Thursday, June 28, 2012
PANAMA LEWIS: RING TALK “WALL OF SHAME” FIRST INDUCTEE! - RINGTALK
Panama needs special attention, not him as a man but him as what he represents about the sport of boxing. If he wasn't involved with boxing, he'd probably be somewhere 'doping' horses.
The continuation of Panama in the sport of boxing in spite of his actions -blatant cheating - says something about the regulatory structure of the sport and about what goes on 'behind closed doors' between trainers, promoters and fight managers... the boxers are often innocent parties to fixes and 'doping' or so we're told. This kind of person sullies the reputation of the entire sport and all the participants. Any longtime fan hates to see this kind of behavior because it makes him feel stupid believing that Mike Tyson wasn't just a creation of Bill Cayton and his monied partners. When Tyson split with them, Cayton bemoaned the money he'd spent creating the Myth of Invincibility around Iron Mike. Mike's weakness of character saw him unravel on his own once he lost the protection of Cus D'amato but that is another story - about a disturbed boy in a man's body manipulated by evil Kings...
Thanks to "Ringtalk " for the story and all the good reporting on various boxing f--k-ups! They remind me of "The Smoking Gun"; covering the Dark Side of Boxing.
PANAMA LEWIS: RING TALK “WALL OF SHAME” FIRST INDUCTEE! - RINGTALK
IT WAS PANAMA Lewis and “THE SPECIAL MIX”
Seven months after asking for that, “Special bottle…the one I mix,” just prior to the 14th round in which Aaron Pryor finished off Alexis Arguello on November 12, 1982, Panama was in the corner of rugged club fighter Luis Resto vs. Billy Collins UNDR Roberto Duran-Davey Moore June 16, 1983. Before the fight, Panama removed an ounce of stuffing/padding out of each of Resto’s gloves, something the fighter now claims Lewis had done on other occasions.
In addition, Resto now claims that Lewis put a “plaster of Paris” substance in his hand wraps (can we all say, Antonio Margarito), thus when the late Billy Collins said between rounds that it felt like he was “getting hit with ashtrays,” he wasn’t embellishing matters. Panama Lewis spent 2.5 years in prison after being convicted of assault, criminal possession of a weapon (Resto’s hands) and conspiracy.
STILL MAKES A LIVING TRAINING
Although Lewis continues to train fighters here and there, he is banned from working a corner in every jurisdiction but the state of Pennsylvania. When I last heard, Panama, now nearing 60, was living in Las Vegas and not in great health. For ruining Billy Collin’s career as a fighter, which caused depression which probably led to his death by car accident some nine months later, Panama Lewis (pictured above) is the first inductee to the Wall of Shame.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 PM and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Source:
http://ringtalk.com/panama-lewis-ring-talk-wall-of-shame-first-induction/billycollins-b-and-white-post
Link:
http://ringtalk.com/panama-lewis-ring-talk-wall-of-shame-first-induction/billycollins-b-and-white-post
PANAMA LEWIS: RING TALK “WALL OF SHAME” FIRST INDUCTEE! - RINGTALK
Seven months after asking for that, “Special bottle…the one I mix,” just prior to the 14th round in which Aaron Pryor finished off Alexis Arguello on November 12, 1982, Panama was in the corner of rugged club fighter Luis Resto vs. Billy Collins UNDR Roberto Duran-Davey Moore June 16, 1983. Before the fight, Panama removed an ounce of stuffing/padding out of each of Resto’s gloves, something the fighter now claims Lewis had done on other occasions.
RESTO CLAIMS MORE IN RECENT YEARS
In addition, Resto now claims that Lewis put a “plaster of Paris” substance in his hand wraps (can we all say, Antonio Margarito), thus when the late Billy Collins said between rounds that it felt like he was “getting hit with ashtrays,” he wasn’t embellishing matters. Panama Lewis spent 2.5 years in prison after being convicted of assault, criminal possession of a weapon (Resto’s hands) and conspiracy.
STILL MAKES A LIVING TRAINING
Although Lewis continues to train fighters here and there, he is banned from working a corner in every jurisdiction but the state of Pennsylvania. When I last heard, Panama, now nearing 60, was living in Las Vegas and not in great health. For ruining Billy Collin’s career as a fighter, which caused depression which probably led to his death by car accident some nine months later, Panama Lewis (pictured above) is the first inductee to the Wall of Shame.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 PM and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Source:
http://ringtalk.com/panama-lewis-ring-talk-wall-of-shame-first-induction/billycollins-b-and-white-post
Link:
http://ringtalk.com/panama-lewis-ring-talk-wall-of-shame-first-induction/billycollins-b-and-white-post
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
A. J. Liebling
This article is a brilliant piece of writing about the writers who write about the underbelly of society as represented by the sport of Boxing. Being a fan of creative non-fiction, made it all the more interesting to me. The article is very long and it is so perfect that it would be a shame to edit it in any way.
Between the Victorian era and the Sixties, boxing was a regular and prominent feature of American life. Knowing something about the fights—being good with your hands, or maintaining an opinion about the welterweight division or fixed bouts or how to beat a southpaw—was a very common piece of equipment in the toolbox of American cultural competence, especially the section of it devoted to masculinity.
Boxing shared with baseball the status of the sport that mattered most (with horse racing not far off the pace), and cultural paths of least resistance allowed almost anyone to know at least a little about it.
Newspapers offered daily coverage by reporters who specialized in boxing, magazines from the Police Gazette to The New Yorker prided themselves on their frequent fight pieces, and magazines devoted entirely to boxing thrived. Boxing gyms, like saloons and union halls, were typical features of working-class neighborhoods across the range of ethnic and racial variety.
Middle- and upper-class boys could find their own paths to the manly art; Theodore Roosevelt boxed at Harvard and FDR at Groton, for instance.
Film, radio, and then television offered boxing in heaping doses. Remember Eloise, the girl in the much-loved children's book who lives at the Plaza? Remember what her nanny does on Friday evenings? She orders beer from room service, smokes, and watches the fights on NBC's Gillette Cavalcade of Sports.
And there was plenty of opportunity to see boxing in the flesh, from numerous fight cards in modest venues featuring local tough guys to marquee events in stadiums featuring world-famous pugilists.
The land reverberated with the fight world's signature cadences, banged out on speed bags and typewriters, and called out by jargon-shouting fans: "Stop waltzin' with 'im, ya bum, and hook off the jab! Over 'n under!"
In The Sweet Science (1956), a collection of fight pieces first published in The New Yorker, A. J. Liebling elegizes this golden age of American boxing, which at midcentury was beginning to end.
In his introduction, Liebling notes "certain generalized conditions today, like full employment and a late school-leaving age, that militate against the development of first-rate professional boxers."
As football, basketball, and other school-based team ball games rose to dominate sports culture, the structural underpinnings of boxing in the industrial neighborhood order withered away, eroded by deindustrialization, suburbanization, and other long-wave forces that transformed the inner city.
The more easily identifiable villain was television, which "by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week," had "knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills."
The fights were a mainstay of early television, which kept boxing in the public eye while hastening its uprooting from the social landscape.
In The Sweet Science, Rocky Marciano, a TV star, ushers in the new order by beating Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezzard Charles, and Archie Moore, all superb technicians in the twilight of their careers, and by brutally retiring the radio hero Joe Louis, the premier heavyweight of the golden age.
Marciano makes a grand entrance by blasting the aging Brown Bomber through the ropes and into the sad endgame of his life.
Liebling observes ringsiders' reactions with characteristic acuteness:
Marciano's supporters, "unsavory young yokels with New England accents," cheer their man "as if he were a high-school football team," a troubling portent. High school football is the cultural polar opposite of the urban male demimonde of sporting life in which fight people had made themselves so cozily at home in the first half of the twentieth century.
"Ahab and Nemesis," the piece that culminates The Sweet Science, deserves a place not only on any list of the finest fight writing but on all-time pound-for-pound lists of great essays on any subject.
In it, Liebling stages Marciano's defeat of Archie Moore as a resonant confrontation between force and intellect. Marciano, by now the reigning champion, embodies force. Younger than Moore, much stronger, and stylistically cruder, he's a slugger who keeps the punches coming until the other man has had enough.
Waiting in his corner just before the bell, "he resembled a Great Dane who has heard the word 'bone.'" Moore, the challenger, represents intellect. A ring-wise virtuoso, erudite and elegant in his craft, he has "the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion, or of how to pick horses first, second, third, and fourth in every race." The rise of Marciano has inflicted on Moore "the pangs of a supreme exponent of
bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout."
In the second round, Moore lures Marciano into a tactical trap and knocks him down with a crisp right thrown inside the arc of Marciano's left hook. "He had hit him right if ever I saw a boxer hit right, with a classic brevity and conciseness," but the referee has counted only to two when Marciano bounces to his feet, ready for more.
"I do not know what took place in Mr. Moore's breast when he saw him get up. He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore's statue grabbed at him—startled because he thought he had killed the guy already—or like Ahab when he saw the White Whale take down Fedallah, harpoons and all."
Moore drags "his shattered faith in the unities and humanities" back to his corner at the end of the round. "As a young fighter of conventional tutelage, he must have heard his preceptors say hundreds of times, 'They will all go if you hit them right.' If a fighter did not believe that, he would be in the position of a Euclidean without faith in the hundred-and-eighty-degree triangle."
