Don King, on Mike Tyson


"Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter?
He went to prison, not to Princeton."



"To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music
and the dancers hit each other."

Monday, August 24, 2015

In the Boxing Gym With John Leguizamo





A Day Out in the Boxing Gym With John Leguizamo





By RUTH LA FERLA

AUG. 21, 2015



At the Church Street gym, John Leguizamo talked about acting and sparring.CreditKrista Schlueter for The New York Times









Accidents happen. Few people know better than John Leguizamo, who was sparring the other day at the Church Street Boxing Gym in Lower Manhattan with his longtime trainer, Jenaro Diaz.



“Stay loose, keep that shoulder back,” Mr. Diaz urged him, with Mr. Leguizamo making sure all the while to keep his gloves up, shielding what is arguably an actor’s prize asset, his face.



“He wouldn’t hit me there,” said Mr. Leguizamo, 51, as he hopped down from the ring to settle on a cast-iron stair. “But this sport can be as dangerous as you want to go.”



Mr. Leguizamo has courted peril throughout his career. Once while filming, he said, raising his palm to his temple, “I was hit so hard that my head pounded for a week.”

Continue reading the main story

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The New Workout: Boxing Without the BruisesAUG. 6, 2015




He talked about Adrien Brody, who starred opposite him in the 1999 movie “Summer of Sam.” Mr. Brody had insisted on performing his own stunts, Mr. Leguizamo recalled, and for his trouble got a clout in the face that literally and permanently put his nose out of joint.



Mr. Leguizamo, compact, agile and a little tightly wound, also did his own stunts until recently. He remembered a film project years ago: “I was on a railroad track with the train coming on at a safe distance behind me. But at some point I looked back and saw the train was gaining on me. I panicked, slipped on a rail and at the last minute rolled off the tracks.”



Whew.



His current role, as the improbably named Rose, friend and drug dealer to the stoner hero played by Jesse Eisenberg in the action comedy “American Ultra,” tapped a similarly kinetic energy.



Playing an engaging, fever-brained thug required Mr. Leguizamo to alternate a heedless quasi-comic bravado with dark bug-eyed terror. The director, Nima Nourizadeh, “challenged me to go totally nuts,” he said, “and I told him, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’ I wanted to do something nobody had ever seen me do.”



His character, liberally tattooed and as jumpy as a feral cat, was modeled loosely on a high school classmate, he said, “a kid who was kind of outrageous and out of control. I added my own kink with the paranoia.”



Mr. Leguizamo, who has turned his gritty adolescence into a professional calling card, encountered plenty of loose cannons in the day. Growing up in the sociocultural melting pot of Jackson Heights, Queens, he was quick to put up his dukes, even at the risk of turning himself into the neighborhood punching bag.



Yet at the gym, its floors scuffed with age, its walls plastered with pinups and portraits of champions, he seemed entirely in his element. “Boxing is this most basic primal thing,” he said. “This notion that you have got to defend yourself.”



For Mr. Leguizamo, that notion has long been a leitmotif. “As a kid, people would pick on me,” he said. “Italians, Latinos, black kids: They were trying to shame you, to make you punk out. But I wouldn’t back down. I wouldn’t take it.”



“I’d say, ‘Let’s fight,’ and then I would get beat up. I was shaking through the whole thing, but I knew only one way out.”





Not incidentally, in the 2003 HBO movie “Undefeated,” which he directed, Mr. Leguizamo plays a boxer slugging his way out of Queens.



The sweaty air at Church Street seemed to draw out the street tough in him. The actor sprawled loose-limbed on the stairs and from time to time called encouragement to a young boxer in the ring.



Yet Mr. Leguizamo, who made his name in the late 1980s and ’90s by embracing and simultaneously sending up his Latino heritage, confided that he once dreamed of genteel assimilation. “I went to college. I tried to get rid of my accent, my streetness,” he said. “But they won’t let you do that.”



