I would tell you’re about to get four boxing columns for the price of one, but you aren’t paying to read this anyway. So I’ll tell you’re about to get four boxing columns for the price of zero, which is the best damned deal you’ll find anywhere. Especially in this economy.
The fact is, it’s tough to come up with column angles when boxing’s power brokers hand you a stretch of multiple weeks without a major fight. So what’s a boxing writer to do when he can’t think of anything worth writing 1,500 words on? Try his best to come up with four things worth wringing about 375 words apiece out of.
The Hall of Fame’s three-year rule keeps looking shakier
The ballots for the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026 went out this week, featuring for the first time the name Gennadiy Gennadyevich Golovkin – or GGG, if you’re into the whole brevity thing.
Golovkin last fought in 2022, so he’s eligible for entry in 2026, in accordance with the rule change approved and enacted in 2019 that reduced the required time after a boxer’s last fight from five years to three.
And that would be all well and good, if not for the fact that as recently as two weeks ago, Golovkin was speaking publicly about wanting to fight again.
If Golovkin gets voted in this year (spoiler: he undoubtedly will, unless he announces a scheduled fight before this month is out, during the IBHOF voting period) and if he ends up fighting sometime in 2026, that will mark the second year in a row that an active boxer will be inducted into a museum meant to honor retired boxers. In 2025, Manny Pacquiao headlined the Hall of Fame’s induction class, then fought Mario Barrios a month later.
Initially, I was fine with the three-year rule. Why make a fighter wait? Time is precious, life is short, boxing takes its toll. I hate to be a downer, but the more years that pass, the greater the chance a boxer either won’t be there to enjoy his induction or won’t be all there to enjoy it.
But Pacquiao and Golovkin are reminding us that three years isn’t always enough to know if a fighter is truly retired.
Hell, five years wasn’t always enough either – as Hall of Famers Sugar Ray Leonard, Alexis Arguello, Mike Tyson, Azumah Nelson and Jeff Fenech showed. But those were five examples over a span of about 30 years. This is about to be two fighters in as many years, if indeed GGG decides to come back.
I don’t mean to contradict the teachings of “Schoolhouse Rock,” but when it comes to the wait for IBHOF induction, I’m not so sure that three is a magic number.
Can a man cover boxing if he doesn’t pay for DAZN?
Look, it’s not that I can’t afford a DAZN subscription. I’ve paid for one since 2018, and though the cost of living keeps trending in the wrong direction and I have mouths to feed and college educations to pay for, I certainly could shell out another $224.99 this year without having to sell any kidneys.
But, partially out of principle, I don’t have a DAZN sub at the moment.
Like a lot of fight fans, I was getting rather annoyed with the fact that the streaming network that once vowed to kill pay-per-view was now asking me to pay extra, on top of the ever-rising annual fee, for almost every card I cared about. So when my sub was set to expire/renew last week, I decided to at least save a few shekels by turning off auto renewal and starting it back up a few weeks later, the next time there was a DAZN card of great interest.
So I logged in. I went through the process of canceling my sub. And rather than lose my business, they made me an offer: switch to a month-to-month plan for $16.99 a month. That would be a slight savings over my previous annual plan and a big savings over the typical monthly plan. OK, fine. You got me. I’m in.
But something went wrong on their end. None of the changes went through. A customer service rep (or chatbot – who the hell knows anymore?) told me they would take care of it and turn off my annual renewal, then start the monthly plan. The next day, the annual renewal had indeed been turned off, but I hadn’t been charged for the monthly. I got a hold of another customer service rep. And … “Oh, so sorry, but that $16.99-a-month deal isn’t available now.”
Apparently the chatbot was unfamiliar with the philosophy of “the customer is always right.” And apparently it didn’t matter to anyone that the customer actually was right in this instance.
So I am temporarily without a DAZN subscription. This week's fights from Lagos, Nigeria, and this Saturday’s card from Glasgow, Scotland? Didn’t watch ‘em, won’t watch ‘em, don’t plan to cover ‘em.
I’m sure I’ll start my sub back up again soon, because I do feel a responsibility to readers of this site. But on principle, I’ll make DAZN wait as long as I possibly can before I give them more of my principal.
