The saga continues.
“So now I’m 16 and 0,” Elbaum recalls. “And I’m more sure than ever that, someday, I’ll be a world champion. I didn’t think it. I knew it. My next fight, I lost a decision at a tournament in Chicago. I felt bad. But hey, it happens. By the time I was nineteen, my record was 40 and 7. But the fights I’d lost were to fighters who were bigger than me, older than me, more experienced than me. There was always a reason for losing.”
Then something bad happened.
“I lost three fights in a row,” Elbaum recounts. “And I realized I’d never be a world champion. It was like a death sentence. I was devastated. I’d thought my destiny was to be like Willie Pep. Now my dream was dead, and it was like the world had come to an end.”
Don Elbaum, like Zelig, surfaces from time to time in proximity to a wide range of players. So let’s travel back in time to the early 1970s.
“I was promoting fight cards in Buffalo and living in the Statler Hotel or the Sheraton, I forget which,” Elbaum recalls. “There was a fantastic deli called Harvey’s attached to the hotel that had great corned beef sandwiches. One day, the deli owner said to me, ‘Don, let me sell tickets for your fights.’ I told him okay, and he did it for four or five shows. He could sell; he was good. And once he started selling tickets for me, I never had to pay for a corned beef sandwich.”
“Anyway,” Elbaum continues, “time goes by. I move to New York. And one day, there’s a story in the newspaper that Harvey is now in Manhattan and has started a film company. I called his office and left a message congratulating him. His secretary called me back and said Harvey was thrilled to hear from me and would be in touch shortly. And that was it. I never heard from him again.”
Why is that bit of Americana relevant today?
“Harvey” was Harvey Weinstein, the Academy-Award-winning film producer who has recently been outed as a bullying sexual predator.
“I liked Harvey,” Elbaum says. “The guy I’m reading about now isn’t the guy I thought I knew. But I guess I was wrong. What he did disgusts me.”
Boxing writers, like most fans, develop a fondness for certain fighters. What separates us from the average fan is that we sometimes also develop personal relationships with the fighters we’re covering.
I was at Seanie Monaghan’s pro debut on May 21, 2010. It was at Capitale in New York on the undercard of a dreadful mismatch between Shannon Briggs and Dominique Alexander. Seanie was fighting a guy named Simeon Trigueno, who would finish his ring career at 0 and 4 with 3 KOs by. Promoter Joe DeGuardia was protecting Monaghan (as Bob Arum would later) because Seanie was a ticket-seller. Being a contrarian sort who’s inclined to root for the underdog when I don’t know either fighter, I was rooting for Trigueno. Seanie knocked him out in the first round.
Several years later, I spent three hours talking one-on-one with Seanie for an article I was writing. And I came away thinking, “This is a great guy.”
Every time Monaghan has fought since then, my heart has been in his gloves.
“You need a mean streak to be a fighter,” Seanie once told me. “But it’s not just fighters. There are rich people who’ve never thrown a punch in their life who are just as mean and cruel as any fighter. Sometimes they’re worse. It just comes out in different ways. Outside the ring, I try to be as nice as person as I can be.”
On July 15, 2017, Seanie suffered the first loss of his pro career when he was knocked out in the second round of a fight at Nassau Coliseum by Marcus Browne. I watched on television, and it hurt to watch.
Seanie suffered more physical damage in some of his victories than he did in the Browne fight. But the loss to Browne exacted an enormous price. Serious economic consequences will follow. There’s also an emotional low that comes with losing.
Writing in Intimate Warfare, Dennis Taylor and John Raspanti summed up the emotional turmoil that accompanies a fighter’s first loss: “Gone is the fighter’s own mindset of invincibility. Suddenly, he has a chink in his armor that wasn’t there before. He is forced to relinquish the illusion that he is unbeatable, that he will always find a way to overcome and prevail. Now he knows better. He will always know better. A record that is blemished just once won’t turn the fighter into a non-entity. But an unspoken probationary period descends like a threatening storm cloud. The ledge overlooking oblivion becomes a bit more precarious, feeling like it could crumble beneath the fighter’s feet at any moment.”
