You know what I hate? I hate that whenever there’s even the slightest bit of controversy at a boxing pay-per-view, MMA fans always stand up and shout, “Another great night for MMA!” Never mind the fact that most of those fans don’t actually follow boxi…
You know what I hate? I hate that whenever there’s even the slightest bit of controversy at a boxing pay-per-view, MMA fans always stand up and shout, “Another great night for MMA!” Never mind the fact that most of those fans don’t actually follow boxing and are only aware of the existence of maybe a handful of fighters.
Those fans were out in droves last night after the controversial split decision was read for the Timothy Bradley/Manny Pacquiao fight. Every journalist covering the fight scored the fight for Manny. It wasn’t the best performance of his career, but there was absolutely no question that he was the better man on Saturday night.
So when judges C.J. Ross and Duane Ford scored the fight 115-113 for Bradley, something was truly amiss. Heck, most view Jerry Roth’s card of 115-113 for Pacquiao equally as unjustifiable. For everyone watching the fight, it was impossible. Sure, Bradley fought a hell of a fight and didn’t quit after rolling his ankle, but showing heart and toughness is not an aspect of scoring.
Immediately after the scores were read, MMA fans and UFC personalities went to Twitter to either proclaim it the death of boxing or call it a huge win for the UFC.
Think about that for a second: A pay-per-view that is almost guaranteed to pull in over a million buys was the death of boxing. And though Zuffa had absolutely no shows going on that night, it was a huge win for the UFC. It’s completely asinine.
Here’s a little secret: Bad decisions happen in our sport too. They literally happen all the time. I know that whenever Leonard Garcia steps into the card, I expect a judge or two to award him a decision, despite him not earning or deserving it.
The crazy thing is, no one ever proclaims that a bad decision is the death of MMA.
Last night had nothing to do with MMA versus boxing. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that there’s almost little to no crossover, as most MMA fans are just as unlikely to watch Friday Night Fights as a boxing fan is to watch UFC on Fuel TV.
There’s no way to fix boxing because there’s nothing to fix. It’s a commission issue.
While he’s likely going to regret being so critical of an athletic commission that he has to work so closely with, he’s not wrong. The way to fix combat sports needs to start with either training or cleaning house at the state level.
Boxing didn’t die last night, and in no way was it a win for MMA. When there’s controversy, everyone loses. So please, MMA fans, shut up. Either watch the sport or don’t, but don’t ignore the fact that your sport is just as dirty. It’s an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
(Is HBO really counting Bradley’s head-butting ability as one of his advantages against Pacquiao? Good grief. / Props: HBOsports)
By Steve Silverman
Timothy Bradley will get the chance of a lifetime on Saturday night when he faces Manny Pacquiao for the WBO welterweight title at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.. Which begs the obvious question…who the hell is Timothy Bradley?
To casual boxing fans, it may seem like the 28-year-old California native came out of nowhere. But Bradley — the reigning WBO and WBC light-welterweight champ — has been competing professionally since 2004, racking up an unblemished 28-0 record (with one no-contest) along the way. While that may be impressive enough on paper to make Bradley worthy of a title shot in the next weight class, a look at his boxing resume reveals that he has only knocked out 12 of his opponents. You can’t say Bradley doesn’t hit hard, but he hasn’t shown the ability to string punches together that lead to impressive KO performances.
Four years ago, Bradley was nearly out of the boxing business altogether. He and his then-girlfriend Monica were down to their last $11 when he flew to England in May 2008 for his first light-welterweight world title fight against Junior Witter — a situation made more desperate by the fact that he and Monica were caring for her two children. Things got pretty grim during those lean years:
(Is HBO really counting Bradley’s head-butting ability as one of his advantages against Pacquiao? Good grief. / Props: HBOsports)
By Steve Silverman
Timothy Bradley will get the chance of a lifetime on Saturday night when he faces Manny Pacquiao for the WBO welterweight title at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.. Which begs the obvious question…who the hell is Timothy Bradley?
