Alright we got the blog operational and now I figured out how to get the comments settings right so you’re lost gems are back from the abyss. Please fire at will now there will be no more problems on that score.
And since you’ve suffered the greivous loss of your words, we thought someone else’s suffering might cheer you up. If you’re into Schadenfreude Boxing Cinema, these jammies right here are classics.
Without further adieu, here is Staten Island’s Gary “Kid” Stark Jr. on the night of his rematch against Andres Ledesma, the hard-hitting Colombian who stunned Stark with a fifth round KO in May of 2007.
Part One: Rematch
Part Two: Lumps
In the coming weeks, we will also be featuring the Undercards on No Mas TV with a few added features and way higher quality resolution. Until then, we’ll always have youtube.
Bit of a lull in the fistic festivities this weekend as we get ourselves ready for the following weekend and the competing HBO (Pavlik v. Lockett) and Showtime (Forrest v. Mora, Quintana/Williams rematch) cards on June 7th.
But as I scanned the fight schedule for this week, I did notice that Danny Williams would be in action, stepping into the ring on Friday night with one Konstantin Airich in a bout in that ballyhooed fight capital of the world, Bilbao. I wonder if they’re fighting at the art museum.
For such a mediocre talent, Williams has quite a claim on heavyweight history in the new millennium, being both the last man to face the last true lineal heavyweight champ, Vitali Klitschko, and the next-to-last man to face the last true unified and undisputed heavyweight champ, Mike Tyson.
Of course, Vitali is returning to the ring, which will erase Williams’ privileged place in his record as his final victim. And Tyson, well, though there has been talk of Iron Mike stepping back into the ring (Holyfield III, Kimbo Slice), the recent press surrounding the man and the Tyson documentary that was a sensation in Cannes all point to a potential new reign for Mike as The Mellowest Man on the Planet.
Lest the return of the spotlight give Tyson any ideas, however, I submit his KO at the hands of Williams as our No Mas Knockout of the Week. This no doubt should have been his last fight, if indeed his last fight shouldn’t have happened years beforehand. In that I watched Tyson’s gradual decline over the years, when I saw this fight I wasn’t quite as startled as I might have been at the deterioration of everything that he had once been in the ring. Four years removed, though, with mostly the young, feral Kid Dynamite era in my mind’s eye, I’m more shocked than I was at the time at what became of the fighting Mike. This is much worse than Louis/Marciano, or Ali/Holmes, or Holmes/Tyson. At least those fading superstars got embarrassed by the best the ring could offer, legends in their own right. Mike, meanwhile, got embarrassed Danny Freakin Williams.
How much more terrible could Saturday have gone for Paulie the Not So Magic Man Malignaggi? The answer is none – none more terrible.
Although, I suppose he might have lost. He didn’t do that. If you missed it, Paulie managed to eke out a split decision over Lovemore N’Dou in Manchester on Saturday as the primary undercard to the big Ricky Hatton homecoming fight with Juan Lazcano. Malignaggi was on the card with the presumption that victories for both him and Hatton would result in the two fighters facing each other in their next bout.
Despite the fact that both presumed victors did indeed win their fights, one has to wonder if that Paulie/Hatton fight will come off now due to sheer indifference. After Hatton’s lackluster victory over Lazcano, I can’t think of a single reason to watch the (Often Gets) Hit Man fight again. As for Paulie, well, there is some interest there, if only to see if he can surpass the majestic stupidity of his performance on Saturday.
And let me say right here that I like Paulie. Actually, I kind of like him even more after this N’Dou debacle, because it was just so preposterous, so hilariously, painfully bizarre… ah lemme just tell the story.
So this was a big moment for the Magic Man, big stadium crowd in Man City’s football stadium, and a much bigger bout with Hatton lying in the balance. At last a stage to match the heroic vicissitudes of Paulie’s self-regard, and he was not in the mood disappoint in the way of a spectacle.
He came into the ring wearing a sort of kabuki mask, which was cool enough. Took about twenty minutes to get to the ring, which was whatever, typical.
When he finally made it to the ring, however, and took off the mask, Paulie revealed a head full of long, thin dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail. Calling the fight for Versus, Wally Matthews, one of the few legitimate defenders of the old school left out there, immediately pointed out to the viewing audience that he had it on reliable information that these dreads were primarily hair-extensions.
The first bell rang, and the fun began. Malignaggi’s ponytail popped loose about twenty seconds into the round and suddenly it wasn’t ole Paulie from the block in there but Ozzy Ozbourne. The dreads couldn’t have been worse as a distraction, either. Paulie was completely blinded in there, and ended up eating a lot of shots while trying to brush his hair out of his eyes. Without question, the hair cost him the first round.
