Bloody, wanking bleedin shame it is that he’s in for such a beating, says Large, because he’s a damn good bloke to have around the miscreant pub that is today’s fight scene. In fact, I raise the figurative pint glass in hoping that Oscar takes him on anyway and leaves Cotto to a fight that matters.

Hatton ready to become best of British (BBC Sport)

Although I consider the first half of the NBA season to officially be the pre-season before the actual season opener (which is of course the All-Star Game) I nevertheless can’t help but notice that a certain bunch of four-leaf-clover-eating Micks up in Beantown are 6-0 (I also noticed that they all seem to be black now – dah… hello ghost of Red Auerbach? are you aware of this development?).

As you may be aware, this bunch of leprechaun-jokers used to be a rather formidable side back before IPods, which got me to wondering – when’s the last time the Green and White pulled a six-fer to start the season?

Well, as has been widely reported, coincidence would have it that it’s exactly 20 seasons ago, when another big three (Jerry Sichting, Brad Lohaus and Artis Gilmore) led the team to a 6-0 start en route to 57 wins and a first-place finish in the Atlantic. This, you will recall, was a turn-the-page season for the Celts and the NBA, as the Pistons finally got over the hump and beat the mighty Bostonians in the conference finals, prompting Kevin McHale to have a famous little passing-the-torch nut-up manchat with Isiah (or was it Dumars?) at midcourt before making for the showers.

Looking back at the Celtics records today, I’m a little surprised to see how tough it actually is to win six to start the season. I figured in their heyday it would have happened almost every year, and yet prior to ’87-’88, you have to go back 15 years for another 6-0 (although they did start 17-2 in ’85). In ’72-’73, the Havlicek/Cowens edition started 10-0 on their way to a 68-14 finish, the best record in the team’s glorious history. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row, they ran into Walt, Willis and the rest of the MSG crew in the conference finals, as Red Holzman’s Knicks went on to their second NBA Championship in three years.

So thus far, going 6-0 in Boston has equalled a great season with nothing to show for it come trophy-hoisting time. But now, NOW, we get into the salad years. In the ten season span from 1957 to 1967, the Celtics started the season at least 6-0 five times:

1967-68: 6-0
1964-65: 11-0
1963-64: 7-0
1959-60: 6-0
1957-58: 9-0

In four of those five seasons, they won the NBA title, only losing it in ’57-’58 in the finals to Bob Pettit and the St. Louis Hawks. The point being that if this year’s edition wants to really channel the glory years, they might want to take it back 40 years, rather than 20. On that score, I simply have to add… Kevin Garnett, we watched Bill Russell… we worship Bill Russell… Kevin Garnett you are NO Bill Russell. (Check out those freaky-deeky Vans-style kicks Bill is wearing in the ’68 playoffs up there – meanwhile Wilt is sporting a run-of-the-mill pair of Chucks – I tell you it’s the little things that set the truly great ones apart…)

Although it’s no news to the devoted follower of the sweet science, I suspect that there’s many a casual boxing fan out there who is unaware that James “Buddy” McGirt, now famous as the trainer of Antonio Tarver and Arturo Gatti among others, was once a great fighter in his own right, and possessed of an overall flair and style in the ring that makes him a cinch for the No Mas Hall of Fame. For that reason, I thought it was about time we threw him some love with a starring role in our No Mas Knockout of the Week.

I’m thinking of ole Dirt McGirt today because I recently watched, perhaps for the first time since it actually happened, Buddy’s title fight with the great Meldrick Taylor from 1988. This is a lost classic of the 80′s, an ABC slugfest that ended with Taylor getting a TKO stoppage over the spent McGirt in the 12th. It was a real coming-out party for Meldrick, with fellow ’84 Olympians Pernell Whitaker, Evander Holyfield and Tyrell Biggs all on hand at Harrah’s in A.C. to help him celebrate winning his first world title.

Two super-talented ’84 gold medalists would prove the thorns in Buddy’s career – Meldrick, of course, and then Pernell, who took a title from him in ’93 in a thrilling 12-rounder at the Garden. McGirt fought Sweet Pea again in ’94 down in Norfolk, and although he went the distance, he was less competitive and lost a lopsided decision. Buddy was a fast, elusive, hard-punching welterweight, but he simply was not in Pernell’s elite stratosphere, which is no crime really – few were or ever will be. Also we must remember that by 1994 Buddy was almost a one-fisted fighter, crippled by problems with his left shoulder that plagued him throughout his fighting days.

In ’88, however, just prior to the Taylor fight, Buddy still had the left hook to great effect, and wielded it liberally to set up a smashing right-hand knockout of a less-fortunate Olympic opponent, 1976 gold medalist Howard Davis. This was a surprising result, as Davis had fought Meldrick to a draw two years prior, and many expected him to beat McGirt en route to a rematch with Taylor. It wasn’t meant to be, however, as you’ll see in the video below, the No Mas Knockout of the Week. Enjoy Buddy’s shucking and jiving and juking and nuking – man had furious style. Sorry about the overall quality of the vid, but I think you’ll forgive that when you hear the announcer’s arcane reference to the oh-so-80′s movie, Broadcast News. In particular, I know it’s going to make the GMan’s day…

(Man, if there’s one thing I miss about the East Coast right now, it’s sports talk radio. Which is a little unfair to Northern California, because I’m sure there are some stations up here where illiterate maniacs with no lives call in and rant about not signing Bonds or Alex Smith or when the hell are they going to play Russell he certainly couldn’t do any worse, etc. But see, I just haven’t investigated it too much, mostly because I couldn’t care less about the 49ers and the Raiders and the Giants. And I suspect, no, KNOW in my heart that there is nothing out here sports-radio-wise to equal the absolutely insane excesses of NYC and Philly. On that score, here’s a piece I posted on this day last year, one that I am embarrassed to say fills me with nostalgia for ole Steve Martorano – L)
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Here’s an exchange I just heard on WIP, the main sports radio station in Philly. The hosts of the afternoon show are two dudes with the Philliest possible names imaginable – Steve Martorano and Anthony Gargano:

CALLER: Yo I ain’t a doctor but I think I got a serious medical opinion about Donovan McNabb’s throwing-up problem.

STEVE: Okay. Let’s hear it.

CALLER: Well, all right… the first time it happened was at the Super Bowl in Jacksonville. Then it happened a couple weeks ago in Tampa. And see, I remember Jon Runyan talking about how the air in Florida made his allergies go crazy-

STEVE: I think I see where you’re going with this. You think that Donovan McNabb might be allergic to Florida.

CALLER: Well, not exactly. But he’s got some kind of allergy problem that-

STEVE: Yeah, yeah, I get it. Donovan McNabb is allergic to Florida. It’s an interesting theory.

CALLER: No, Steve, listen I’m serious about this-

STEVE: I’m serious too! I gotta think about it a little more, but you may have just figured out the problem.

ANTHONY: No look, he didn’t figure out the problem. I got something here that’s just going to blow this whole theory out the water. Cause McNabb also threw up at the Carrier Dome when he was with Syracuse.

STEVE: Huh. Was he playing Florida?

I did an interview with Franchise today over at his site, jarrypark.com. We re-capped the Cotto/Mosley bout (Franchise was actually in the Garden for that one) and the undercards, talked about all the potential bouts out there now for Cotto, and also discussed today’s news that Manny Steward will not be training Jermain for the Pavlik rematch in February. Check it out, and check out Chise’s site in general. It’s a forum for all fight sports, primarily oriented around these pod-cast interviews that he does with internationally renowned impresarios like yours truly.