posted by Large

(Be sure to check out Baggiesboy’s piece on tomorrow’s U.S./Mexico soccer match below this post. I had to bury him due to the breaking Margo situation, but as always he brought his A-game to the pitch. -L)

As I’m sure you guys have read or heard by now, Tony Margarito and his trainer Javier Capetillo both had their licenses revoked by the California State Athletic Commission after a hearing today into the handwraps controversy that emerged prior to Margarito’s fight with Shane Mosley on January 24th.

Our crack commenter Howard in NYC, who I gather doubles in his non-Masian existence as a lawyer, pointed out last week that because Mosley’s trainer, Nazim Richardson, had removed the suspiciously hard pads from Margarito’s dressing room and taken them to Mosley’s, there would be chain of custody issues raised by Margarito’s defense team, and indeed there were.

But apparently, nobody was biting on that line. Margarito’s trainer, Capetillo, also tried to take the entire blame upon himself, saying that he himself was responsible for the hard pieces being inside the fighter’s wraps and that Margarito had no knowledge of the matter whatsoever. As for what he’d done, Capetillo said it was “an innocent mistake.”

Nobody swallowed that, either. A year of license suspensions was voted by the Commission for both men to the tune of 7 yeas and zero nays. Down goes Margo.

Perhaps the most stunning revelation of the day, however, had no influence on the final judgment, though it is certain to lead to mass speculation and perhaps further punitive action against Margarito and Capetillo. During the proceedings, a deputy attorney general for the prosecution, Karen Chapelle, tried to introduce a claim that Margarito had worn similar pads under his gloves for the Cotto fight last July. The Commission refused to hear it, saying that it was irrelevant to the question of what happened at the Staples Center prior to the bout with Mosley.

Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Large

Dudes, I realize that football owns the headlines at the moment (although I can’t help but feel myself that the presence of the Arizona Cardinals makes this the Anything But Super Bowl…) but my piece on the Margarito handwraps controversy is up at HBO today. In it, I give Nazim Richardson’s detailed account of what transpired in Margarito’s dressing room before the Mosley fight, an account that clears up a lot of wrong information and rumors that have been floating around on the web about the incident.

I was unable to get any comment from either Margarito’s camp or the California State Athletic Commission. The CSAC will not offer any further comment until the final ruling, and Margarito’s co-managers did not return any of my phone calls. So I only had Nazim’s story to go on. That said, his is a pretty nuanced and damning story that leaves very little wiggle room for interpretation. This piece is pretty much a news story as I wrote it for HBO, so I did very little editorializing, but I think you’ll find that the material speaks for itself. So please check it out, and enjoy the Springsteen concert. I got 4-1 the Boss opens with “Born in the U.S.A.” -L
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Tale of the Taping (hbo.com)
“When I asked Richardson if he thought that Margarito would have gained an edge against Mosley if the pads had been allowed to stand as they were, he laughed. ‘With the kind of condition we had Shane in,’ he said, ‘I figure if Margarito had a stick in his hand he wouldn’t have beaten Shane that night.’