posted by Large

(Allow me to reintro-pimp myself… two pieces elsewhere that I thought Masians would find of interest. The first I’ll just try to slide by you as smoothly as possible, a 2009 boxing wish-list for the sweet scientist known as St. Nick, a piece that also serves as my debut with an organization you may be familiar with. The second piece is a review for First Cuts of an online comic book on the life of Jack Johnson called ‘The Original Johnson” (available for free at comicmix.com with new installments every Wednesday). I know what you’re thinking – a comic-book treatment of Jack Johnson? How much more No Mas can you get? I thought the same thing myself, and then was unpleasantly surprised to say the least. Check it out and remember to weigh in with your thoughts on Fight of the Year in the piece below this one – the 2008 No Mas Boxing Awards get handed out tomorrow. -L)

Holiday Wish List 2009 (HBO Boxing)
“Here we are at holiday time again, and boxing diehards are everywhere poring over their 2009 wish lists and wondering what dream bouts Santa will favor us with in the year to come. So in the true spirit of the holidays, allow me to offer just a few gift ideas to the jolly old heavyweight in the bright red suit…”

Comic Book Review: “The Original Johnson” (First Cuts)
“…The idea that his life was one pitted in vengeance against and ultimately victorious over white America fundamentally (and willfully, I imagine) misunderstands the situation. And when Von EeDen casts the terms of that vengeance in the form of Johnson’s sexuality and pursuit of white women, the absurdity becomes borderline racist. In what has to be one of the more unfortunate lines ever written about Jack Johnson, Von EeDen writes in his first installment that ‘When black men anywhere grab their dicks, they’re celebrating the memory of the Original Johnson.’”

posted by Large

Another year has come and gone in the squared circle, and a hell of a year it was. With New Year’s Day 2009 almost upon us, it’s time for us to reflect on 2008 and hand out our third annual year-end No Mas boxing awards.

We only do Fight and Fighter of the Year here at the Mas, and given the circumstances of 2008, we’re only going to subject Fight of the Year to general debate, because Fighter of the Year is so completely sewn up in advance that there’s really not much to talk about until we shower said FOY with the appropriate accolades in the awards ceremony. I trust you know who I’m talking about.

As for Fight of the Year, for all the great donnybrooks that visited us in 2008, two stand out as the clear candidates for the No Mas statue. Many, I suspect, will call for a third – the Pacquiao/Marquez rematch – and I’m willing to hear any and all arguments that make the case for this bout, cause it was indeed a mother. But I recently watched that fight, along with all the other worthy entrants (ah sweet Christmas), and I found it to be just a hair or so short of the standard set by what to my mind are the dueling contenders of the year.

So I’ll list those contenders below, along with a few dwellers in what I see as the honorable mention category, and then let the debate begin. You can post your arguments here as comments or send them to me or I-berg in an email. The winner will be decided in highly unscientific fashion by gauging the overall vibe of the No Mas constituency, and as usual I’ll be quoting your missives in the awards ceremony piece, which will hit the airwaves on Dec. 31st.

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posted by Large

(I had two pieces up over at The Sporting Blog today that I thought would be of interest to Masians, both concerning comebacks. One is most welcome, the University of Nebraska’s reissue of Paul Gallico’s classic, Farewell to Sport, a must-have X(No)-Mas gift if ever there was one. The other is decidedly unwelcome, tomorrow’s Holyfield/Valuev debacle. I noticed just now, reading over them, that the name “Primo Carnera” gets dropped in each piece. I tell you, readers over at TSB must find me really, REALLY uninteresting. Anyway, next week I promise that we’ll get into it a little on end-of-the-year awards and the like. Until then – L)

The Real Deal
“In my estimation, Evander Holyfield is the greatest heavyweight of my time, more so than Tyson… or Lewis… He was a genuine throwback — compare his will and determination to that of Marciano and Holyfield does not come out wanting in the least. The guy came to fight every night and overcame all manner of obstacles due to his Balboan capacity for perseverance and fearlessness in the face of any man alive. I have no doubt that for the right purse Evander would fight a grizzly bear tomorrow night, and I also feel certain that after the bout, the victorious bear (if bears are capable of such things) would leave the ring with deep respect for the size of his opponent’s cojones and think twice before ever fighting him again.”

