Tag: George Foreman

Come in 37, your time is up – Whyte and Itauma at a familiar crossroads

Article first appeared at BigFightWeekend.com

Every match made in a boxing career is, essentially, a crossroads fight.  

Terminology widely applied to bouts between fighters on an upward trajectory and an opponent trying to arrest decline or prove it to be a false narrative. Crossroads fights tend to have something at stake for both parties subject to the grasp the veteran has on the remnants of his ambition and the potential that pulses beneath the novice’s bravado. The advantages of youth versus the assurance of battle hardiness. 

Moses Itauma, aged 20, versus Dillian Whyte, 37 years young, possesses all the elements required to earn the crossroads moniker and is the latest in a long line of prospects facing off against an established name.

Continue reading “Come in 37, your time is up – Whyte and Itauma at a familiar crossroads” →
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Veteran Wilder punches toward future greatness

The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
Bob Fitzsimmons, 1862-1917

It is the nature of the meandering river of life that the vistas and postcards of the past can seem more lustrous than our current view. That which has passed becomes richer for the embellishment our memory imposes and the present dulls as our optimism dissipates with grey hair and midlife. Applied to boxing, it exaggerates our heroes and denigrates their successors.

This manifests as “Tommy levels Floyd”, “nobody beats peak Iron Mike”, or for older observers, “nobody punched like the Brown Bomber”. Ask Eddie Murphy. These opinions root deeply, becoming fixed in the landscape of our outlook. It closes us to the brilliance of now. The genius around us. Things new can still be great and may one day, if we are spared long enough, be the fixations of our future. Best to embrace the enjoyment they provide as if still young ourselves, than diminish them in the kangaroo court of our rose-filtered nostalgia.

Saturday’s knockout win, accumulated with a single right hand that travelled around 18 inches, continued to confirm that future history will smile on Deontay Wilder in much the same way it romantacises those bygone gladiators.

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DeMarcus Corley, the old grifter, dances into another Diggstown

‘The guy got hurt. It happens. It happens to fighters. I thought you knew that.‘

James Woods, as Gabriel Caine, in Diggstown.

In the 1992 picture, Diggstown, or Midnight Sting for those on this side of the pond, Lou Gossett Jnr. plays ‘Honey’ Roy Palmer. A long retired prizefighter for whom fame never called. Subjected to the persuasive patter of con-man Gabriel Caine, Palmer finds himself in the titular town with 10 opponents lined up to face him in a 24 hour period. The prospects of triumph seem distant and the consequences of defeat, and the lost bet for Caine, catastrophic given the Mafia origins of the money Caine has wagered on the outcome.

‘Honey’ Roy, like DeMarcus Corley, who boxes again this weekend two years on from the last of a long sequence of defeats, had retained a fighter’s physique and the wiles of a well-schooled pug, but he was, nevertheless, 47 years old.

Continue reading “DeMarcus Corley, the old grifter, dances into another Diggstown” →
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Dubois and Joyce clash in the heavyweight foothills

Don’t be afraid to take a big step, you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.

David Lloyd George, Politician
1863-1945

It is all too rare for unbeaten prospects to fight while still in the foothill stages of their climb toward boxing’s mountain top. So numerous and divergent are the paths to boxing’s summit; and the world titles to be found there, a prize broader and less elusive than the zenith it once represented, that exciting contenders often progress in isolation of each other. The fear of falling back from the trail tends to prove more persuasive than the rewards found in victory or the lessons of defeat.

On Saturday night, British heavyweights Daniel Dubois and Joe Joyce will dispense with the unsatisfactory custom of cosmetic record padding and pitch their unresolved potential against one another. The fighters, the division, boxing fans and the sport itself will benefit from the nobility of trying to authenticate their standing as a potential world title challenger in the old fashioned way.

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Deontay Wilder and his battle with truth and nostalgia

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” 
― Virginia Woolf

In a world of fake news, to which all facts become refutable, where opinion matters more than truth and being right is a state of mind rather than a resolved conclusion, it becomes ever harder to remain objective in our summation of fighters. Fighters like Deontay Wilder. These modern ills encourage closed thinking, nostalgia for times passed and the methods and ways that made them.

