Don Tingley
Retired
Posts: 9,134
Joined: Feb 2012
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RE: Boxing Chat & Discussion
Haye and Chisora fight now confirmed.
Upton Park on July 14, sanctioned by the Luxembourg Boxing Federation - neither of them hold a current British Boxing Board of Control licence.
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08-05-2012 12:18 |
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199lives
Master Poster
Posts: 607
Joined: Jan 2010
Reputation: 25
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RE: Boxing Chat & Discussion
Decent article from Dan Jones in the Standard last night i saw on another forum, there was also a similar one on the bbcsport site used the rumble in the jungle as a comparison.
"There have been plenty of tuts already. But what have Haye and Chisora actually done wrong? Talked trash, traded a few extracurricular thumps in front of a few well-placed camera phones? Embarrassed people? Annoyed the German police? (Not enough, incidentally, for charges to have been brought.)
Well, cry me a river. Far greater champs than David and Dereck have done genuinely bad things and boxing has ticked along.
Jake LaMotta threw fights for Mob money. Sonny Liston probably took a tumble, too. Mike Tyson bit ears, was convicted of rape and threatened journalists. Bernard Hopkins's public pronouncements on racial matters would have seen him horsewhipped out of boxing had he been white. Muhammad Ali called Joe Frazier an Uncle Tom and waved a gorilla at him and somehow wound up the hero in Manila.
What else? Wikileaks diplomatic cables released in late 2010 alleged that the Nicaraguan welterweight and light- middleweight champion Ricardo Mayorga beat a rape charge in 2004 by making a deal with Daniel Ortega to donate a share of his purse to the national government and promote Ortega in public. (Mayorga absolutely denied the allegation.)
And of course, Floyd Mayweather is about to start a 90-day jail term for domestic abuse -- a term postponed by the state of Nevada so they could profit from the spectacle of Mayweather's war with Miguel Cotto. Now there's a fight that shouldn't have been made.
And this is barely scratching the surface. It's not even scratching the surface of the surface. Why complain that boxers are baddies? They're supposed to be baddies. The point is that they are redeemed from their badness in the white heat of the ring. Plenty of bad guys have put the gloves on but few cowards ever contested 12 rounds.
No, compared to most of boxing's bad guys, Haye and Chisora are naughty schoolboys. (If you want to see what used to pass for beyond-the-pale, review the careers of unlicenced boxers from the 1970s and 80s -- the life of Lenny McLean wouldn't be a bad place to start.) More pertinently, Haye and Chisora are also decent heavyweights whom thousands of ordinary people will pay to see get it on. In that, their fight is a matter of market democracy.
Unsurprisingly, the sorest parties in Haye-Chisora are not the punters but the powers-that-be, annoyed that Warren has taken this fight off-piste.
Well, the BBBofC only have themselves to blame. The withdrawal of Chisora's licence and the sloth of the decision-making process concerning the length of his sentence has backfired spectacularly on them. So Luxembourg's boxing authorities will sanction the fight -- and perhaps many more in future. The BBBofC have to fall in and endure the paradox of the biggest British fight in the last few years being one over which they have no influence or association.
And in all this, we return to a simple truth. Boxing's establishment(s) have long assumed that the public cares about titles, rankings, belts and organisational propriety. In fact, what they care about is seeing the best fighters fight one another. It's that simple."
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11-05-2012 21:20 |
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