Well, he "had hit a guy right, and the guy hadn't gone. But there is no geezer in Moore, any more than there was in the master of the Pequod." Moore fights valiantly, brilliantly, but Marciano wears him down and overwhelms him. The challenger is counted out in the ninth round "with his left arm hooked over the middle rope as he tried to rise. It was a crushing defeat for the higher faculties and a lesson in intellectual humility, but he had made a hell of a fight."
Liebling locates the primal struggle between brawling and technique at the root not only of boxing but of writing about boxing. At the beginning of "Ahab and Nemesis" he quotes from Heywood Broun, a reporter of the 1920s and 1930s who favored classically sound boxing ("There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop"); later in the piece Liebling cites Pierce Egan, "the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring," who favored brawlers: "gluttons" and "prime bottom fighters," in Egan's Regency slang.
Liebling presents himself as a dissenting Brounian surrounded by an Eganite crowd, pro-Marciano and "basically anti-intellectual" in its instincts. Most of the fans at Yankee Stadium just want to see somebody get hurt, while Liebling is looking for something else: a demonstration of principle, a lesson in being human.
The slippery work of extracting nuggets of meaning from a fight is Liebling's great subject, the problem that shapes not only the themes but also the form of his writing about boxing.
He mixes registers and allusive gestures up and down the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, assembling an interpretive repertoire suited to the challenge posed by the fights.
To follow the nuances of his account of the turning point in the second round, for instance, the reader needs to know something about opera, Melville, Euclid, and Aristotle's Poetics.
At other points Liebling compares Archie Moore not only to Faust and Ahab but also to the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the statesman Winston Churchill, the director and actor Orson Welles, Camus's Sisyphus, and a Japanese print entitled "Shogun Engaged in Strategic Contemplation in the Midst of War."
Ripely colloquial language punctuates and ironically offsets this checklist of high-cultural literacy. The phrase "he thought he had killed the guy already," for example, appearing between references to Don Giovanni and Ahab, serves to denature their pompousness by underscoring it, and "geezer" both ratifies and deflates the recurring comparison of Moore to Ahab.
Whitey Bimstein, a trainer, noting that Marciano abandoned the right-left combination he was attempting when Moore knocked him down, says to Liebling, "He never tru' it again in the fight." Insider voices like Bimstein's carry a different kind of cultural authority, the practical working knowledge of skilled craftspeople.
Each register complements and ironizes the others. Each way of understanding boxing, from the shop-floor know-how of fight people to the symbolic and interpretive approaches suggested by references to literature and art, helps the reader see a particular order of meaning in the bout and fills in the blind spots left by others.
Contrasting the variety of ways of seeing becomes the point of the piece, dramatizing the process of making sense of what would appear to most readers as opaquely chaotic violence.
Liebling took pleasure in portraying himself as a character uniquely equipped to meet such challenges. A gouty fat man who was also a distinguished war correspondent, food writer, and press critic, he had formal education (he attended Dartmouth but did not graduate) but he also cultivated the Ishmaelian charm of the autodidact, always a little too eager to share his learning and a little tone-deaf when it came to distinctions between the canonical and the esoteric.
He was a sound reporter, well trained at big-city newspapers, but also an idiosyncratically well-read dabbler and aesthete. He knew his way around the fine arts and classical literature, but he also knew fight people, gamblers, songwriters, grifters, and other characters who exemplified what his editors at The New Yorker called "low-life."
With just a few confident brush strokes he can sketch a self-portrait as a typical urban intellectual of his time, a child of the middle class drawn to both the library and the street, as he does in this sentence describing the buildup to the Marciano-Moore bout: "There was no doubt that the fight had caught the public imagination, ever sensitive to a meeting between Hubris and Nemesis, as the boys on the quarterlies would say, and the bookies were laying 18–5 on Nemesis, according to the boys on the dailies, who always seem to know."
Liebling was not just an elegist, recording the passing of what had been; he also helped assemble the materials of epic, showing the way forward to writers who responded to what came next.
To the New Journalists, the wave of nonfiction innovators who mapped the changing social and cultural landscape of America in the Sixties, he bequeathed his novelistic voice, his gift for combining first-person experience and a reporter's rigorous pursuit of the bigger story, his high-low cultural range, his eye for the traffic between margins and mainstream, and a digressive long-form style more suited to the magazine than the newspaper.
The New Journalists had a taste for boxing, which even in decline continued to enjoy its traditional status as excellent material. The pungent talk and secret lore of fight people still drew writers, as did the wealth of sights and sounds to capture in arresting language.
Gay Talese's profile of the deposed heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson was an early landmark of the genre, and Tom Wolfe reports experiencing a stylistic awakening ("What inna namea christ is this—") in the fall of 1962 when he read Talese's profile of Joe Louis in Esquire. Norman Mailer and many other writers of the period found in Muhammad Ali a quintessential subject, an outsize figure so original and poetic that he obliged writers of nonfiction to employ the techniques of fiction.
In the opening pages of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), Wolfe perfectly captures the betwixt-and-between state of both boxing and writing about boxing in the early Sixties.
He begins by disparaging the journalistic old order, attacking the "totem newspaper" as a desiccated artifact that people carry around to mark their identity rather than to read with interest.
One kind of totem newspaper serves as the "symbol of the frightened chair-arm-doilie Vicks Vapo-Rub Weltanschauung" (think Boston Globe) while the other propounds a "tough-but-wholesome outlook, the Mom's Pie view of life" (think Boston Herald). Those who carry the second kind of totem "can go off to the bar and drink a few 'brews' and retail some cynical remarks about Zora Folley and how the fight game is these days and round it off, though, with how George Chuvalo has 'a lot of heart,' which he got, one understands, by eating mom's pie."
Wolfe turns to boxing to exemplify a fading manly blue-collar culture and the moribund orders of writing associated with it, all willfully blind to what's really happening—the encroaching grooviness, the developing transformation of morals and politics and just about everything else.
But one of the chapters that follows is a profile of Ali, and on almost every page Wolfe records his debt in both approach and content to fight writers and other connoisseurs of low life who came before, including the sportswriter W. C. Heinz, Liebling's New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell, and especially Liebling himself, a graceful and far-seeing stylist who wrote lasting non-fiction literature founded on solid reporting.
Carlo Rotella is director of American Studies at Boston College and author of
Excerpted from
A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.
Copyright © 2009 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Boxing shared with baseball the status of the sport that mattered most (with horse racing not far off the pace), and cultural paths of least resistance allowed almost anyone to know at least a little about it.
Newspapers offered daily coverage by reporters who specialized in boxing, magazines from the Police Gazette to The New Yorker prided themselves on their frequent fight pieces, and magazines devoted entirely to boxing thrived. Boxing gyms, like saloons and union halls, were typical features of working-class neighborhoods across the range of ethnic and racial variety.
Middle- and upper-class boys could find their own paths to the manly art; Theodore Roosevelt boxed at Harvard and FDR at Groton, for instance.
Film, radio, and then television offered boxing in heaping doses. Remember Eloise, the girl in the much-loved children's book who lives at the Plaza? Remember what her nanny does on Friday evenings? She orders beer from room service, smokes, and watches the fights on NBC's Gillette Cavalcade of Sports.
And there was plenty of opportunity to see boxing in the flesh, from numerous fight cards in modest venues featuring local tough guys to marquee events in stadiums featuring world-famous pugilists.
The land reverberated with the fight world's signature cadences, banged out on speed bags and typewriters, and called out by jargon-shouting fans: "Stop waltzin' with 'im, ya bum, and hook off the jab! Over 'n under!"
In The Sweet Science (1956), a collection of fight pieces first published in The New Yorker, A. J. Liebling elegizes this golden age of American boxing, which at midcentury was beginning to end.
In his introduction, Liebling notes "certain generalized conditions today, like full employment and a late school-leaving age, that militate against the development of first-rate professional boxers."
As football, basketball, and other school-based team ball games rose to dominate sports culture, the structural underpinnings of boxing in the industrial neighborhood order withered away, eroded by deindustrialization, suburbanization, and other long-wave forces that transformed the inner city.
The more easily identifiable villain was television, which "by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week," had "knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills."
The fights were a mainstay of early television, which kept boxing in the public eye while hastening its uprooting from the social landscape.
In The Sweet Science, Rocky Marciano, a TV star, ushers in the new order by beating Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezzard Charles, and Archie Moore, all superb technicians in the twilight of their careers, and by brutally retiring the radio hero Joe Louis, the premier heavyweight of the golden age.
Marciano makes a grand entrance by blasting the aging Brown Bomber through the ropes and into the sad endgame of his life.
Liebling observes ringsiders' reactions with characteristic acuteness:
Right after Marciano knocked Louis down the first time, Sugar Ray Robinson [the reigning middleweight champion and the greatest fighter of that, or perhaps any, era] started working his way toward the ring, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, and by the time Rocky threw the final right, Robinson's hand was on the lowest rope of the ring, as if he meant to jump in. The punch knocked Joe through the ropes and he lay on the ring apron, only one leg inside.
The tall blonde was bawling, and pretty soon she began to sob. The fellow who had brought her was horrified. "Rocky didn't do anything wrong," he said. "He didn't foul him. What you booing?"
The blonde said, "You're so cold. I hate you, too."The silver age of Muhammad Ali was just over the horizon, and the fights would sustain a strong presence on broadcast television for another generation (until cable and pay-per-view demoted them to the status of niche-market attraction), but the half century of boxing's cultural ascendancy was coming to a close.
