Brick's Random Thoughts: Adamek, Rankings, Dawson, and More

I am doing business in Ukraine. I can tell you it’s real hard to make an exact translation from Ukrainian to English…especially with respect to names…so don’t give boxrec TOO hard a time.

And on the subject of going from Cruiser to Heavy…..how much weight have guys like Holyfield and Haye and Adamek actually put on to get up to Heavy? How much at most did Holyfield weigh for a fight? Of course it’s not only weight; it’s how a guy’d frame puts on that weight. I mean Butterbean put on weight too…and so did Jirov but he really didn’t have the body type to put on 20-30 pounds.

I’ve always thought Holyfield was a freak of nature…or a freak of enhanced drugs…the way he quickly and easily went from cruiser to heavy…..actuall from Olympic Light heavy.

Good to point that out. They do move around some (but no more than they have to, mostly the same side), and have an overhead, but you’re right, it’s not the same fight the judges see, any more than they see the same fight as each other.

After finally getting around to watching Dawson-Pascal, it just highlighted how badly HBO needs to get a new Spanish translator. Sure, he’s better than their last one, but that doesn’t take much, and it shouldn’t take TOO much effort to find someone who can translate well on the fly and knows boxing terminology. The French language translator for Pascal’s corner showed just how much can be added by having a competent translator back there.

Raul Marquez who does HBO Latino play by play would be excellent but then again… who would call fights on the Spanish broadcast.

1. Is there an American-based fighter with a better hardcore fanbase than Tomasz Adamek? About 6,000 fans packed the Prudential Center for what most viewed as a tune-up fight, and the crowd noise was absolutely deafening at times. The crowd was making so much noise that the fighters couldn’t even hear the bell at the end of the first round. It also may have played a role in influencing the judges – most scores I’ve seen ranged from 116-112 to 117-111 for Adamek, while two of the judges scored it 118-110. Then again, if the crowd noise influenced the judges, then it influenced me as well, as I only gave the sixth and twelfth rounds to Grant. And I can pretty much guarantee you there were more non-English speakers in that audience than non-Polish speakers.

Adamek is everything that is good about boxing… and you know what if we(US) had a fighter who would really make himself a local attraction by fighting often vs good to great oppnets you would perhaps see this happen. Outside of Guerrero at middleweight, there is no real local fanbase for US fighters. Heck…even the crowds we see in LA, Housto, Dallas is more of a reflection of the sheer size of the city and the number of fans instead of fans of x fighters.

Then again, one thing that people often forget is that for most fights, the side that the TV camera is on is the one side where there’s no judge. This, oftentimes what people see on TV is from the one angle that the judges can’t see the action. That may play a decent role in some perceived scoring sleights, such as Devon Alexander’s win over Andriy Kotelnik.

Yeah… but you can’t use that for some fights were it is clear who is actually punching, landing, and basically kicking the other guys ass.

There needs to be some unification in the light heavyweight division. With action fighters Jean Pascal, Tavoris Cloud, Beibut Shumenov and Juergen Braehmer as the titlists, I can guarantee that sparks would fly in a bout between any of them.

I would love a 4 way tournament… it is too bad that Braehmer will not fight in the US, Cloud will go another year before a fight, Shumenov… well he is pretty kick ass, and PAscal will most certainly fight Bute.

Tomasz Adamek is starting to show just how big of a gap there can be between cruiserweight and heavyweight. Two of Adamek’s strong suits at cruiserweight were his power and his chin, and both seem to be distinctly mediocre at heavyweight. Just one more reason to give props to guys like Evander Holyfield and David Haye who seemed to make the jump without too many problems.

Yeah…. you have to remember that Adamek was several years ago… a lightheavyweight. the difference between LW and HW is around the difference between Sergio Martinez and Joel Casamajor.

I can’t believe that a panel of 36 boxing writers think that Sechew Powell, Vanes Martirosyan, Yuri Foreman and Ryan Rhodes deserve to be ranked ahead of Sergiy Dzinziruk at junior middleweight, but that’s just what the Ring Magazine ratings committee has done. I realize he’s been fairly inactive, but Razor has several wins a cut above anything those guys have done.

There are never a lack of stupid people voting for something in boxing.

Going relatively unnoticed, Wladimir Klitschko finally joined the Ring’s pound for pound top 10, making him the first ranked heavyweight since Lennox Lewis. In a way it speaks to the weakness of the pound for pound rankings at the moment, but few fighters have consistently dominated their weight class like Wlad over the past several years.

He gets some bonus points for banging the miget that everyone would like to #@#$

Why in the world did Boxrec change the names of all the former Soviet-bloc fighters? I realize their actual names are in Cyrillic, but when someone’s gone his entire career with a spelling of his name, there’s no reason to suddenly start calling him “Vasiliy Zhirov”. Fortunately, they’ve gone back and changed some of the more known fighters back to the names they’ve actually fought under

Eh… at least they didn’t change Johnny Storm’s name.

Note to Chad Dawson – nice hair, champ. Not sure what’s in worse taste – having the challenger come in with the word “champion” shaved into his head, or wearing a Condom Depot ad on his butt.

One word of advise…. you should never go cheap on condoms… EVER….

Maybe HBO should consider a slightly different business model when it comes to boxing. For the past 15 years or so, they’ve been trying to build up stars by buying mismatches for rising prospects who have potential. Rather than overpaying for these fights to deliver an inferior product, why not put the onus on the promoters to actually make good, competitive, exciting fights, and then buy those? Instead of trying to create a star, let the promoters do their jobs, create the stars, and THEN start to pay decent money for the fights once they start to get bigger. HBO could pay half as much and still put on most of the same BAD cards, simply because the promoters still wouldn’t have any alternatives that would pay better.

Yeah… touche’ but same story different day, week, month, year, etc…

Yeah… sorry… working chingos recently

Oh… a blown up and shot Joel Casamajor or any lightweight you want to mention.

I totally agree re: HBO. They are so lamebrained. The best analogy I can come up with for Seth Greenberg is that he’s like a parent who thinks he can figure out what his teenager will think is cool.