BEST OF TCS

**** Boxing Needs You, Baby! On Arum, Pacquiao, & Mosley Professional logicians would go mad, like blindfolded chess players, trying to make sense of boxing, its followers, and that strange hydra-headed beast, the fight media. When Bob Arum recently confirmed that Shane Mosley would be facing Manny Pacquiao in the spring, all of fistic cyberspace seemed to spontaneously combust at the announcement. Nobody, it was howled, wants to see this fight. It is an outrage! Like the Antonio Margarito-Manny Pacquiao affair, this declaration lead first to spluttering Twitter indignation and then to calls for a boycott. To his many accomplishments [...]

On May 26, 1911, the first White Hope tournament, a motley assortment of eleven barnyard scrappers and dockwallopers, was held at the National Sporting Club in New York City. How such a tournament could be staged with a counterintuitive number of participants in a state where decisions were outlawed is testament to the huckster genius of Tom O’Rourke, ex-boxer, occasional promoter, full-time hustler and glib manager of, among others, African-American greats Joe Walcott and George Dixon. O’Rourke was one of several managers who smelled greenbacks in the pursuit of white fighters during the Jack Johnson era.  The national want ads, kick started by millionaire author and amateur Darwinist Jack [...]

***** “All he wanted to do was fight, fight, fight.” Paul Gallico ***** He tore out of the Great American Desert to make a mockery of the carefree Jazz Age, trailing behind him the dark shadow of the lawless frontier, snarling, heeling, butting, permanent stubble underpinning his perpetual scowl. From the High Plains he scratched his way to riches in Los Angeles before winding up, incongruously, under the whirling lights of Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, where he ignored the carousels on his way to doing what he loved doing best: raising cain. To hell with kewpie dolls, red [...]

***** A sharp and focused Victor Ortiz thrashed Andre Berto in a savage—if slightly one-sided—bout on Saturday night at the MGM Grand Theater at Foxwoods Resort & Casino, scoring a unanimous decision over 12 grisly rounds in a fight that featured multiple knockdowns. Final scores were 114-111, 115-110, and an imprecise 114-112. With the loss, the parallel universe career of Andre Berto gets its first dose of reality in years. Somehow Berto, who is more Quiznos than caviar, became a meal ticket for Al Haymon and Lou DiBella, despite the fact that Berto has long been little more than a [...]

***** Amir Khan underwent a trial by inferno against pitiless Marcos Maidana last night at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, notching a unanimous decision in a spiteful war that left both fighters battered, spent, bruised, and ennobled. Both men punished each other–with a fervor–throughout the fight.

Now that Antonio Margarito has gotten a license from a vending machine in the lobby of the offices of the Texas Combative Sports Commission, his fight with Manny Pacquiao is officially on. And with the looming bout, apparently, comes a maelstrom of criticism, outrage, and pompous advice sure to last as long as the buildup to the fight itself.

Antonio Margarito has become the sanctimonious hobby horse of the hour. In a comical hearing not exactly the dramatic equivalent of Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy of A Murder or Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, Antonio Margarito, shot down by a 5-1 vote against, was denied a license to fight by the California State Athletic Commission. Insisting that the doctored knucklepad was the sole work of his trainer, the Renfield-like Javier Capitello, Margarito will have to go elsewhere in the United States for a license.

With the recent announcement that Golden Boy Promotions will be sandbagging its Shane Mosley-Sergio Mora pay-per-view with Carlos Baldomir (who will be 20 years older than his opponent) and Vivian Harris (two fights removed from being taken out of the ring on a stretcher), thereby converting the Staples Center into some kind of temporary necropolis, undercards continue to be a subject of what passes for debate in boxing.