Marciano's supporters, "unsavory young yokels with New England accents," cheer their man "as if he were a high-school football team," a troubling portent. High school football is the cultural polar opposite of the urban male demimonde of sporting life in which fight people had made themselves so cozily at home in the first half of the twentieth century.
"Ahab and Nemesis," the piece that culminates The Sweet Science, deserves a place not only on any list of the finest fight writing but on all-time pound-for-pound lists of great essays on any subject.
In it, Liebling stages Marciano's defeat of Archie Moore as a resonant confrontation between force and intellect. Marciano, by now the reigning champion, embodies force. Younger than Moore, much stronger, and stylistically cruder, he's a slugger who keeps the punches coming until the other man has had enough.
Waiting in his corner just before the bell, "he resembled a Great Dane who has heard the word 'bone.'" Moore, the challenger, represents intellect. A ring-wise virtuoso, erudite and elegant in his craft, he has "the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion, or of how to pick horses first, second, third, and fourth in every race." The rise of Marciano has inflicted on Moore "the pangs of a supreme exponent of
bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout."
In the second round, Moore lures Marciano into a tactical trap and knocks him down with a crisp right thrown inside the arc of Marciano's left hook. "He had hit him right if ever I saw a boxer hit right, with a classic brevity and conciseness," but the referee has counted only to two when Marciano bounces to his feet, ready for more.
"I do not know what took place in Mr. Moore's breast when he saw him get up. He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore's statue grabbed at him—startled because he thought he had killed the guy already—or like Ahab when he saw the White Whale take down Fedallah, harpoons and all."
Moore drags "his shattered faith in the unities and humanities" back to his corner at the end of the round. "As a young fighter of conventional tutelage, he must have heard his preceptors say hundreds of times, 'They will all go if you hit them right.' If a fighter did not believe that, he would be in the position of a Euclidean without faith in the hundred-and-eighty-degree triangle."
Well, he "had hit a guy right, and the guy hadn't gone. But there is no geezer in Moore, any more than there was in the master of the Pequod." Moore fights valiantly, brilliantly, but Marciano wears him down and overwhelms him. The challenger is counted out in the ninth round "with his left arm hooked over the middle rope as he tried to rise. It was a crushing defeat for the higher faculties and a lesson in intellectual humility, but he had made a hell of a fight."
Liebling locates the primal struggle between brawling and technique at the root not only of boxing but of writing about boxing. At the beginning of "Ahab and Nemesis" he quotes from Heywood Broun, a reporter of the 1920s and 1930s who favored classically sound boxing ("There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop"); later in the piece Liebling cites Pierce Egan, "the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring," who favored brawlers: "gluttons" and "prime bottom fighters," in Egan's Regency slang.
Liebling presents himself as a dissenting Brounian surrounded by an Eganite crowd, pro-Marciano and "basically anti-intellectual" in its instincts. Most of the fans at Yankee Stadium just want to see somebody get hurt, while Liebling is looking for something else: a demonstration of principle, a lesson in being human.
The slippery work of extracting nuggets of meaning from a fight is Liebling's great subject, the problem that shapes not only the themes but also the form of his writing about boxing.
He mixes registers and allusive gestures up and down the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, assembling an interpretive repertoire suited to the challenge posed by the fights.
To follow the nuances of his account of the turning point in the second round, for instance, the reader needs to know something about opera, Melville, Euclid, and Aristotle's Poetics.
At other points Liebling compares Archie Moore not only to Faust and Ahab but also to the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the statesman Winston Churchill, the director and actor Orson Welles, Camus's Sisyphus, and a Japanese print entitled "Shogun Engaged in Strategic Contemplation in the Midst of War."
Ripely colloquial language punctuates and ironically offsets this checklist of high-cultural literacy. The phrase "he thought he had killed the guy already," for example, appearing between references to Don Giovanni and Ahab, serves to denature their pompousness by underscoring it, and "geezer" both ratifies and deflates the recurring comparison of Moore to Ahab.
Whitey Bimstein, a trainer, noting that Marciano abandoned the right-left combination he was attempting when Moore knocked him down, says to Liebling, "He never tru' it again in the fight." Insider voices like Bimstein's carry a different kind of cultural authority, the practical working knowledge of skilled craftspeople.
Each register complements and ironizes the others. Each way of understanding boxing, from the shop-floor know-how of fight people to the symbolic and interpretive approaches suggested by references to literature and art, helps the reader see a particular order of meaning in the bout and fills in the blind spots left by others.
Contrasting the variety of ways of seeing becomes the point of the piece, dramatizing the process of making sense of what would appear to most readers as opaquely chaotic violence.
Liebling took pleasure in portraying himself as a character uniquely equipped to meet such challenges. A gouty fat man who was also a distinguished war correspondent, food writer, and press critic, he had formal education (he attended Dartmouth but did not graduate) but he also cultivated the Ishmaelian charm of the autodidact, always a little too eager to share his learning and a little tone-deaf when it came to distinctions between the canonical and the esoteric.
He was a sound reporter, well trained at big-city newspapers, but also an idiosyncratically well-read dabbler and aesthete. He knew his way around the fine arts and classical literature, but he also knew fight people, gamblers, songwriters, grifters, and other characters who exemplified what his editors at The New Yorker called "low-life."
With just a few confident brush strokes he can sketch a self-portrait as a typical urban intellectual of his time, a child of the middle class drawn to both the library and the street, as he does in this sentence describing the buildup to the Marciano-Moore bout: "There was no doubt that the fight had caught the public imagination, ever sensitive to a meeting between Hubris and Nemesis, as the boys on the quarterlies would say, and the bookies were laying 18–5 on Nemesis, according to the boys on the dailies, who always seem to know."
Liebling was not just an elegist, recording the passing of what had been; he also helped assemble the materials of epic, showing the way forward to writers who responded to what came next.
To the New Journalists, the wave of nonfiction innovators who mapped the changing social and cultural landscape of America in the Sixties, he bequeathed his novelistic voice, his gift for combining first-person experience and a reporter's rigorous pursuit of the bigger story, his high-low cultural range, his eye for the traffic between margins and mainstream, and a digressive long-form style more suited to the magazine than the newspaper.
The New Journalists had a taste for boxing, which even in decline continued to enjoy its traditional status as excellent material. The pungent talk and secret lore of fight people still drew writers, as did the wealth of sights and sounds to capture in arresting language.
Gay Talese's profile of the deposed heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson was an early landmark of the genre, and Tom Wolfe reports experiencing a stylistic awakening ("What inna namea christ is this—") in the fall of 1962 when he read Talese's profile of Joe Louis in Esquire. Norman Mailer and many other writers of the period found in Muhammad Ali a quintessential subject, an outsize figure so original and poetic that he obliged writers of nonfiction to employ the techniques of fiction.
In the opening pages of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), Wolfe perfectly captures the betwixt-and-between state of both boxing and writing about boxing in the early Sixties.
He begins by disparaging the journalistic old order, attacking the "totem newspaper" as a desiccated artifact that people carry around to mark their identity rather than to read with interest.
One kind of totem newspaper serves as the "symbol of the frightened chair-arm-doilie Vicks Vapo-Rub Weltanschauung" (think Boston Globe) while the other propounds a "tough-but-wholesome outlook, the Mom's Pie view of life" (think Boston Herald). Those who carry the second kind of totem "can go off to the bar and drink a few 'brews' and retail some cynical remarks about Zora Folley and how the fight game is these days and round it off, though, with how George Chuvalo has 'a lot of heart,' which he got, one understands, by eating mom's pie."
Wolfe turns to boxing to exemplify a fading manly blue-collar culture and the moribund orders of writing associated with it, all willfully blind to what's really happening—the encroaching grooviness, the developing transformation of morals and politics and just about everything else.
But one of the chapters that follows is a profile of Ali, and on almost every page Wolfe records his debt in both approach and content to fight writers and other connoisseurs of low life who came before, including the sportswriter W. C. Heinz, Liebling's New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell, and especially Liebling himself, a graceful and far-seeing stylist who wrote lasting non-fiction literature founded on solid reporting.
Carlo Rotella is director of American Studies at Boston College and author of
Excerpted from
A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.
Copyright © 2009 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
While best-known for his boxing writing, Liebling also dabbled in politics, including his landmark piece, "What If Everyone Involved in this House Un-American Activities Committee Scandal Were Black?"
NFL brain injury lawsuit includes 2,138 players whereas Boxing offers no redress for injured fighters
The sport of boxing has the same risks of injury by repeated concussive blows to the head that cause irreparable long-term damage to the brain.
What is the difference with boxing and football when it comes to suing for damages? Where are the deep pockets that the lawyers can target with these charges? Is it possible to sue Don King or Bob Arum? There are official boxing bodies - the WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO governing many different weight classes and presiding over the alphabet soup of boxing titles. None of which represent the kind of money in Football teams, stadiums, owners and leagues do in football.... Boxing does not have the same business structure with wealthy team owners and well financed governing bodies that are involved in football.
Boxers operate as individuals with their own managers and under the auspices of local promoters and governing bodies. It would hard to bring a group of boxers together to launch any class action suit. Lawyers not having any wealthy 'villains' to pursue would be unlikely to work on a contingency basis. Who will pay to help participants in a sport where, aside from a few Superstars like Manny Pacquiao, the athletes earn very little money, are treated like disposable commodities, and often get abused by corrupt managers and promoters.
