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By John Lumpkin If you peruse various boxing forums, there is a lot of concern that MMA is going to be the end of boxing. To some degree, the concerns are not unreasonable as we have witnessed a steady decline in the mainstream press coverage of boxing. 
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By Thomas Hauser Earlier this month, I wrote an article entitled Hypocrisy at West Point that called into question a policy known as the “alternative service option.” In relevant part, that policy states, “Army cadet-athletes now have options to pursue professional athletic opportunities thanks to the U.S. Army’s Alternative Service Option program. If cadet-athletes are accepted into the program, they wi
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By John Lumpkin Tell the truth now, how many of you recognized – scratch that, knew that Zsolt Erdei was THE reigning World Light Heavyweight Champion?
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By Jason Pribila Shortly after Miguel Cotto got out of the shower following his pummeling of Alfonso Gomez on April 12 in Atlantic City, Top Rank Promoter, Bob Arum told the media that he would like to match Miguel against Antonio Margarito, who was an hour removed from knocking out Kermit Cintron.
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By Thomas Hauser Visually, the upcoming fight between Joe Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins looks like a confrontation between a concert violinist and a street thug. The combatants’ personalities are vastly different too.
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By Matthew Hurley: There has always been something quietly remarkable about boxer Larry Holmes. The former heavyweight champion of the world was a calm, patient tactician in the ring.
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By Thomas Hauser Caleb Campbell (United States Military Academy, Class of 2008) is 23 years old and was captain of the 2007 Army football team. Less admirably, he is a prime example of the hypocrisy that attends the war currently being waged at the behest of his commander-in-chief.
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By Thomas Hauser 1. It was a hard-fought battle with lots of controversy, but promoter Gary Shaw accepted his fighter’s loss gracefully.
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By Thomas Hauser “The greatest tragedy for heavyweight boxing,” James Lawton has written, “is not so much the decline so visible in the remnants of a once compelling trade, but the way what is left of the carcass is still fed upon so ravenously.”
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By Thomas Hauser John Duddy sat on a chair in dressing room #5 at Madison Square Garden and bowed his head. An hour earlier, he’d been on the same chair, readying to do battle against a club fighter named Walid Smichet, who’d been chosen in the belief that his style and limited ring skills would make Duddy look good. Their fight was presumed to be the final step on the journey to a lucrative match-up between John and middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik.
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By Thomas Hauser The crowning achievement for one fighter is often the low point for another. In July 2005, when Jermain Taylor dethroned Bernard Hopkins, it was his greatest triumph. But for The Executioner, it was the most bitter defeat in an illustrious ring career. Two years later, boxing’s wheel of fortune turned again. Kelly Pavlik seized the middleweight title by knocking out Taylor in seven rounds. This time, it was Jermain whose world was turned upside down
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By Thomas Hauser I met Don King for the first time in autumn 1983. I’d just started researching a book entitled The Black Lights, which was my initial foray into boxing writing. Bill Cayton and Jim Jacobs (who co-managed WBC lightweight champion Edwin Rosario) invited me to lunch. I arrived at their office, and Bill told me, “Don King will be joining us.”
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By Thomas Hauser On May 15, 2004, one moment of violence turned Roy Jones’s world upside down. Antonio Tarver landed a single perfectly-timed punch in the second round, and the cloak of invincibility that had led boxing’s reigning “pound-for-pound” king to be mentioned in the same breath as Sugar Ray Robinson was gone.
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By Thomas Hauser Heavyweights are a different breed of fighter. There’s something about a promising young heavyweight that makes cynical boxing aficionados swoon and normally cautious investors open their wallets. As legendary matchmaker Teddy Brenner once observed, “There’s boxing and there’s heavyweight boxing.”
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By Thomas Hauser “The truth comes out in a boxing ring,” says Paulie Malignaggi. “I’ve seen a lot of guys who are tough on the streets come into the gym and turn their back once they get in the ring. Boxing does one of two things. It makes a coward out of you or it makes you a man."
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By Thomas Hauser The line between programming and marketing in sports is often blurred. Two HBO offerings -- 24/7 and Countdown – exemplify this circumstance.