In Hollywood there were casting hurdles. “I had a lot of people telling me, ‘Stay out of the sun,’ ” he said. “ ‘Say that you’re Italian.’ There was a lot of shame.”



He’s not looking back, though. He loves making films, especially indies, he said, but relishes still more “the infinite possibilities of the stage.”



“If on any given night you’re hungry, you’re sick or you’re heartbroken,” he said. “Whatever you do comes out different.”



No matter, he said, “You’ve got to commit.”





A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2015, on page ST9 of the New York edition with the headline: An Actor Learns to Keep His Guard Up.







Source:

A Day Out in the Boxing Gym With John Leguizamo - The New York Times:

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Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Marco Huck vs Krzysztof Glowacki 2015 08-14


Possible Fight of the Year

Marco Huck

 Krzystof Glowacki stuns Marco Huck

This fight highlighted hard punching by two determined fighters who both fought back after being stunned and the drama had a fantastic finish.  You had the feeling throughout the entire fight that either fighter might get knocked out at any time. Hopefully, they will fight in a rematch.  It would still be a coin toss deciding who would dominate the next time around. 





Published on Aug 15, 2015
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Source: https://youtu.be/N0Gx2ONc7o8



Sunday, August 16, 2015

Tony Thompson failed drug test for bout that ruined David Price career

Tony Thompson failed drug test for bout that ruined David Price career | Sport | The Guardian:

"It has emerged that the heavyweight boxer Tony Thompson failed a drugs test for the fight that ruined David Price’s career.



The American, who stopped Price in both February and July 2013, tested positive for hydrochlorothiazide – which is classified as a diuretic and masking agent – after their July rematch.



Price’s prospects have since diminished despite him then being considered a potential world heavyweight champion. Following the second of the defeats the 32-year-old split with his trainers, Franny Smith and Lennox Lewis, and the promoter Frank Maloney and turned to a sports psychologist.



His latest attempts to rebuild his reputation led to a third knockout defeat, earlier this month for the European title, to Germany’s Erkan Teper.



Thompson, 43, who insisted doping should be legalised before his first defeat of Price, has fought four times since; he was banned by the British Boxing Board of Control for 18 months but that was only enforceable in the UK.



The ban expired in May 2015. David Price: I had a few little scuffles on the playground as a kid Read more Price learnt of the ban only on Sunday. An insider in his camp said the second defeat, and the way Thompson recovered from a heavy second-round knockdown, caused Price to “seriously question himself – he was low, he thought his career was over”, and contributed to his decline. UK Anti-Doping said in a statement the delay in Thompson’s failed drugs test being revealed was a consequence of the American’s response to the charge. “The athlete instigated a lengthy legal process, including filing an appeal which he failed to progress and which was ultimately dismissed,” the statement read.



The decision was published by the National Anti-Doping Panel. It revealed Thompson argued the banned substance entered his body through a medication taken for high blood pressure – not to control his weight or hide other substances – but he did not provide sufficient proof from a medical professional to support this. He also claimed to be unaware hydrochlorothiazide was banned.



He was given a separate 12-month ban by the Austrian Boxing Federation for the presence of the same substance when fighting Kubrat Pulev in August 2013, three weeks after UKAD contacted him about their case. Thompson continues to maintain his innocence. When contacted yesterday he said: “I did fail a drugs test but everybody knows what I failed it for – high blood pressure medicine. “How could it be wrongdoing? I’m taking it for what the doctor prescribed it for. I have high blood pressure, I have for the last 15 years.”"



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I often wondered why these types of cheaters came up positive for diuretics until I read that Hydrochlorothiazide is classified as a diuretic and masking agent


Diuretics and Masking Agents | Play Healthy

 

playhealthy.drugfree.org/facts/diuretics-and-masking-agents


Diuretics and Masking Agents are products that dilute or mask a urine sample used in drug testing or impair the excretion of a performance enhancing substance to conceal its presence in a urine sample. Masking Agents eliminate fluid from the body to hide or “mask” a performance enhancing substance. Diuretics reduce the concentration of a performance enhancing substance in the urine so the chance of detecting the performance enhancing substance is decreased.

