Lyle Fitzsimmons

827 articles published

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827 stories on BoxingScene are published under the Lyle Fitzsimmons byline.

Every story follows our editorial policy. To report a mistake, use our corrections form; for anything else, contact us.

Articles by Lyle Fitzsimmons: page 47

Oscar De La Hoya: Canelo Will Eventually Fight Golovkin

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•May 5, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - It’s official. Our long national hyperbolic nightmare is over. And as we turn from the tattered wreckage of Manny Pacquiao’s mayhem-creating aura – or from the tattered wreckage of his right shoulder, you decide – we can look confidently forward knowing that boxing’s pay-per-view future remains in the capable hands of a 20-something redheaded Mexican. Or so sayeth Oscar De La Hoya, at least. The “Golden Boy’s” got a vested interest in that scenario, of course, but that’s not to say that the fight his man will take part in this weekend – in Houston, against oft-menacing Texas native James Kirkland – won’t be worth a watch when it arrives on HBO’s air Saturday at 9 p.m. The match will air live, and will be paired with the network’s replay of some other fight that apparently happened last Saturday. The former six-division world champion sat down recently to discuss his company’s flagship fighter, the inherent danger of a rumble with Kirkland and the opponent he ultimate sees as a PPV foil.

Yes, boxing fans, there is heavyweight life after May 2

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Apr 28, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - It’s not a dream. There is actually a heavyweight fight out there, after all these years, that’s simply got to get made. Wladimir Klitschko and Deontay Wilder, come on down. As soon as possible, please. No disrespect to the now 17 foes against whom Dr. Steelhammer has now racked up 18 title defenses since obliterating Chris Byrd in 2006, but the gloved world has finally evolved to a point where it’ll no longer accept another in an assembly line of overmatched Americans and anonymous Europeans. Sure, Tyson Fury is interesting. And yes, Vyacheslav Glazkov is unbeaten. But of all the names out there for a guy perfect for a decade, Wilder’s is the only one that resonates. Because the “Bronze Bomber” needs Klitschko for authenticity. And no less importantly, Klitschko needs the “Bronze Bomber” for validation. Don’t believe me? Ask Max Kellerman. “All you can do is beat the guys who are around when you’re champ,” HBO’s scruffy one said before Klitschko outgunned Bryant Jennings at a close to jam-packed Madison Square Garden. “He suffers from Larry Holmes syndrome. All you can do is beat the guys in front of you, and he’s beaten them thoroughly for a long, long time and really established himself among heavyweight champions.” Only Canastota-honored names like Holmes and Joe Louis exceed Klitschko’s run of duration and dominance, but it’s still going to take beating a guy like Wilder – not another Alex Leapai or Mariusz Wach – for the boxing public to agree to what the boxing record books clearly suggest.

Giving TV Scoring Methods a Calculated Makeover

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Apr 22, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - In all the years I’ve watched boxing – more than 30 in fact, since I sat with my dad in Grand Island, N.Y. and watched Ken Norton dispose of Duane Bobick in 58 seconds – I’ve been irked each and every time I’ve heard a TV judge thusly describe the action of a just-completed one-sided round: “Fighter A really dominated for the whole three minutes in Round X, and, with the knockdown, he gets the extra point on the scorecard and wins it, 10-8.” Anyone else understand my angst? As those who’ve sat and watched a fight with me will testify, it’s within seconds after hearing such a statement that I’ll clarify, pointing out that in a 10-point must system, scoring a knockdown does not earn you an extra point at all. Ten, in this case, remains 10. Rather, it docks the fighter who was knocked down an extra point, chipping the nine he would normally have received down to eight or even seven in some extreme cases. But no matter whether it’s Harold Lederman, Steve Farhood, Steve Weisfeld or someone else crunching the numbers, it’s almost always described incorrectly, as if the winner suddenly jumped from 10 to 11 for displaying his dominance. It drives me nuts. So, in accordance with the philosophy of coaching the talent on hand rather than teaching old dogs new tricks, I’ve decided to rebuild the system around my stuck-in-cement colleagues. Instead of an overly complex formula involving 10 points for winners and nine or less for losers, I propose going back in time to the era when winners of a normally competitive round received one point and the losers received none. If the round is even, a scoring crutch I try to avoid at all costs, neither fighter receives a point. Lastly, if a fighter scores a knockdown or more and truly wins a round in decisive fashion, he gets either two or three, actually earning the “extra” point(s) too often rewarded by the TV talking heads.

