Back in April of 2001, “Prince,” Naseem Hamed, then sporting a perfect 35-0 record, faced “The Baby Faced Assassin,” Marco Antonio Barrera, then holding a 52-3 pro ledger in one of the biggest featherweight fights in recent history. What took place in the ring proved memorable.
The showdown, at The MGM Grand in Las Vegas, was widely expected to provide another exciting knockout night for “Naz” – instead we saw a would-be great humbled almost to the point of retirement.
Who can forget the way Hamed, by now trained by the great Emanuel Steward, took so long in coming out of his dressing room for battle? A good fifteen or twenty minutes passed before Barrera, who had made his way to the ring with no fuss at all, was joined by the U.K superstar who was attempting to gain similar status in America. On the way to the ring, carried in as he was by a huge, sort of hoop/swing that held him aloft, Hamed was pelted by unimpressed fans, who threw beer over the deeply religious, non-drinking Muslim. The irony was not lost!
Two ageing heavyweights who really should be happily enjoying retirement will meet in Russia on November 4th. R-Sport reports how Oleg Maskaev, the former WBC heavyweight champion, will face Britain’s Danny Williams in Krasnodar, Russia. 44-year-old Maskaev, 38-7(28) was to have faced Corey Sanders in a rematch of a 2002 meeting which was won by Sanders via 8th-round TKO, but Sanders was unable to get a visa to travel to Russia. 40-year-old Williams, who has a 44-18(33) record (having lost his last eight outings, half by stoppage) was available and has been brought in at short notice.
IBF/WBA super-middleweight king Carl Froch is confident he will defeat unbeaten George Groves in the all-British showdown set for November 23rd; with “The Cobra” believing he will get the job done inside the distance. And the 36-year-old is already eyeing an even bigger fight for himself, to take place in Las Vegas.
There was a whole lot going on in the world fifty years ago. In the real world, hugely popular President, John. F Kennedy was embroiled in both civil rights issues and the ever-growing tension that was building in South East Asia. In England, the shock of the Profumo Affair was huge news, and in the same country members of pop music group The Beatles were closing in on taking the entire planet by storm.
There are, and probably always will be, rumours among boxing folk that say Mike Tyson wanted no part of George Foreman. The two heavyweight greats fought their peak years in different eras, yet due to Foreman’s astonishing 1987 comeback, there was serious talk as early as 1988 that the two lethal punchers would one day meet in the ring. The fight would have been a huge money-spinner but it never happened. Why? Was Tyson, far more mentally fragile than fans, at the time of his reign of terror (and even beyond), could ever have guessed, scared of “animal” Foreman? Or was the fight lost for some other reason? Without getting into that – and what does it really matter why the fight never happened – I make my case for what WOULD have happened had the two legends collided, as talk of the fight peaked, in late 1990.
The look on Russian warrior Ruslan Provodnikov’s face said it all. Moments after he’d taken all the fight out of the tough and gutsy Mike Alvarado, Provodnikov, blood trickling down his swollen face, let loose with his emotions. Proud to be a world champion, stating afterwards what it means to him to be “a world champion like Leonard and Duran,” Provodnikov saw all his years of toil come to the good.