posted by Large

“Here’s my take in a nutshell – I think Margarito’s a little tougher, I think Cotto’s a lot better, and one of the things that I love about boxing is that generally better beats tougher nine times out of ten.” -Large

This would seem to have been that tenth time.

As I look back at Margo/Cotto from the distance of a day, I confess that my thoughts are still whirling. I’m not sure I’ll fully process the whole thing for a week or two. Somebody, I can’t remember who right now, wrote in on a comment to say that he hurled a few times before the fight because he was so worked up. I had similar problems ringside. The overall intensity level down there was so… intense that for the first couple rounds or so I felt like I was going to pass out. I’ve never been ringside for a fight that was contested at that kind of savage emotional pitch before. I found myself watching, near-hyperventilating, trying to remember to breathe, trying to pay close attention, and at the same time wondering how the fighters’ families can handle it, how they don’t have regularly have strokes and heart attacks in the arena. I haven’t seen the HBO coverage yet, but it’s my understanding that they showed a lot of gratuitous shots of Cotto’s family weeping after the stoppage. I can only imagine.

So, all of that said and in that I haven’t yet watched the replay, I will grant you that my memory of the affair is less than crystalline. Still, the narrative of the fight seems very clear to me. Cotto was simply, jaw-droppingly awesome for five rounds, Ray Leonard awesome. My colleague to my left was a guy from Sherdog who I intimated was heavily in Margarito’s camp, and in the middle of the fifth round he said out loud, “this is just embarrassing,” and we all knew exactly what he meant. Margarito wasn’t stalking at that point so much as just stumbling around the ring getting hit with one sweat-spraying flurry of bombs after another. The chatter at ringside about the punches was insistently centered on one observation – Cotto’s shots were stiff, head-snappers that sent like full water-bottles of sweat flying into the crowd, while Margarito seemed to rarely connect so cleanly or effectively because Cotto was so mobile and able to pick off Tony’s slower, more plodding combinations.

The final seconds of the fifth round really stick out in my mind . Cotto landed another in an endless series of big combinations and then Margo tried to return fire and Cotto dodged four or five punches in a row with this rubber-man upper-body shimmyshake that was pure virtuoso material. When the bell rang, the crowd erupted into a roar that was like a round of “brava!” at the opera for the maestro of the proceedings. Of course, none of us knew at that moment that we’d just witnessed the maestro’s last hurrah.

Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Large

Just layed down my action. I got Margartio by KO/TKO with 7/2 odds and Margs in the 10th & 11th at 28/1 – Ryan

Ryan, son, I hope you’re going to be investing in a couple of No Mas shirts with your recent windfall, just, you know, to share the love.

Seriously, though, congratulations to our sterling commenter and current star prognosticator, No Mas Ryan. The man had a startlingly clear vision of how this fight was going to go and he nailed it. A couple of our other regulars were right on it as well, the always quiet and humble Rooster among them.

Honestly, to be rather quiet and humble about the matter myself, even I kind of nailed it, despite the fact that I went the other way in the prognosticating. I admit that I seriously started to doubt myself when I wrote my Wednesday thoughts post and realized that I truly didn’t believe Cotto could win a toe-to-toe war with Tony, and therefore was going to have to fight the whole thing on his bike to come out on top. For five and a half rounds, it looked like he was going to do exactly that and pitch a shutout doing it. But the Reaper came a-callin’.

Anyway, look, I’m writing this in my room at the Luxor while Mrs. Large packs up our stuff behind me in the new “Cotto/Margarito: The Battle” t-shirt that I picked her up last night (the official fight shirts were kind of ill – check out the man’s version on the right there). But I’m proud of how prescient many of our comments about the fight were this week, so I’m going to list a few below, followed by some Large photos from fight night (the best I got was that photo of the victorious and ominous Reaper himself up top there after the post-fight presser). I’ll have my full breakdown up tomorrow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dudes, dudes, dudes… I’m sitting here at the post-fight presser waiting for Tony’s arrival on the scene, which Bob Arum just informed us was imminent. Like all of you, I imagine, I’m still so high on adrenaline and disbelief that I feel like I just hoovered up six big lines of good blow. Man, I’m telling you all, when Margo nearly finished the job at the end of the tenth and Cotto staggered to his corner all bloodied and beaten and… well, what can I say? I was so pumped up that I nearly passed out.