From there on the fight was all about the hair. They pulled it back and taped it in his corner and it kept springing free. In between rounds, one of his cornermen stood over him and frantically tried to snip off all the loose dreads before the next round began. As Wally Matthews put it, “Malignaggi must be the first boxer in history who needs a hairdresser in his corner.” Finally, somewhere around the eighth or ninth, the whole ponytail started swing up over Paulie head and onto his face, as in the picture up top there. What ensued from that was some of the most comic scenes I’ve ever witnessed in a boxing ring. It was Will Ferrell-movie material, pure theater of the absurd.
After that round, the jig was up. Paulie barber in the corner went to work and hacked off all the dreads before the next bell. I ask you people, has such a thing ever happened before in the history of the sweet science? An impromptu hair-cut in the corner in between rounds?
In the post-fight interviews, Malignaggi did not shy away from the ridiculousness of the whole thing, saying it was a complete disaster from start to finish. He didn’t quite acknowledge how much of a distraction it was in the ring, however, which was the amazing thing to me. He claims that he broke his oft-broken right hand once again in the sixth round, and I believe him. But he was off his game from the start of that fight, and the reason was on his head, and not in his gloves. The guy made about as big a fool of himself as could be imagined in front of, oh, 30,000 people, and what’s more, I can’t quite believe that the whole thing had Ricky Hatton thinking him to himself, “right then, that’s the bloke I need to be fighting next, that bloody idiot.”
Following this past weekend’s Boxing After Dark card on HBO, I’ve had a lot of conversations and email exchanges about the Cuban junior lightweight phenom Yuriorkis Gamboa, who won a unanimous decision over Yonkers-born Golden Gloves champ Darling Jimenez. Gamboa is a fiery and charismatic 130 in the ring who draws comparisons to Tyson, many comparisons to Meldrick Taylor, and the esteemed Unsilent even wrote me to compare Gamboa to a young Buddy McGirt.
Pick your poison on that score. There’s one thing that’s not up for debate about this kid, however, and that’s the fact that he inspires great interest and excitement in just about everyone who sees him, the type of excitement that no hype machine can generate, the type that only comes from the sheer impact of witnessing a remarkable talent in action. Twice now I’ve watched Gamboa fight and twice I’ve been overwhelmed by his bravado and hand speed and the seemingly impossible elasticity of his upper body (add Pernell to the list of superlative comparisons). Twice I’ve also seen him get unceremoniously dropped due to his carelessly daring style, knockdowns that have prompted the announcers to say in their knowing voices that while Gamboa’s preening pyrotechnics may have worked in the amateurs (he won a gold medal in Athens), he’ll have to learn to keep his hands up in the pros or he’ll be headed for queer street before he ever glimpses easy street.
Which is undoubtedly true. Darling Jimenez is a better fighter that people give him credit for, tough as tough can be with an impeccable amateur pedigree. But given the way that Gamboa dominated him in the early rounds of their fight, Jimenez probably shouldn’t have gone the distance and definitely shouldn’t have landed Gamboa on the canvas as he did in the fourth round (at about :55 seconds in the video below).
Even after he got dropped, however, Gamboa kept his hands slung low and dared Jimenez to hit him, a dare that Jimenez frequently obliged. You can call it youthful arrogance if you want, or stupidity even, but myself I can’t help but see it as a conscious choice borne of Gamboa’s idea of what constitutes success as a fighter. One has to imagine that it’s occurred to him before that keeping his hands up would be a much less risky proposition in there, but he nevertheless insists on leaving them down and dodging punches with his kinetic head-movement and effortless shoulder-rolling, dodging punches by centimeters that it seems he could evade by feet or block with ease if he so chose.
I’m reminded of a baseball game I once played in Cuba. I was down there with a large posse for the millennial new year’s celebration – I-Berg and Morty Bravo were with me and it was I-Berg actually who arranged for this game, the fantasy of which was that we Americanos would face off in a showdown with the local Cubanos for hemispheric sandlot supremacy.
As long as I live, I’ll never forget that day, never forget walking through the quiet streets of this bombed-out Cuban town with a huge group of Cubans toward the field with I-Berg, who was ever so slightly over-stimulated, yelling out to no one in particular in his impressive Spanglish that everybody should come out to watch a great baseball showdown between Cubans and Americans. These calls of his, I recall, brought many querulous faces to windows looking down at us as we passed with expressions that decidedly said, ‘those crazyass gringos are going to get whupped.”
We fared better than might have been expected, although the numbers were such that a strict U.S. vs. Cuba game was impossible. In a double-header, the Cuban-dominated side won a game as did the American-dominated side, which was very much in keeping with the spirit of the whole thing.
