posted by Baggiesboy

(My apologies on this one – Bag sent me this dispatch last week and due to an email breakdown in Large Land, I didn’t get it. Thankfully, the piece, like all writing on men in thongs, is evergreen. -L)

I’ll be brief. Thank heaven for London’s Metropolitan Police. Last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown got some rare kudos for his economic meltdown maneuvers, but it was the dear old Bobbies who actually saved the world from a fate worse than death: a legion of England fans dressed in nothing but a mankini.

Kazakhstan’s finest footballers were on display at the new Wembley Stadium on Saturday. The country’s most infamous fashion statement was almost on show as well. Yes, the luminous green male thong made famous by a Kazakh of a completely different origin, Borat Sagdiyev, was reported to be flying off the shelves in response to a ‘Facebook” posting asking Englishmen to wear the fabled mankini as a show of support for the Three Lions. As a devotee of Project Runway, let me assure all No-Masians that I’m all for pushing the fashion envelope, but to quote the aforementioned Borat: ‘This one… not so much.”

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posted by Large

Age Inappropriate
In a seeming night-long desire to downplay Bernard’s achievement, Jim Lampley repeated a few times Saturday night that George Foreman’s KO of Michael Moorer was a more stunning display of age over youth than what Hopkins did to Pavlik Saturday night.

To which Manny Steward responded, “yeah, but he did that with one punch.”

My thoughts exactly. Very famously after his win over Moorer, Big George asked Larry Merchant what he thought of the fight and Larry said, “George, I thought you lost every round.” And George said, “Yeah, I did… until I knocked his ass out.”

The puncher’s chance is one thing, and all credit to George for having that punch in his pocket, but until he unfurled it he was getting embarrassed, and getting embarrassed by a fighter of the caliber of Michael Moorer.

Now, admittedly, all of us today are in the process of reassessing our feelings about Kelly Pavlik. But going into this fight, he had few doubters even among hardcore boxing acolytes known for their capacity to doubt. He was drawing comparisons to Hagler, to Monzon, the great middleweight assassins of our time. He’d shown range, mobility, accuracy, relentlessness, a great beard and devastating power. Plus, he’d KO’ed the guy who beat Bernard twice on points, and then soundly beat him again in a rematch.

And then Saturday night, Bernard, 43 years young, turns around and HUMILIATES Pavlik. Completely blanked him on my card, and if you gave Kelly a round on yours, then you took mercy on the kid, because he didn’t deserve it. This is a Floyd over Gatti type ass-spanking we’re talking about here, Calzaghe over Lacy. Christ, Bernard was never a puncher even in his prime, and he almost knocked Kelly the fuck out, Kelly who once ate tremendous bombs from a hitter like Miranda like they were Corn Flakes!

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posted by Large

I would imagine that most of you out there, like myself, are not terrifically moved by this weekend’s major contest in the ring. So little lies in the balance. In my weekly boxing notes over at The Sporting Blog, I made the case that the fight would be infinitely more interesting if it were being fought at the middleweight limit. Taylor narrowly, and many (including myself) felt controversially, beats Ex and ends his ten-year reign. Pavlik then beats Taylor. Now if Ex somehow could manage to turn it all around and steal the belts back from Pavlik, well… that’s a story right there, even if it doesn’t make for a pretty fight.

I can’t quite figure why it’s not at 160, either, because I tend to believe that Bernard would stand a better chance at the lighter weight. I think Pavlik is happier, and stronger, in the 170 region than he is down at ’60. And given the fitness freak that Bernard is, hell, I have to think that making middleweight again wouldn’t mean shit to him.

But whatever – it’s done. Maybe it came from Pavlik’s team, the catch-weight. Maybe he didn’t want to risk the belts on the possibility that Ex ekes out a decision on the scorecard with, to borrow a term from Ricky Hatton’s assessment of Money May, a barrage of “fiddle-faddle.”

It does seem that what we’re left with as our central drama for this bout is not exactly the most compelling question you can ask going into a pay-per-view: Is Bernard Hopkins going to be able to fiddle-faddle his way to a stultifyingly boring points victory, or after all these years of wily bravado is he finally going to get the shit beaten out of him?

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Please check out the newest episode of the Undercard, starring Will Rosinsky. As some of you will remember, Will was one of the original subjects of Brooklyn to Beijing and we have been following him since he won the he gloves in 2007. After a year where had decided to forgo a pro career and focus on teaching, Will changed his mind.

