Rant #1– Well, I won’t spend too much time on the James Toney-Randy Couture farce since I already touched on most of my main points in my article, An Open Letter to Randy Couture.
However, I just want to express how bad I felt watching that freak show. Toney is one of my all-time favorites and, yeah, I know that he ultimately was the one who decided to walk into Dana White’s ambush, but you still have to feel sorry for the guy.
When the fight started, Toney immediately went into his shoulder roll stance, as if there were going to be any punches to counter. It drove home the fact that Toney was completely ill-prepared and delusional about how this fight would play out.
Toney was like the harmless, delusional drunk old man in a bar who gets beaten to a bloody pulp by some laughing thug for “talking tough.”
This wasn’t necessary and if there was any chance of me softening up and becoming a UFC fan, that road is closed now.
Rant #2– As I’m writing this, two of the sport’s biggest news sources, Yahoo Sports and ESPN, are sporting boxing sections that have absolutely no mention of this past Saturday’s Giovanni Segura-Ivan Calderon war…The closest we got was a very general Twitter post from Dan Rafael about the contest.
I don’t know what this says about both news sources, but as a hardcore fan, it doesn’t sit well with me at all.
Rant #3– Who said there was no honor among thieves?
Bob Arum delivered Pacquiao-Margarito to Jose Sulaiman as promised. That means likely over a million dollars in “sanctioning fees” to the WBC for paving the way for this jr. middleweight title bout between two guys who have a combined ONE fight at jr. middleweight over the last six years. Arum, in return, gets yet another all-Top Rank title fight.
But Sulaiman, always the generous fellow, may have even thrown Arum a bonus. Apparently, the rumored Mike Jones-Jesus Soto Karass bout on the Pacquiao-Margarito undercard will be a WBC title eliminator for the winner of Andre Berto-Selcuk Aydin.
Karass is a Top Rank fighter while Jones is being courted by the promotional company and may soon sign with them.
But when Jones is ranked #6 in the WBC’s latest official rankings and Karass is #16, declaring a fight between the two a “title eliminator” is pure hubris.
Sulaiman isn’t even pretending to hide his douche-baggery anymore.
Enough…I’m off to bed…
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