The already battered sport of boxing took another body blow when Floyd Mayweather Jr. walked away from the ring (and a potential $25 million fight with Oscar De La Hoya) last month.
"I learned a long time ago from this guy named Cyrano de Bergerac, 'Don't bring me no mortal men, bring me giants.'" --Don King
1966 Mike Gerard Tyson is born.
The call came last week, just as I was boarding a plane to Salt Lake City. On the other end of the line was Bernd Boente, the top-flight manager for IBF, WBO and IBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and his brother, former WBC champion Vitali Klitschko.
Nicknames should be apropos, shouldn't they?
While the most common topics leading up to Super Bowl XLII this weekend are the Patriots run for a perfect season and Tom Brady's ankle, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has its own questions to answer Saturday at UFC 81 in Las Vegas.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship opens 2008 with its first pay-per-view card of the year coming just three weeks after UFC 79. The promotion takes its show to Newcastle, England, after the UFC held two events in the country last year. UFC 80 begins a very busy stretch for the UFC -- one that includes a UFC Fight Night the Wednesday after UFC 80 and UFC 81 just two weeks later.
Floyd Mayweather grabbed the boxing spotlight May 5 in Las Vegas and he has yet to relinquish it. With a less than stunning showing but more than decisive victory over Oscar de la Hoya that night, Mayweather kicked off a year in which he accumulated more than $50 million in ring performances. He also developed thousands of new fans for his slick footwork out of it (Or maybe you missed Dancing with the Stars).
In the sport of boxing, Floyd Mayweather is without peer. He is an unparalleled champion, a fighter with multiple talents to go along with his multiple personalities. On Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Mayweather (39-0) put on a boxing clinic against welterweight pretender, er, contender Ricky Hatton, out-boxing the former junior welterweight champion before flattening Hatton with a series of combinations that left the former undefeated Brit wondering why he even bothered stepping into the ring in the first place. After the fight ended, Mayweather embraced his challenger as a friend and praised him for his efforts, calling Hatton "the best I have ever fought."
Boxer Ricky Hatton loves to eat, drink beer and throw darts. But if he can upset Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas, he'll be the toast of Britain
The already battered sport of boxing took another body blow when Floyd Mayweather Jr. walked away from the ring (and a potential $25 million fight with Oscar De La Hoya) last month.
"I learned a long time ago from this guy named Cyrano de Bergerac, 'Don't bring me no mortal men, bring me giants.'" --Don King
1966 Mike Gerard Tyson is born.
The call came last week, just as I was boarding a plane to Salt Lake City. On the other end of the line was Bernd Boente, the top-flight manager for IBF, WBO and IBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and his brother, former WBC champion Vitali Klitschko.
Nicknames should be apropos, shouldn't they?
While the most common topics leading up to Super Bowl XLII this weekend are the Patriots run for a perfect season and Tom Brady's ankle, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has its own questions to answer Saturday at UFC 81 in Las Vegas.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship opens 2008 with its first pay-per-view card of the year coming just three weeks after UFC 79. The promotion takes its show to Newcastle, England, after the UFC held two events in the country last year. UFC 80 begins a very busy stretch for the UFC -- one that includes a UFC Fight Night the Wednesday after UFC 80 and UFC 81 just two weeks later.
Floyd Mayweather grabbed the boxing spotlight May 5 in Las Vegas and he has yet to relinquish it. With a less than stunning showing but more than decisive victory over Oscar de la Hoya that night, Mayweather kicked off a year in which he accumulated more than $50 million in ring performances. He also developed thousands of new fans for his slick footwork out of it (Or maybe you missed Dancing with the Stars).
In the sport of boxing, Floyd Mayweather is without peer. He is an unparalleled champion, a fighter with multiple talents to go along with his multiple personalities. On Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Mayweather (39-0) put on a boxing clinic against welterweight pretender, er, contender Ricky Hatton, out-boxing the former junior welterweight champion before flattening Hatton with a series of combinations that left the former undefeated Brit wondering why he even bothered stepping into the ring in the first place. After the fight ended, Mayweather embraced his challenger as a friend and praised him for his efforts, calling Hatton "the best I have ever fought."
Boxer Ricky Hatton loves to eat, drink beer and throw darts. But if he can upset Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas, he'll be the toast of Britain
Sports Illustrated will announce its choice for Sportsman of the Year on Dec. 3. Here's one of the nominations for that honor by an SI writer. For more essays, click here.
A unification fight between IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and WBO champion Sultan Ibragimov is close to being finalized, Klitschko's manager Bernd Boente told SI.com on Friday.
One of the loudest criticisms of boxing -- usually levied by advocates of mixed martial arts -- is that the sport is dominated by aging stars. For the most part, the critics are correct. Oscar de la Hoya (34), Floyd Mayweather (30), Wladimir Klitschko (31) and Shane Mosley (36) are all on the wrong side of 30. They are also still the biggest draws, with De La Hoya-Mayweather breaking every box office record and Klitschko leveling every young fighter left dangling in his path.
In the aftermath of the most impressive win of his career, Joe Calzaghe did an incredibly unimpressive thing.
He is one of the most successful fighters of his generation but he is as anonymous as Waldo.
