Tag Archives: Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.

Podcast Review – The HBO Boxing Podcast

01 Thursday May 2014

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The stars of HBO’s new effort represent a sort of boxing podcast supergroup.  Kieran Mulvaney, long-time ESPN blogger, and recently added to the 24/7 lineup for Pacquiao-Bradley 2, was responsible for HBO’s previous attempt, Heavy Hitting.  His partner Eric Raskin, among the most talented and entertaining of active boxing writers, is also one half of the duo behind Ring Theory, which remains boxing’s best podcast by far.

The HBO Boxing Podcast is extremely professionally done.  Sound quality is excellent, even though the participants appear always to be in different cities.  Handovers are FM-radio-slick.  The content is well-prepared and focused: no lengthy discussions here of whether Skype is working, or whether one or another participant is going to be too hungover to dial in on time.  All this is worth mentioning because it is by no means a given, even from an organisation as professional as HBO: Mulvaney’s Beckettian Heavy Hitting sounded like a castaway talking to himself in a dustbin.

There is ample evidence of both intelligence and humour.  Raskin in particular has plenty to say that is useful and interesting, and usually finds entertaining ways to say it.  What is more, the product is tightly structured, albeit on occasion perhaps too much so: in a tic familiar to Ring Theory listeners, Raskin cannot help announcing when the podcast is about to move from one “segment” to the next, as if he cannot trust his listeners to figure it out for themselves (which is not to say he is wrong, only that there might be more elegant ways of achieving the same thing).

But the reason why the production values are so superior to those of other podcasts is that this isn’t really a podcast in the usual sense & spirit of the term, i.e., enthusiasts sharing their more-or-less independent views with their more-or-less peers.  Rather, it is a marketing vehicle for HBO’s upcoming big fights[1].  This often makes for unsatisfying listening even when the fights themselves are reasonable matches, as has been the case for most of those featured so far, including Chavez, Jr.-Vera 2 and Lomachenko-Salido as well as Pacquiao-Bradley 2 (sample dialogue: “are you as pumped for this fight as I am?”).  But when the fight clearly cannot live up to the excitement Raskin & Mulvaney are being paid to convey – as in the case of the recent Kovalev-Agnew mismatch – listening becomes painful. Mulvaney, a long-term boxing fan but a relative newcomer to the ranks of professional pundits, raving that Agnew might be able to do to Kovalev what Tony Thompson did to the cheese-chinned David Price, sounds like a man who has got the gig of a lifetime and can’t believe his luck.  Raskin, gently pointing out the differences between Price and the terrifying Kovalev, who is about as fragile as a Bond villain’s sidekick, sounds like he can’t believe Mulvaney’s luck either.

However, there is hope.  Following the Pacquiao-Bradley rematch Raskin and Mulvaney convene to discuss, for the first time on the podcast, a fight that has already happened.  Thus relieved of the pressure to sell something, their conversation assumes a more normal tone, and becomes far more entertaining and informative – making for an excellent listen, much more in the “spirit of podcasting”.  Perhaps this will be enough to make HBO realize that this forum, and Raskin in particular, could be used very effectively to extend and enhance its boxing coverage rather than simply shill for it.  We shall see.

 

[1] There is also a peculiar form of product placement in the form of the “Stat Chat Segment”, brought to the podcast by “our friends at Compubox”. It is hard to imagine Compubox’s products holding much interest for the average boxing fan (I picture a heavyset man of vaguely Mediterranean descent wearing a stained string vest and chewing the remains of a long-dead cigar).

 

On Making Weight

15 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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This week I built on my proud history of needling world-famous sports writers by exchanging tweets with Nigel Collins, former editor of The Ring magazine and all-around good guy, who recently wrote a typically scholarly yet entertaining article on the topic of making weight.  This subject has been in the news a lot lately, as there have been several occasions where a fighter, usually but not invariably the “A”-side, has failed to achieve his target weight by the time of weigh-in.  Floyd Mayweather, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Julio Cesár Chavez, Jr. have all been guilty of this.  In each case the culpable celebrity fatty has paid his opponent cash from his share of the purse: Floyd, for example, paid $600,000 to Juan Manuel Marquez in return for being allowed to weigh in two pounds over the limit.

