3,425 stories on BoxingScene are published under the Cliff Rold byline.
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The story out of WBO Light Heavyweight titlist Juergen Braehmer was that a stomach illness meant a trip back to Germany rather than staying put for a unification clash with WBA titlist Beibut Shumenov.
Boxing 2011 began with disappointment. The Heavyweight fight everyone wants to see may just be the fight David Haye will always find a reason not to take. The Light Heavyweight unification meant to highlight the first real weekend of the year imploded.
By Cliff Rold - Boxing in 2010 had a lot of positives. Sometimes it was easy to miss them. Boxing is a funny thing from the perspective of the audience. It’s event driven with only the most rare of fistic gems capable of making the educated fight fan the center of the office sports chatter. Mega-fights bridge the gap between boxing and the real world of sports in the 21st Century. In 2010, the mega-fights teased but never came home to us. No matter how strong the year closed, no matter how good the year was for those appreciative of great boxing no matter the star power, what didn’t happen loomed larger than what did. It wasn’t the only problem. 2010 was also a year plagued with cancellations, postponements, and replacement players. Every year has those but, in a year where the biggest fights (in this case, at Heavyweight and Welterweight) never came together, seeing two key players leave the Super Six Super Middleweight tournament or being forced to wait a little longer on Juan Manuel Lopez-Rafael Marquez stung more than usual.
It was a thrilling start to the 2011 boxing year as 30-year old Jr. Welterweight Mauricio Herrera (16-1, 7 KO) of Lake Elsinore, California endured heavy hands and a swollen left eye to score a career best unanimous decision victory over formerly undefeated 26-year old Russian Ruslan Provodnikov (17-1, 11 KO) at the Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas, Nevada on Friday night.
The Middleweight division can do better than Felix Sturm-Ronald Hearns. It can probably do better than Sergio Martinez-Sergiy Dzinziruk.
In any professional sport, it can take a while for a new season to pick up, to really get going. It holds true even if that professional sport has no official season marks save for the turning of the calendar.
By Cliff Rold - The skill. The physical chess match. The artistry. All are reasons to tune in to a great boxing match. None are the first, the real, reason though, are they? The first reason remains the same, now and forever. When fans tune into a fight, what they want to see more than anything else is the knockout. And what they really, really want isn’t just a run of the mill stoppage. No matter the thrill, a referee stopping a bout in a flurry along the ropes is never as satisfying as the lights out, can’t get up by the count of ten moment. It can never happen enough. Its purest form happens rarely. It is the priceless moment where the perfect punch lands that fighter and viewer alike know, as the defeated trails towards the floor, that the night has reached its conclusion.
By Cliff Rold - No matter the year, in the waning days of any there are some things in boxing that are certain, categories and honors that were none the moment they were witnessed. The Fight of the Year is often of those things. When Richard Steele stepped in and waved off Julio Cesar Chavez-Medrick Taylor with two seconds to go in 1990, he waved off all other pretenders to Fight of the Year honors that year as well. In 2005, the final bell for Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo was also the closing bell on anything else contending for the year’s finest battle. 2010 was not one of those years. 2010 is going to be one of those years where the “Fight of the Year” emerges from a slow consensus, a year with lots of good choices but nothing that can’t be argued against. In total, that worked out as a very good thing for fight fans.
It can be one of the sport’s hardest terms to define: the comeback. A fighter away from the game for years who returns at high form can be said to have made a comeback. Eder Jofre, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Vitali Klitschko all came out of lengthy time out of the ring to post big wins and pick up extra titles
It was a year of disappointments, cancellations, and then escalations into the sort of fights that make the first two problems evaporate, if only for a night.