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Sunday, May 17, 2015

Golovkin KO's Willie Monroe Jr in Six

I watched it on HBO. You can read the Daily Mail version here. I haven't read it.



Okay, I wrote a previous blog, complete with a picture of me with Willie Monroe Jr. when he was a kid just starting out. You know where my heart was and I wasn't trying to hide it. Nor did I want to jinx Monroe before the fight when it was clear he needed two things -- courage and a big punch. He only had one of those two things.

Monroe showed courage when he got off the canvas after two early round knockdowns. Both were devastating. Who doesn't know that Golovkin is the savage destroyer, a search and seek and find guided missile capable of launching nuclear firepower against all opponents. An acknowledged predator inside the ring. 

But it was clear from the start what I knew already, that he had only six KOs in a career of 19 fights. He doesn't have the big bomb.  Never did. I knew that was a problem, a problem mentioned in so many words by Roy Jones Jr. during the fight.  He needs to get respect, said Jones, though that was not the way he said it. 

Getting respect is the real first rule of Fight Club. If you can't put some hard leather on Golovkin's face or body, then he's going to walk right through you. That's exactly what Golovkin did, shaking off most of Monroe's punches like they were bouncing rubber balls, even asking for more. 

Still, don't get the idea that YOU can take Monroe's punches. Unless you're the real deal, you'd go down in a hot minute.  What I"m saying about the lack of a big punch applies to the top dogs of boxing. 

And then I'm thinking what it must have felt like to take so many hard, hard punches from Golovkin.  I've been KOd before and it kind of leaves you in a tough spot, even after the headache dies away. Dies away is probably a poor choice of words. 

But I've got to say this about Gennady Golovkin.  I've been a huge fan, even though my heart was for the local American man. His attitude is great and I long ago embraced him as the fight promoters and the American public should, and as they seemed to be doing in last night's arena.  

He's smart, too, and if you were listening, you would have heard him say that he'd like Cotto or Canelo Alvarez before he'd think of Andre Ward. Andre Ward, remember, was the first guy to say he'd be glad to take on Golovkin. This while lots of other guys who should have been stepping up were in absentia.

Know what I'd like from the wish fairy?  I'd prefer Alvarez vs. Golovkin before Golovkin v. Cotto. Cotto's great, mind you, but he's light and also not at the peak of his career (though by no means inconsequential) .  Alvarez v. Golovkin is fresh on both sides. Two devastating brilliant fighters. 

The winner would face Andre Ward, of whom we've seen too little lately. 

I want to say one other thing, writ large:  ROMAN GONZALEZ.  I want to say it again:  ROMAN GONZALEZ.  But that deserves a separate space.


Saturday, May 9, 2015

Gennady Golovkin v. Willie Monroe Jr. --Oddsmakers Give Monroe Little Chance to Beat GGG



I'm going to stick my head way out on a limb here and the statistical likelihood is that it will get knocked off.  On hearing of Gennady Golovkin's next fight with Willie Monroe Jr., one fight fan lodged the typical comment:  "GGG's gonna' murder this fool."  But there's something to be said for the undisputed underdog here, and in boxing, the lines separating the winner from the loser are not so finely drawn.

I'm conflicted b/c I'm a long time fan of both GGG & Willie Monroe Jr. I met Monroe when he was just starting out, a kid.  We were both at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canistota, New York.  I used to do a bit of work in boxing and if boxing has "groupies" then I'm one of them. Anyway, I took a picture of myself and young Monroe, talked to him a while, whereupon he told me he was going to be a middleweight champ.  I was thinking, like "How can anyone even say you're going to be a middleweight champ when you've only had a couple of pro fights?

It takes some balls, I know, but it's also possible you're seriously naive. Yet, there was something different about Monroe Jr. He was so nice about, exuding a kind of humble confidence that kind of make you think, well okay...maybe...it's possible. The guy is likeable in the extreme. We had a nice chat and talked about his uncle? grandfather? Willie "The Worm" Monroe" who was a clever tough Philly fighter I liked to watch long ago.

But then I saw this new Monroe in a couple of fights (you always watch the fighters you've come in personal contact with --it's been like that with me since the days I met Ali at his training camp in Deer Lake Pa.) and I see he's coming up in the game. I stilll had my doubts, especially when he was scheduled to fight Brian Adams in the Boxcino tournament.

 Weeks earlier I'd seen Brian Adams demolish his opponents with what looked like nuclear bombs. So I wondered how this well-spoken highly intelligent college boy was going to deal with that.  In fact, Monroe Jr. made it look easy, and the way he did it was through smart fighting which didn't look like Mayweather style fighting but had the same result.  And hey, you can say all you want about being "too defensive" but both Mayweather & Monroe can hit, and hit accurately with combinations.

