Marvelous Marvin Hagler died this week at the age of 66, and he got a lot of things done in his sport and in his life : one of boxing’s greatest punchers and owner of the sport’s hardest chin; multi-year middleweight champion in the 1980s; actor in Italy; a ringside commentator in the UK … […]

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Two fun developments over the past few days: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man won the heavyweight boxing championship, and a librarian ended a reign of terror on the game show “Jeopardy!” Both results were unexpected. And welcome. The first hero was Andy Ruiz Jr., winning a seventh-round knockout victory over the previously unbeaten Englishman Anthony […]

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Much has been made this week of the moments of madness after Khabib Nurmagodemov defeated Conor McGregor in a highly anticipated Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Las Vegas. People rushed into the ring, punches were thrown. Some people who were at the event feared that the situation could devolve into a riot in the sold-out […]

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Full credit to the author of that headline — which was used as the “lede” (the opening paragraph) in her newspaper story. Bravo, Shannon O’Connor of Southern California News Group. She has the story on a funky little place in the San Bernardino (California) Mountains, formerly known as Santa’s Village, now called “Sky Park at […]

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Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor is something a four-year-old would come up with. One of those curious kids who out of nowhere says, “Who wins if Green Lantern fights Wonder Woman?” That’s what this … fight? … encounter? … scam? … feels like. Two competitors who have competed in different realms. Who have powers unique […]

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As a boxing fan, I wanted to dislike Wladimir Klitschko. I really did. It seemed as if he and his brother took over the sport of boxing around 2005 — and rode it into irrelevance. But I couldn’t really have an issue with Wladimir … or with Vitaly, his elder brother (and mayor of Kiev). […]

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Manny Pacquiao lost his slice of the world welterweight championship tonight when he lost a unanimous but controversial decision to little-known Australian Jeff Horn in Brisbane. The fight happened on Sunday morning, in Australia, so that it could be shown on live non-pay-per-view TV in the U.S., where it was Saturday night. (Here is video […]

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I twice saw Muhammad Ali perform in person. On both occasions he came across as a shattered man. In the ring, in 1980, when Larry Holmes gave him a savage beating in Las Vegas. And again at the Opening Ceremonies for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when he was already firmly in the grip of Parkinson’s […]

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Manny Pacquiao says his third go-round with Timothy Bradley, at the MGM Grand tomorrow night, will be his last fight. It pretty much is time for the Filipino fighter, 37, to go, though a re-run of a re-run with a middling opponent is not exactly a Fight of the Century Part Dieu exit from the […]

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As a sports editor, it is easy to wonder why various fields of endeavor cannot arrange their schedules so that they don’t overlap and dilute their audience — as well as the media recognition they might get that night or the next morning. Today, for instance, we had at least four events that could have […]

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