Book Review: Farewell to Sport
“His profiles of the Jazz Age’s Holy Trinity — Dempsey, Ruth and Jones — are about as thoughtful and incisive as sports writing ever has been. His treatment of the Primo Carnera tragic farce is as compelling and revelatory in ten pages as Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall was in 300. He writes of speedboating, gangsters and broken-down pugs on the take, he drops the names Goethe and Ronsard as easily as he does Benny Leonard or Helen Wills, and despite the fact that he never met a myth that he didn’t love, he remains as sober-eyed as Lardner while maintaining a reverence worthy of Rice.”

posted by I-berg

No Mas friend Ben Younger, director of Boiler Room and Prime, recently took me to see Itamar Moses’ new ‘Back, Back, Back”, a play inspired by the lives of Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss. Prior to that night, theater had intersected with baseball exactly twice for me: seeing one of the 37 performances of ‘The First: A Jackie Robinson Musical” (How I love ya, How I love ya, Branch-ie!) in 1981 and refusing to see Damn Yankees my entire life, likely due to fear I’d enjoy it. ‘Back, Back, Back” was entirely superior to both of these. That’s faint praise, so let’s say that the play is up until December 28 at the New York City Center ($52) and I strongly recommend that you see it.

In our interview to follow, Moses downplays the importance of knowing baseball for “getting” the play. And while I don’t doubt that someone who isn’t hip to inside jokes about Tony La Russa will still enjoy it, for the baseball fluent, there are some especially rarified pleasures. But although occasionally very funny, Back Back Back is less a comedy than a morality play set in 80s and 90s baseball clubhouses. The dialogue is well timed and observed, the staging imaginatively transports a bare bones set from the ’84 Olympics to the 2005 Congressional hearing, and the performances are excellent, including a standout job by Jeremy Davidson as Kent/McGwire. Again, I strongly recommend it, and with the possible exception of “The Great White Hope” which is before my time, I’m going to go ahead and give this the coveted No Mas all-time Tony.

Below is my interview with the playwright, who has famously feuded with his college friend and rival Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated”), has a name worthy of a roster spot on the House of David traveling team, and is rapidly emerging as a major new talent.

No Mas: For even a casual sports fan, it’s immediately obvious who “Kent” and “Raul” are based on. Other characters, notably Tony LaRussa and Orel Hershiser, are directly named. Why not Canseco, McGwire, or Weiss?

Itamar Moses: It’s true that the off-stage players and managers referred to in the play are “real” people, but it felt important to make my on-stage players fictional. I think the layer of distance that adds helps in all kind of ways. It makes it easier to read the play as an allegory, which is what it is, and helps to suggest that the issues in the play are not limited to baseball, which they’re not. The play isn’t non-fiction, it isn’t a biopic or a docudrama, and trying to read it that way is an enormous mistake. (Which is why the critics who don’t like the play turn out, invariably, to have viewed it through that limited and limiting lens.) Kent, Raul, and Adam are, I hope, convincing portraits of professional athletes, but they’re also archetypes. I was interested in the dramatic situation, and the ideas and feelings it would allow me to explore, not in “outing” this or that real person.