Monaghan can look back on what he has accomplished over the past seven years in boxing and in his personal life with pride. But the odds that he’ll make life-changing money from boxing in the future just got longer.
I was going through some old files recently and came across several thoughts that Emanuel Steward shared with me that I’d never used in articles. Now is as good a time as any to relate them:
• “There are no standards for being a trainer anymore. Just throw a towel over your shoulder and say you’re a trainer. It’s like being a writer for a boxing website. Anyone can do it.”
• “I was watching a fight the other night, and the trainer kept telling his fighter to double-up on the jab. I wanted holler, ‘How can he double up on the jab when he can’t land the first one?’”
• “In the dressing room before a fight, you can ask your fighter if he feels good. But he’ll always tell you ‘yes.’ So unless you know your fighter very well, you don’t know if he’s feeling good or not.”
Emanuel died five years ago. The day it happened, Larry Merchant told me, “I haven’t been this sad since my father died.”
Emanuel Steward was important to boxing. A lot of people miss him.
On June 16, 2017, WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman said that the WBC might bestow its Diamond Belt on the winner of the August 16 Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor spectacle. That raises an interesting possibility.
In order to fight for a WBC championship, or if a fighter is ranked by the WBC in its top fifteen in any weight division, the fighter must be registered in the WBC Clean Boxing Program and submit to year-round performance-enhancing drug testing by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency.
Mayweather has studiously avoided VADA testing, preferring to be tested by the more compliant United States Anti-Doping Agency.
If the WBC requires Mayweather and McGregor to submit to VADA testing, it would reaffirm the sanctioning body’s commitment to clean sport. But that’s unlikely to happen. Either Mayweather and McGregor will decline the WBC’s offer. Or propelled by a desire to be part of Mayweather–McGregor, the WBC will find a way to negate its Clean Boxing Program’s VADA requirement. Sulaiman hinted at that possibility on July 19, when he said that neither Mayweather nor McGregor is currently ranked by the WBC and, if they fight for the Diamond Belt, it would be regarded as a commemorative trophy, not a championship.
The WBC’s Clean Boxing Program is the most promising of boxing’s current anti-PED initiatives. It would be a shame if Mauricio Sulaiman were to undermine it for the sake of participating in one fight.
Jim Thomas is best known to boxing fans as the attorney who guided Evander Holyfield through the glory years of Evander’s career. But Thomas has a history of his own as a participant in combat sports. In his words, “I spent 1/365th of one year as a professional regulated full-contact kickboxer.”
Thomas grew up poor, earned a scholarship to college and law school at William and Mary, and was a reasonably good athlete. Along the way, he spent seven years training as a karate kickboxer. The high point of his career was a three-week stint in Japan when he won sixty-three out of sixty-three amateur bouts under Japanese karate rules, which allow full contact to the body but not the head. That led his sensei (teacher/trainer) Hiroshi Hamada (who—again in Thomas’s words—had “a go-out-on-your shield warrior spirit”) to enter Jim in a professional bout.
“It was for five hundred dollars,” Thomas recalls. “That was like food for a year when I was in law school.”
The bout was contested in 1
975 in Williamsburg, Virginia, where the twenty-three-year-old Thomas was in his final year of law school. The contract weight was 175 pounds. Jim’s chief second was Jeff Smith (a friend who later became a seven-time Professional Karate Association world light-heavyweight champion).
And, oh yes . . . The opponent was Jerry Rhome, who would become a full-contact karate kickboxing U.S. heavyweight champion.
“I knew I was overmatched going in,” Thomas recounts. “Rhome was so far above me. In the first round, I was like a Chihuahua chasing after a German shepherd. Rome was just getting in work. Then, in the second round, he got tired of it and landed a left punch to the head followed by a right punch to the head. I ducked under the right, which brought my head within perfect range of a left round kick that landed on flush the bridge of my nose. It was one of the few times that people saw a guy go down and actually hit head-first on the canvas.”