To casual boxing fans, it may seem like the 28-year-old California native came out of nowhere. But Bradley — the reigning WBO and WBC light-welterweight champ — has been competing professionally since 2004, racking up an unblemished 28-0 record (with one no-contest) along the way. While that may be impressive enough on paper to make Bradley worthy of a title shot in the next weight class, a look at his boxing resume reveals that he has only knocked out 12 of his opponents. You can’t say Bradley doesn’t hit hard, but he hasn’t shown the ability to string punches together that lead to impressive KO performances.
Four years ago, Bradley was nearly out of the boxing business altogether. He and his then-girlfriend Monica were down to their last $11 when he flew to England in May 2008 for his first light-welterweight world title fight against Junior Witter — a situation made more desperate by the fact that he and Monica were caring for her two children. Things got pretty grim during those lean years:
“As we were literally in the middle of that struggle to survive, I had the craziest thoughts about what I should do [to make money] to feed the kids,” he said. “I can understand how for a lot of people who are really down on their luck, the whole criminal thing becomes appealing.”
Luckily, it didn’t come to that. Bradley earned $65,000 for his split-deicison win over Witter, which gave him the opportunity to keep going in boxing without having to take on a “civilian” job in order to make ends meet. More lucrative fights followed, and it wasn’t long before Bradley turned his life around. He eventually married Monica and the lifestyle issues and the bills that dogged him are no longer an issue. He will earn $5 million for getting into the ring with Pacquiao. (By the way, Pacquiao will earn a reported $26 million for the fight.)
Bradley may not be a household name as he goes into the ring against a legend like Pacquiao, and he is a significant 4-1 underdog in the fight. But he has faced a slew of lefthanders throughout his career so he won’t be thrown off by that aspect of Pacquiao’s game. The real problem for Bradley will come from Pacquiao’s rapid-fire delivery and swarming style. When Pacquiao finds an opening, he does not deliver one or two punches. He throws the proverbial “punches in bunches,” which allows him to stun his opponents and put his imprint on a fight.
To be fair to Bradley, his performance level has gone up since beating Witter, and he has notched victories over highly-rated opponents like Kendall Holt, Lamont Peterson, Devon Alexander, and Joel Casamayor. The victory over Casamayor came via TKO in eight rounds, but again, that’s not how his fights usually end. Bradley is one of the most highly conditioned boxers that Pacquiao has ever faced and Bradley is depending on that asset to allow him to keep pushing hard in the late rounds. While there is some logic to that, Bradley’s conditioning won’t exactly be a key factor if he gets busted up early. If Pacquiao is able to swarm the challenger with combinations throughout the first five rounds, he won’t be around in the later rounds for his conditioning to work in his favor.
Bradley knows he is moving up to the big time and fighting an opponent who is dramatically better than anyone he has ever faced. He has the kind of bravado that is often associated with top boxers, but that doesn’t mean he truly believes he will beat Pacquiao when the two get into the ring together. It’s clear that Bradley is a hard worker with a solid left jab and a good overhand right. But how will he react to a fighter with Pacquiao’s speed and quickness?
It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for Bradley, but that chance could turn out to be a pipe dream a few minutes after he steps into the ring. Not only is he going up against a fighter with more athletic ability, punching accuracy, and finishing talent than anyone he has ever faced. He is also moving to a higher weight class, where his questionable punching-power might look even more underwhelming.
Could Bradley come through with the best performance of his career, frustrate Pacquiao, and somehow go the distance and win the fight? Perhaps. But it seems much more likely that Pacquiao will assert his will, sting Bradley with his unorthodox combinations, and hand this hard-working challenger the first defeat of his career.
Fans of combat sports were treated to a memorable evening on Saturday night as Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto battled it out on pay-per-view following an entertaining fight card put on by the UFC on FOX.The ratings aren’t in quite yet for these …
Fans of combat sports were treated to a memorable evening on Saturday night as Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto battled it out on pay-per-view following an entertaining fight card put on by the UFC on FOX.