Even the Ivy league universities are facing law suits that could impinge on university endowments. Boxing was abandoned long ago in the university athletic systems. Lawyers want a return on their efforts in the form of massive contingency fees and these fees aren't available in the disjointed organizations that oversea the sport of boxing and the many jurisdictions where fights take place.
Boxers suffer the same depression and altered behaviors as football players. Just think about the great Alexis Arguello shooting himself after enduring chronic headaches and depression or the controversial suicide of Arturo Gatti. Both these guys had distinguished careers and epic battles. Aguello against Aaron Pryor produced wars that left marks on both guys.
Before fighting Aaron Prior, Alexis had fought 82 times against tough competition winning and defending titles in several divisions... Prior was "juiced" during the fight and his corner-man 'panama' Lewis was to go on to be involved in many more scandals in the sport. Where were the regulators when it came to getting this CHEAT out of the sport.
During the early 1980s, he was considered one of the best trainers of his time, compared with Emanuel Steward and Lou Duva. The most noted boxer in his stable was light-welterweight champion Aaron Pryor.
In 1982, Pryor fought Alexis Argüello. Before the fourteenth round, a cornerman held up a plastic water bottle, but HBO cameras caught Lewis yelling, "Not that bottle, the one I mixed."
Pryor knocked out Arguello, but Lewis' comments fueled rumors that the bottle contained stimulants.
Lewis said it only contained Perrier and tap water. Although Lewis was never formally sanctioned, the incident sullied his reputation, which was confirmed by his cheating discovered in subsequent fights.
It was later alleged in an interview with former Lewis-trained boxer Luis Resto in the HBO documentary film Assault in the Ring, that Lewis would break apart pills used to treat asthma and pour the medicine into the water, giving Resto greater lung capacity in the later rounds of a fight.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Lewis
uploaded by primeboxers on Dec 11, 2010
PHILADELPHIA — A concussion-related lawsuit bringing together scores of cases has been filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of hiding information that linked football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.
Complaints:
REBUTTAL:
The league has denied similar accusations in the past.
Easterling, 62, suffered from undiagnosed dementia for many years that left him angry and volatile, his widow said.
He acted out of character, behaving oddly at family parties and making risky business decisions that eventually cost them their home. They were married 36 years and had one daughter. She believes the NFL has no idea what families go through.
Ray Easterling played for the Falcons from 1972 to 1979, helping to lead the team’s “Gritz Blitz” defense in 1977 that set the NFL record for fewest points allowed in a season.
He never earned more than $75,000 from the sport, his widow said.
After his football career, he started a financial services company, but had to abandon the career in about 1990, plagued by insomnia and depression, she said.
Some of the plaintiffs are named in more than one complaint, but the AP count does not include duplicated names in the total.
What is the difference with boxing and football when it comes to suing for damages? Where are the deep pockets that the lawyers can target with these charges? Is it possible to sue Don King or Bob Arum? There are official boxing bodies - the WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO governing many different weight classes and presiding over the alphabet soup of boxing titles. None of which represent the kind of money in Football teams, stadiums, owners and leagues do in football.... Boxing does not have the same business structure with wealthy team owners and well financed governing bodies that are involved in football.
Boxers operate as individuals with their own managers and under the auspices of local promoters and governing bodies. It would hard to bring a group of boxers together to launch any class action suit. Lawyers not having any wealthy 'villains' to pursue would be unlikely to work on a contingency basis. Who will pay to help participants in a sport where, aside from a few Superstars like Manny Pacquiao, the athletes earn very little money, are treated like disposable commodities, and often get abused by corrupt managers and promoters.
Even the Ivy league universities are facing law suits that could impinge on university endowments. Boxing was abandoned long ago in the university athletic systems. Lawyers want a return on their efforts in the form of massive contingency fees and these fees aren't available in the disjointed organizations that oversea the sport of boxing and the many jurisdictions where fights take place.
Boxers suffer the same depression and altered behaviors as football players. Just think about the great Alexis Arguello shooting himself after enduring chronic headaches and depression or the controversial suicide of Arturo Gatti. Both these guys had distinguished careers and epic battles. Aguello against Aaron Pryor produced wars that left marks on both guys.
During the early 1980s, he was considered one of the best trainers of his time, compared with Emanuel Steward and Lou Duva. The most noted boxer in his stable was light-welterweight champion Aaron Pryor.
In 1982, Pryor fought Alexis Argüello. Before the fourteenth round, a cornerman held up a plastic water bottle, but HBO cameras caught Lewis yelling, "Not that bottle, the one I mixed."
Pryor knocked out Arguello, but Lewis' comments fueled rumors that the bottle contained stimulants.
Lewis said it only contained Perrier and tap water. Although Lewis was never formally sanctioned, the incident sullied his reputation, which was confirmed by his cheating discovered in subsequent fights.
It was later alleged in an interview with former Lewis-trained boxer Luis Resto in the HBO documentary film Assault in the Ring, that Lewis would break apart pills used to treat asthma and pour the medicine into the water, giving Resto greater lung capacity in the later rounds of a fight.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Lewis
Aaron Pryor vs Alexis Arguello I - Nov 12, 1982 - Entire fight - Rounds 1 - 14
uploaded by primeboxers on Dec 11, 2010
Aaron Pryor vs Alexis Arguello I
Aaron
Pryor defends his WBA Light Welterweight Championship of the World
against Alexis Arguello. The fight had been given alot of media
attention and was considered a sure Fight of the Year winner.
The fight
didn't disappoint, but it didn't get Fight of the Year, however it got
ranked #8 in the 100 Greatest Fights of all time by Ring Magazine in
1996.
The fight also had some controversy, as 'Panama' Lewis, the
trainer of Pryor requested a specific bottle of which Pryor was to drink
from; 'The one that I mixed'.
The fight ended in the next round, and no
urine test was administered by the Miami Boxing Commision after the
bout. Because of this, they had a rematch 10 months later.
-
Their records at the time
Aaron Pryor: 31-0
Alexis Arguello: 77-5
-
Their records at the time
Aaron Pryor: 31-0
Alexis Arguello: 77-5
License:
Standard YouTube License
NFL brain injury lawsuit includes 2,138 players
By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press June 7, 2012
PHILADELPHIA — A concussion-related lawsuit bringing together scores of cases has been filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of hiding information that linked football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.
Complaints:
Lawyers for former players say more than 80 pending lawsuits are consolidated in the “master complaint” filed Thursday in Philadelphia.
Plaintiffs hope to hold the NFL responsible for the care of players suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions. Other former players remain asymptomatic, but worry about the future and want medical monitoring.
The suit accuses the NFL of “mythologizing” and glorifying violence through the media, including its NFL Films division.
“The NFL, like the sport of boxing, was aware of the health risks associated with repetitive blows producing sub-concussive and concussive results and the fact that some members of the NFL player population were at significant risk of developing long-term brain damage and cognitive decline as a result,” the complaint charges.
“Despite its knowledge and controlling role in governing player conduct on and off the field, the NFL turned a blind eye to the risk and failed to warn and/or impose safety regulations governing this well-recognized health and safety problem.”
REBUTTAL:
The league has denied similar accusations in the past.
“Our legal team will review today’s filing that is intended to consolidate plaintiffs’ existing claims into one “master” complaint,” the NFL said in a statement. “The NFL has long made player safety a priority and continues to do so. Any allegation that the NFL sought to mislead players has no merit. It stands in contrast to the league’s many actions to better protect players and advance the science and medical understanding of the management and treatment of concussions.”
The NFL provides a series of medical benefits to former NFL players to help them after football, including joint replacement, neurological evaluations and spine treatment programs, assisted living partnerships, long-term care insurance, prescription benefits, life insurance programs, and a Medicare supplement program.
One of the programs, the 88 Plan, named after Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, provides funding to treat dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Players do not need to demonstrate that the condition was caused by their participation in the NFL.
Overall, the NFL, in partnership with the NFLPA, has spent more than a billion dollars on pensions, medical and disability benefits for retired players.
Individual Stories:
Individual Stories:
Mary Ann Easterling will remain a plaintiff despite the April suicide of her husband, former Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling, who had been a named plaintiff in a suit filed last year.
Easterling, 62, suffered from undiagnosed dementia for many years that left him angry and volatile, his widow said.
He acted out of character, behaving oddly at family parties and making risky business decisions that eventually cost them their home. They were married 36 years and had one daughter. She believes the NFL has no idea what families go through.
Ray Easterling played for the Falcons from 1972 to 1979, helping to lead the team’s “Gritz Blitz” defense in 1977 that set the NFL record for fewest points allowed in a season.
He never earned more than $75,000 from the sport, his widow said.
After his football career, he started a financial services company, but had to abandon the career in about 1990, plagued by insomnia and depression, she said.
The list of notable former players connected to concussion lawsuits is extensive and includes the family of Dave Duerson, who shot himself last year. Ex-quarterback Jim McMahon, Duerson’s teammate on Super Bowl-winning 1985 Chicago Bears, has been a plaintiff.
Summary of Complaints:
Summary of Complaints:
The cases are being consolidated for pretrial issues and discovery before Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia.
The players accuse the NFL of negligence and intentional misconduct in its response to the headaches, dizziness and dementia that former players have reported, even after forming the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee to study the issue in 1994.