Upon further review, judges of PBC double weren’t so bad

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Apr 14, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons In Florida, we call it the “cone of uncertainty.” Whenever a hurricane clears the islands of the eastern Caribbean, meteorologists of every Sunshine State persuasion are sent scrambling to computers as it approaches our retiree-sopped peninsula. At the business end of the cautionary arc is a flared-out section that illustrates the few hundred mile range within which the rain, wind and other fun and games will actually make landfall. And while their pre-landfall appearances on camera tend to lean a smidge toward the overdramatic, my just less than eight years in the southernmost state have shown me the weather guys generally get it right. Which is why, in the aftermath of yet another teeth-gnashing weekend of boxing judging – and having already surveyed the fatalistic Twitter pronouncements that never follow too far behind – I’ve decided to again co-opt a little of Jim Cantore’s act for the boxing crowd. Re-introducing, ladies and gentlemen… the new and improved “cone of judging uncertainty.” Available from me to you, my cherished Tuesday fans, free of charge. Its practical application for non-dangerous storm situations is simple. When you watch a fight and add up your own scores, simply overlay the cone onto your paperwork and allow for a one-point swing in either direction from what you’d tallied – because, after all, none of us is infallible.

HBO’s Jim Lampley Memorizing His May 2 Line

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Apr 7, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - You might think a blow-by-blow guy like Jim Lampley arrives at ringside with a knapsack of rehearsed phrases to pull out at the exact moment a fight gets all dramatic and compelling. You might think that. But you’d be wrong. Instead, the imminent International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee insists, his pre-fight carry-on includes as little paper as he can get away with, and—with a soon-to-be exception on May 2—no scripting. For that special Saturday night in Las Vegas, even his own rules are meant to be broken. “Normally, I would have nothing,” he said. “But in this particular instance, I do have one line that I am planning, hoping that I will use at the very outset of the fight, either before the opening bell or immediately after the opening bell. That line has been evolving in my mind for six years. “And that's the only one. I'll tell you the day after the fight whether I actually got that sentence in or whether it gets lost in the flow of everything else. But I do have an observation that I'm planning to make which is in my head and I think I'll probably make it around the time of the opening bell.”

Russell’s KO Creates New 20-something Dynasty at 126

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Mar 31, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - Will the real Gary Russell Jr. please stand up? Is the 26-year-old still the athletically gifted but technically outmatched wannabe he portrayed nine months ago in a not-nearly-so-close-as-it-was-scored majority decision loss to Vasyl Lomachenko? Or is he now the multi-faceted assassin who took less than 10 in-ring minutes to detach veteran Jhonny Gonzalez from a tenuous connection to world-stage relevance on Saturday night in Las Vegas. The answer, as in many things, probably resides somewhere in the middle. But regardless of where one thinks the Washington, D.C. native rightfully belongs in the suddenly reconfigured mix at 126 pounds, there seems little reason to doubt that the featherweight ranks are entering a top-end golden age they’ve not seen in recent multi-belt memory. Russell’s four-round ascension made him the fourth 20-something to possess a recognized championship trinket in the weight class – 25-year-old Lusanda Komanisi is the IBO’s lesser-known title-holder – and the prospect of fellow youngsters Lomachenko (27, WBO), Nicholas Walters (29, WBA) and Evgeny Gradovich (28, IBF) dueling for premier jewelry is a tantalizing dream if not a reachable reality. And it doesn’t hurt that the division’s most-decorated non-champion – Abner Mares – is only 29. Russell, the former U.S. amateur kingpin, controlled the first two rounds against Gonzalez with his fast fists, but it was a thudding straight left followed by a sweeping right hook that sent his foe down in the third, and the wobbly Mexican never recovered – falling once more in the fourth before referee Tony Weeks stepped in to end matters just 37 seconds into the session.

Arum: Journalistic decline shaped Floyd-Manny perceptions

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Mar 24, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - Just when you think you know, you don’t. Remember when all the geniuses of the sport – you know, the so-called fight freaks and the lemmings who follow – claimed it would never happen, and they were all sure that they knew why? We know Bob Arum and Floyd Mayweather Jr. don’t get along, they insisted, so the idea that they’ll ever be able to share a stage while a fight with Manny Pacquiao is being announced is simply not possible. Less than a year ago, in fact, when reporting on Pacquiao’s contract extension with Top Rank, those clairvoyants used phrases like “killing any hopes” and “impossible to fathom” when discussing how the Filipino’s deal with the Las Vegas promoter would impact a possible mega-fight with “Money.” Not only were they the smartest guys in the room. They had the attitudes to match. Right up until they were wrong, that is. “The quality of journalism today is not what it used to be,” Arum said in a recent phone chat, in which he described the way Mayweather had responded over the years to agenda-wielding queries about him.

Kovalev - Canadian pit stop or prelude to Stevenson?