The ratings aren’t in quite yet for these events, but judging by trends on both Google and Twitter, it’s safe to assume that the Mayweather-Cotto event profited a huge number while UFC likely lagged behind the results that it pulled in from the first two events on FOX.
The night proved that while the UFC may be the fastest growing, boxing is still the king of combat all sports…
For now.
There is absolutely no denying that Floyd Mayweather is the biggest draw in fighting today. His pay-per-view buy numbers are astounding. His rival, Manny Pacquiao, trails behind him but is still by far and away the second-biggest draw.
But after that, it’s anyone’s guess.
It has been nearly eight years since the last time that a pay-per-view event headlined by someone other than Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao reached a million buys, when Oscar De La Hoya battled Bernard Hopkins.
Pacquiao and Mayweather crack the one million buy mark with ease in every fight they have, but aside from those two marquee fighters, the sport of boxing and its influence on the mainstream sports world is on life support.
If you take Pacquiao and Mayweather out of the equation, boxing only had two events in 2011 which reached even 100,000 pay-per-view buys. In contrast, the UFC easily surpassed 100,000 buys for every event they put on in 2011.
As Mayweather and Pacquiao near the end of their careers, the UFC must be salivating at the possibility of finally being the pinnacle of combat sports. Who knows exactly how long boxing’s stars will stick around, but with no one waiting in the wings to take their place, boxing could be in for some serious dark days as the UFC pulls ahead, perhaps for the long haul.
While the UFC did lose its own biggest pay-per-view buy generator in Brock Lesnar, the growth in the popularity of stars such as Jon Jones and Junior dos Santos could help make up for that. However, the biggest reason for the company’s success on pay-per-view has been its business model.
Unlike boxing, the UFC brands itself, not the fighters.
Sure, they create stars in the process, but the focus is always on the UFC brand itself. If a main event fight gets canceled, the card isn’t scrapped—they just replace it with another fight and fans eat it up. We simply can’t get enough. That cannot and does not happen in the boxing world.
If the sport of boxing doesn’t drastically change its model, we could be talking about it in the past tense. As in, “remember when we used to watch boxing?”
We might already be past the point of no return…and the UFC is ready to fill the void.
For more MMA news, fighter interviews and opinions, follow Nick Caron: @NicholasCaron.
Ever wonder how boxing great Manny Pacquiao would perform in an MMA fight, assuming he enters an MMA ring as a pure boxer? Well, an undercard involving featherweights of the Universal Reality Combat Championship—the leading MMA promotion in the P…
Ever wonder how boxing great Manny Pacquiao would perform in an MMA fight, assuming he enters an MMA ring as a pure boxer?
Well, an undercard involving featherweights of the Universal Reality Combat Championship—the leading MMA promotion in the Philippines—served as a simulation to answer that question.
Here’s the video of the fourth match at URCC 21 Warpath, held at the SMX Convention Center in Metro Manila in the Philippines last month.
Watch former boxer and now National Kickboxing (Nat Kick) representative Mario Sismundo, a dead ringer of boxing’s living legend, walk into the blue corner.
Into the red corner runs Miguel Alo, a recently retired member of the Philippines’ national wrestling team, representing Team S.P.R.A.W.L.
If you think this featherweight match turned out to be a smaller and obviously less significant version of the classic James Toney vs. Randy Couture fight at UFC 118, you are right. The other major difference being that this fight between the Filipino fighters took much longer, with the armbar submission (instead of an arm triangle choke) coming late in the second round.
(URCC does not observe the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, and instead features two 10-minute rounds per match a la Pride Fighting Championship of yesteryear.)
…The crowd was chanting “Manny! Manny!” during the bout as Sismundo looked like a dead ringer of boxing great Manny Pacquiao.
However, the former Philippine wrestling team mainstay took down the kickboxer at will throughout the fight and unleashed vicious punches and elbows in his ground-and-pound.