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posted by Large

Flizz-noyd
I doubt that I have to tell any of youse out in No Masylvania that the rumors about a Lil Floyd comeback to fight Pacquiao are swirling left and right. In this piece over at The Sporting Blog, I discuss those rumors and the fact that most of them are originating from a supposed call that Lil Floyd placed to his father saying that he wants Floyd Sr. in his corner for a potential Pac Man smackdown. I offer the theory that Floyd is reaching out to his dad primarily to block him from training Hatton to fight Pacquiao, much as he blocked his Uncle Rog from training Stevie Forbes last year to fight Oscar. Let me add today that I think Floyd Sr.’s words in this article over at Doghouse Boxing confirm my theory. Says Papa Floyd: “‘Manny is the man right now. It all depends on who he chooses,if it’s Ricky or Floyd. Of course, whoever makes more money for him, that’s who Pacquiao will choose. But whoever he chooses, he just needs to be ready to fight.”

Since when is Floyd Jr. suddenly a viable candidate and not just a rumor for the next Pacquiao fight? Sounds to me like Money May is definitely up in his daddy’s ear. And Daddy’s listening.

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posted by Large

(I wrote this in the Vegas airport this morning and then on the plane ride back to Oakland. Just getting around to posting it now, because… well, I took a long nap. The rigors of fight night are hard on us old farts, both fighters and writers alike. -L)

I’m sitting here in the Las Vegas airport watching the hordes roll through security while I wait for my flight out. And I do mean hordes. Oscar and Manny really brought Vegas back to life, if only for one weekend. I just heard a security guard say to his security buddy, ‘man this is like Sunday morning in the old days.” I couldn’t tell if he was happy about that or not.

It’s overcast and seriously blah in Vegas today, and the crowded airport feels like the living embodiment of a hangover. Dishevelment and bloodshot eyes at every turn. In their Juicy sweatpants and ubiquitous Uggs, somehow the skanks look even skankier, and the good ole boys even more preposterous in their cowboy hats and luminous belt buckles. Plus, look, when you’ve got James Carville using a trash-can for a table as he wolfs down a slice of Sbarro’s pizza at ten in the morning, well, you’ve pretty much got the whole picture in a nutshell.

Though you’d have to go back quite a few years for my last drink, I’m feeling a little hungover myself this morning. Predictably, I did not sleep like a lamb. Woke up to a coughing fit at five in the morning , I tell you, the smoke in the these damn casinos gives your allergy-plagued Large fits , and then just after I fell asleep, some wolves of the early Vegas morning threw a fireworks party in the parking lot right below my window. This was no amateur effort, either. Shit was pretty pro, twenty minutes worth of explodificating mayhem. At first I was pissed, but then I just got up and watched. By the end of the show they’d won me over to their way of seeing things.

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I’m sitting here in the press room, still stunned, still buzzing. I don’t see a lot of sleep in my future.

All’s I can say for myself is… No Mas Large – Seldom Right and Wrong Again. I admit that I thought the idea that Oscar, he who ate thunder from Vargas, who took breakneck four-and-five-punch combinations from Sugar Shane – the idea that this guy would be stopped by a junior lightweight seemed preposterous to me.

The thing I forgot I suppose is glaringly obvious in retrospect – the Vargas fight, the Mosley fights… they were a long time ago. I got all riled up the other night watching Oscar/Quartey and trying to remember where I watched it originally (that was another, much fuzzier era for Large – I think I was with I-berg though I’m not entirely sure) and then it suddenly hit me that De La Hoya/Quartey was almost ten years ago. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

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posted by Large

After being told by Ring Lardner that he was betting heavy on Jess Willard to beat Jack Dempsey, Grantland Rice said, “I think you’re wrong Ring. An ox cannot defeat a tiger.”

At which point, W.O. McGeehan chimed in, “No, but an elephant sure as hell can.”

As far as De La Hoya/Pacquiao goes, I think what we’re dealing with is more in the territory of this exchange: A pit bull can defeat a mountain lion. But a bull terrier sure as hell can’t.