To crave that past is natural, to canonise those who loomed large within it likewise, but it is a flawed benchmark with which to measure those who swim in their wake. It is a story as prevalent in boxing as any other facet of life. The hurricane of content we are subjected to in the age of social media does tug at the anchor points of these beliefs but amid the din of those gales, we can all be guilty of becoming extremist in our view in order to be heard, clinging ever more tightly to the rigidity of our thinking. Continue reading “Deontay Wilder and his battle with truth and nostalgia” →

Boxing: The Ali Files by Norman Giller – A review

The-Ali-Files-1

Within the pages of The Ali Files, from the pen of the prolific Norman Giller, there is a gift for boxing fans young and old. Particularly those for whom Muhammad Ali is an experience afforded by the proxy of film or television interview or those of us desensitised to his brilliance by time and the ensuing mythologising and marketing of his story.

In The Ali Files, Giller has returned Muhammad to his rightful home. The ring. The place where the story began and where his legend was hewn. It serves to refresh us all, including the great man himself.   Continue reading “Boxing: The Ali Files by Norman Giller – A review” →

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Boxing: Povetkin still looking for the World but now without an Atlas.

Muhammad Ali was 32 years old when he Rumbled in the Jungle in 1974. His victory considered all the more miraculous given his veteran status and the power of youth presumed to reside with George Foreman.  There are many who feel he should have retired at that zenith. How times change. On Saturday night another 32-year-old, Alexander Povetkin, he of the callow face and quiet demeanour, will belatedly try to step from the shadows of the brothers Ukraine. Continue reading “Boxing: Povetkin still looking for the World but now without an Atlas.” →

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Don King signs Barrera, does it still matter?

In any consideration of those who transcended boxing over the past 30 years and found a place in the consciousness of the general public; Ali, Foreman and Tyson would surely stand head and shoulders above even Sugar Ray Leonard, Prince Naseem Hamed and Oscar DeLaHoya. Though not strictly a sporting figure, having never seen combat inside the ring, I think the man who stood between Ali and Foreman back in 1974 and who oversaw much of the money-making period of Mike Tyson’s career is arguably boxing’s fourth most recognisable face, Don King. Does this week’s signing of Barrera show an ebbing significance or  the beginning of a renaissance for boxing’s most infamous promoter?

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Boxing: Achieving the Unachievable? Holyfield Gets The Shot

Evander3In truth Evander Holyfield’s status as a boxing legend is already assured. Any fighter who has clashed with Holmes, Bowe, Foreman, Lewis and Tyson, irrespective of their age and form at the time, is clearly a world-class operator and the manner of Holyfield’s performances during his pomp endeared him to a generation, or two, of boxing fans. His latest run at the title, as a forty something has on occasion looked capable of undermining all of his preceding achievements, but Evander, the most irrepressible of men, may yet have the last laugh. Thanks to the withdrawal of Ruslan Chagaev, he has his shot. Continue reading “Boxing: Achieving the Unachievable? Holyfield Gets The Shot” →

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Tommy Morrison To Fight in MMA

TommyM“I’m just going to walk in and hit him on the chin.”

Seriously, stop it. So far this week I’ve read reports about Evander Holyfield, Henry Akinwande, Andrew Golota and Oliver McCall, today’s ‘vintage’ heavyweight – and I don’t mean that in a fine wine type way – is Tommy Morrison. I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve had a “Life on Mars” type experience and been transported back to 1994. Clinton in the White House and Billy tearing the labels from his bottles of bud. Continue reading “Tommy Morrison To Fight in MMA” →

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Hopkins Returns. Did he ever leave?

Bernard Hopkins

When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.

Norman Mailer, Author, 1923-2007, The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Boxing needs personalities. And never more so than in the beleaguered heavyweight division. Yesterday’s announcement, and the worst kept secret in boxing, that former middleweight great and presently consensus Light-Heavyweight champion, Bernard Hopkins plans to return in the blue ribbon weight class didn’t cause the gasps of disbelief the ‘Executioner’ appears to crave.

Continue reading “Hopkins Returns. Did he ever leave?” →
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