“I could see the crowd,” Thomas continues. “They were waving but I couldn’t hear them. The sound came on at the count of six. I got up and did what I’d seen fighters do on television; pounded my gloves together and said, ‘I’m okay.’ The referee said the fight could continue, and Jeff threw in the towel.”
“I was upset with Jeff,” Thomas recalls. “Jeff said, ‘Explain to me what you thought you were going to do to Jerry if the fight went on.’ I told him to go screw himself, although in less polite terms than that. And Jeff told me, ‘Look, you were already knocked out once, and you’ll have a headache for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If I’d let it go on and you got knocked out again, which would have happened, you’d have a headache for the next six weeks. You’re in law school, right?’
“Yes,” Thomas answered.
“And you’re one of the top students in your class?”
“Yes.”
“How well will you do in law school if you can’t think?”
Two hours later, Thomas, Smith, and Rhome were having beers together at a local bar.
And there’s an epilogue to the story. Years later, Thomas was the head of litigation for Long Aldridge & Norman (a major law firm in Atlanta). It was there that he met Holyfield for the first time. Evander was in Jim’s office for a get-acquainted session, and Jim mentioned that he’d once fought Rhome (who by then had served briefly as one of Evander’s sparring partners). That led to an expression of disbelief. So Jim took a scrapbook off the shelf and showed Holyfield a photo of his squaring off against Rhome at the start of their fight.
“Look at that,” Evander exclaimed.
“Don’t get too excited,” Thomas cautioned. “It doesn’t end well.”
Then Jim turned to the final photo.
“It doesn’t matter how it ended,” Holyfield told Thomas. “You got in there and fought this guy. I never thought I’d know a lawyer who got in there and did what I do.”
Misrepresentations and forgeries are common in the sports collectibles market. Within that environment, many buyers rely on Professional Sports Authenticator and PSA/DNA for authentication.
PSA focuses on authenticating and grading sports cards and other trading cards. PSA/DNA focuses on authenticating autographs and the overall memorabilia market. According to the PSA website, the two companies “have processed over 20 million cards and collectibles with a cumulative declared value of over a billion dollars.”
The PSA/DNA website states that PSA/DNA was founded by PSA in 1998 “in response to widespread counterfeiting, forgery, and piracy of autographed collectibles.” The website further states, “PSA/DNA is the world’s leading third-party authentication service for autographs and memorabilia,” and adds, “PSA/DNA experts conduct ink analysis, structure analysis, object evaluation, and side-by-side comparisons. Experts may also use a video spectral comparator to further evaluate the autograph.”
Impressive. Right?
Wrong.
A photograph listed for sale on eBay as of this writing is described as follows: “Michael Dokes Authentic Autographed Signed 16x20 Photo . . . This is a 16x20 Photo that has been hand signed by Michael Dokes. It has been authenticated by PSA/DNA and comes with their sticker and matching certificate of authenticity.”
Confirming the authenticity of Michael Dokes’s signature, the PSA/DNA website states:
“PSA/DNA Certification Verification #T14814—It is the opinion of PSA/DNA Authentication Services that the signature(s) listed below is/are genuine. According to the Certification Database, this item is defined as follows:
Item: Photograph
Primary subject: Michael Dokes
Result/Grade: Authentic.
Now we come to the problem.
The “authentic autographed photo that has been hand signed by Michael Dokes” and “authenticated by PSA/DNA and comes with their sticker and matching certificate of authenticity” isn’t a photo of Michael Dokes signed by Michael Dokes. It’s a photograph of Michael Grant signed by Michael Grant.
Daniel Mendoza earned recognition as champion of England when he defeated Bill Warr in 1794. He’s widely regarded as pugilism’s first “scientific” boxer and was also boxing’s first Jewish champion. He learned Hebrew as a boy, was bar mitzvahed at age thirteen, and is said to have been the first Jew that King George III ever spoke with.