When the fight was stopped with the tapout, Sismundo’s bloodied face looked less like Pacquiao’s and more like Antonio Margarito’s—post Pacquiao.
In fairness to Sismundo, he did show some guard, mount, rear-naked choke attempts and takedown defense, albeit mostly inefficient.
What if the real Manny Pacquiao cross-trains in wrestling and ground grappling for a year before, hypothetically, making his MMA debut fight?
That could very well turn out to be a different story.
Not that Mayweather (42-0) and Cotto (37-2) aren’t capable of putting on a great show in their light-middleweight championship fight, May 5th in Las Vegas, but the boxing world is always transfixed by the best possible matchup. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao has headed that list for a long time.
The 31-year-old Cotto is the real deal and is capable of pushing Mayweather, 35, to the limit. An upset may be a real possibility. Not only does Cotto have sensational power, he is capable of launching a barrage with either hand.
The other factor working against Mayweather is that he may not respect Cotto as a fighter. You can tell that by the trash talk — of which there has been very little. The two fighters have been very respectful of each other and that’s very unusual for Mayweather. In one of the pre-fight press conferences, Mayweather spoke of his admiration for Cotto’s straight-forward and hard-hitting approach. He also used the opportunity to belittle Pacquiao, suggesting that he is barely paying attention to the opponent in front of him.
Not that Mayweather (42-0) and Cotto (37-2) aren’t capable of putting on a great show in their light-middleweight championship fight, May 5th in Las Vegas, but the boxing world is always transfixed by the best possible matchup. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao has headed that list for a long time.
The 31-year-old Cotto is the real deal and is capable of pushing Mayweather, 35, to the limit. An upset may be a real possibility. Not only does Cotto have sensational power, he is capable of launching a barrage with either hand.
The other factor working against Mayweather is that he may not respect Cotto as a fighter. You can tell that by the trash talk — of which there has been very little. The two fighters have been very respectful of each other and that’s very unusual for Mayweather. In one of the pre-fight press conferences, Mayweather spoke of his admiration for Cotto’s straight-forward and hard-hitting approach. He also used the opportunity to belittle Pacquiao, suggesting that he is barely paying attention to the opponent in front of him.
You could see that for yourself on HBO’s 24/7 series in which Mayweather is shown taking a phone call while he is in training for the fight. Specifically, he’s hitting the speed bag with one hand and talking on the phone while he holds it on his shoulder. It’s not that Mayweather isn’t hitting the bag impressively with one hand — it’s shockingly fast — but it’s just as obvious that he has other things on his mind beside the twice-beaten Cotto.
That could be a mistake. There may be two defeats on Cotto’s resume, but he has gotten revenge for the biggest defeat he ever had. Cotto lost to Antonio Margarito in July 2008, and that defeat weighed heavily on him. Cotto appeared to dominate the fight through much of the early going but Margarito kept coming and coming, and Cotto’s defensive skills were lax. Instead of blocking or sidestepping Margarito’s punches, it seemed that Cotto was intent on catching every one of those shots with his head. The fight was stopped in the 11th round and it appeared that if the fight had not been called at that moment, serious and perhaps permanent damage could have been done.
Cotto would also lose to Pacquiao in 2009 via TKO, and he appeared to be old news as a light-middleweight fighter. However, Cotto went back to work, rediscovered his power and figured out how to defend himself a little better. The psychological damage of the loss to Margarito was still impacting him, but when Cotto got revenge by stopping his rival in the 10th round last December, it was clear that the Puerto Rican champion was back. In his mind, he had avenged the worst moment of his professional career and he was willing to fight anyone.
Cotto now gets his opportunity to see exactly where he stands in the rankings. It’s one thing to get revenge over a fighter like Margarito who had a damaged eye and is fairly easy to hit, but it’s quite another to match wits and fists with Mayweather.