I like GGG and I know he's got devastating punching power but  I recently saw his performance in the Martin Murray fight and a few others. There is a certain type of fighter that could give GGG trouble, and it wouldn't surprise me if Willie Monroe Jr. was the guy.

I talked to Monroe again after he won the Boxcino Tournament (same place, I can't stay away from the joint, especially during the inductions). I told him I was afraid for him in the Bryan Adams fight. He laughed it off, saying he had a great training camp, and had "learned ways to deal with that." (meaning big punching power)

I call GGG's thing the "Tyson Effect" but what if there are guys like Buster Douglas who, for one night at least, don't buy into the "Tyson Effect?"  I'm kind of a red, white, and blue guy and so I'm going for my American boy Willie Monroe Jr. to give GGG a lot of problems.   There's a way to fight tough brawlers--look at the way Lucas Matthyse busted up my favored Ruslan Provodnikov just a few weeks ago.  The game's called "boxing," don't forget, and that doesn't mean  jumping forward with your head lined up with your opponents punches.

So okay, if you've read this far, you might want to read this interesting article from BOXING NEWS 24.  It's got some facts and figures.

If you read nothing more, you should at least read what Willie Monroe Jr. had to say about the lead up to the fight next week. This is a quote from the article in Boxing News 24:

"“It was shortly after he (GGG) fought Martin Murray and what a lot of people don’t know and it’s closer to the fight so I can let this be released without it being too crazy (is) a lot of people don’t know that GGG’s camp turned me down twice when my name was brought up. They turned us down and they wanted to fight Tureano Johnson. There’s a picture floating around – they had already made the poster for him (GGG) and Tureano and that’s who they were gonna fight. HBO was sort of like ‘We really don’t want to see you fight him because you knocked out Curtis (Stevens) and then Curtis went and knocked him out’. So then it was between me and (Jorge Sebastian) Heiland. HBO was like ‘He’s not really known in America and the only guy he’s really beat is Matthew Macklin and you (GGG) knocked him out!’ So he was almost forced to have to fight me. I know for a fact that the other two opponents was offered more money than me. I hear a lot of people saying ‘Monroe must be taking this for the money’, I know for a fact they were offered more money than I was but that’s just the type of guy I am, I like to fight."

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Mayweather Love: Fight Wasn't Boring -- Pacquiao Was




Memo to Mayweather:  If there is a next fight for you, be sure to throw yourself on your opponent's hardest punches.  Do it several times. Commit ring hari-kari. Open up your veins and bleed if you can because that's what all these whining non-boxing people want to see.  If you see Pacquiao's punches coming, don't slip it, don't feint, and above all, you must let him hit you.  This is the average person's conception of boxing, not mine. If I were annointed king, I would pass a law requiring that anyone who comments on a boxing match must have spent at least three minutes of one round in the ring, not with the top talent, but with an unknown journeyman fighter. Try to get away from your opponent, to "run" as you call it. Then tell me what you think (if your brain still works). 

I bought the fight for $100 bucks and don't feel ripped off . (I do wish the PPV ticket prices weren't so high, however)  Now there is all this criticism of a "boring" fight because, after all the hype, the match went twelve rounds and there were no knockdowns. Plus, insulting to the gullible manipulated audience which was suckered into believing Pacquaio was the Messiah, Mayweather Jr. (the all-purpose smug privileged people's devil) didn't fall for Manny's b.s fighting style.  Mayweather just did what the great fighters do--use all of their talents, adjust to situations, and whip up on your opponents.

I'll tell you what's boring. Sportwriters trying to capture eyeballs by doing what they usually do in Mayweather fights. Make Mayweather the bad guy, and put halos around the heads of his opponents, the latest one being Manny Pacquiao.

I'll tell you who's boring:  Manny Pacquiao.

Pacquiao was boring with his "exciting" fighting style which involves jumping around the ring like a jack-in-the-box, a tactic that only works with people who think a jitterbugging boxer is a better one.  To counter such a bald tactic, Mayweather kept positioning himself at the edge of the "circle of violence," moving in and out to crash Pacquiao's face with solid shots, mostly right hands, but later in the fight scoring some nice left hooks.  Of course, none of this is supposed to happen when an orthodox fighter faces a southpaw--it's only a real ring general like Mayweather who can figure it out and deal with it.

Pacquaio was also boring with his immediate post-fight several times repeated claim that the won the fight. That was an embarrassing low point of which I haven't read a single account. Sportswriters apparently were having trouble extricating their heads from Freddie Roach's backside and didn't hear that.