“After voluntarily assuming a duty to investigate, study, and truthfully report to the public and NFL players, including the Plaintiffs, the medical risks associated with MTBI in football, the NFL instead produced industry-funded, biased, and falsified research that falsely claimed that concussive and sub-concussive head impacts in football do not present serious, life-altering risks,” the complaint says.
The problem of concussions in the NFL has moved steadily into the litigation phase for about a year.
According to an AP review of 81 lawsuits filed through May 25, the plaintiffs include 2,138 players who say the NFL did not do enough to inform them about the dangers of head injuries.
The total number of plaintiffs in those cases is 3,356, which includes players, spouses and other relatives or representatives.
The total number of plaintiffs in those cases is 3,356, which includes players, spouses and other relatives or representatives.
Some of the plaintiffs are named in more than one complaint, but the AP count does not include duplicated names in the total.
“We want to see them take care of the players,” Mary Ann Easterling said.
The concussion policy - Sports - Political and Editorial Cartoons - The Week
The concussion policy - Sports - Political and Editorial Cartoons - The Week
cartoon view
The concussion policy
June 15, 2012, at 2:04 PM
Ex-pros sue over head injuries
Ex-pros sue over head injuries | JournalNow.com
Ex-pros sue over head injuries
By: Associated Press , JournalNow Staff | The Associated Press
Published: June 08, 2012
PHILADELPHIA --
A concussion-related lawsuit bringing together scores of cases has been filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of hiding information that linked football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.
Attorneys for former players say that more than 80 pending lawsuits are consolidated in the "master complaint" that was filed Thursday in Philadelphia.
Plaintiffs hope to hold the NFL responsible for the care of players suffering from dementia, Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions. Other former players remain asymptomatic but worry about the future and want medical monitoring. The helmet-maker Riddell, Inc. also is named as a defendant.
"I want this game to be around, to be a great sport, a sport that my own boys will be able to play and enjoy all the benefits I believe that football has," said Kevin Turner, a former running back for the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots who is now suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The suit accuses the NFL of "mythologizing" and glorifying violence through the media, including its NFL Films division.
The cases are being consolidated for pretrial issues and discovery before Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody.
According to an AP review of 81 lawsuits filed through May 25, the plaintiffs include 2,138 former players. The total number of plaintiffs is 3,356, which includes players, spouses and other relatives or representatives.
Ex-pros sue over head injuries
By: Associated Press , JournalNow Staff | The Associated Press
Published: June 08, 2012
PHILADELPHIA --
A concussion-related lawsuit bringing together scores of cases has been filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of hiding information that linked football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.
Attorneys for former players say that more than 80 pending lawsuits are consolidated in the "master complaint" that was filed Thursday in Philadelphia.
Plaintiffs hope to hold the NFL responsible for the care of players suffering from dementia, Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions. Other former players remain asymptomatic but worry about the future and want medical monitoring. The helmet-maker Riddell, Inc. also is named as a defendant.
"I want this game to be around, to be a great sport, a sport that my own boys will be able to play and enjoy all the benefits I believe that football has," said Kevin Turner, a former running back for the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots who is now suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The suit accuses the NFL of "mythologizing" and glorifying violence through the media, including its NFL Films division.
The cases are being consolidated for pretrial issues and discovery before Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody.
According to an AP review of 81 lawsuits filed through May 25, the plaintiffs include 2,138 former players. The total number of plaintiffs is 3,356, which includes players, spouses and other relatives or representatives.
Paul Williams paralysed in crash recently
Johny Tapia was a bigger story because his whole life was a tragedy. But Paul Williams was a pound- for-pound- best fighter in the 3 divisions
he fought in.... big loss for the sport. He is alive but few people
recover from a severed
Former world champion Paul Williams has been left paralysed from the waist down after a motorcycle accident on Sunday in the Atlanta suburbs and doctors said it is unlikely he will continue his career, his manager, George Peterson said Monday.
"From
the waist down, he has absolutely no movement. He's in very good
spirits, though," Peterson told The Associated Press from his home in Aiken, South Carolina. "He still believes he's going to fight again."
Williams
severed his spinal cord after falling on his back and head when he was
thrown from his motorcycle Sunday morning in Marietta, Georgia, Peterson
said. Williams has been listed in serious but stable condition on
Monday at an undisclosed hospital.
"I
know he's going to make a statement after surgery on Wednesday, because
he's that kind of person," Peterson said. "He's 100 percent coherent
and still has the will to want to get back on the motorcycle."
Williams was scheduled to fight Saul Alvarez on Sept. 15 in Las Vegas but that event has been canceled, Peterson said.
He said he continues to hope with Williams that the boxer's career isn't over.
"I want to think along with him, 'cause I've seen him do things in his boxing career that shouldn't have happened," he said.
The
crash happened Sunday morning in Marietta after Williams tried to avoid
another car in the next lane that was negotiating a curve and then had
to maneuver to avoid an oncoming car. Williams was in the area to attend
his brother's wedding Sunday afternoon, Peterson said.
"We
want his fans to know he's going to be all right and he'll be back,"
Peterson said. "He said if he wasn't going to be boxing, he's going to
be a stand-up comedian."
Teofilo Stevenson
Not many fighters possessed the one punch "POP!" that Stevenson scarried in his right hand. Witness one punch KO's over great amateurs like Dwayne Bobick. And Teofilo always made it look easy beating all the great amateur heavyweights of the day.
Many fans thought he could beat M. Ali, if he was given the opportunity to fight as a professional boxer. Alas, he was a devoted Cuban national and no amount of money could tempt him to defect from his country and his ideals. He was a great man in the days when values meant something.
We have witnessed the destruction of Mike Tyson by the temptations layed out before him by Don King and other corrupt influences. He squandered all the hundreds of millions of dollars he allegedly earned. Robin Givens tried to have his expenses and other fees paid to King accounted for. Mike went off the rails and who knows how that turned out.
Tribute to Teofilo Stevenson:
Boxer Teofilo Stevenson loyal to Cuba's revolution
Teofilo Stevenson won his third gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics
Three-times Olympic gold medallist Teofilo Stevenson died on 11 June.
The BBC's Sarah Rainsford went to his funeral and met some of the people inspired by
the late boxer who turned down millions of dollars to fight Muhammad Ali.
He was Cuba's greatest boxer, once its most famous figure after Fidel Castro, and huge numbers of people had come to remember him - fellow Olympic champions, many in their tracksuits, jostled alongside everyone else.
Stevenson's open coffin stood in a side-room - draped in the national flag, red boxing gloves resting on top. The crowd filed in slowly, taking it in turns to stand alongside in an honour guard.
The boxer was just 60 when he died, and I saw a few people wiping away quiet tears. But most seemed there less to mourn, than to commemorate a sporting legend.
Teofilo Stevenson brought home three consecutive Olympic gold medals for Cuba in 1972, 1976 and 1980.
A poster boy for the Communist sports system, with a destructive right hand, he was unrivaled in the amateur ring for many years, a world champion several times over.
But when he turned down millions of dollars to fight Muhammad Ali, he also became a powerful symbol of loyalty to Cuba's revolution.
The fight with Ali would have been a fantasy clash between the two greatest heavyweights of their generation. But Fidel Castro had banned professional sport as corrupting.
Stevenson would have had to defect and he claimed the affection of "millions of Cubans" was more important.
Stevenson won gold in Moscow in 1980
Castro's tribute to Teofilo Stevenson appeared in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper.
"No other amateur boxer in history shone so brightly," Mr Castro declared, hailing Stevenson's talent first, then his loyalty.
Cuba invests heavily in sport, only to see many of its finest defect in frustration, seeking better pay and opportunities overseas but Stevenson, "could not be bought for all the money in the world", said Fidel.
And so it was the patriot - and true Olympian - as well as the maestro that the crowds stood and applauded here as Stevenson was driven through the streets of Havana this week for one last time.
"Teofilo Stevenson will always be in the heart of the Cuban people. He will never be erased," Juantorena said.
Link:
BBC News - Boxer Teofilo Stevenson's loyalty to Cuba's revolution
Many fans thought he could beat M. Ali, if he was given the opportunity to fight as a professional boxer. Alas, he was a devoted Cuban national and no amount of money could tempt him to defect from his country and his ideals. He was a great man in the days when values meant something.
We have witnessed the destruction of Mike Tyson by the temptations layed out before him by Don King and other corrupt influences. He squandered all the hundreds of millions of dollars he allegedly earned. Robin Givens tried to have his expenses and other fees paid to King accounted for. Mike went off the rails and who knows how that turned out.
Tribute to Teofilo Stevenson:
Boxer Teofilo Stevenson loyal to Cuba's revolution
Teofilo Stevenson won his third gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics
Three-times Olympic gold medallist Teofilo Stevenson died on 11 June.
The BBC's Sarah Rainsford went to his funeral and met some of the people inspired by
the late boxer who turned down millions of dollars to fight Muhammad Ali.
He was Cuba's greatest boxer, once its most famous figure after Fidel Castro, and huge numbers of people had come to remember him - fellow Olympic champions, many in their tracksuits, jostled alongside everyone else.
Stevenson's open coffin stood in a side-room - draped in the national flag, red boxing gloves resting on top. The crowd filed in slowly, taking it in turns to stand alongside in an honour guard.
