Mayweather vs Cotto, Canelo vs Mosley, Pirog, Rafael Marquez, More: Boxing TV Schedule For May 1-5

Since there's a fight on Tuesday that we'll be covering, the TV schedule is two days early this week. It's a lighter schedule than usual, because it's a MEGA HUGE EVENT SUPER SHOW week, and not many promoters like running TV against that stuff. Plus, it has Canelo, so even the Mexican TV schedule is light.

Tuesday, May 1

Rossiya 2 (Russia), 11:10 a.m. EDT, Dmitry Pirog vs Nobuhiro Ishida, Vyacheslav Glazkov vs Gbenga Oloukun. Assuming we can find a feed of this, and we should be able to, we'll have live coverage. This isn't much of a challenge on paper for the WBO middleweight titleholder Pirog, but it's a fight for a major title that does in theory mean something, plus it's a Tuesday at 11 a.m., so what else am I doing? Bad Left Hook will have live round-by-round coverage.

Thursday, May 3

BoxNation (UK), 2:30 p.m. EDT, Steve O'Meara vs Bradley Pryce, Ashley Sexton vs TBA. This show has been postponed, as O'Meara pulled out on Tuesday.

Friday, May 4

Fox Sports Net / Fox Deportes, 10:00 p.m. EDT, Daniel Ponce De Leon vs Eduardo Lazcano, Ishe Smith vs Ayi Bruce. Golden Boy begins their surely meaningful relationship with the Fox Sports group. There's no way this turns into a totally forgettable series. No way, man. Not with the track records of these two forces. But this show is fine. Ponce De Leon vs Lazcano is better than half of the PPV on Saturday. Honestly, Smith-Bruce might be, too.

Saturday, May 5

RCTI (Indonesia), 7:30 a.m. EDT, Chris John vs Shoji Kimura, Daud Yordan vs Lorenzo Villanueva. I thought about getting up early and trying to watch this one to cover it live, and then I realized how fucking insane that would be for me to get up at 5 a.m. or so, get my bearings, have some breakfast, watch this show, head to my fight HQ in Michigan around Noon, watch the German show, and then do the PPV that night. Not because that's some crazy amount of work or travel, but because by the time Vargas vs Forbes started on the PPV I'd be so tired and oversaturated with boxing that I wouldn't be able to properly enjoy my Maker's Mark. So what's the point? This is a decent show though. John should win as always (Kimura's better than his average opponent, though), but Yordan-Villanueva is a good fight. I don't know. Maybe we'll have coverage.

BoxNation (UK) / ARD (Germany), 2:30 p.m. EDT, Marco Huck vs Ola Afolabi II, Alexander Dimitrenko vs Kubrat Pulev, Robert Stieglitz vs Nader Hamdan. There will be other fights, including middleweight prospect Dustin Dirks facing washed-up Thomas Ulrich, and heavyweight prospect Edmund Gerber facing Maurice Harris. This is a good show, even with Stieglitz vs Groves lost to injury. Huck vs Afolabi was a solid, close fight the first time around, and Pulev is one of the better prospects out there, already ranked No. 10 in the world by BLH (Dimitrenko is No. 9). Hamdan is a lousy replacement for Groves, but the focus is more on keeping Stieglitz busy and protecting Stieglitz-Abraham now. Bad Left Hook will have live round-by-round coverage.

Sky Sports 1 (UK), 3:00 p.m. EDT, Paul McCloskey vs DeMarcus Corley, Prizefighter: Irish Middleweights. Well, at least it's not Julio Diaz, since McCloskey-Diaz was a pretty laughable fight. McCloskey wants another world title shot eventually, but he's not exactly convincing anyone that he's a real threat. He won a debatable decision last September against Breidis Prescott (we scored it for Breidis, though he did fade badly int he fight), and now he faces Corley. I'll give fair warning here: Corley is only a middling fighter at this point, but he seems to get up when he thinks there's a chance a win will mean something, and I wouldn't look past him here. McCloskey isn't so good that Corley can't still beat him. The rest of the show is a Prizefighter tournament, plus Martin Lindsay has a six-round fight on the card, too.

HBO PPV / BoxNation (UK) / Televisa (Mexico), 9:00 p.m. EDT, Floyd Mayweather Jr vs Miguel Cotto, Canelo Alvarez vs Shane Mosley, Jessie Vargas vs Steve Forbes, Deandre Latimore vs Carlos Quintana. We'll obviously have a ton more on this card in the coming days, so pass on discussing it here. Bad Left Hook will have live round-by-round coverage.

ESPN2 / ESPN3.com, 10:00 p.m. EDT, Demetrius Andrade vs Rudy Cisneros. This isn't a mistake or anything. This is airing on Saturday, not Friday. I have absolutely no earthly clue why ESPN would bother paying anyone money for this fight, but I'm starting to get the feeling that Andrade's team has them over a barrel in some way, because this fight is, uh, not worth airing against a Mayweather PPV. This would be a pretty rotten FNF main event. In this time slot, it just doesn't make any sense. Who the hell is going to watch this? Forget just the Mayweather show. There's the NBA playoffs and baseball going on, too.

TV Azteca (Mexico), 10:30 p.m. EDT, Jackie Nava vs Diana Ayala, Rafael Marquez vs Kenichi Yamguchi. The main event here has Jackie Nava, the very popular and pretty awesome WBA super bantamweight titlist, facing a Colombian challenger who is 12-6-3 (7) and last fought against someone making her debut. And they ask me why I can't bring myself to follow women's boxing most of the time. I'm sure that sounds sexist to someone, but I frankly watch enough mismatches on the male side. That's the real Rafael Marquez, not some, like, Rafael P. Marquez or anything. From what I hear, this is step one to Marquez trying to land one more title fight. I'm sure he'll find it.