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By Lyle Fitzsimmons - I heard from my old friend Tom Thompson the other day.
He’s only an “old friend” in the newfangled 21st century definition of the word… seeing how we’ve never actually met, we’ve spoken just twice and the tangible structure of our relationship has been largely built on a series of cyber debates over Presidential politics, college football and Bruce Springsteen music.
But above all else, Tom and I like to “talk” boxing.
And while I’ve had to endure his sometimes suspect views on Floyd Mayweather Jr. (he picked Gatti), Winky Wright (he picked Trinidad) and Bernard Hopkins (he picked Tarver) over the years, he’s also been right often enough to warrant the occasional return chat.
So when pressed for an idea on what to include in my holiday week column from a pre-Christmas retreat in the shockingly frigid Smoky Mountains, I decided to drop a line to Thompson family compound in Louisiana and pick his brain as the calendar flipped one day closer to 2009.
In the interest of full disclosure - and though his full-time pursuits make him more “business guru” than ace journalist or in-ring expert - he did give the latter two a try with the launch of the diamond-in-the-rough TigerBoxing.com Web site in the fall of 2004.
Though “Tiger” never got the exposure of many counterparts elsewhere on the Internet, it dwarfed all but a few in terms of quality, both through the acumen of its writers - Kieran Mulvaney, Kevin Iole, and, well… me, for example - and its pursuit of compelling feature content rather than hit-and-run opinion. [details]
He’s only an “old friend” in the newfangled 21st century definition of the word… seeing how we’ve never actually met, we’ve spoken just twice and the tangible structure of our relationship has been largely built on a series of cyber debates over Presidential politics, college football and Bruce Springsteen music.
But above all else, Tom and I like to “talk” boxing.
And while I’ve had to endure his sometimes suspect views on Floyd Mayweather Jr. (he picked Gatti), Winky Wright (he picked Trinidad) and Bernard Hopkins (he picked Tarver) over the years, he’s also been right often enough to warrant the occasional return chat.
So when pressed for an idea on what to include in my holiday week column from a pre-Christmas retreat in the shockingly frigid Smoky Mountains, I decided to drop a line to Thompson family compound in Louisiana and pick his brain as the calendar flipped one day closer to 2009.
In the interest of full disclosure - and though his full-time pursuits make him more “business guru” than ace journalist or in-ring expert - he did give the latter two a try with the launch of the diamond-in-the-rough TigerBoxing.com Web site in the fall of 2004.
Though “Tiger” never got the exposure of many counterparts elsewhere on the Internet, it dwarfed all but a few in terms of quality, both through the acumen of its writers - Kieran Mulvaney, Kevin Iole, and, well… me, for example - and its pursuit of compelling feature content rather than hit-and-run opinion. [details]
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