The boxer was just 60 when he died, and I saw a few people wiping away quiet tears. But most seemed there less to mourn, than to commemorate a sporting legend.
Teofilo Stevenson brought home three consecutive Olympic gold medals for Cuba in 1972, 1976 and 1980.
A poster boy for the Communist sports system, with a destructive right hand, he was unrivaled in the amateur ring for many years, a world champion several times over.
But when he turned down millions of dollars to fight Muhammad Ali, he also became a powerful symbol of loyalty to Cuba's revolution.
The fight with Ali would have been a fantasy clash between the two greatest heavyweights of their generation. But Fidel Castro had banned professional sport as corrupting.
Stevenson would have had to defect and he claimed the affection of "millions of Cubans" was more important.
Castro's tribute to Teofilo Stevenson appeared in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper.
"No other amateur boxer in history shone so brightly," Mr Castro declared, hailing Stevenson's talent first, then his loyalty.
Cuba invests heavily in sport, only to see many of its finest defect in frustration, seeking better pay and opportunities overseas but Stevenson, "could not be bought for all the money in the world", said Fidel.
And so it was the patriot - and true Olympian - as well as the maestro that the crowds stood and applauded here as Stevenson was driven through the streets of Havana this week for one last time.
"Teofilo Stevenson will always be in the heart of the Cuban people. He will never be erased," Juantorena said.
Link:
BBC News - Boxer Teofilo Stevenson's loyalty to Cuba's revolution
Cuba's Mister Boxing
Teofilo Stevenson, Cuba's Olympic Champion goes for gold at the PanAm Games, Mexico City.
Comments by Sugar Ray Leonard
Ivy League, Big Ten to Combine Resources on Head-Injury Study
Ivy League, Big Ten to Combine Resources on Head-Injury Study
June 19 (Bloomberg) --
The Ivy League and Big Ten conference are teaming up to study head injuries in sports.
Shirley Tilghman, Ivy League Council of Presidents chairwoman and Princeton University president, said in a release, "By pooling our expertise and resources, our institutions aim to significantly expand upon the research needed to improve long-term concussion-prevention measures."
LINK:
Ivy League, Big Ten to Combine Resources on Head-Injury Study
June 19 (Bloomberg) --
The Ivy League and Big Ten conference are teaming up to study head injuries in sports.
The two conferences, along with the Big Ten Committee on Institutional Cooperation, are sponsoring a joint study aimed at improving head-injury assessment and prevention.
The program, announced today in e-mailed releases from both National Collegiate Athletic Association conferences, will use resources from the 20 combined schools and data from their over 18,000 athletes.
Shirley Tilghman, Ivy League Council of Presidents chairwoman and Princeton University president, said in a release, "By pooling our expertise and resources, our institutions aim to significantly expand upon the research needed to improve long-term concussion-prevention measures."
Discussion about the education, prevention and treatment of head injuries has become a popular topic in sports of all levels, particularly in football.
The National Football League is facing lawsuits from more than 2,000 former players seeking damages for head injuries sustained on the field, and the Pop Warner youth football organization is limiting contact in practices to reduce the risk of concussions.
The Ivy League and the Big Ten said they were already independently working to research and address various aspects of head injuries in athletics, including concussions.
LINK:
Ivy League, Big Ten to Combine Resources on Head-Injury Study
Tomasz Adamek outpoints Eddie Chambers
Adamek humble in victory while Chambers stayed busy making excuses... Adamek was a great Champion as a light heavyweight and is the best small heavyweight out there.
Too bad the division has the Klitschkos at the Top whose size alone is too much to overcome for the average heavyweight... and no, Lennox Lewis won't be making a comeback.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Newark, N.J. (AP) -Tomasz Adamek unanimously outpointed Eddie Chambers in a 12-round bout Saturday night to capture the IBF North American heavyweight championship.
Adamek, a Polish fighter who lives in Kearny, N.J., has won two straight fights after losing a WBC heavyweight title fight to Vitali Klitschko last September in Poland.
Adamek improved to 46-2, receiving winning scores of 116-112, 116-112 and 119-109.
"The fight was very close, but I felt I fought my fight and I won the fight," Adamek said. "I was looking to win the fight. If I start to look to knock someone out, you can lose. I felt I controlled the fight."
Chambers, who lost to Wladimir Klitschko for the IBF and WBO heavyweight crown in March 2010, was fighting for the first time since February of 2011, missing two scheduled bouts due to injury.
"I'm sure I would have won the fight if I had both hands," Chambers said. "I threw a hook off my jab and his big arm got in the way. I must have torn something in the bicep. I tried later to throw some punches with my left, but I couldn't muscle anything with my left. I had to figure out what to do."
"Eddie was fast and very sneaky," Adamek said. "I didn't know anything about his arm. Someone told me after the fight was over. I just had to be ready for anything."
"I was unsure about the decision and if you're unsure, you can't say you won clear cut," Chambers said. "I don't like to sound brash, but I would have won if I didn't get hurt. I worked so hard to get ready for this fight and I was in the best shape of my life."
One more excuse:
Chambers was fighting for the first time since the passing of his long-time manager "Big" Rob Murray, who died June 3. Murray's son, Rob, Jr. has taken over handling Chambers.
SOURCE:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/16/sports/s211522D50.DTL
Jail Ain't For Sissies
Gleason's Sporting World: No personal chef for Mayweather in jail? | recordonline.com
This Dec. 22, 2011, photo provided by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department shows a typical single-inmate Clark County Detention Center jail cell in the administrative segregation unit in Las Vegas.
The jail cell is similar to one where Floyd Mayweather Jr. is serving a 90-day jail term. Lawyers for Mayweather say the undefeated champion boxer may never fight again if he's not released from the jail he entered earlier this month.
(AP Photo/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department )ASSOCIATED PRESS
Points to ponder while wondering if Floyd Mayweather Jr. thought he was headed for an 87-day stay in a Las Vegas jail or the Las Vegas Hilton.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Gleason's Sporting World: No personal chef for Mayweather in jail?
This Dec. 22, 2011, photo provided by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department shows a typical single-inmate Clark County Detention Center jail cell in the administrative segregation unit in Las Vegas.
The jail cell is similar to one where Floyd Mayweather Jr. is serving a 90-day jail term. Lawyers for Mayweather say the undefeated champion boxer may never fight again if he's not released from the jail he entered earlier this month.
(AP Photo/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department )ASSOCIATED PRESS
Points to ponder while wondering if Floyd Mayweather Jr. thought he was headed for an 87-day stay in a Las Vegas jail or the Las Vegas Hilton.
Money
is reportedly acting like he's gotten a worse deal than Manny Pacquiao
in the Timothy Bradley fight. Mayweather says he's not getting enough
exercise, even though jail officials say he's refused to exercise.
Mayweather says he's not getting enough to eat, even though jail
officials say he's refused to eat.
The guy can't seem to get a break for attacking a former girlfriend while two of their kids watched.
It's
about time those evil higher-ups at the Clark County Detention Center
treat Mayweather with a little respect. Where's the personal chef? The
day pass to Gold's Gym?
You want to know what constituted a clown question? Jim Rome asking David Stern if the draft lottery was fixed.
Source:
kgleason@th-record.com;
Twitter: @th_KevinGleason
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Boxing Trivia
Country singer Johnny Paycheck took his name from a Boxer who fought Joe Louis called Johnny Paycheck. Was that a cynical name given to a 'canvas back' sent in to lose and to build Joe's record of ko's...?
Monday, June 11, 2012
Boxing Judges Suspended
Maybe we need to see more suspensions for hotly disputed decisions... or find out what kind of bias is built into the process and how judges are chosen.
One disputed scorecard earned three New Jersey boxing judges indefinite suspensions and no clear route back to ringside - NYPOST.com
Sacrificed
July 9, 2011: three judges suspended indefinitely after working the junior middleweight fight between Paul Williams and Erislandy Lara at a ballroom in Boardwalk Hall at Atlantic City.
Four days after Williams was awarded a controversial majority decision that drew boos from most in the crowd, all three judges — Bennett, Donald Givens of Linden, N.J., and Hilton Whitaker III of New Jersey — were put on indefinite suspension by Aaron Davis, the commissioner of the New Jersey State Control Board.
In
announcing the suspensions, Davis said in a statement, “we feel that
we did not provide our best officiating on July 9.”
Davis did add there
was no evidence of any corruption on the part of the judges.
Nearly
11 months later, the three judges remain suspended ...
There was outrage over the decision. HBO broadcaster Bob Papa told his audience, “This is a joke.”
Four days later, Davis announced the
unprecedented decision to put the judges on indefinite suspension.
Davis admitted the suspensions have been “long,” but offered no hint of ending the suspensions.
“Those tests are not that hard to pass,” he said. “I’d like for all our guys to pass the test with no problem. I’d like them to have some more ongoing training before I fully reinstate them. Then, after training, I’d probably like them to shadow a judge and come back with those scores.”
Suspending judges is nearly unheard of in boxing, but Davis defended his actions.
Davis said all the judges are “good guys,” but hopes the suspensions send a message to other judges in New Jersey and regulatory commissions around the country.
“We
can’t be satisfied with subpar performances,” he said. “We don’t
accept that from fighters. We shouldn’t accept it from our officials
either. If people know they’re going to be accountable for their
actions, hopefully they’ll take better actions.”