Here’s Margo on the stump now hitting us with a little “I told you so” but also throwing mad props to Cotto. I’m going to check out now and listen up to what these guys have to say. I’ll tell you this – Margarito is pretty swollen, even with the sunglasses on. I’m kind of relieved to see that he at least got injured in there, because I don’t know… watching that thing, watching the number of ungodly shots that he ate without even blinking, I was beginning to wonder if Tony Margarito was actually human. Early and huge props to Ryan on his calls and wagers – we had great debates about this fight all week, and he turned out to be dead-on.

In conclusion, check out my post-fight recap over at The Sporting Blog, and we’ll go over this… well, we’ll be going over this thing for the rest of our lives, but we’ll start tomorrow, or if not then, Monday.

P.S. – Bob Arum is just now informing us that early word is that this fight did great PPV numbers and that whereas before it didn’t seem like, say, an Oscar/Margo fight was a possibility, now he thinks it’s very much in the ballgame. Who knows – man it’s hard for me to imagine Oscar having the cojones to step in the ring with the Antonio Margarito who came to fight tonight.

P.P.S. – No Cotto at the presser. They sent him straight to the hospital. Evidently, he needed a shitload of stitches. Man, lost in all of this is Cotto’s epic display of guts- – JESUS WHAT A FIGHT! All right, Large out, we’ll be back on this soon.

posted by Large

Friends, Masians, countrymen… what else is left that we haven’t already said or written? In his pre-fight report card today, Cliff Rold made the point for the always excellent Boxing Scene that expectations for this bout are so high right now that a pretty good fight just won’t cut it.

Let’s face the facts and admit that he’s right about that. We’re all expecting a classic. On that front, I really laid it on the line today in my preview over at The Sporting Blog, exhorting even non-boxing fans to check this bout out with superlatives like this:

Boxing was already pretty marginalized in the sporting world when I was a teenager in the 80’s, but a handful of fights from that era continue to live forever outside the narrow confines of the boxing fraternity , Holmes/Cooney, Pryor/Arguello, Leonard/Hagler, Hagler/Hearns. I firmly believe that Cotto/Margarito is going to be one of those affairs, one of the four or five fights from this era that we’ll still be talking about twenty years from now. When that time comes, I imagine you’ll be glad you watched it live.

So if this one turns out to be, well, say, just as good as the Cotto/Mosley fight that I’ve been blathering on about all week, it still might feel like a disappointment.

But that’s what makes boxing so interesting really, the unpredictability of it. Sometimes you have all the hype in place and the right type of coverage for a fight that looks to be a third world war and the fight delivers in the end. And sometimes it doesn’t. Nothing left to do on this one but wait out the next excruciating 30 hours or so and let the chips fall where they may.

I’m not going to restate my position in detail as far as my prognostification goes today. If you’ve been following along all week, you know where I stand, and if you haven’t, here’s my take in a nutshell – I think Margarito’s a little tougher, I think Cotto’s a lot better, and one of the things that I love about boxing is that generally better beats tougher nine times out of ten. Despite what the Rocky movies have taught us, this is a sport where elite athletes compete at almost unimaginable levels of skill, speed and dexterity. I think back to Roger Mayweather in the Floyd/Hatton 24/7 saying something like, “they think this is a Rocky movie but it isn’t, this is real life and the real motherfucker is going to win.”

Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Baggiesboy

(Breaking up the Cotto/Margo vigil that our site has become this week, I bring you a hilarious soccer interlude from the mysterious man of mystery, Lord Bag. As usual, I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s going on about, but I had a bloody good laugh of it anyway, didn’t I? Yeah cheers, all hail the Bag – L)

Last night upon landing at La Guardia airport after a trip to Savannah, Georgia, my Cincinnati-based Delta flight attendant announced that she liked to leave her passengers with a thought for the day. In this case it was: ‘A smile is a facelift you can give yourself for free.” Which made me think of ‘The Two Ronnies.” No, not those entertaining daily headline makers: Messrs. Cristiano Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, but the supreme British comedy duo: Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.

Ronnie Corbett: Good evening! It’s wonderful to be back with you again, isn’t it Ronnie?

Ronnie Barker: Indeed it is. And in a packed program tonight, I shall be having a word with a man who goes in for meditation, because he thinks it’s better than sitting around doing nothing.

