Friday Q & A

The new Finito will be here soon!

The Finito Five 9/30/11

And you wonder how the WBC could strip a belt from someone the caliber of Sergio Martinez? Wonder no longer.

My top five thoughts about the boxing world for hump day:

1. You have to be wondering at this point what’s going through Juan Manuel Lopez’ featherweight brain (and I DON’T mean that as an insult, so be quiet, all of San Juan) when he says he wants a piece of Yuriorkis Gamboa. While I believe that Juanma is afraid of no man, he probably had to think about it twice in the face of the Cuban’s absolute destruction of Jorge Solis. Solis is no chump, and he could do nothing with Gamboa’s speed or power. You got the feeling that Solis knew what was coming, but could do zero to stop it. As great as Lopez is, Gamboa looks like he could even take Manny Pacquiao’s head off right now; the longer Top Rank takes to make this fight happen (anytime now, Arum), the more I feel like Juanma may get his first loss.

2. Jeeze, Jorge Solis sure doesn’t look anything like his 108-pound brother Ulises, does he? I always have to do a double take when one brother accompanies the other to the ring just to make sure I’m watching the right fight. Come to think of it, maybe they should have done something with their names like the boxing Simms brothers, Travis and Tarvis. How about Jorge and Gorje? Or maybe Ulises and Twolises? Just a thought.

3. How great was it to hear and see Nick Charles doing the Mikey Garcia-Matt Remillard fight on the Gamboa-Solis undercard? After reading that recent Sports Illustrated article, I didn’t think Charles was ever going to be healthy enough to do anything on TV again. But there he was on HBO, still fighting cancer with Arturo Gatti-like heart, giving all of us boxing fans an unexpected treat. As great as Nick has been for boxing (and sports in general), we sadly may not have him much longer. Big props to HBO and regular Boxing After Dark blow-by-blow man Bob Papa for letting us hear Slick Nick once again.

4. As much as Gamboa upped his stock Saturday, that’s how much fellow Cuban Erislandy Lara’s dropped the night before. What was with that stinkbomb against Carlos Molina on Friday Night Fights? Lara was coming off of four straight first-round knockouts, for heaven’s sake! I don’t know if Lara thought he’d just be able to smoke the capable Molina with one punch, but that’s sure as heck what it looked like he was trying to do. You barely saw a combination from him the first six rounds. In fact, Lara didn’t get serious until the last four rounds or so, and he was damn lucky to get a draw. Since Molina was easily the best opponent Lara’s faced, he better get serious and start listening to trainer Ronnie Shields, who he repeatedly ignored the entire fight. He’ll never beat any serious fighter at 154 looking like that.

5. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Just look at the above photo of WBC President Jose Sulaiman and WBC Executive Director Mauricio Sulaiman. If this doesn’t answer the question about how Julio Ceasar Chavez, Jr. got ranked #1 at middleweight, I don’t know what will.

One Knee Equals Two Rushed Judgements

While Odlanier Solis hit the deck against Vitali Klitschko, it was a freak knee injury that took him out. Although a couple of talking heads said the Cuban came into the fight with a bad knee, the only bad thing was Klitschko's uncharacteristic lack of sportsmanship when he barked at Solis for dogging it when the man had, in fact, torn his ACL.

As a sports fan having watched a variety of injuries in a variety of sports, I can tell you that one of the trickiest of them all is the good ‘ol ACL tear. Just in the NFL alone, I’ve seen Napoleon McCallum get spun 90 degrees on his knee until it practically exploded; I’ve also seen Arizona Cardinals kicker Bill Gramatica tear his ACL celebrating a field goal. The latter example just goes to show that no how good of an athlete you are (and with NFL kickers, I guess that’s debatable anyway), strange injuries can happen at just about any time.

That’s one reason why I just don’t buy all the talk about Odlanier Solis having some kind of significant prior knee injury going into his fight with Vitali Klitschko Saturday. No sooner had Solis legitimately torn up his knee at the end of the first round (which resulted in a loss for the Cuban, by the way), you had Lennox Lewis of the Epix broadcast team insinuating that Solis must have had a prior knee injury even though he had absolutely no inside knowledge to support such a claim. When a report came out Sunday that a Cologne Arena spokesman had backed up Lewis’ claims by saying they did know of a preexisting knee injury (which was later refuted by Solis’ promoter), it was then just generally assumed that Solis and his team had screwed the fans and the promoters by stepping into the ring that night as damaged goods. Even Dan Rafael of ESPN, who is usually smarter than this, suggested that there should be some kind of punishment for Team Solis.