“Willpower” was shot around his pro debut in August. He is also gonna be on the Wednesday Oct. 22nd Broadway Boxing at BB King’s. We will be in there shooting. If anyone is interested in tickets give me a shout as I believe some are still available through Will.

Please let us know what you think, and please forward a link to www.nomas.tv to anyone you think would be interested. Congrats to Nick Strini on what I think is the best episode yet.

posted by Large

Masians, I’m wounded, and not because I lost a carelessly wagered hundred bucks on Sam Peter. Yesterday’s action in the ring was incredibly disappointing to me. Both major fights featured lackluster performances that made me ache for the current state of boxing, from the loser in one bout and the winner in the other. I’ll start things off with far and away the more shocking result…

He’s heavy… AND he’s my brother
Ah, quitting on your stool. Few things are less likely to endear you to the fight community, and few a more destructive harbinger for the future of a career.

Sam Peter’s sit-down retirement after the eighth last night was no doubt a product of the WBC’s bizarre adherence to open scoring. Big Sam was taking a whupping in there, nothing was going his way, and the news that he’d won exactly one round to that point on all three judges’ scorecards proved too much bad news for him to bear.

The scoring system aside, though, it’s hard to forgive a fighter for throwing in his own towel the way Peter did last night. Yes, Klitschko was outclassing him in every way, and yes his efforts to turn the tide of the bout were proving futile at every turn. But Sam has been known to turn things around with one big shot before, and he’d landed a few bombs in the prior couple of rounds that were without question his best shots of the fight. Vitali was starting to wear down just enough for Sam to get close now and then, and it was giving Peter the opportunity to make the fight into the kind of infighting brawl that it needed to be if the Nigerian was going to transform that nightmare in there into a happy ending.

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posted by Large

Big night ahead in the ring, Masians. Although it doesn’t feature any A-listers, it features some definite names from the B-plus list, and also promises real consequences for the fate of the light heavy and heavyweight divisions.

By far the more consequential bout to my mind is the Sam Peter/Vitali Klitschko fight going on over in Berlin this afternoon, which will be shown on Showtime on tape delay tonight before the Dawson/Tarver fight. I devoted my entire Round by Round column over at The Sporting Blog to Sam/Vitali, so you can get the lion’s share of my thoughts over there. Let me summarize by saying that I think a Dr. Ironfist in his prime puts the Nigerian Nightmare to sleep in five in what would surely be a rock-em-sock-em robots kind of affair.

But Vitali is a good six years and many, many injuries past his prime. He’s 37 and he hasn’t had a fight in almost four years. You hear reports that he’s in the best shape of his life, but who can you trust in this kind of dubious promotional situation? Me, I got a c-note on Peter by KO at 12/5. My rooting interest is strong, because I want that Sam/Wlad rematch. It’s the most entertaining and consequential heavyweight fight out there (unless, of course, David Haye makes hay) and it would be a big-ticket unification bout for the big boys, the kind of fight boxing really could use right now. Vitali beats Big Sam and that Sam/Wlad match will never happen, and a Vitali/Wlad fight is out of the question, leaving the heavyweights right back at Nowheresville. So, you know. Viva Big Sam.

As for Dawson/Tarver, I realize this is for all intents and purposes a unification bout at 175, given that it seems that Joe Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins are all but finished bothering with light heavyweight belts in their pursuit of big-dollar catch-weight fights. (Although I am sad to see that for some arcane organizational reason, Chad Dawson’s WBC belt is not at stake tonight – the alphabet gangs are so painfully inept).

And given that this is THE fight at 175 right now, I am underwhelmed to say the least. I think it mostly boils down to Tarver, although Dawson’s recent outing (loss, or at the very least a draw) with Glen Johnson plays a role as well. But Tarver is the main culprit of my malaise. This guy’s bark has been worse than his bite for so long now that his continued prominence combined with his essential irrelevance has almost started to offend me.

For some reason, there were many who were swayed by his destruction of Clinton Woods that the prime-time, Roy Jones-destroying Tarver was back in black, but I’m having none of it. Clinton Woods shit the bed that night, and let’s face the facts – Clinton Woods was never all that in the first place, which means that a shitting-the-bed Clinton Woods is not exactly Joey Maxim. In defeating Woods soundly, Tarver was still less than spectacular to my eyes. He did what he had to do and otherwise failed to distinguish himself in any way.