A.C. Milan boss Carlo Ancelotti might pass this along to his new signing, Ronaldinho. The Brazilian magician has not been pulling too many rabbits out of the hat of late. Although judging from his waste line he’s not been sitting around doing nothing , he’s eating at least three square meals a day, if not more.

Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Large

Lot of Margo action out there in No Mas Land. And I’m sure all you Margartians out there are now feeling emboldened by the fact that Teddy Atlas is picking Cotto, this the same Teddy Atlas who recently picked Tony Thompson to beat Wlad Klitschko, a stab at provocative prognostification more egregious than even that of the recent provocateur who tabbed David Diaz to handle Pacquiao.

Our recent conversation on the comments of my Monday Thoughts post ended with Tommy making the point that I was overlooking Margo’s height and reach advantage. Maybe. It’s possible that this will lead Cotto into harm’s way at a frequency that will allow Margo to break him down systematically.

Predictably, though, I don’t see it, mainly because, big though he is, Tony doesn’t really fight big. He’s at his most effective when he’s up close and personal – I can’t think of a Margo fight where I thought either his height and his reach were a real factor. And I think we all agree that this bout with Cotto will in no way resemble the classic long-versus-short fighter dynamic, Ali/Frazier, with Frazier bulling his way inside and Ali sharpshooting and trying to keep Smokin’ Joe at bay. If Cotto’s smart, he’ll spend a lot of time Saturday night in the Ali role, moving backwards at angles and letting Margo force the action while he does the sharpshooting. Check out the last four rounds of the Mosley fight to see just how effective Cotto can be in that mode. Christ, in the much ballyhooed ninth round of that fight, when Cotto was definitely hurt and on his bicycle, he still almost managed to win the round because he fought so artfully and accurately on the bike.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just wanted to ask you all to check out nikelab.com, which Dave and I both worked on through AKQA in San Francisco, the agency which designed and built the site. Neil Robinson, who was the lead creative for the site (and owner of several No Mas tees), brought me in on the project and I went to AKQA’s office in San Francisco back in March to meet with him and his team. I helped them come up with the information design for the athlete pages–telling their stories largely through numbers. Once we had the format set, Dave and I wrote the profiles for 49 of the athletes.

We’re really proud of how it turned out. The design and the photography are incredible and we dig the way everyone from Lebron to Yang Lian (a female Chinese weightlifter) got the same treatment, which feels very much in the Olympic spirit. We’d like to thank Neil Robinson, Sallie Lippe, and Bob Hall at AKQA and congratulate their amazing staff of designers. Also thanks to our man Ricky Engelberg (godfather of this project), Jimmy Mouton and Liz Valentine who both ran point at Nike.

The site was featured as the Favourite Website Awards site of the day for July 15th, a nice honor and I think well deserved.

posted by Large

Question thrown out to the Mas community: How do you think Tony Margarito fares against Shane Mosley?

I’ve been asking that question myself lately since I’ve been sitting around watching fights in preparation for this weekend’s donnybrook. The other day I watched back-to-back the two masterpieces of Cotto’s 2007 campaign, the Judah and Mosley fights. As for Margarito, I’ve watched the three fights I have on hand – Cintron II, Clottey and Williams. And let me tell you something, people. You know what it’s like when you go to the night session at the U.S. Open and it’s a women’s match first and you’re like, “damn these ladies be smacking that ball” but then that match ends and the dudes come out and they’re hitting the ball about a thousand times faster and it makes it seem like the women were playing in slow motion?

Well, watch Margarito/Cintron and then watch Cotto/Mosley and you’ll achieve a similar effect. Cotto/Mosley was contested at such a high level in almost every facet at which a fighter can excel that it makes Margarito’s bout with Cintron seem like Toney/Rahman. At one point during the middle rounds of Cotto/Mosley, Lampley says something like, “this is one of those fights where you just sit back and think that it’s simply amazing that human beings can do this,” and to that I say hear hear. The shit is absolutely mindblowing.

Meanwhile, Margo was outspeeded by Josh Clottey and Paul Williams, crafty fighters, neither of them in Judah or Mosley’s league. I’ll give you my two cents right now – I don’t know about Zab because you never know how he’ll fare late into a fight, but I really don’t think Margarito could beat Mosley, not the Mosley who came to fight Cotto last November. Honestly, I think he’d get killed. I don’t think he’d get knocked out, but I think he’d get schooled and lose a lopsided decision. The speed exchange rate is horrifyingly to his deficit.