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Bradley Upsets Pacquiao: Bob Arum 'Ashamed' of Boxing, Calls Decision 'F***ing Nuts'
Will we see a recount of the judges' scorecards or an official protest to the IBF? I didn't see the fight but the internet is full of sho0uts of "ROBBERY!" There are official channels for a protest, unless Arum would rather see the matter settled in a money-making re-match... Grudge matches are good for business.
http://www.manmademag.com/news/90cfb5/
Bradley Upsets Pacquiao: Bob Arum
'Ashamed' of Boxing,
Calls Decision 'F***ing Nuts'
by $$$ Rematch Clause
Read More: Many fan comments
Bradley Upsets Pacquiao: Bob Arum 'Ashamed' of Boxing, Calls Decision 'F***ing Nuts'http://www.manmademag.com/news/90cfb5/
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Pacman Lost
Many say Pacman lost his previous fight and only won because of a bad decision... NOW:
Pacman robbed at MGM
LAS VEGAS – Timothy Bradley had youth and confidence on his side. Manny Pacquiao possesses power and speed in abundance. Pacquiao made good use of his skills to pound Bradley, but he couldn’t convince two of the judges at ring side that he did enough to win.
So Bradley scored victory in a 12-round split decision before a stunned crowd at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night. Somewhere in a jail cell at the Clark County Detention Center, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. was screaming in outrage.
Pacman robbed at MGM
LAS VEGAS – Timothy Bradley had youth and confidence on his side. Manny Pacquiao possesses power and speed in abundance. Pacquiao made good use of his skills to pound Bradley, but he couldn’t convince two of the judges at ring side that he did enough to win.
So Bradley scored victory in a 12-round split decision before a stunned crowd at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night. Somewhere in a jail cell at the Clark County Detention Center, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. was screaming in outrage.
No Stare Down?
Being focused is not a problem for Bradley.
“I have never seen anyone more focused on getting stuff done than Tim,” said Bradley’s manager, Cameron Dunkin. “He has an incredible work ethic. He eats it, watches it, sleeps it, breathes it. He takes his career more seriously than anyone I have ever seen.’’
Should Bradley win, a rematch clause is already in place for a fight on Nov. 10. That would ruin hopes for a Pacquiao bout with Mayweather any time soon, who is currently in the Clark County (Nev.) jail serving a three-month sentence on a domestic violence charge. Bradley went so far as to have an oversized ticket made for the Nov. 12 fight and presented it to his wife, M
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/boxing
Bradley continued to work harder and harder for the biggest fight of his life, and said he’s ready to rumble as well.
In the third episode of HBO’s 24/7, Bradley said he was done with training, and perhaps tired of it.
“I’m sick of training I (can) fight tomorrow. I (can) fight tonight,” said Bradley, bouncing around some track oval like a collegiate star.
He has maintained a strict vegetarian diet.
“I train like no other,” said Bradley who would sleep at the gym if that’s what it would take for him to win.
“Fights are won in the gym,” he said.
“I have never seen anyone more focused on getting stuff done than Tim,” said Bradley’s manager, Cameron Dunkin. “He has an incredible work ethic. He eats it, watches it, sleeps it, breathes it. He takes his career more seriously than anyone I have ever seen.’’
Should Bradley win, a rematch clause is already in place for a fight on Nov. 10. That would ruin hopes for a Pacquiao bout with Mayweather any time soon, who is currently in the Clark County (Nev.) jail serving a three-month sentence on a domestic violence charge. Bradley went so far as to have an oversized ticket made for the Nov. 12 fight and presented it to his wife, M
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/boxing
Bradley continued to work harder and harder for the biggest fight of his life, and said he’s ready to rumble as well.
In the third episode of HBO’s 24/7, Bradley said he was done with training, and perhaps tired of it.
“I’m sick of training I (can) fight tomorrow. I (can) fight tonight,” said Bradley, bouncing around some track oval like a collegiate star.
He has maintained a strict vegetarian diet.
“I train like no other,” said Bradley who would sleep at the gym if that’s what it would take for him to win.
“Fights are won in the gym,” he said.
Timothy Bradley challenges Manny Pacquiao
Let's hope Timothy Bradley can do a better job of executing this strategy. It back fired on Ricky Hatton when he ran into a BIG punch!!!
George Willis: Timothy Bradley has gone to school on Manny Pacquiao, his superstar June opponent - NYPOST.com
His game plan includes being relentless.
Bradley (28-0, 12 KOs) is experienced enough, fast enough and determined enough to give Pacquiao trouble.
Bradley craves what Pacquiao (54-3-2, 38 KOs) has — fame, fortune and his face on an electronic billboard in Times Square.
It is part of a sponsorship deal Pacquiao has with Hennessy that includes a commercial. It prompted Pacquiao to plug his two favorite things during his press conference:
Christianity and Cognac.
***
Cooney’s charity work, personality a real knockout - NYPOST.com
Having just read a book about overcoming substance abuse and dependence that featured an interview with Gerry Cooney, it is uplifting to see him continuing on his path of recovery. He is a very inspiring guy who overcame his problems in noble style.
Cooney’s charity work, personality a real knockout - NYPOST.com
Cooney’s charity work, personality a real knockout - NYPOST.com
Posted: 11:08 AM, March 19, 2012
When you mention the name Gerry Cooney, flashes of vicious left hooks jump to the forefront of your mind.
But despite being one of the hardest hitting fighters the sport has ever seen, Cooney’s personality is his real knockout punch.
Cooney, whose career exploits include a 28-3 record (24 KOs), is famous for his 54-second knockout of Ken Norton and for going toe-to-toe with Larry Holmes for the World Heavyweight Championship in 1982.
Cooney uses his celebrity to help mentor trouble youths, visit prisons and talk to people in rehab clinics.
“I’m all about information,” Cooney told The Post. “We all have no idea how lucky we are, there are a lot of kids who have nothing. I tell them they have plenty of options, that you have to fight for your life.”
Cooney’s final fight came 22 years ago, but his legend still lives on. While in New York City for his weekly Sirius XM show “Friday Night Fights,” Cooney is regularly stopped in the streets of Manhattan by fans. Even those who are not familiar with Gentleman Gerry identify with the Long Island-raised fighter.
“Everybody identifies with the fight of life,” Cooney said. “I show [kids] a highlight reel of me and they are glued to that fight and they never forget me. Even when I see someone stop to want to take a picture or ask me a question, I appreciate it, it’s part of what we do.”
The struggles Cooney experienced growing up, and with alcoholism following his boxing career fuel the fighter’s desire to help others. Cooney visits 50-60 charities a year and doing countless other benefits year-round.
“It’s just a win-win,” Cooney said. “All of the people that come to support the charities get to hang around with us, rub elbows together, have some laughs and at the end of the day we sit down, have a dinner and say we raised this kind of money which would never have happened.”
Cooney, who now resides in central New Jersey with his wife and three children, feels guilty when he cannot attend a charity event.
“I feel bad because I want to be with my family, I want to be able to do [every event],but I can’t” Cooney said. “I have a great wife, a great family but sometimes they get put on the back too much and I don’t like that.”
In addition to the charity work he does, Cooney helps those within the boxing community and who are closest to him.
Former amateur boxer Mike Trapani has been tied to Cooney in many ways. As Trapani made a name for himself in New York City in the late 1970’s he crossed paths with Cooney in the sparring ring and the two have remained close for over 30 years.
Forced into early retirement following two retina injures, Trapani (40-3, 36 KOs) has been able to turn to Cooney when he needed him the most. Cooney has spoken at Trapani’s elementary school boxing academy, run at Villa Maria Academy in the Bronx, but it was a chance encounter at a Rochester boxing event where Cooney made the biggest impact.
“I was going through a difficult time in my life when I ran into Gerry at the event,” Trapani said. “Gerry asked me how I was doing and I said ‘I feel like Ken Norton already knocked out and lying on the ropes waiting to get nailed from a murderous puncher again.’ Gerry then told me to call him every day and that ‘we would fight this together.”
Trapani does not think his relationship with Cooney happened by chance. He calls Cooney’s presence a miracle.
“Once again having come off the canvass of life, I consider Gerry's support as being my moment of clarity,” Trapani said. “There is no doubt in my mind that God has put Gerry Cooney in my life.”
This June marks the 30-year anniversary of Cooney’s title bout with Larry Holmes. Cooney, who can recite Holmes’ phone number off the top of his head, laments the degradation of the sport over the past two decades, but does believe boxing is primed to make a comeback.
“I think boxing, for the last 20 years, was raped and robbed, from different promoters and managers. They took the heart out of the game,” Cooney said. “In the 1970’s we were a force to be reckoned with. But [boxing] is on the comeback, people want to see fights.”
Cooney admitted he could see himself as a figure in boxing’s return to prominence. With the passion for the sport still strong within him, Cooney said he would like to train a fighter, under the right circumstances.
“I would love to be able to train somebody,” Cooney said. “But the problem is if I want it more than they do, I’ve got no time for it, I’ll have to play golf instead.
“I’m a fighter, you never lose that fight, in whatever you do.”
But despite being one of the hardest hitting fighters the sport has ever seen, Cooney’s personality is his real knockout punch.
Cooney, whose career exploits include a 28-3 record (24 KOs), is famous for his 54-second knockout of Ken Norton and for going toe-to-toe with Larry Holmes for the World Heavyweight Championship in 1982.