I could go on for a long time about the details of the games, my own individual heroics in particular. It’s a long-standing joke among I-berg, Morty and myself that as time passes our memories of our own greatness that day have grown to Ruthian proportions. I do vivdly remember at a crucial point in the second game ill-advisedly trying to stretch a double into a triple and getting called out at third in a play that got everybody riled up (and with complete objectivity, I want to tell you something – I was safe). When I came off the field, a Cuban spectator came up to me and said in broken English, “you are a true pelotera,” which I still count among the greatest things anyone has ever said to me anywhere about anything.
I bring up that anecdote first to celebrate myself (oh I did have a hell of an afternoon people) but also because it gets to the spirit of what I remember about that game and how it links in my mind to Gamboa’s fighting style. It was the fact that I tried to get to third, that it was a such a bad decision and that I went for it anyway and almost made it, that brought the cheers. That entire day I noticed that theme in the way the Cubans played the game and the way the fans cheered their players. The fact of success was not what brought the real accolades. There was a definite attitude of, “hey, anyone can hit a double man, anyone can catch a fly ball.” Doing it with style, with daring, doing it in a way that was surprising or ridiculous – this was what it meant to really play the game.
I remember a shtick that the outfielders would do that was a hell of a sight. A fly ball would get lofted and the outfielder in the nearest vicinity would wait to break for it and make a real show of this waiting, put his hand on his chin and feign a yawn, wait till the last possible moment and then break for the ball like a streak of lightning and try to catch it. This maneuver was a real fan favorite, whether he caught it or not.
Now this was a fun game on a fun day and absolutely nothing was at stake, no matter what I-berg or me or Morty Bravo might have been pretending in our minds. I don’t mean to imply in any way that based on this one experience I had many years ago that I think Cubans aren’t competitive, nor am I really drawing a “man we Americans are uptight and them Latinos sure know how to have fun” distinction. But there was an inarguable cultural difference from my own experience in the way I felt the game being approached that day that was striking to me. Like most of my peers, I imagine, I was intensely schooled in the environment of “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” from an early age, and taught that anything done for mere style’s sake on the field was “hot-dogging”, a cardinal sin against the holy spirit of the pursuit of victory.
The Cubans seemed to view every play as an opportunity to do something astonishing. There was a baseball for art’s sake feeling in the air that was contagious, and I’m reminded of that when I watch Gamboa fight. With every flurry, with every feint, he looks to be trying to do something memorable, almost impossible, and that pursuit often seems more interesting to him than anything else, certainly than merely winning in some workmanlike fashion. Yes, yes, as his competition stiffens, this is a pursuit that will become an increasingly dangerous game. But in the meantime, let me just understate the case tremendously and say that, man, it is something to see.
For the Undercard’s sophomore broadcast, we treat you to a double dip of local boys making good in the latest Gotham Boxing show at the Roseland: Dimitriy Salita and Jorge Teron.
In the fall of 2005, I profiled Dimitriy “Star of David” Salita for The Fader. When photographer Alex Tehrani and I went up to Salita’s training camp in the Poconos, we watched Dimitriy and his friend and sparring partner Merhav Mohar argue in their cabin’s kitchen about who kept better kosher, while a young Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx took it all in with a bemused smile. That kid’s name was Jorge Teron. When we watched the three work out later that day, Teron impressed us. His look and his style were from another time–a time of crisp double jabs, medicine balls and lightweight championships that packed the Garden.
Two and a half years later, I got to see an extremely smooth Jorge “The Truth” Teron remain undefeated (20-0-1) and knockout Sandro Marcos for the NABA title. Those initials don’t hold a lot of water, but fortunately it won’t be the only belt Teron ever wears. All we have to do is get him to retire the airbrush t-shirt and invest in a throwback robe and shorts we can start dusting off the Alexis Arguello comparisons.
As for Dimitriy, it was good to see him back in the ring, and hard to argue he didn’t deserve a soft landing after almost a year off. But Dima, much as we love you and wish you nothing but success–hebrew to hebrew, it’s time to step up or step down. Either way you choose you have my respect, but watching you take out the trash is losing some of its luster.
Stay tuned to the Undercard for a chilling Episode Three featuring Gary Stark and an incredibly swollen face.
No Mas and Round1 are proud to introduce “The Undercard” a new series of videos about the untold stories of the boxing universe: up and coming prospects, down and out train wrecks, unsung cut men, promoters on the make, refs not on the take, Vegas and AC late night shake and bake. Under the radar of the fair weather fan and right on your frequency.
Episode 1: “A night out with Kid Chocolate” includes a backstage peek at the man in brown as he prepares to squash tomatoes at the Roseland ballroom. The Kid delivers insightful conversation, then delightful devastation.