Examples of Masking Agents include but are not limited to: Alpha-Reductase Inhibitors (i.e., Finasteride and Dutasteride), Epitestosterone, Probenecid and Plasma Expanders (i.e., Albumin, Dextran and Hydroxyethyl Starch).

Examples of Diuretics include but are not limited to: Acetazolamide, Amiloride, Bumetanide, Canrenone, Chlorthalidone, Ethacryrnic Acid, Furosemide, Indapamide, Metolazone, Spironolactone, Thiazides (i.e., Bendroflumethiazide, Chlorothiazide, Hydrochlorothiazide) and Triamterene.



 GET THE FACTS
 
Steroids
Stimulants
Human Growth Hormone
Human Chorionic Gonatropin (hCG)
Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)
Insulin-Like Growth Factors (IGFs)
Diuretics and Masking Agents
Miscellaneous Anabolic Agents
Erythropoietin (EPO)
Anti-Estrogens
Performance Enhancing Supplement
Energy Drinks
Over-the-Counter Dietary Weight Loss Supplements and Pills
Nutritional and Dietary Supplements


http://playhealthy.drugfree.org/facts/stimulants


Stimulants:
Amphetamine
Clobenzorex
Ephedrine
Methylphenidate



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David Price Tony Thompson II - YouTube

Friday, August 14, 2015

Boxer Cam Awesome Delivers Nutso Postfight Interview After Losing


Published on Jul 24, 2015
Cam Awesome, nĂ© Lenroy Thompson, lost his semifinal bout tonight to Cuban heavyweight Lenier Pero but “won” the wacky postfight interview with ESPN, making references to himself being the “Taylor Swift of boxing” and insisting, as the way a man who changes his name to Awesome only can, that he was the real winner.



Awesome takes on geopolitics, linguistics, and social media in the manic and weird interview which at this point we really must just insist you watch for yourself.



[ESPN2]




Ring magazine looks to future with live fights - Dan Rafael Blog - ESPN


The Ring magazine -- the “Bible of Boxing” -- has chronicled nearly a century of the sport’s rich history since it was founded in 1922. While the magazine still publishes a printed product, it has done what virtually every publication has done, which is to concentrate the bulk of its coverage on its website.

Now the venerable Ring brand, owned by Golden Boy promoter Oscar De La (just the fifth owner in Ring history) is making a major move with its fight coverage. It will become an outlet for live boxing, not just stories about those fights.

The magazine’s website, www.ringtv.com, will begin streaming live fights via Roku, Amazon Fire and (eventually) Apple TV beginning Sept. 4.

It will start with live streaming coverage of two Golden Boy fight cards per month, including its “LA Fight Club” series, which lost its English-language home on Fox Sports 1 this summer when Golden Boy’s contract was not renewed. Golden Boy found a home for the Spanish-language telecast on Estrella TV.

Besides the Golden Boy bouts (and other video content), Ring said it will work with other boxing promoters from around the world to secure American streaming rights for non-Golden Boy events.

“The boxing fan of today is interested in following the sport through multiple mediums – cable, (video on demand), print, mobile, online and streaming video,” said Michael Rosenthal, Ring’s editor in chief. “Our fan base is loyal and eager to watch not only live, action-packed fights but everything that goes into making those fights. That includes training, press conferences, weigh-ins and more. The Ring TV app will help us deliver that type of content to fans all over the world.”

Ring also plans to provide on-demand fights from the Golden Boy library.

De La Hoya said he was glad to be able to put his Ring platform to good use by showing live fights regularly as well other fight-related activities.

“Now, no matter what language fans speak they will be able watch future world champion fighters at the beginning of promising careers either on The Ring TV or on Estrella TV,” De La Hoya said."



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Source: Ring magazine looks to future with live fights - Dan Rafael Blog - ESPN: "N Senior Writer