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Mar 17, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - OK, folks, what exactly did we see on Saturday night in Montreal? Was it a rampaging champion stepping up in class and handling – albeit not entirely comprehensively – the most completely qualified challenger either he or his most significant contemporary has met? Or was it something else, more along the lines of a heretofore beyond reproach automaton being shown to have tangible cracks in what had previously been an impenetrable shell? It says here that it was a little of both. Yes, Sergey Kovalev threw more punches, landed more punches, scored the lone knockdown and had won all but one round when hostilities ended after 63 seconds of round 8 with Jean Pascal. And yes, Kovalev was unable to blow the doors off a consensus top-five light heavyweight, left himself open for more than intermittent counterpunches and wobbled noticeably upon their landings. Even the Russian himself seemed to waver in his assessment, suggesting to HBO’s microphone that he wasn’t thrilled with the beginning, but that the end was precisely what the Kremlin ordered. “How I start it, I didn't like,” Kovalev told HBO's Max Kellerman. “But after four rounds I got the control. I got him with a good right hand and he was mine.” Of course, the unsettled nature of the Kovalev report card does little practical good for the gutty but certainly beaten Pascal, who’ll be nursing a headache for days even as his perceptions rise in the eyes of those who judge a fighter’s worth by the beating he’s able to absorb before folding. Toward those dubious ends, he earned more respect in loss No. 3 than he had in wins 1 through 29.

Keith Thurman's Rise Continues To Make Waves

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Mar 10, 2015

By Lyle Fitzsimmons - I’ve never had much luck with prospecting. I was convinced cell phones would never be the must-have accessory of every pre-teen. I’d have guessed the only electric cars I’d see were the ones on slotted race tracks around my Christmas tree. And yes, in 1998, I was the one who’d have drafted Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, too. Not surprisingly, my legacy of blatant misfires carries over to the fight game as well. Upon watching Eric Fields improve to 11-0 at Mallory Square in 2008, I immediately went out and interviewed him, convinced he’d be the future of the cruiserweight division. And after seeing a high school-aged bantamweight named Ray Ximenez Jr. a few years later, I felt the same instant enthusiasm, wrote about him a day later and figured he’d surely be a legit world-class commodity by age 20. Well, here we are in 2015. Fields has won precisely one fight scheduled for more than eight rounds and was stopped in the fourth round of his most recent outing 13 months ago in a California airport hangar. And though Ximenez, now 22, remains unbeaten after a dozen performances as a pro, he’s still not graduated past eight-round fights – and only squeaked to a majority decision against a 7-12 foe to earn win No. 10. Given that dubious history, it’s no surprise I maintain a death grip on any success I find. So, Keith Thurman, you’ve been warned. And now that another night in Las Vegas has come and gone, I expect the bandwagon to fill. Though he was forced to settle for a Floyd Mayweather Jr. leftover on Saturday night rather than the “Money” man himself, the thoughtful, enlightened Floridian did enough of a number on Robert Guerrero over 12 rounds to officially stamp his ticket to the welterweight division’s exclusive room.

Thurman: This is Mayweather's Toughest Foe in Years

Lyle Fitzsimmons

•Mar 3, 2015

It’d be easy for Keith Thurman to be irritated come May 2. After all, the fact that Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao are finally getting together later this spring means an indefinite delay on the Floridian’s ascension to the top of the welterweight division. Now 26, Thurman has long been suggested as heir apparent to the elder 147-pound statesmen, has frequently said he’d like a chance to forcibly pass the torch in the ring and has called Mayweather’s name intermittently since being elevated to the WBA’s second-tier championship status in July 2013.

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About

Articles by Lyle Fitzsimmons: page 47

Oscar De La Hoya: Canelo Will Eventually Fight Golovkin

Yes, boxing fans, there is heavyweight life after May 2

Giving TV Scoring Methods a Calculated Makeover

Upon further review, judges of PBC double weren’t so bad

HBO’s Jim Lampley Memorizing His May 2 Line

Russell’s KO Creates New 20-something Dynasty at 126

Arum: Journalistic decline shaped Floyd-Manny perceptions

Kovalev - Canadian pit stop or prelude to Stevenson?

Keith Thurman's Rise Continues To Make Waves

Thurman: This is Mayweather's Toughest Foe in Years

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Lyle Fitzsimmons

About

Articles by Lyle Fitzsimmons: page 47

Oscar De La Hoya: Canelo Will Eventually Fight Golovkin

Yes, boxing fans, there is heavyweight life after May 2

Giving TV Scoring Methods a Calculated Makeover

Upon further review, judges of PBC double weren’t so bad

HBO’s Jim Lampley Memorizing His May 2 Line

Russell’s KO Creates New 20-something Dynasty at 126

Arum: Journalistic decline shaped Floyd-Manny perceptions

Kovalev - Canadian pit stop or prelude to Stevenson?

Keith Thurman's Rise Continues To Make Waves

Thurman: This is Mayweather's Toughest Foe in Years

Jaron Ennis-Josh Kelly unification nearing completion for February 27

Willy Hutchinson reveals Canelo Alvarez contact and vows to 'box his head off'