Mayweather’s straight right hand has been one of the most devastating weapons in boxing and there’s no stopping it. If Cotto is not quicker than Mayweather — and he is not — he’s going to get hit with that punch quite a bit. When you are getting hit in the face repeatedly and hard, you are going to have a difficult time keeping your mind on your own gameplan.
Mayweather must believe that beating Cotto is just a matter of showing up and moving quickly. “Money” knows all about Cotto’s past defeats and he plans to use those losses to help him with his strategy. And that could be the biggest issue for Cotto. He’s fighting Mayweather, a man who bitterly resents Pacquiao, and he doesn’t want to look bad against an opponent that Pacquiao previously TKO’d. He wants to beat Cotto worse than Pacquiao did, and that’s his motivation.
The only problem with that is Cotto’s power. If Mayweather goes for an early- or middle-round knockout, he could leave himself in a vulnerable position. Cotto can drop the hammer and Mayweather has never shown an inclination for being willing to take a big punch.
There could be some dicey moments for Mayweather, but he should find a way to get past Cotto. He still has designs on the mammoth pay-day that would occur if a fight with Pacquiao actually took place, and the best way to make that happen is to take on Cotto and handle him.
In boxing, as in life, you have to follow the money. That’s why Mayweather will take charge in the late rounds and keep his dream scenario of a fight with Pacquiao intact.
So when he sat down alongside current WBA (super), WBC, and The Ring super middleweight champion Andre Ward on last night’s edition of Inside MMA, the inevitable question came up: who does he think are the top five best boxers in MMA?
Check out Freddie’s top five, along with his thoughts on GSP vs. A. Silva, after the jump.
(That moment when you get hit so hard you shit your pants in front of the whole gym.)
So when he sat down alongside current WBA (super), WBC, and The Ring super middleweight champion Andre Ward on last night’s edition of Inside MMA, the inevitable question came up: who does he think are the top five best boxers in MMA?
Freddie’s Top Five 5. K.J. Noons – ”K.J. is always in my gym and he’s very dedicated with his work ethic. I just love his tenacity in the ring. He comes to fight and he’s all about action.”
4. Nick Diaz– “Nick Diaz is one of the most exciting fighters in the world, today. He’s great with his hands. He gets sidetracked a little bit, like in his last fight, but I think he’ll a great comeback. I’m looking forward to facing him with “GSP” someday, ’cause there’s a lot of talk about that.”
3. B.J. Penn– “You know, B.J., he’s one of the best strikers I’ve ever faced, and that I’ve ever been in the ring with. It’s been quite a few years ago, and I think he’s close to retiring right now, but I’d call him the “James Toney of MMA,” because his weight would fluctuate quite a bit. He’ll fight from low weights to heavyweights. He’ll fight anyone in the world. He’s a good guy to be around, and he’s just a hard, hard worker and a great striker.”
2. George St. Pierre– “GSP’s one of the greatest guys in the world. He’s a real gentleman and one of the best students I’ve ever had. I asked him, ‘How long did you go home and practice in front of the mirror last night?’ Because if I show him a move, he comes back with it the next day, and you know he practiced all night in front of the mirror. So, I love the guy. He’s a good guy and a hard worker, and that’s what it’s all about it hard work.”
1. Anderson Silva– “I had the honor of working with Anderson Silva, when he was in our gym for about five or six days in a row. He told me, ‘I’m pretty good at MMA, but I’m not too goo at boxing.’ He’s just a real humble guy and very talented. He is one of the best guys that really understands distance and timing. He fights off the ropes a little bit. I told him that can be a little bit dangerous sometimes and to be careful, but he’ll suck you in, he’ll set you up, he’s one of the most intelligent fighters I’ve ever seen and have ever worked with.”
While you’re thinking your own lists over, check out part of the interview from last night’s episode, in which Roach and Ward break down the Dana White approved Anderson Silva vs. GSP match, their favorite aspects of MMA other than boxing, and boxing’s current decline, or lack thereof.