With enough glitz, kitch and corporate sponsorships to make Las Vegas blush, welcome to the new and weird (yet weirdly underwhelming) epicenter of world boxing
NEW YORK -- Patience is a virtue that Samuel Peter is fresh out of. It has been nine long months since the 27-year-old Peter last competed, nine months since the man known as the Nigerian Nightmare beat James Toney for the second time to earn (for the second time) the title of the WBC's number one contender.
There is a belief in this world that boxing is dead. There is a belief the sport is plagued by dull fights and managed by corrupt promoters -- whose only interest is keeping an alphabet soup of title belts around the waists of their fighters. There is a belief that when the icons of the sport (Floyd Mayweather, Oscar de la Hoya, Bernard Hopkins) walk away, the sport will be left with scores of average fighters who possess a fraction of the skills of their predecessors.
I just wanted to ask him one question. Maybe two. But Floyd Mayweather wasn't having it.
Last week SI writer Richard Deitsch interviewed Buster Douglas for the magazine's Q&A. The 47-year-old former heavyweight champion -- he stunned Mike Tyson in 1990 -- is launching a career as an actor. Here are additional excerpts from their conversation:
Name: Suzanne Grassel School: Syracuse Age: 21 Major: Magazine journalism and sport management Job: Media Intern, USA Boxing, USOC Paid/unpaid: Paid School Credit: Yes Hours: 8-5, Monday-Friday Duration: May 30-Aug. 27 (with a week off in the middle)
Boxing has long been regarded as, in the words of Jimmy Cannon, the red-light district of sports. In the popular imagination, the Sweet Science is anything but: it is widely viewed as a shady game run by mobsters and sharps, corrupt officials and snakelike managers, a morass of mismatches and fixed fights, in which the principles take more dives than Greg Louganis. Such Hollywood-fueled melodrama aside, however, boxing is a remarkably straightforward and transparent sport.
Editor's note: We asked SI.com writers to share their memories from the best game they've ever seen. Here are their stories:
NEW YORK -- IBF and IBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko refuted a report Sunday that he suffered a broken hand during his win over Lamon Brewster.
Saturday night was all right for fighting. But the pageantry for the 69th card in the Ultimate Fighting Championship's tough-and-rumble existence began much earlier that week. Long before the fighters unhinged the latch of the steel Octagon on April 7 and fought on a card titled UFC 69: Shootout, thousands of fans had converged on Houston, tribalists on a pilgrimage. The prefight weigh-ins drew massive crowds. The line for the fighters' autograph show wreathed the girth of the Toyota Center, the venue for UFC 69. The downtown bars and restaurants were overrun by fight fans.
And so, having finally attracted a little mainstream attention again, has boxing squandered another opportunity. With all eyes upon the sport -- well, more eyes than usual -- it produced an event of not much drama, little excitement and no satisfying conclusion. And even for somebody who found the semispectacle satisfying, there was no possibility of another one with even this much promise. The winner immediately announced his retirement, and the loser, who doesn't fight much anyway (or win much anymore), was ambivalent about his future in the ring.
LAS VEGAS -- Nearly 24 hours have passed since Saturday night's epic battle between Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya. The crowds have thinned out (or as much as they can in a casino) and the celebrities have all gone home.
The rumblings of the jet engine are deafening, but for Oscar De La Hoya they're as soothing as an ocean breeze. As he settles into one of the plush leather seats on the Gulfstream G-4 -- one of two $14 million planes leased by his promotion company, Golden Boy, to carry him and Floyd Mayweather Jr., his opponent in Saturday's megafight, on a nine-day, 11-city promotional tour -- he can finally be at peace. Why? Well, for starters, it's one of the few times during the day he can put some much-needed distance between himself and Mayweather, against whom he will defend his WBC super welterweight crown and vie for the title of boxing's best pound-for-pound fighter. "I love being able to interact with people, to shake their hands and sign autographs," says De La Hoya. It's the other stuff that gets a little old. "Sometimes when I'm sitting onstage listening to Floyd run his mouth, I think to myself, Hey, I don't need this."
Oscar De La Hoya, the most acclaimed boxer of his era, has a loving family and a budding business empire. He needs one more victory to gild his Hall of Fame career -- and wants one more whopping payday.
Special from SI Latino
Andre Ward can hear the doubters.
Juan Manuel Marquez entered the ring Saturday as an unknown commodity. When he walked out, he was a proven one.
Also in this column: SI.com's boxing gurus make their picks.
Vitali Klitschko wants to make history. More precisely, he wants to make history again. "I have a vision," said Klitschko in a telephone interview from the Ukraine. "It's one I have had for a long time. I want my brother and I to be heavyweight champions at the same time."
In 1992, Riddick Bowe decided to take a stand. Unhappy with the WBC's mandate that he fight No. 1 contender Lennox Lewis, Bowe decided that the belt was no longer worth the leather strap it came on. So in a glorious public-relations stunt, Bowe took the belt and unceremoniously dumped it into a London trash can.
When Roy Jones Jr. defended his IBF super middleweight title in 1996, he was wearing Grant boxing gloves. Evander Holyfield wore them, too, for his 1999 WBC heavyweight bout against Lennox Lewis. A...
LYNNWOOD, WASHINGTON -- Her blue eyes glazed over with a look of fierce determination, 16-year-old Dallas Malloy shuffled her feet back and forth on the way to a boxing ring -- and into boxing hist...
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