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By Thomas Hauser There’s a time-honored promotional tactic in the entertainment industry. Create a buzz that an event is where everyone wants to be; and suddenly, because of the buzz, everyone wants to be there.
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By Thomas Hauser “Every so often,” essayist Arthur Krystal writes, “two men arise with differently cast minds representing different constituencies, who capture the attention of people not normally disposed to view a fight. Perhaps each battler embodies the interested spectator’s own hopes of how the world works.”
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By Thomas Hauser Today’s video-game culture and increasingly violent movies have spawned a demand for entertainment that offers clearly-visible mayhem.
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By Thomas Hauser Each year during the holiday season, I publish a list of what I consider to be the best books on boxing. That list, updated with recently published titles, follows. Some of these books are now out of print. But with the proliferation of online services like Abebooks.com and Amazon.com, all of them can be found.
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By Thomas Hauser Some of boxing’s most memorable battles have been contested in the courtroom, not the ring.
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By Thomas Hauser We don’t stop being citizens when we enter the world of sports. With that in mind, once a year I use this space to address issues that are more important than boxing.
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By Thomas Hauser Vinny Maddalone is a club fighter with the heart of a champion. Boxrec.com lists him as the 206th-ranked heavyweight in the world. His records stands at 28 wins and 4 losses with 19 knockouts. There was a fifth loss, but the verdict was changed to “no contest” after his opponent tested positive for marijuana.
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By Thomas Hauser I have a great mother. She got married at nineteen, and I was a wedding night baby. She isn’t young anymore, but she’s still young at heart.
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By Thomas Hauser For most of the world, a prize fight is a sporting event, entertainment, a show. For a fighter, each bout carries the potential to be a crucial turning point in his life.
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By Thomas Hauser September 22nd will mark the eightieth anniversary of the famous “long count” fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. The two men are remembered as adjoining links in history’s chain of heavyweight champions. But Dempsey was more than just another champion. He was one of the most charismatic fighters in ring history and the bridge between boxing’s old and modern eras.
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By Thomas Hauser In the past, I’ve recounted the memories of boxing personalities regarding the first professional fight they ever saw. The recollections of four more individuals who have left their mark on the sweet science follow:
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By Thomas Hauser The recent betting scandal involving NBA referee Tim Donaghy should be a wake-up call for other sports. Donaghy, as virtually everyone in the sports world now knows, pled guilty to two felonies related to allegations that he had passed information to organized crime figures and placed bets on NBA games that he officiated.
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By Thomas Hauser As sports and technology have evolved over the years, training and coaching have evolved with them. From video-tape to computer analysis to sports medicine, the sources of improvement are endless. By way of example, some of the men who won gold medals in swimming at the 1960 Rome Olympics wouldn’t have qualified for the women’s finals at the 2004 Athens games.
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By Thomas Hauser There’s a centuries-old proverb, “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” Howard Cosell used to declaim, “You can buy the writers for a ham sandwich.” “With some writers, it’s in their DNA,” says former Boxing Writers Association of America president Bernard Fernandez. “If it’s free, they have to eat it.”
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By Thomas Hauser Bernard Hopkins is a writer’s fighter. He’s quotable and charismatic with marvellous ring skills to match his persona. He’s also an exceedingly complex man with personal potential that has yet to be fully tapped. He can be smart and foolish, diplomatic and brusque, funny and mean, charming and cruel. At times, he’s wise.
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By Thomas Hauser: Glory came late for Bernard Hopkins. Bernard’s first pro fight was at age 23 for a purse of four hundred dollars. He lost, sat out for sixteen months, returned to the ring in 1990, and was defeated only once over the next fifteen years. In 1995, he captured the IBF middleweight crown with a seventh-round knockout of Segundo Mercado. Ultimately, he made twenty consecutive title defenses.
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By Thomas Hauser In April 2001, I was in Las Vegas for the fight between Naseem Hamed and Marco Antonio Barrera. Meanwhile, in the days before their encounter, the arena at the MGM Grand was taken over by Julia Roberts, George Clooney, and company, who were filming a remake of Ocean’s Eleven.
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By Thomas Hauser The recent contract negotiations between Larry Merchant and HBO offer insight into several facets of the relationship between boxing and the media.