Especially since I apparently need to start saving up to pay for Paramount+ next year, too.
Is it October 25 yet?
This somewhat contradicts all my griping about the cost of being a boxing fan and any “in this economy” quips, but I’m very much looking forward to Saturday, October 25, a double-PPV day.
In the afternoon (my time), there will be Joseph Parker-Fabio Wardley, which absolutely shouldn’t be a pay-per-view in the US but of course is a DAZN PPV, because DAZN is just astonishingly bad at killing PPV. That said, it has the makings of a fantastically fun heavyweight fight, with massive stakes – a shot at world champion Oleksandr Usyk on the line.
And that evening, there’s another PPV, this one courtesy of Amazon Prime, with one fight I love, one fighter I refuse to miss and a couple more solid undercard bouts. Those are, respectively, Stephen Fulton vs. O’Shaquie Foster, Sebastian Fundora (facing Keith Thurman) and the dual duels of Jesus Ramos Jnr vs. Shane Mosley Jnr and Isaac Lucero vs. Roberto Valenzuela Jnr.
It's a solid day/night of boxing, especially if you have a group of fight fans you can get together with to defray the costs.
But it feels much more than merely “solid.” It feels spectacular, mouthwatering, etc., because October 25 is the desert oasis of boxing days.
It is the first collection of fights worth getting excited about in a month and a half, since the weekend of Terence Crawford vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. The rest of September was decidedly ho-hum. And in October, we have some decent regional shows: Jaron “Boots” Ennis against the best Angola-born, Portugal-based 154-pounder around; and Danny Garcia’s supposed farewell fight. Oh, and John Gotti III vs. James Hagler Jnr. Can’t forget that one.
That’s why I’m excited for October 25. Because it will have been six weeks since the last fights I cared about.
For what it’s worth, a slow October in boxing isn’t the worst thing if your Major League Baseball team happens to be in the playoffs. Should my Phillies make a run, I’ll find silver linings in the lack of appealing October fights.
(There are no silver linings, however, when it comes to the way July and August are there for the taking for boxing promoters and the fact that those promoters never seem to do enough taking. More to come on that next summer, some week when I’m struggling to think of column ideas.)
Enjoy Canelo while you can
In a vacuum, the news that a fighter is getting elbow surgery and won’t be able to train for a few months is no big deal.
But when that fighter is 35 years old, has had 68 pro fights spanning 20 years and has been steadily slowing down for the past three years, that elbow surgery puts fight fans on notice: The end is near for the biggest star of the era.
Saul “Canelo” Alvarez is scheduled for surgery on October 23 and won’t fight again until the second quarter of 2026. May 2, the Saturday of Cinco de Mayo weekend, is part of that second quarter, in case you weren’t aware.
Between the accumulation of injuries (Canelo has also had surgery on his right knee and left wrist), the reality that we now routinely use terms like “once great” to describe him and the fact that he has more money than he knows what to do with (I’m pretty sure his silk pajamas are laid out for him each night by butlers and housekeepers who are themselves dressed in silk pajamas), I would say there’s a better-than-50-per-cent chance 2026 is Alvarez’s final year as a fighter.
If he fights on Cinco de Mayo weekend and Mexican Independence Day weekend, that brings Canelo to a total of 70 fights. If he wins both of those, that’s 65 victories. Those feel like good numbers to go out on.
Especially when Canelo clearly wants nothing to do with David Benavidez and has run out of other opponents whom people are pumped to see him take on.
The news of the elbow surgery was all the heads-up we needed that, at this point, any fight could be Canelo’s last.
What a gift he has been to the sport. He has fought almost everyone we wanted him to. As long as he’s not in the ring with William Scull, he’s almost certain to give fans their money’s worth. And he kept the Las Vegas mega-event alive after Floyd Mayweather Jnr called it quits.
He wasn’t perfect – there was some “contaminated meat” and a few shady scorecards along the way. But for the most part, Canelo was a class act. And when he wasn’t quite so classy, such as when he cursed out Demetrius Andrade at a postfight press conference, he made the act of being unclassy exceptionally cool.
We’re gonna miss Canelo Alvarez when he’s gone. And I’m getting the feeling he’ll be gone sooner than people realize.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