Of course, in a fight the odd pound doesn’t matter.  The issue is the impact on the body of making weight in the first place.  Fighters struggle and sweat hard to lose the weight, mainly by dehydration, and the last couple of pounds are inevitably much the hardest.  So if one fighter makes the effort and the other doesn’t the latter will likely recover from the effort much more quickly, giving him a physical advantage.  He will also have got away with it, potentially giving him a psychological advantage.  Theoretically his opponent could refuse to fight and have the whole thing called off: but after months of training, and possibly a lifetime of preparation for a unique opportunity (e.g., to fight Mayweather), at the risk of being called a ducker, and under pressure from all the interested parties (promoters, broadcasters, managers, fighters on the undercard, and so on) who is going to do that?  Big-name fighters like Mayweather and Chavez know this perfectly well, and are clearly taking unfair advantage.

So, bad things happen before the weigh-in.  But equally bad things happen thereafter.  Some fighters add enormous amounts of weight, 15lb or more, in the 24 hours between the weigh-in and the actual fight.  (Some fighters specialize in it: Chavez reputedly comes in at as much as 180lbs for the fight despite fighting in the 160lb middleweight division.)  Size isn’t everything, but this amount, much more than “the odd pound”, potentially can give a fighter a big advantage in the ring.

And some combine the offences.  In a case already discussed on this blog Orlando Salido weighed in for his recent featherweight fight with Vasyl Lomachenko more than two pounds over the contracted 126lbs, then gained an amazing nineteen further pounds by the time of the fight, making him in reality a welterweight, four whole weight classes higher, and meaning that by the time he entered the ring his bodyweight was one-sixth higher than the featherweight “limit” at which he had agreed to fight[1].

This sort of carry-on undermines the whole point of weight limits, which is to ensure that fighters are physically fairly matched, and that the fight is decided by performance rather than poundage.  More importantly, dehydrating then rehydrating the body – the principal means of losing then gaining weight rapidly – is dangerous at the best of times, never mind the day before volunteering to get repeatedly punched in the head.  As with most of the safety aspects of boxing, objective scientific evidence is dismayingly hard to come by, but it seems possible that such drastic weight loss and gain may contribute materially to the risk of brain injury.  Certainly, it is noteworthy that heavyweights, who punch (and so receive punches) hardest, but who do not have to make weight, appear to suffer fewer serious injuries or deaths in the ring than lighter fighters (though anecdotally they do seem to be particularly prone to longer-term issues like Parkinson’s, dementia pugilistica, frontal lobe syndrome and so on).

So what is to be done?  Part of the problem lies in the decision to move the weigh-in to the day before the fight.  This was intended to make things safer,  but as usual with boxing, this doesn’t seem to have been thought through all that carefully.   After all, the longer you have to recover, the more you are going to try to “boil down” to a weight that doesn’t really suit your physique.

Nigel Collins suggests we go back to the old way of doing things, namely, weigh-ins on the day of the fight.  This might stop fighters adding back quite so much weight between weigh-in and fight, but it doesn’t seem to me to address the safety problem: we’ll still have people sweating hard to get the last pounds off.  Here’s the conversation:

Nigel Collins ‏@ESPNFNF  Mar 13

@DabberMatt Less is more. Make weight on the day of the fight. It’s simple and honors the concept of weight classes.

 Matthew Bailey ‏@DabberMatt  Mar 13

@ESPNFNF But the aim is to match fighters by weight, not lead to a dangerous weight-loss & gain contest. Regular weighing is simple & fair.

Nigel Collins ‏@ESPNFNF  Mar 13

@DabberMatt We disagree.

We certainly do, though in the most civil of terms[2].

Enough namedropping: here’s what I think.  With the greatest of respect to Nigel Collins, here less is not more.  To me, the problem lies with the very idea of “the” weigh-in, that is, with only having one.  Instead, for a contracted period before the fight, say four to six weeks, the fighters should be weighed regularly – for big fights, maybe even daily.  Over this period they have to stay within some reasonable margin over the contracted weight for the fight (somewhere around five per cent of bodyweight is probably about right).  Then they are weighed on the day of the fight, when they actually do have to make weight.  This would ensure that the guys fighting at the given weight are, normally, round about that weight – which, to me, “honours the concept of weight classes” much better than a once-and-for-all last-minute check.  It would mean no more massive dehydration and rehydration (and consequent weight loss and gain) before a fight.  And if a fighter is clearly not going to make the weight, he can be warned, sanctioned and even disqualified well in advance, helping to avoid the dilemmas of a possible last-minute cancellation.

