posted by Large

As a match, Oscar/Manny has grown on me.

Obviously, the size issue is problematic, and it doesn’t reflect well on Oscar, who is making a habit lately of fighting smaller guys who are unlikely to hurt him very much.

But the thing I’ve come to realize is this: Who besides Margarito would we have him fight? No doubt about it, ducking Margarito is a charge that Oscar has no choice but to own up to. He said he’d fight the winner of Margarito/Cotto, and then it turned out that what he meant to say was, “I will fight the winner of Margarito/Cotto… so long as it’s Cotto.”

It’s another embarrassing moment for a guy who’s had more than his fair share of embarrassments, but with some critical distance I have to admit that it doesn’t seem such a cardinal sin to me in retrospect. Is Oscar wary of Margarito? Absolutely. But at the same time, Tony doesn’t bring a lot of PPV muscle to the table for an Oscar-level fight. A De La Hoya/Margarito PPV would be a promotional dream and do fantastic numbers, but then again, De La Hoya does good numbers whenever he fights. I certainly don’t think De La Hoya/Margs comes close to De La Hoya/Manny money. So from Oscar’s standpoint, it boils down to this – why take a risk against a killer like Margs when he can make more money and risk much less?

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posted by Large

First of all, you can, ah… disregard that last post there. As you all probably know by now, Margarito/Mosley is back on. I guess I’ll start with that, and then move on to a brief treatment of this past weekend’s big fights and what I thought were some questionable stoppages.

Supposedly, the time-line is that Mosley’s team tried to make Mosley/Berto for a few days after Margarito passed, and when that deal looked unlikely they went back to the table with Margs. Then, at the last possible minute, HBO miraculously found an undisclosed amount of money to give Tony that made him feel the love and finally tipped the scales in the fight’s favor.

I’m dubious of this account. It strikes me more that the Top Rank powers-that-be finally persuaded Margarito that it was a very bad move for him career-wise (both in terms of his Q factor and his wallet) to pass on this fight, and then they convinced HBO to come up with some nominal sum so they had face-saving material to work with in the press.

However it got done, it seems now (for the moment anyway) that it is done. Margarito/Mosley, January 24th, Mandalay Bay. Hot damn. Yours truly certainly plans to be ringside for that shit. We can discuss the different angles of that matchup till we’re blue in the face (dah, fingers?) in the coming weeks. For now, let me just say that I’m very glad to have a red-meat fight on the horizon that we can sink our teeth into here at the Mas.

Now… back to the weekend. Three stoppages, all of which left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth, albeit for different reasons.

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posted by Large

My plan is to write a little Hatton/Malignaggi preview tomorrow and at the same time give my thoughts on tonight’s Molitor/Caballero bout which is, as I write, about an hour or so from the opening bell.

So let me leave those two topics alone for now and direct you to my Weekly Boxing Notes over at The Sporting Blog, where I cover the week’s two biggest boxing stories, Margarito passing on a much-discussed and long-negotiated fight with Shane Mosley, and the rumors, growing in intensity by the day, that Lennox Lewis is considering a return to the ring for a rematch (or more, a continuation of his first fight) with Vitali Klitschko.

Like all of you out there, I imagine, I’m deeply disappointed in Margarito’s decision. Especially given the fact that he called Sugar Shane out with such cavalier arrogance. It’d be poor form for any fighter to talk a load of crap about fighting another guy and then a month later walk away from a perfectly good deal to fight that guy. But for a fighter like Margarito, the heir to the True Mexican Warrior spirit, it’s just… man it’s a drag.

As I mention in my Sporting Blog piece, I can’t imagine that Margs actually thinks that there’s another bigger fight than Mosley waiting for him out there between now and next summer. Two million smackers guaranteed money? Who the hell else is going to put that on the table for him right now? The only reason that he can be walking away from the Mosley deal is because it’s too risky for the only really big-money bout he has waiting for him – the Cotto rematch.

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posted by Large

Last night may have been the most important evening for the sport of boxing in a long time, certainly since Oscar/Floyd, and arguably even more so than that lucrative, headline-grabbing but ultimately inconsequential affair. David Haye’s complete destruction of Monte Barrett at the O2 Arena in London last night heralded the return of some legitimate drama to the heavyweight ranks, something that boxing desperately has needed since the retirement of Lennox Lewis and the demise of both Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson.

You have to go back all the way to the 1930′s, to the days of Jack Sharkey and Primo Carnera and (bless his heart) Jim Braddock, to find an era in which the heavyweight title was held so cheaply and by such a cabal of undeserving second-rate fighters as it has been over the last five years since the retirement of Lewis. Not surprisingly, boxing often has seemed to be on life support in popular culture during that stretch. As go the heavyweights, so goes the sport, and for some time now the heavyweights have been going very badly indeed.

How much can we divine of David Haye’s heavyweight future from what he did to Two Gunz Barrett in London last night? Not a lot, I’m afraid, purely for the reason that Barrett is finished and he wasn’t really all that much to marvel at when he started. A heavyweight contender in this barren era, more than anything Monte resembles the second-stage caliber of tomato-can that Mike Tyson used to finish on a bimonthly basis during his march to notoriety in the mid-80s.

