Rant!

By Boxing News - 10/18/2016 - Comments

Image: Rant!

By Jermill Pennington: Tyson Fury – the thing I hate about the situation with Fury is that I feel duped to some degree. In my estimation of Fury leading in to his Fight versus Wladimir Klitschko I thought we were seeing a man poised for greatness. A man that was nearly driven to the point of insanity by his thirst to become the heavy weight champion of the world. In retrospect the aforementioned may still hold true, however the extreme feeling of letdown has taken place since his win over Klitschko.

Since his win over Klitscho, Fury has done nothing other than eat himself in to an unrecognizable loaf. To add to his battles at the table, Fury also seems to be battling a drug addiction. While I always try to have empathy for those battling addiction, in the case of Fury I have little as I deem his problem to be a severe case of “after party syndrome.”

Let me be the first to say I see nothing wrong with someone letting their hair down after accomplishing something. Fury’s win over Klitschko in context can be said to be the biggest win in recent years knocking off a champion who’d been in place for a decade. That alone deserves countless adult beverages and a week on a secluded beach, however there is a time the party must stop and we get back to work. For me I’m very disappointed in Fury, I feel betrayed and let down as I thought we were seeing a man that would push the boundaries in the heavy weight division, instead all we got was a guy who beat a great champion only to disrespect the time and effort it takes to be a champion for a decade.

Floyd Mayweather – One thing I find strange is that when controversy involves the black community many times people call on athletes to speak as some sort of spokesperson. While there are some that are versed enough to carry the torch, there are many that should run at the sight of a microphone coming towards them. Add Floyd Mayweather. For the record I’m huge fan of Floyd, INSIDE THE RING, outside the ring I have very little interest in what Floyd has to say.

Floyd did a recent interview addressing issues such as black lives matter and relations between police and those in the black community. I’m very particular in conversations regarding race and politics with whom the person is speaking. Many times a person giving their individual opinion is taken as the sentiment felt by all; if that’s the case I definitely don’t want Floyd speaking for the black community. Understand that someone who sounds uninformed or doesn’t speak eloquently enough many times can be dismissed as ignorant, and when that person is a representation for others unfortunately those he’s representing can be seen as the same. For that reason I say Floyd, shut up if you’re not talking about boxing.

Canelo/Golovkin – when it comes to the saga this is Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin I feel as though we’ve seen this story before. To keep this portion of my rant short, sweet, cut and dry we are now in what should have its proper term in boxing known as the “marinating period.” A word that should be hated by boxing fans because all it means is we’re not going to be getting the fight anytime soon. The question regarding the two that seems to linger is who’s to blame? The obvious culprit would be Alvarez who gave Golovkin step aside money to fight Miguel Cotto for the Middleweight crown. I’m not certain but there seemed to have been some sort of verbal agreement (why not contractual? Beats me) that Alvarez would fight Golovkin after defeating Cotto. Long story short Alvarez vacated the belt and went down to the Jr. Middle weight division leaving Golovkin with no dance partner.

Few things, why was the agreement not contractual? And in the case of Golovkin, why accept step aside money if the belt is all you want? Marinating a fight has been tried and proven to be effective in bringing in the revenues if timed right. I personally think all parties are in on it for the bigger payoff a year down the road, like it or not it’s the sport we love.

PBC – Something here went drastically wrong. At this point it seems that the plan in how they were going to take over the market was not thought out well at all. Over paying fighters before they’ve proven to be a worthy commodity doesn’t seem to be the way to go and I’m totally about the fighters getting paid. Seems they were able to corral a bunch of fighters, but that’s as far as their plan seemed to go. After you have all the fighters, what are you going to do with them? Another thing I think the PBC master minds should have known is that you can’t make someone a star; they have to become a star. As much as you’d like us to believe Danny Garcia’s a star, boxing fans still aren’t buying and that’s not discredit to Danny. What’s the use of having all the fighters if you’re not planning on having them fight each other?

In the end I find myself with a sad feeling. There were many fans who hated the PBC format, I never understood why because as we see now without PBC there just isn’t much boxing to talk about. At least when PBC was on television regularly we had fights, whether you deemed them worthy of your viewership or not, some boxing is better than no boxing. I always felt like fans should support PBC, simply because of more boxing being available. For whatever reason lines were drawn and a large sect of fans made it their mission to undermine the PBC for reasons I’m still unsure of. So now I hope you’re happy, we have no boxing worth mention, mission complete.