Secondly – and I know this will be unpopular – it is clearly time to consider changing the weight classes.  People are generally significantly bigger and heavier now than they were a century and a half ago, when the original classification was introduced.  The average adult male in the UK now weighs about 85kg[3], making him a cruiserweight.  His counterpart from 1870 was 70kg[4], just barely a middleweight (as one might intuitively expect for the average or “middling” man).  And there are precedents: Olympic weightlifting has changed its weight classes numerous times to reflect exactly this phenomenon, with the heaviest class having changed from over 82.5kg between 1920-48 to over 105kg today.

Finally, it seems to me that this is yet another reason to lament boxing’s complete and utter lack of a central governing body with a responsibility for fighter safety.  This isn’t just a technical debate, nor can it satisfactorily be solved with money.  Most importantly, for the fighters, there is a lot more at stake than “honouring a concept”.

[1] Lomachenko gained weight before fighting too, but was still about 12lbs lighter than his opponent on entering the ring.

[2] David Walsh could learn a thing or two from this exchange.

[4] http://www.nber.org/papers/h0108.pdf?new_window=1 – p.35.  Figure given is for males, 36-40.

On Titles

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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Everyone who follows boxing knows that there used to be just eight “world champions”, one for each of the original weight classes.  And everyone also knows that there are now seventeen weight classes and four major “sanctioning bodies” (plus a number of minor ones), dishing out not only “world titles”, but also a lot of other belts that bring some purported distinction short of (or in some cases apparently superior to[1]) “world champion” status – so now we have silver, diamond, international, intercontinental, supreme, and super champion titles, to name just a few.

There being so many of them, and so many of them being meaningless, one might fairly ask why fighters are so obsessed with titles.  I have suggested a couple of possibilities in previous entries on this blog.  For one thing, many people (wrongly) believe that a fighter in possession of a title deserves special treatment by judges; and for another, fighters like to have something, however meaningless, to fight over.  But there are at least a couple more reasons.

One is expressed in the old cliché that titles, like Olympic medals, “can’t be taken away from you”: a consideration which is perhaps less trite in the case of fighters, from whom everything but their titles (including their money, their self-esteem and their higher cognitive functions) invariably is taken away.  I am sure that fighters love titles at least in part because for the rest of their lives, wherever they turn up, they will be introduced as “former World Champion . . .”.  Quite apart from the boost to the ego, this means a lot when they are competing with other has-beens for gigs “greeting” the punters at third-rate casinos, speaking on the after-dinner circuit and opening supermarkets, where most of the audience won’t even know that there are dozens of “champions” at any one time.

Another, probably the most commonly cited, is that more money can be made from the public when a title is at stake.   Certainly, title fights, and fights between boxers who are highly rated by the sanctioning bodies, are likeliest to be staged at the biggest venues, and most importantly, to be shown on television.  But it is hard to see why fighters, or anyone outside the sanctioning bodies, could see this an argument in favour of the present system.  All that follows is that titles put economic power in the hands of the unaccountable, unregulated sanctioning bodies, which only creates greater possibilities for patronage and corruption.

The grounds for naming a “champion” are usually straightforward, since if a challenger beats the titleholder, he takes over: but what is less clear is how challengers are decided.  All the sanctioning bodies produce “rankings” of fighters, determining who is eligible to fight for the title, and in the case of the fighter ranked No.1 behind the champion, who the champion has to fight to retain his standing.  But the process for coming up with such rankings is entirely opaque.  What’s more, different sanctioning bodies have historically been closer to particular promoters or fighters than others[2], undermining whatever objectivity the rankings may otherwise have.  It barely needs mentioning that each of these titles attracts a generous “sanctioning fee”, payable to the relevant sanctioning body or bodies[3].

The Ring magazine attempted to cut through all this opacity and complexity by developing its own titles and rankings, based on strict, objective, transparent criteria, and (perhaps most importantly) involving the payment of no fees.  The credibility of this process, and indeed that of the entire previously-venerated publication, went up in a puff of smoke in 2011 when the original editorial staff of the magazine were fired by Golden Boy Promotions (owners of The Ring since 2007), suspiciously large numbers of whose fighters subsequently began appearing at or near the top of the rankings[4].

This whole grubby charade was illuminated by a remark made recently by Mauricio Sulaimán, head of the WBC, following his organisation’s curious decision to elevate Julio Cesar Chavez, Jnr. to number one contender at super middleweight, despite his never having fought at that weight, and despite the fact that there are very many other fighters with an ostensibly superior claim.  Sulaimán explained it thus[5]:  “The ranking’s sole purpose is to list those fighters eligible to fight for the WBC title. It is not a popularity contest, it is not a way of saying who is best in the division” (emphasis added).