Now, to be fair, Cotto barely beat Mosley that night, and a lot of people think he didn’t beat him, that the fight was at the very least a draw. Myself, I thought he tipped it, but either way. Watching both the Judah and Mosley fights back to back it’s patently clear what a skillful boxer Cotto has become, how he’s developed his jab into a veritable poleaxe, how much improved he is defensively and how mobile and creative he’s become with his combinations. And for those of you out there who doubt his chin, watch these fights and tell me that he can’t take a licking at 147. Judah and Mosley aren’t big hitters, but then again neither is Margo. Zab and Shane both connected with huge, clean haymakers on Cotto, shots of the kind that I think Margarito will have problem landing, because he just doesn’t have anywhere near Judah/Mosley handspeed or reflexes.

So, well, what I’m saying is this – go to the videotape if you can and tell me what you see. I’ve been feeling for a while that this was a pick ‘em fight, but my own recent investigations into the archive has led me to conclude that the oddsmakers may know wherefore they speak on this one. Cotto is in a different league, a league that right now I think may only have one other occupant, and it sure as hell ain’t Margo. It’s Money-O.

posted by Large

For my general thoughts on the Pavlik/Hopkins make, check my Weekly Boxing Notes over at The Sporting Blog. Below I’m just going to round out my feelings on the matter with some free-association.

Brothers and sisters, let’s face it – this was about Plan Q for Team Pavlik. Plan A was Calzaghe, Plan B was Abraham, and when those two went south, all plans from C to P (none of which were that great anyway) ended up seeming irreparably flawed.

What Pavlik is suffering from is a condition that Miguel Cotto has had for a few years now. It’s commonly known as “bound-to-hurt-you-tosis.” If you’re going to step in the ring with either of these two men, you better make sure you’ve milked the sport for every dollar it has out there for you beforehand, because these guys are man-wreckers who could, as Mickey Goldman told Rocky when he cautioned him against fighting Clubber Lang, “hurt ya poimanent“. To face them, you can bet that everyone on the list is asking for stupid STUPID money, as well they should. But the thing is, neither Cotto nor Pavlik is quite a Double Stupid Money draw yet in his own right, and so they can’t pay out comparably big dollars to their opponents. Hopefully, Cotto is going to break out of that purgatorial state by beating up on Oscar’s beautiful ass in December and gaining a big-time national profile in the process. As for Pavlik, I don’t know what the fight will be that will make him a crossover star. It’ll probably just take him a few years of regular and routinely devastating work at the elite level, because he’s charismatic, he’s got the great Rocky-like backstory, and, well… I quote Larry Holmes – “he’s got the complexion to make the connection.”

Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Large

I’m on the road, No Masians, first Philly and now NYC, and thus having a little trouble keeping up with all my commitments. I did watch Klitschko/Tony the Toothless Tiger this weekend and let me tell you something – I was unimpressed. Somehow it seemed like the CW coming out of that fight was that it was a good outing for The Klinch Who Stole Christmas. Me, I thought he looked pedestrian at best.

There was a time back there, around, say, the Calvin Brock fight, when I thought that Manny Steward was evolving Wlad into a too-legit-to-quit one-two machine. That progression seems to have halted entirely, regressed even. Klitsch is now a bigger, right-handed, early-period Manny Pacquiao, only, you know, less fast and good. In other words, he’s all one punch, that straight right hand which is admittedly a frightening sledge-hammer of a shot but still one that he can’t seem to land accurately without measuring it constantly with that awful sissy slap of a jab that made such a mockery of the Ibragimov fight. First half of the fight, when Tony the Tiger still had some bounce in his old paws, he wasn’t haven’t much trouble bobbing and weaving out of the way of the big right, and Wlad didn’t have much of a clue as to what else to do in there.

Of course, eventually Old Tony ran out of Frosted Flakes and down went Frazier, not from any particular punch so much as the war of attrition that was his own raging exhaustion. (You had to ache for Thompson in his corner late in the fight when his trainer was getting up his ass and Tony kept saying, “Trust me, you have to trust me, I have a plan” – his trainer so blatantly did not trust him and neither did anyone else).

Read the rest of this entry »