welcome back…I haven’t moved since December, but I won’t argue that TCS is not some sort of dead link…

Poor Jessica Savitch. But, as you probably remember, you don’t have to go that far out of boxing for similar shenanigans…I remember the clearly inebriated Frank DeFord “hosting” a few pay-per-views in the late 1990s, with Collins glass in hand. Only in this sport can a man who admits freely that he hates boxing (“I despise boxing…”) be hired as a broadcaster…

As far as Pacquiao goes, it’s true, not many are going to remember the Clottey Two-step–except for its Cowboys Stadium setting–but he never stopped fighting hard and Clottey never stopped doing his imitation of one of those Pillow People from the 1980s…In the end, it’s just a line of type in the record books….Let’s see what Bob Arum conjures up for Pacquiao in the future….

thanks for checking in. This is why you want to have a decent scrap or two on the undercard…If the main event doesn’t hold up, you can at least say “But the fight between so and so was really good!” But no, we can’t have that. Instead we have to be the guinea pigs for Bob Arum’s bizarre lab experiments….According to CompuBox, Pacquiao only landed 20% of his shots…if Clottey doesn’t feel like getting hit too much, he won’t….

Lampley used to be pretty good, but at a certain point, everyone in this business (except the fighters, for the most part) becomes an egomaniac and he’s no different. He just wanted to be the center of attention and found the dopiest way to do it….

As for Telefutura, every now and then Golden Boy seems to be satisfied with a small profit on an event-by-event basis and puts on a decent club show for it’s own sake. Hopefully, they’ll do that once in a while on Telefutura, otherwise they should just call their show “Future Champions Beat Up Cristian Favela.”

Yeah, man, you miss a lot of carnage on TCS when you go on strike….

Comparing the Lampley meltdown to the Howard Dean shriek. Classic. Or how about the infamous Jessica Savtich NBC news digest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr8AExHciBE

I do believe that many years ago, when Lampley was first starting out as one of the first sideline reporters for college football on ABC (before that became the exclusive realm of hot looking females), that there WAS an incident involving certain substances. More of the Bolivian variety, rather than the choice of the trailer park population– some of who probably write copy for Boxing Scene.

As for the boxing, compared to the many nuthuggers pro and con, I like to think I can be objective on Pac. But there was absolutely NOTHING to be added to his legacy by that fiasco Saturday night (through no fault of his own) when Clottey didnt show up at all. 1200 punches against an inanimate object I guess means something but not a lot. And maybe we can read something into the fact that Cotto didn’t strike that fear into Clottey. But this one will be completely forgotten twenty years from now when we look back at Pac. Next.

“Broadcast vigilante” is pretty good! I like that one. That Bang thing was truly one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever heard during a fight. Crazy form of Tourettes or something.

Not as excited as most seem to be about the Telefura thing as most seem to be. And Golden Boy just doesn’t inspire confidence.

Anyway, hope you’re well man, I missed a lot of good stuff since I last checked in

Thanks for writing. I hear you about watching a decent bout regardless of the bona fides of its participants, but this was on a pricey PPV with lots of pre-fight hype. 85% of boxing matches are made solely to advance the promoter’s agenda and Saturday night was a clear case of that…It’s just a question of matchmaking for a big event…for 100K more, Top Rank could have put on a much more exciting show…not necessarily featuring Kelly Pavlik as the chief support, for example, but putting in some younger, hungrier, more exciting boxers in there.

To be honest, by the time Soto-Diaz came around, I was already in a stupor brought on by boredom, but it seemed to me that Soto was on autopilot and that Diaz was just not talented enough to do anything about it. This seemed underscored by the constant handshakes and hugs shared between the two during the fight….It’s always good to see veteran fighters get paid, however…

Lampley, to me, is a symbol of all the egos outside of the ropes constantly vying for attention at the expense of the fighters and the spectators…he used to be a professional on ABC and now he’s morphed into, as you say, the crazy uncle….

I don’t follow MMA much, but I’m aware of the UFC’s reputation for filling cards top to bottom….no promoter in boxing will ever get a similar rep…the last one to have that kind of rep was Don King, whose early 1990s shows now look legendary…

Like you say, you need to entertained and casual boxing fans are going to say –and have said- -that the Pacquiao-Clottey show was awful….

lampley is what you get.. knocking that guy is like knocking your crazy uncle at the reunion…every year, every event, things get uncomfortable when he’s around. it’s just how it is. lampley and merchant were like the off kilter uncles from whichever side of the family you always secretly laughed.

boxing purists hate on mma, but i can’t remember the last UFC that charged that much for an event…and virtually showed 1 fight that beforehand you could even say semi-mattered.

it’s sports, combat sports even…but still entertainment.