Then again, in winning a preposterous UD over Glen Johnson, Chad Dawson didn’t exactly distinguish himself as a major talent either, and Dawson doesn’t have two wins over Roy Jones on his resumé. Yes, Johnson is a relentless battler, the kind of guy who is going to give you fits on your best night for sure, but he’s also a battle-weary 39-year-old who I tend to think a top-notch A-list young fighter would dispense with right now. Bad Chad proved not to be that fighter.

So that’s the situation – two belts at stake tonight in a scrap between a guy who is well past his best and a guy who may never have been all that he was cracked up to be to begin with. For a 175 unification bout, it’s not exactly must-see TV. Then again, it’s on after Sam/Vitali, and knowing myself I doubt I’ll be very motivated to change the channel. I’ll have a recap for you on Monday.

(p.s. – Pavlik/Hopkins countdown premieres on HBO tonight at midnight EST.)

posted by Steve Tignor

(Very happy day for us here at No Mas, as our star tennis correspondent, Steve Tignor, returns to the Mas with some long-awaited Deep Tennis musings. Steve is the executive editor of Tennis magazine. For more of his writing, check out his regular column, Concrete Elbow, on the Tennis website. -L)

Are you ready for the Great Depression, Part Deux? Will we soon be standing in soup lines at Trader Joe’s and doing the Charleston all night to keep the blues away? That last thought may not be as terrible as it sounds. The dances of the 1930s gave us the Big Bands we still listen to today. Maybe it’s not an accident that my favorite musical purchase of 2008 has been a reissue of the best of them, Lester Young with Count Basie, 1936-’40. Not that I’ve been listening to it all that much since the market tanked and my Wachovia stock sank to the bottom of the ocean. Looking at my iPod today, I see that the last song in the ‘Recently Played” section is a little angrier than the Charleston: It’s the Dead Kennedys’ ‘Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and it sounded about right on the subway this morning.

Now maybe it won’t get that bad, maybe we’ll still love our landlords, maybe we’ll wait in sushi lines at Trader Joe’s instead, but since the 1930s are suddenly in the air, I was curious to see what happened to big-time tennis during that era. As much as any sport, it has mirrored the historical patterns of the last 100-odd years. It began as an upper-class diversion and followed the fortunes of the country’s ruling establishment through the amateur era, until both were blown up in 1968. One example: In 1929, the market tanked, the ’20s stopped roaring, the Golden Age of Sport ended, and East Coast WASPs, who had ruled that decade like no other, were kicked off their pedestal. Tennis followed in lockstep: 1929 was also the year that a 36-year-old Bill Tilden, a product of the Philly elite and the last champion to come from an old-line East Coast cricket club, won his final title at Forest Hills.

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(It’s a heady time in Philly, with the Fightins just one series away from their first trip to the Fall Classic in 15 years. Being a Philly sports fan born and bred, however, it’s hard for me to revel in optimism instead of dwelling in perpetual fear of imminent humiliation. With that in mind, I bring you this classic No Mas piece on an anniversary that I offer as some bizarre talisman to stave off the dark side of the force. -L)
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On this day 57 years ago, the Yankees completed their sweep of the Phils in the 1950 World Series with a 5-2 victory at Yankee Stadium. The Phils, young and vibrant, the beloved “Whiz Kids” led by 23 year-old Richie Ashburn and 25 year-old Del Ennis, had clinched the National League on the last day of the season, October 1st, with an extra inning win over the Brooklyn Dodgers – Dick Sisler was the hero with a 3-run homer in the tenth at Ebbets Field. It was the second pennant in team history and the first in 35 years. At last, it seemed that Philadelphia’s long baseball exile in the desert of mediocrity was coming to a close.

Less than a week later, the World Series was history and Philly’s hopes were ground into the dirt beneath Joe DiMaggio’s spikes. Vic Raschi threw a complete-game shutout for the Yanks in game one to beat the Fightin’s 1-0, and then a Joe D homer in the top of the tenth provided the winning run of the Bombers 2-1 victory in game two. Game three was another one-run affair – the Yanks won it 3-2 when a walkoff single from Jerry Coleman off Russ Meyer scored Gene Woodling in the bottom of the ninth.

Game four, October 7th, 1950, was not so close. The Bombers scored two in the first with RBI’s from Yogi Berra and DiMaggio, and then added three in the sixth to make it 5-0. The Phils managed two in the ninth off starter Whitey Ford, but Allie Reynolds came in to get the final out and finish the sweep. Philly would not make it back to the postseason again for another 26 years, and when they did, well, they got swept, 3-0, by the Reds in the 1976 NLCS.