Just think about that for a moment.  The WBC rankings are not a way of deciding who is the best boxer, only who is eligible to fight for a title.  For “eligible to fight for a title”, it is pretty clear we may simply read “willing to pay a sanctioning fee in the near future.”  Otherwise, why would all the sanctioning bodies exclude from their rankings any fighter who holds or who has committed to fight for a title from another such body?  After all, anothing sanctioning body’s champion and designated challenger are, prima facie, more than likely to be among the best fighters in the weight class.  But as Sulaimán puts it, “if George Groves states his intention to fight for another championship [i.e., the title of another sanctioning body], we cannot retain his ranking because he is busy for three to six months and he holds up other fighters who are eligible”.

This approach is not restricted to the WBC.  Compare this, from the WBA’s rules:  “Ratings represent the best opinion of the Association as to the relative qualification of the boxers in particular weight categories at a particular time and who are available and willing to fight for the Association’s title”. Note that ratings are based on “opinion”, not objective criteria, and “qualification” is not defined.  More importantly, however, “[t]he Committee may demote or remove a boxer from the ratings based on any relevant factor, including . . . failure to pay or allow to be paid sanction fees.”

The IBF apparently represents an improvement in explicitly stating that ratings “must be based solely on win/loss records, level of competition, [and] activity”.  However, they are also subject to “a boxer’s adherence to IBF/USBA rules and regulations”, which of course includes payment of sanctioning fees.  What is more, again, “[b]oxers that contract to fight for other world titles shall be considered unavailable and will be removed from the rankings”.  And, wouldn’t you just know it, “[a]ll ratings criteria are subject to exception by approval of the Ratings Committee.”

My personal favourite criterion for deciding on a mandatory challenger, however, comes from the WBO, who insist that, inter alia, “[i]n the event that the Champion has a contract with a major television network (HBO, SHOWTIME, ZDF, Sky or other similar broadcast company)”, the mandatory challenger must be “an acceptable challenger to the Champion’s television network”.

So the rankings of the sanctioning bodies are nothing like those of The Ring‘s old system.   In no case is ownership of either a sanctioning body’s title or the right to challenge the titleholder based solely on a fighter’s merits as a fighter.  This being so, what is the point of the ranking?  And therefore, what is the point of the title?

One final thing.  The spirit of The Ring’s original ranking system lives on, in the form of The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board (http://www.tbrb.org/), who are hereby appointed Official Rankings Provider to The Rumpus Compass.  We bestow this honour on the basis that . .

  1. Their rankings are at least rankings (i.e., an attempt to rank fighters by how good they are) rather than whatever it is the alphabets produce;
  2. The rankings look more or less right;
  3. They are a great bunch of guys (one member of the committee is our favourite “Jewish collegeboy”, podcaster Eric Raskin)
  4. We have a soft spot for plucky no-hopers; and
  5. Any organisation with a name as bad as “The Transnational Boxing Rankings Board” can only be in it for the right reasons.

[1] From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Boxing_Association): “The WBA recognizes the title holders from the WBC, WBO, and IBF organizations. The WBA refers to a champion who holds two or more of these titles in the same weight class as an “undisputed champion” or “super champion”. This applies even if the WBA title is not one of the titles held by the “undisputed champion”.

If a fighter with multiple titles holds the WBA’s title as well, the fighter is promoted to “Super Champion” and the WBA title becomes vacant for competition by other WBA-ranked boxers. As a result, the WBA tables will sometimes show a “WBA Super World Champion” and a “WBA World Champion” for the same weight class, instead of “WBA Champion”.

A WBA champion may be promoted to “Super Champion” without winning another organization’s title . . . The WBA will promote their titlist to a “Super” champion when he successfully defends his title five times.”

[2] Most famously, for many years the WBC was accused of taking orders from Don King.  Also, Bob Arum went on record to admit that he had bribed senior officials at the WBA, and when Bob Lee of the IBF was jailed on numerous counts of racketeering the names of both Arum and King were mentioned in court.

[3] The old joke that WBA stands for “we be askin’”, and WBC for “we be collectin’” is too good to omit.  Readers are invited to submit their own suggestions for “IBF” and “WBO”.

[4] Allegedly.  Readers interested in events surrounding this episode are directed to Ivan Goldman’s discussion of it at http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_ring_is_counted_out.php?page=all.  Having read Goldman’s article, you may feel the urge to enjoy again what Manny Pacquiao did to Oscar de la Hoya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-8zGw-1YAM.