But aye mate, there’s the rub, because Haye disposed of Barrett in truly Tysonesque fashion, connecting with gigantic power shots that reduced the much bigger Two Gunz to Less Than Zero Gunz, to not so much as a Slingshot (Slingzhot?) in there, knocking him down twice in the third, twice in the fourth, and for the fifth and final time in round five to cap off a Major Statement Fight of the sort that we’ve been waiting for from a heavyweight for a long, long time.

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posted by Large

On paper, Jermain Taylor vs. Jeff Lacy seems like a reasonable fight. Two Olympic teammates and two former titlists discredited by losses trying to make it back to the big-time. Each about the same size, each with something to prove, each looking to use the other to move on to bigger and better things. Sure, why not, book the date, yeah cheers.

But then, if you follow boxing at all, you know exactly why not. Jermain is still a viable contender in the 160-170 pound zone, a highly dangerous guy who nearly finished Kelly Pavlik in their first fight and gave him a hell of a 12-round scrap in their second. Granted, Pavlik’s rep is considerably tarnished at the moment following the boxing lesson he got from Bernard Hopkins a few weeks ago, but of course Jermain’s got an answer to that one as well, cause he beat Bernard twice himself, highly disputable decisions, both of them, but still, wins are wins.

As for Lacy, well, unlike Taylor, who is on a two-fight losing streak (both to Pavlik), ole Left Hook has won his last three bouts in a years-long effort to claw his way back to credibility. I saw all three of those fights, as perhaps did you, because each of the three was on national television.

To this fight fan’s eyes, each was a devastating loss in victory. On my scorecard, I had him dead even with Not So Vicious Vitali Tsypko in December of 2006. Last December, he managed a very ugly points victory over none other than The Pride of Providence, Peter Manfredo. And then this past July on (the dear, departed) Wednesday Night Fights, he struggled to make it past a borderline tomato-can, Epifanio Mendoza, winning a majority decision with one judge scoring it a draw.

Tsypko, Manfredo and Mendoza – not exactly the wide world of sports, let alone the caliber of opposition that Jermain has become accustomed to, the Pavliks, Bernards and Winky Wrights of the world. The one real marquee name on Lacy’s record is a certain Mr. Joe Bag-of-Donuts from Wales, and I sincerely doubt I have to tell you what happened when those two met up.

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Two things happened tonight to make a run-of-the-mill fight marginally interesting: Joe Calzaghe stepped into a forearm to the bridge of his nose, and Roy Jones suffered a nastyass cut over his left eye.

Calzaghe going down in the first round certainly spiced things up a little, and, at least briefly, gave him something to think about in there when otherwise there might have been precious little to trouble his mind. Even after the fight, when Kellerman showed him the replay of the knockdown, I don’t think Joe realized that he had been hit by the heavily taped part of Roy’s arm and not his glove, a blow that I imagine felt more like getting billyclubbed on the nose than getting hit with a punch. This, I think, gave Calzaghe a healthier respect for Jones’ power than was deserved. He figured out by the third round or so that Jones couldn’t hurt him (where the fuck, I imagine him thinking, did that one punch come from?), but until then it made for some drama as Calzaghe went into matador-mode and gave off the atmosphere of courageously weaving in and out of Roy’s potentially damaging artillery to land his shoeshine combinations. For a glimmer, the last 30 seconds of the first round and the first 60 of the second, the evening had some urgency.

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I-Berg childhood pal and No Mas regular Kopper gets a few things off his chest in this report from Ringside (err…300 level) at the Garden last night. Photo by our man Ben Younger who actually was up in the foldings.

I have been to 2 or 3 other notable fights live in my life. Of those I had been to, the Calzaghe/Jones fight was certainly the most tenuous of importance or relative significance. In the grand scheme of things, did anyone other than the nation of Wales really care who won this fight? My overwhelming dislike of Roy Jones Jr. and the way he conducted his career, full of pansy-assed mandatory challengers and a general uwillingness to fight anyone who could hurt him made my loyalties in this fight a foregone conclusion. It also exposed to me for the first time how someone’s seat really influences how one sees a fight. I was sitting in a relatively crappy seat. Row B of Section 334 in the Garden. It was pretty high up, and watching the ring and the jumbo screen pretty much showed the fighters at an even size, so there was little advantage to watching the screen. I soon appreciated Kellerman commentary and found myself believing Calzage up by 3 rounds with 2 to go. Turns out all 3 judges scored it a blowout and I felt stupid. What I felt walking out of there was that I pretty much wasted $250 and boxing as a whole needs to do something to get people like me back into the arenas.

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posted by Large

Masians, Large here back at the eleventh hour to talk a little Calzaghe/Jones. Life is indeed a whirlwind for me these days keeping me from my regular Mas duties. Let me just tell you something right here up top – 2008 has been some serious shit in Largetown. Reggie Large, the Phils, Obama. The hits just keep on coming.

The prospect of Joe Calzaghe fighting Roy Jones Jr., however, does not rank. I hated on this fight hard today in my weekly boxing notes over at The Sporting Blog, and I’m not sure I have anything worthwhile to add to that here. This always will remain in my mind as the fight that brought HBO’s 24/7 back to earth. Seriously, that series could do no wrong in my mind before this latest three-spot batch, but man, all of their creative shots and impeccable editing and pitch-perfect writing (by true friend of the Mas, Aaron Cohen) couldn’t disguise the fact that there is a hollow core to this Calzaghe/Jones enterprise, absolutely no there there whatsoever.

But, all right. So be it. Now that I’ve gotten the requisite hating out of the way, let me air out my thoughts on the fight itself…

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