Look, I’m not a doctor or a professional journalist, but if Solis had a knee injury so significant that he couldn’t last a round in the ring, how in the world did he get through sparring and his pre-fight physical? It’s not like this was some prelim bout in Haysticks, Kansas; there was a cavalcade of media present around both fighters leading up to a heavyweight championship fight. Solis probably had more people watching him work out for this fight than he’d had in all his previous fights as a pro combined. Not one of them noticed that he had a bad wheel? Seems at least one or two of them might have commented about a knee brace, a limp, something that hadn’t been there before. Also, from what I understand, the physical they put the fighters through is pretty exhaustive. Do you mean to tell me they can catch Ruslan Chagaev’s Hepatitis B in a prefight physical, but a damaged knee wouldn’t be detected? It seems like people are looking to find someone to blame for an incredibly disappointing fight rather than looking at it as just an unfortunate accident.

And let’s also not forget one of the bigger problems in boxing, which is that you’re only guaranteed a fight as long as you can make into the ring in the first place. If Solis was to cancel due to injury, Klitschko probably would just go ahead and fight Tomasz Adamek, and there would be nothing that mandated Solis would ever get another chance at the fight. Ask Derek Chisora what it’s like to have a Klitschko carrot dangled in front of someone, just to have it taken away. If Solis did have some kind of previous injury, what incentive would he have had to report it in the first place?

We all know how disappointing the night was for the fans and promoter, but let’s not forget that it was probably the most disappointing for Solis. Solis had a freak injury on the biggest night of his career that killed things before they ever got started. A bad situation doesn’t need to be made any worse by media types we look to for intelligent analysis (yes, even from Lennox) jumping to spurious conclusions.

Friday Q & A

Miguel Cotto did a lot of this against Ricardo Mayorga Saturday, and kept his poise when the Nicaraguan tried to goad Cotto into doing something stupid. Cotto wisely left the stupidity to Mayorga.

A take or two on some naggingly unanswered questions plaguing the boxing world:

Q: Assuming by now you’ve gotten off your duff and watched the Miguel Cotto-Ricardo Mayorga fight, did Cotto do enough to impress in not stopping Mayorga until the twelfth round?

A: Yes, I think so. It wasn’t the most impressive performance Cotto has ever had, but Mayorga is such a weird, awkward brawler that a lot of standard boxing technique goes out the window against him. The most impressive thing about Cotto was his discipline while the Nicaraguan was doing his usual crazy antics, most of which Mayorga does in lieu of actual effective boxing. If you remember, Shane Mosley needed the twelfth round before stopping Mayorga, too; if you haven’t fought Mayorga before, it usually takes several rounds to figure out what the hell he’s actually doing. Once that happens, most top level fighters can begin to do some damage in the later rounds, which is what happened Saturday.

Q: But it looked like Mayorga essentially quit from an elbow injury. Does that make this any kind of real knockout?

A: Look, Mayorga might have been complaining of the elbow, which was probably legitimately hurt, but it was Cotto that was taking the heart out of him. Jean Pascal dislocated his shoulder THREE TIMES against Adrian Diaconu and still finished the fight. So don’t tell me that Mayorga couldn’t have one-handed it for two minutes and finished the fight. It looked more to me that Mayorga had just had enough of Cotto’s pounding on him, especially after that wicked left hook.

Q: Who hurt himself more in a loss: Yuri Foreman to Pavel Wolak (TKO-6) or Lenny Zappavigna to Miguel Vazquez (UD-12)?

A: Foreman for sure. Lenny Z. is a young fighter who got in the ring against a boxing technician light years ahead of anyone he’s previously faced, and got taught a lesson. He was lucky to get a smelly victory against Fernando Angulo last year that he didn’t deserve, anyway; Zappavigna needs to improve, but is young enough at 23 to do so. Foreman, on the other hand, had been making inroads into major TV exposure with his fight at Yankee Stadium against Cotto last year; he needed this awful performance like a hole in the head. Foreman is a great story, but has less power than an electric can opener and a style that is not all that crowd-pleasing. When you have those things against you, especially at 30, you had better win. Letting a straight-ahead brawler like Wolak box circles around you means that HBO or Showtime won’t come calling again anytime soon.

Q: So with the Odlanier Solis-Vitali Kitschko fight on the Epix network, what do you think has the greater odds of happening: Solis winning or anyone actually getting the Epix network to watch it?

A: Probably Solis, but not by much. I get the huge DirecTV package at my house with a million channels, and Epix is one of the three channels they don’t carry. When you have a link at the bottom of your website that says, “What is Epix?”, you can’t bet not too many people actually know. It looks like they are available in the U.S. on Charter and Cox cable, plus Dish Network, but not the two biggies, Comcast cable and DirecTV. Hopefully, someone will have this available for download, because there won’t be a whole lot of us fans watching it live. I understand the Epix website will stream it for this fight, so that’s good news. However, if Epix continues to broadcast fights like they say they are, it will be a big inconvenience to many a fan.