In other words, to bring us out of the zoo for a moment, the x factor is the size difference. It has been since day one and it remains the case the day before the fight. I’m eager to see video of the weigh-in (I’m not in Vegas yet, flying in tomorrow morning, keeping the trip short what with Reggie and all) just to look at their comparative hefts after they’ve made the weight (presuming they make the weight), because to this point when I picture the two men together in my mind, I see the big, bloated Oscar towering over the miniscule Manny as if they were brothers and Oscar is 15 and Manny is 8, and all I can think of as a bon mot in the grand tradition of Lardner and Rice is… an 8-year-old cannot defeat a 15-year-old unless he has a bazooka.

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posted by Large

I know I’m pushing the boundaries of tardiness here, but before I wade forth into the Oscar/Manny debate, let me briefly revisit the past weekend, where to my eyes the big winner was PWill and not Arreola. The Mexican Nightmare got a little exposed as far as I was concerned. Travis Walker is not A-level material by any means, and though he certainly seemed strong and athletic, he didn’t look like a particularly skillful fighter to me. And as we all saw, he was tagging Arreola at will in there. That Arreola eventually prevailed in a full-scale firefight is to his credit, and he’s guaranteed to swing for the fences every time he steps up to the plate, but I have the feeling that his man-titty-jigglin’ grip-it-and-rip-it style would find him seriously brain-damaged in under five against a gigantic sharpshooter like Wlad. Arreola is SO easy to hit, and when Wlad can measure someone with that right-hand poleaxe of his, it generally makes for a very short evening. Maybe, MAYBE, it would be fun to watch, but I more suspect it would be like watching someone get electrocuted. The chair wins every time, and it ain’t pretty.

In stark contrast to Arreola, Paul Williams really showed me something last Saturday night. Verno Phillips is no world-beater, but he’s definitely a respectable opponent. To crib from Arreola’s hilarious post-fight interview, Verno’s “a strong motherfucker” and he puts out 110 percent at all times. That PWilly dealt so cooly with that nastyass cut against such a game and crafty customer as Phillips speaks volumes as to the state of his maturity. Williams’ cut was very bad, and in a very unfortunate spot. The thing leaked sheets of blood into his face round after round. It was the kind of situation that had Juan Diaz/Nate Campbell written all over it – a raw but talented youngster gets a bad cut against a take-no-prisoners journeyman and the journeyman makes the most of it when the young’un gets rattled by the sight of his own blood flowing in buckets.

The Punisher, however, would not be so punished. You’d have thought he wasn’t cut at all the way he comported himself in there, and his patient but insistent body attack was frickin’ ferocious. Beating Verno is one thing, but stopping him? Ike Quartey couldn’t do it. Kassim Ouma couldn’t do it. Hell, it hasn’t happened in over 20 years. What’s more, PWill didn’t just stop him with one lucky haymaker. He broke the man’s will, stopped him with utter, relentless savagery. Kellerman made the comment that Williams looked stronger at 54 than he ever has at 47, and I heartily agree. You just wonder after an outing like that… who the hell is going to want to fight this kid now? No one wanted him beforehand, but after that? Fuck, man. Even if Margarito finally has the cojones to take the rematch, it’s not going to happen this year. No way does Margs go Mosley, Cotto and then Williams in ’09. It’s suicide. And then who else is there who would dare fight Williams? Berto? Mosley? Is Mosley that crazy? Maybe the Pavlik talk will start again, but I doubt Pavlik will want any Paul Williams action up his ass until he gets his feet back under him after that Bernard embarrassment. Really, it’s a sad predicament, but I see Williams having to suffer at least another year of the waiting game before he gets a marquee bout.

(I’m planning to have an Oscar/Manny piece up tonight and then offer my prognostification tomorrow, but if I don’t manage tonight’s piece, I have a little recap of the major stories going into the bout over at The Sporting Blog today for that decidedly non-boxing audience – probably well-trod material for the average No Masian, but maybe worth a look if you’re bored. Also, Versus tonight at 8 shows Oscar/Vargas and Manny/Morales II (I think it’s the second fight) back to back. And if you haven’t noticed, HBO has Oscar/Quartey available On Demand right now, a classic, great fight for them to pull out of the vault.)