Cheryl Tiegs? Dah… what was my primary masturbation fantasy from about 1982 to 1986 doing at a fricking Richard Gutierrez fight? Or was she there to see the Cubans? Or… well, what the hell was she doing there exactly? Matt Damon, Zo, Jake LaMotta… I get it. It’s the Fountanbleu, Rat Pack, whatever. But the Queen of the Swimsuit Issue? And did you notice how Joe Tessitore slipped it in as if it were no big deal? “And there’s Cheryl Tiegs, out enjoying the fights tonight.” Like, yeah, because that sort of thing happens all the time at Friday Night Fights. “Oh, and look over there, it’s Bianca Jagger. And whaddya know, there’s Carol Alt french-kissing Kathy Ireland.”
The Cubans – I got a better feel for the less-heralded Erislandy Lara last night than I did for the great Guillermo Rigondeaux, primarily because that dude that Rigondeaux fought, Juan Noriega, may be the worst opponent I’ve ever seen served up in a televised fight. The guy was Golden Gloves amateur-class territory, and what’s more, he was visibly terrified in there, which made the whole thing agonizing to watch. I understand they have to get a guy like Rigondeaux a couple of serious tomato cans before he fights even a borderline skilled fighter, but still, something about last night’s debacle made me feel like I was watching an afterschool special. The bell rang, they waded out to the center of the ring, and I took one look at Noriega and thought, “stop the fight!” The poor kid. He did not belong anywhere near that ring. I felt for him.
Strictly hand-held is how I roll. The video below is cobbled together from some nuggets I culled from what I shot of the major players who hung around after the Pacquiao-Hatton press conference last Saturday night. I recommend you sticking around to hear the bite where Floyd Sr. dismisses Hatton as “damaged goods,” paraphrasing in his own broken English a point that Hemingway made much more eloquently in his great bullfighting tract, Death in the Afternoon – that once gored, most matadors are never the same again inside the ring.
Oh my people, what a night. Let me just put my apologies up top here for being MIA for a while and then get right to the good stuff. I have indeed been mired in some television-type business as I-berg pointed out, not to mention that I recently moved Mrs. Large and Reggie Large to a new house. Things have been non-stop. But I will tell you this – I’m going to be doing some fight-week reporting from San Jose next week for HBO leading up to next Saturday’s BAD card headlined by what promises to be a meanass smackdown, James Kirkland vs. Joel Julio. I will certainly bring some of that insider love here to the Mas.
Now to revisit what we just witnessed. To start off, let’s understate the case a bit and say that Marquez/Diaz is the hands down FOY right now and no matter what happens in the rest of ’09, it will at least be garnering some honorable mentions in that category come December. Because this was a memorable scrap.
Though I didn’t weigh in here with a prognostification, I’m on record going way back to when this fight was announced as saying that I thought Marquez was going to take the Baby Bull to school. And though Diaz gave an admirable account of himself tonight, I can’t say I ever really wavered from that prediction at any point in the fight. There was that one left hook that Diaz landed in the second, I think, that staggered Marquez a bit, a shot that in the moment gave me pause, but when I saw the replay it didn’t seem to me that JMM was hurt so much as stunned and a little tied up with his feet.
It was impressive how much Diaz went for right from the opening bell. The kid was all the way down damn-the-torpedoes lane. There was a marked physical disparity in there too that I wasn’t expecting to see. Diaz looked considerably bigger, and with his relentless forward momentum, it felt a little like what in my memory Oscar/Floyd looked like in the first couple of rounds – a bigger man bum-rushing the shit out of a smaller man to the extent that the smaller guy, despite being the more skilled and savvy fighter, couldn’t help but seem concerned.
By the third round, however, Marquez had steadied the ship and started to turn the tide his way. I gave him the third and the fourth, and at that point the fight started to remind more of Mayweather/Hatton. You had the crowd favorite and the balls-out pressure fighter still seeming like he’s getting the better of the action because he’s always pushing forward, getting the big roars whenever he lets his hands go, when in fact most of his lunging shots are getting blocked or missing and he’s eating a lot of clean counters right on the button in return.