Pacquiao is also boring with his claim of a shoulder injury on his right side. Let me tell you something.  You can't be injured and not injured at the same time, but you can have hand problems, shoulder problems, rib problems, leg problems, as both Mayweather and Pacquiao both do.  Pacquiao was throwing lots of jabs in his attempts to get in on Mayweather.  A southpaw jabs with his right hand. Count the high number of jabs. Also consider that Pacquiao has two signature punches -- the straight left (with which he KOd Ricky Hatton), and the right hook(which worried me the most) which kept falling short because Mayweather was constantly shifting, giving him angles.

Fighters are always in one sort of pain or another. If the pain and injury is severe enough, you postpone the fight.  Pacquiao checked "no" to the question about injuries and so did Mayweather (with his own problems not used as an excuse).  They were ready to fight and wanted the fight to go forward. But who knew that Pacman was preparing an a priori excuse which most sportwriters and a gullible public would be only too happy to swallow?  As Mayweather is quoted in this article, "Winners win, losers have excuses." 

Now there is this ridiculous lawsuit..  You can't be injured and not injured at the same time, legally speaking. The plaintiffs allege that Pacquiao's camp (Bob Arum & others) defrauded them by having the fight go on while later claiming he was injured.

Of course, we know that Pacquiao (and Mayweather) are seeing doctors, physical therapists, kinestheticians, and exercise physiologists as a matter of routine. Pacquiao's doctors said he was okay to fight, ultimately. Pacquiao's people also say they had American Anti-Doping Agency permission to administer a supposedly non-steroidal medication in combination with other treatments.  (Was it for this reason that the Mayweather camp was wary of artificial injections in previous fight discussions?)  But the Nevada State Athletic Commission ruled Pacquiao's desired  medication wasn't permitted under its licensing rules.

And so we have this peripatetic, all-asses-covered statement by Top Rank. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. Truth to tell, Manny Pacquiao is a good fighter, a man I respect as a fighter. He just wasn't up to that top level that some people were fooled into thinking he was.  Unfortunately, Pacquiao 's real life performance doesn't match up  to the persona he's tried to project, nor the image the media has been complicit with Pacquiao in creating.

Can we at least do one thing?  Remove the halo from Pacquiao's head and put the crown on Mayweather Jr. It's about time one of the topmost boxers of our era got his due.






Monday, May 4, 2015

Mayweather v. Pacquiao: If You See Something Say Something

The article I read about the Mayweather v. Pacquiao PPV boxing match was similar to many others I read after the fight.  This offending article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, a fine publication with fine writers, except for Jason Gay who wrote this one.  Mr. Gay did a fine job of describing Las Vegas and his own personal narrative but he's not a boxing head and he's solidly in line with the anti-Mayweather crowd. These people do not know what harm they do, and are willing to ignore the depredations of football and basketball players while holding boxers to impossibly high standards of conduct.  Yes, Mayweather Jr. was punished after pleading guilty to domestic abuse and no one approves of that. But this pious disapprobation that you hear about Mayweather is a bit tiresome.  I don't know Mayweather, I don't know Pacquiao, and neither do you probably.  Who is it so willing to cast the first stone?

Half the time, I think the animus is directed at Mayweather's father and uncle, both of who were terrific boxers who lived life the hard way.  But how fair is that?

Anyway, I was so pissed at anti-Mayweather articles like this that I had to say something.  So  here's my nasty commentary in the WSJ comments section beneath the article. I know I am pissing against the wind here, but America is the land of second chances.  Besides, I'm a long-time Mayweather fan and all I wanted to see proved in the fight was that Mayweather always and indisputedly was a far better boxer, ring strategist, tough guy, and far more honest person.

The rest is b.s.  Anyway, here's my WSJ rebuttal. I hope you'll understand:

If boxing is "not what it used to be," neither are so-called boxing writers.  Most of them favored Pacquaio and always trumpeted the good-guy vs. bad-guy scenarios that the non-boxing public invariably buys into hook, line, and sinker.  I don't want to remove the media halo bestowed upon him by "boxing analysts" in thrall with the sanctimonious new-found religion trope-- after well, you know.

But didn't anyone notice Pacquiao's pathetic post-fight comments repeatedly telling a PPV announcer that he won a fight that was so lop-sided that Paulie Malagnaggi almost lost his lunch on hearing it? Yet, not one "sportswriter," in their habit of demonizing Mayweather and deifying Pacquiao, remarked on that. Meanwhile, Mayweather was gracious to all comers in pre-fight and post-fight interviews. 

The fact is that Mayweather is and ALWAYS was the better fighter. Only old age can defeat him. I hope he retires undefeated. Give the man his due, as has been done w/ Ali & Tyson.