Cooney uses his celebrity to help mentor trouble youths, visit prisons and talk to people in rehab clinics.
“I’m all about information,” Cooney told The Post. “We all have no idea how lucky we are, there are a lot of kids who have nothing. I tell them they have plenty of options, that you have to fight for your life.”
Cooney’s final fight came 22 years ago, but his legend still lives on. While in New York City for his weekly Sirius XM show “Friday Night Fights,” Cooney is regularly stopped in the streets of Manhattan by fans. Even those who are not familiar with Gentleman Gerry identify with the Long Island-raised fighter.
“Everybody identifies with the fight of life,” Cooney said. “I show [kids] a highlight reel of me and they are glued to that fight and they never forget me. Even when I see someone stop to want to take a picture or ask me a question, I appreciate it, it’s part of what we do.”
The struggles Cooney experienced growing up, and with alcoholism following his boxing career fuel the fighter’s desire to help others. Cooney visits 50-60 charities a year and doing countless other benefits year-round.
“It’s just a win-win,” Cooney said. “All of the people that come to support the charities get to hang around with us, rub elbows together, have some laughs and at the end of the day we sit down, have a dinner and say we raised this kind of money which would never have happened.”
Cooney, who now resides in central New Jersey with his wife and three children, feels guilty when he cannot attend a charity event.
“I feel bad because I want to be with my family, I want to be able to do [every event],but I can’t” Cooney said. “I have a great wife, a great family but sometimes they get put on the back too much and I don’t like that.”
In addition to the charity work he does, Cooney helps those within the boxing community and who are closest to him.
Former amateur boxer Mike Trapani has been tied to Cooney in many ways. As Trapani made a name for himself in New York City in the late 1970’s he crossed paths with Cooney in the sparring ring and the two have remained close for over 30 years.
Forced into early retirement following two retina injures, Trapani (40-3, 36 KOs) has been able to turn to Cooney when he needed him the most. Cooney has spoken at Trapani’s elementary school boxing academy, run at Villa Maria Academy in the Bronx, but it was a chance encounter at a Rochester boxing event where Cooney made the biggest impact.
“I was going through a difficult time in my life when I ran into Gerry at the event,” Trapani said. “Gerry asked me how I was doing and I said ‘I feel like Ken Norton already knocked out and lying on the ropes waiting to get nailed from a murderous puncher again.’ Gerry then told me to call him every day and that ‘we would fight this together.”
Trapani does not think his relationship with Cooney happened by chance. He calls Cooney’s presence a miracle.
“Once again having come off the canvass of life, I consider Gerry's support as being my moment of clarity,” Trapani said. “There is no doubt in my mind that God has put Gerry Cooney in my life.”
This June marks the 30-year anniversary of Cooney’s title bout with Larry Holmes. Cooney, who can recite Holmes’ phone number off the top of his head, laments the degradation of the sport over the past two decades, but does believe boxing is primed to make a comeback.
“I think boxing, for the last 20 years, was raped and robbed, from different promoters and managers. They took the heart out of the game,” Cooney said. “In the 1970’s we were a force to be reckoned with. But [boxing] is on the comeback, people want to see fights.”
Cooney admitted he could see himself as a figure in boxing’s return to prominence. With the passion for the sport still strong within him, Cooney said he would like to train a fighter, under the right circumstances.
“I would love to be able to train somebody,” Cooney said. “But the problem is if I want it more than they do, I’ve got no time for it, I’ll have to play golf instead.
“I’m a fighter, you never lose that fight, in whatever you do.”
Brain Damage Accumulates
Let's hope that Tony P. does not fight again for a few months after what was probably a serious concussion. In the boxing world's underbelly some fighters take a beating and get another fight too soon by boxing under another name.
Boxer Lavarn Harvell connects to the head of Tony Pietrantonio for a knockout during their third round of a light heavyweight boxing fight in Atlantic City.
Harvell, nicknamed Baby Bowe for his resemblance to former boxer Riddick Bowe, knocked out Pietrantonio in the third round after landing a devastating right hook.
In the photos from the fight, Pietrantonio's face appears to become distorted due to the punch.
Pietrantonio was reportedly unconscious before he hit the mat and the referee stopped the fight without a count.
“I felt that punch all the way up my shoulder and back, so I knew he wasn’t getting up.
ts brutal facial - NYPOST.com
Mayweather surrenders to begin jail sentence - NYPOST.com
Another one bites the dust - he says Pacman fight will never happen....
Why do so few Hollywood felons serve time compared to Boxers? Economic discrimination or worse???
Mayweather surrenders to begin jail sentence - NYPOST.com
Mayweather pleaded guilty in December to reduced domestic battery charges in a hair-pulling, arm-twisting attack on Josie Harris, the mother of three of his children.
Las Vegas police say that as a high-profile inmate, Mayweather probably will serve most of his time away from other prisoners in a small solo cell in the high-rise Clark County Detention Center.
Why do so few Hollywood felons serve time compared to Boxers? Economic discrimination or worse???
Mayweather surrenders to begin jail sentence - NYPOST.com
Mayweather pleaded guilty in December to reduced domestic battery charges in a hair-pulling, arm-twisting attack on Josie Harris, the mother of three of his children.
The plea deal allowed him to avoid
trial on felony charges that could have gotten Mayweather up to 34 years
in prison if he was convicted.
Las Vegas police say that as a high-profile inmate, Mayweather probably will serve most of his time away from other prisoners in a small solo cell in the high-rise Clark County Detention Center.
In jail, he'll have a cell about one-third the
size of a small boxing ring.
Bolxing Judges Suspended
Maybe we need to see more suspensions for hotly disputed decisions...
One disputed scorecard earned three New Jersey boxing judges indefinite suspensions and no clear route back to ringside - NYPOST.com
Al Bennett hasn’t been ringside since July 9, 2011.
That’s when he was one of three judges suspended indefinitely after working the junior middleweight fight between Paul Williams and Erislandy Lara at a ballroom in Boardwalk Hall at Atlantic City.
Four days after Williams was awarded a controversial majority decision that drew boos from most in the crowd, all three judges — Bennett, Donald Givens of Linden, N.J., and Hilton Whitaker III of New Jersey — were put on indefinite suspension by Aaron Davis, the commissioner of the New Jersey State Control Board.
Al Bennett remains suspended indefinitely as a boxing judge following his involvement in a controversial decision last year.
Nearly 11 months later, the three judges remain suspended, unable to work in any jurisdiction. Bennett, a judge for 25 years, and Whitaker, a 69-year-old who has been in boxing since age 15, say they feel like scapegoats. In interviews with The Post, they charge Davis with initially lying to them and ruining their reputations and careers.
“For him to do this to me after 25 years, it took me to a place I’ve never been before,” Bennett said. “You take one fight and flushed my whole 25 years down the toilet. He took me to a place where I was depressed. I was kind of ashamed to show my face out in public. It’s like we’ve been put in a dark closet and locked in the closet.”
Whitaker, a retired bus driver, also is angry and frustrated.
“To be told I’m one of the best judges in the world and have done all I have done to climb to where I have climbed to be at a standstill now is aggravating,” he said. “It has taken me out of something that I enjoy and love to do.”
Williams-Lara was televised on HBO, and the broadcast team, including former judge Harold Lederman, favored Lara after the 12-round fight. But Whitaker scored the fight for Williams (115-114), as did Givens (116-114). Bennett saw it a draw (114-114), giving Williams a majority decision. It was the 20th title fight for Bennett, the eighth for Whitaker and the first for Givens.
There was outrage over the decision. HBO broadcaster Bob Papa told his audience, “This is a joke.” Four days later, Davis announced the unprecedented decision to put the judges on indefinite suspension.
Nearly a year later, Whitaker is frustrated after following Davis’ recommendation to attend judging seminars held by the Association of Boxing Commissions in Washington and Raleigh, N.C., where he passed both tests and was recertified on Jan. 21, 2012.
Bennett attended the seminar in Washington, but failed the test. Bennett said he didn’t properly prepare for the test because he was angry over his suspension. He plans to retake the test at an upcoming seminar.
Davis admitted the suspensions have been “long,” but offered no hint of ending the suspensions.
“Those tests are not that hard to pass,” he said. “I’d like for all our guys to pass the test with no problem. I’d like them to have some more ongoing training before I fully reinstate them. Then, after training, I’d probably like them to shadow a judge and come back with those scores.”
Suspending judges is nearly unheard of in boxing, but Davis defended his actions.
“I just don’t go around suspending people with no reason,” he said. “I’d just like people to complete the training. If somebody got wind I reinstated somebody that failed the test that all the judges take, they would look at me crazy.”
Bennett, 62, is confident he will pass the test the next time he takes it. Not only does he miss the estimated $8,000-$10,0000 a year he earns judging, what makes him cringe these days is when they reference the suspensions during boxing telecasts.
“It’s just unfair,” Bennett said. “For me to get back in the game, I’ve got to build back up a whole new reputation. But I’m not going to quit because of this. I’ve been a judge for 25 years and didn’t have any problems until that night.”
Davis said all the judges are “good guys,” but hopes the suspensions send a message to other judges in New Jersey and regulatory commissions around the country.
“We can’t be satisfied with subpar performances,” he said. “We don’t accept that from fighters. We shouldn’t accept it from our officials either. If people know they’re going to be accountable for their actions, hopefully they’ll take better actions.”
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