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By Thomas Hauser The first fight that Bob Arum promoted was Muhammad Ali versus George Chuvalo in 1966. Arum is 75 years old now. He and Don King are self-described “dinosaurs of the sport.” But while King has seen his influence fade in recent years, Arum’s remains constant. His current roster of fighters includes Manny Pacquiao, Antonio Margarito, Kelly Pavlik, Erik Morales, Jose Luis Castillo, Humberto Soto, Kid Diamond, Jorge Arce, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Hasim Rahman, and Migue
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By Thomas Hauser Perpendicular to the boardwalk in Atlantic City, a four-story shopping mall called The Pier Shops at Caesars extends across a narrow beach and juts out over the Atlantic Ocean. Standing at the eastern end of the mall, one can gaze at the ocean and see Herman Melville’s “great shroud of the sea” as it rolled on thousands of years ago.
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By Thomas Hauser She’s 79 years old now and lives in a one-bedroom apartment in East Las Vegas, the industrial part of town. Defying age, she has managed to remain both shapely and slender. She’s charming and disarming with an air of refinement and still has long fiery-red hair.
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By Thomas Hauser: Boxing’s historical record, like most forms of history, centers on the exploits of kings, not foot soldiers. But the sweet science is about more than great champions. Journeymen, faceless opponents, and young fighters with optimism are an integral part of the game.
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By Thomas Hauser: At 5:00 PM on Wednesday, May 2nd. Floyd Mayweather Jr. was holding court at the Mayweather Boxing Club, the storefront gym in Las Vegas where he trains.
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By Thomas Hauser For the past two years, in addition to his involvement with boxing, Lou DiBella has been president and managing partner of the Connecticut Defenders (a Double-A minor league baseball team). His goal is to someday be managing partner of the New York Mets. So, what would happen if the people who run boxing took over Major League Baseball? Here’s a sampling of what we could expect:
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By Thomas Hauser In 1973, Elton John advised the world, “Saturday night’s alright for fighting; get a little action in.” Now Saturday is the only night on which mega-fights are held.
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By Thomas Hauser: The New York State Athletic Commission has made enormous progress with Ron Scott Stevens as chairman. It might now be the best commission in the country.
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By Thomas Hauser Fans watch fighters in the ring and see the blows. That’s very different from getting hit. And while fans often identify with fighters, they rarely consider what watching a fight is like for someone who has close personal ties to one of the combatants and loves him.
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By Thomas Hauser Bob Sheridan was first behind the microphone for a fight in 1966. Since then, he has called more than 800 championship bouts and become an integral part of boxing’s historical soundtrack. From radio to broadcast television to closed-circuit to pay-per-view; been there, done that.
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By Thomas Hauser The tagline for the fight (“The World Awaits”) is a bit pretentious. The world hasn’t paid much attention to boxing lately. The days of Louis-Schmeling II and Ali-Frazier I (when the world really awaited a prize fight) are gone. But boxing is waiting for Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd Mayweather Jr like a drowning man who sees a log floating in his direction. The log won’t solve all of his problems but it will keep him afloat for a while.
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By Thomas Hauser It has become accepted sport in the boxing industry for writers to trash today’s heavyweights. With that in mind (and on the theory that turnabout is fair play), I asked some of the more-criticized heavyweights of recent years to evaluate today’s boxing writers. Their thoughts follow.
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By Thomas Hauser Last Saturday (February 17th), boxing returned to New York City in the form of an HBO Boxing After Dark triple-header at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The main event featured Paulie Malignaggi (21-1, 5 KOs), who was in action for the first time since his June 10th loss to Miguel Cotto.
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By Thomas Hauser "The sweet science," A. J. Liebling observed, "is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder."When Liebling penned those words, he was referring to the lineage of boxing’s heavyweight champions. It was a glorious line of succession revered by fight fans with the same emotion that British royalists embrace the monarchy.
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By Thomas Hauser The May 5th fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr might turn out to be the largest-grossing fight in the history of boxing. Over the next few months, thousands of articles will be written about the combatants. Their respective pysches will be thoroughly explored. I don’t claim intimate knowledge of either man, but one experience with Mayweather stands out in my mind.
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