Monday Night Quarterback

Even though the WBC decided to strip middleweight champion Sergio Martinez of his belt, that's apparently not going to stop "El Maravilla" from flaunting it, along with his Ring Magazine belt. Sergio, you better be careful - I'm sure a sanctioning fee will still somehow be charged by the green-belt bandits.

Some quick thoughts about the fistic weekend that was:

## Anyone else think that there’s no way Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao won’t be fighting Sergio Martinez anytime soon? He can say all he wants about fighting either guy next, but Martinez is more likely to sprout wings and fly before he sees himself in the ring with either man. His fantastic KO of the previously unbeaten Sergiy Dzinziruk has seen to that. Much like Nonito Donaire’s awesome starching of Fernando Montiel last month, “El Maravilla” showed that rare quality of making excellent fighters look like they don’t belong in the ring with him. Only the true greats of the sport are typically able to do that. Believe me, Dzinziruk will beat a lot of people and win more titles before he’s done, and he probably will not look this bad again for a long time. That fact that he did speaks to where Martinez is at right now. If Floyd or Manny fought him right now, I think they’d be in real trouble.

## While I haven’t watched the Miguel Cotto-Ricardo Mayorga fight (which I’m sure is filled with Mayorga talking junk and getting hit A LOT), I did see a clip of the post fight press conference, which may just have been more interesting. While no one should be really surprised that Bob Arum’s going to line his pockets by putting the Plaster Caster himself, Antonio Margarito, back in the ring with Cotto, he better be aware of just how this dynamic might play out. If you check out this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL1cQ-V8f at about the eight minute mark, you will see Cotto giving Margs a reception so frosty you’d have been able to keep your beer cold just by putting it in the space between the two. Cotto has obviously serious disdain for Margarito, beyond the usual trash talk between fighters jockeying for a fight. Cotto likely believes that he was beaten by a guy with loaded gloves, and probably wants not just to beat Margarito, but beat him up. Arum had better be prepared for a situation where Margarito, between the Pacquiao fight and the potential one against Cotto, might be finished after two brutal beatings.

## I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to get all that excited over Andy Lee’s thrilling, come-from-behind KO of Scot Craig McEwan on the opener of Martinez-Dzinziruk. Yeah, it was a great fight, but all I’ve been hearing about is how great a comeback it was, and how he saved his career, blah, blah, blah. The truth is, while McEwan is a solid fighter, he’s no top ten guy at middleweight, and he tagged Lee at will for about six rounds in that fight. All credit to Lee’s persistence, but does ANYONE see him beating Kelly Pavlik or Paul Williams, let alone Martinez, who is rumored to be his next opponent? Lee gets hit far too much, and the top guys in the division would take him apart. He’s been with Emanuel Steward too long to think that he’ll suddenly become a better defensive fighter at some point soon; if he was ever going to, Manny would have already got him there. All it looks like Lee has earned with his win is a chance to earn a nice payday while getting beaten down by Martinez.

Reinventing the Finito

Well, if you’ve noticed, it’s been a few months since anything appeared in this space. My apologies for that; I certainly hadn’t intended for the Finito to suddenly fade into the sunset after a year and a half a la David Reid! Truth is, I’ve always called this blog a labor of love; while the love is there, watching all the fights, putting together the research and getting all my thoughts together was very much the labor. I was always able to do that because my job was much like a nurse’s shift, and I’d have three or four days off at a time. Around the first part of October, I took an 8 to 5 job like most regular American folks. I figured I would have all the time in the world to continue my weekly ramblings, now that I wouldn’t be a night-working vampire anymore and be alive with the rest of the world. Alas, soon enough, I found that I almost never had any time during the week to WATCH the fights, let alone write anything about them. Most of the time in the past, one of my posts would take me one or more nights to put together. With my current job, I just don’t have that kind of time. Why didn’t you 8 to 5’ers tell me about any of this stuff?

So now that I’ve bored you with all the details of my life you could care less about (Finito Lopez would have found time to write, you might be thinking), here’s the point. Since the previous posts took as much time to put together as they did, why not just make more frequent, but shorter, posts? I still watch the fights and keep up with everything in the Sweet Science; instead of a two or three-page article, a short and sweet post might just do the trick. So from here on out, the Finito will continue, just in more frequent and smaller bursts. I have no idea how this will eventually flesh itself out, but why not give it a try?

For those of you that have read my crazy ramblings the last couple of years, I thank you. For those of you who would rather read the wit and wisdom of Floyd Mayweather than anything I might have to say, I have bad news. Here begins the relaunch of the Finito – I hope you’ll be along for the ride!