Mendoza authored both a personal memoir and a treatise on boxing. In each instance, the writing now seems dated. That’s to be expected since Mendoza’s championship reign coincided with the presidency of George Washington.
But some thoughts are eternal. Thus, it’s worth repeating one of Mendoza’s observations: “A knowledge of the art of pugilism can never be acquired by theory alone.”
Those of us who sit on the easy side of the ropes should remember that pearl of wisdom.
Nine years ago, I wrote an article entitled “BoxRec.com: Boxing’s Indispensable Website.” I praised John Sheppard, the indefatigable Brit who has maintained the site as a gift to the boxing community since its inception in 2000. And I quoted numerous boxing aficionados, among them:
• Matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Short of actually being at a fight, they’re the best source of information out there. I have my own computerized records, and I’m on BoxRec at least a dozen times a day. We take it for granted, but everyone in boxing would miss it if it was gone.”
• Historian Mike Silver: “BoxRec.com is a dream come true. It’s one of the greatest gifts to boxing fans and boxing historians in the history of the world. Years ago, you needed a whole shelf of Ring record books to track the records of fighters. Now anyone can do it in seconds for free. Every time I write about boxing, I want to thank them.”
• Promoter Lou DiBella: “Anyone in boxing who says he doesn’t use BoxRec is either a complete imbecile or lying.”
Virtually everyone who follows the sweet science, from the most powerful denizens of the boxing world to casual fans, uses BoxRec.com. John Sheppard still works fulltime on the site, as he has since 2005. He recently hired his first fulltime employee, a computer programmer who works from home “so I’m not so stressed anymore.” The site has almost two hundred editors located around the world, none of whom are paid. The result is a database that’s unparalleled in the history of boxing.
BoxRec.com has data on more than 55,000 referees, judges, managers, promoters, matchmakers, supervisors, and other “non-fighters.” But its core content consists of more than 2,050,000 bouts that have been entered into its database. That includes roughly 23,000 active (having fought within the past 365 days) and 622,000 nonactive fighters. These numbers keep growing as new fights take place and more old ones are recorded.
And there’s a feature unique to BoxRec.com that makes it the clear industry favorite. Anyone who views a fighter’s record can also see the complete record of that fighter’s opponents, his opponents’ opponents, and so on down the line.
One change from recent years is that BoxRec.com has now been embraced by, and is an official registry for, the Association of Boxing Commissions. That makes life easier for Sheppard
because, in his words, “Even the most recalcitrant states now send us results.”
On a typical day, BoxRec.com has 116,000 visitors who view 700,000 pages. These are impressive numbers that translate into 3,596,000 visitors who view 21,700,000 pages per month. Roughly 27 percent of this traffic comes from the United States and 25 percent from the United Kingdom.
Converting BoxRec.com to a pay site would mean a big payout for Sheppard. But nine years ago, he told this writer, “I’ve always lived within my means. I’ve never needed a lot of money to be happy. That’s not why I started the site. That’s not what it’s all about. I don’t want BoxRec to ever become a closed shop.”
To this day, Sheppard maintains that view, saying, “It’s never going to happen. Not on my watch.”
Three years ago, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Sheppard with the James A. Farley Award for Honesty and Integrity. He deserves that recognition and any other accolades that come his way.
There are times when the New York State Athletic Commission ill-advisedly tampers with standard practice. That was evident at Barclays Center on January 14, 2017.
Recently enacted NYSAC medical protocols call for ring doctors to stand on the ring apron and observe both fighters during all breaks between rounds. If a doctor wants to examine a fighter from inside the ring, the doctor asks the referee to call a time out.
This led to multiple occasions on January 14 (in the co-featured bouts and also on the undercard), when a boxer was examined, and the action was put on hold, to the dismay of the crowd and the opposing fighter.
Does this practice contribute to safeguarding the health and safety of fighters?
Protect Yourself at All Times Page 32