Golden Boy’s Quillin-Sharpe Little More Than a Human Sacrifice

by Paul Magno

Late yesterday, Golden Boy Promotions papered every boxing site with a well-written press release announcing the next fight of their middleweight-super middleweight title hopeful, Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin.

According to the Golden Boy promotional mill, Quillin (22-0, 16 KOs) will be “bringing a bit of East Coast flavor to the Sports Center in Fairfield, Calif. [on February 11th].”

Well, unless that “East Coast flavor” is “turd,” Schaefer, De la Hoya, and the Golden crew are really stretching the boundaries of truth in advertising with this one.

Quillin’s opponent for the Telefutura-televised main event, described in the press release as “a longtime East Coast favorite,” is a pug by the name of Dennis Sharpe who, aside from being inactive since mid-2007, had lost five in a row before his lay-off and had gone 0-5-2 in his last seven. You’d have to go all the way to May of 2004 to find a win for Sharpe. As a matter of fact, Sharpe (17-5-3, 4 KOs) hasn’t even won a round since later in that same year.

Setting up prospects with easy interim bouts is a long-held tradition in boxing, but this is beyond the traditional soft touch.

Matching a 27-year old undefeated burgeoning star up against an inactive 36-year old punching bag on a nationally-televised broadcast is flat-out wrong for the sport and completely irresponsible for the event’s producers, Golden Boy and the usually respect-worthy, Don Chargin.

Another troubling aspect of this farce is that at least a dozen boxing sites, including big boys like Fightnews and Boxingscene, ran with this story and printed the press release, which was little more than an advertisement for the event, verbatim, as a news story.

Never once does the press release mention Sharpe’s inactivity nor does it mention that Sharpe last won a round a full year before Quillin made his pro debut.

It’s a lot easier to just print a Golden Boy full page ad on your site, but in this case, it doesn’t take that much effort at all to do a little research and actually inform those who do you the favor of reading your site.

Quillin wants a tune-up, Golden Boy wants to protect their investment, boxing sites want easy content, and Sharpe wants a pay day. Everybody seems to be getting what they want with this human sacrifice…except Telefutura, who wants to put on a good show and, of course, the fans, who get cheated out of a real contest in one of the sport’s few TV dates.

The best case scenario for this bout is that we get a quick KO and a look at the undercard fighters…Worst case scenario is, well, something that the sport always flirts with when it chooses to book ridiculous mismatches.