This year, we've seen a fight end because junior middleweight Kermit Cintron catapulted out of the ring; we saw a fight end two different times after referee Arthur Mercante, Jr. forced junior middleweight Yuri Foreman to fight on with a torn meniscus in his knee; and we saw a fight end where cruiserweight Paul Briggs crumpled in a heap from a mere glancing jab, prompting allegations of Briggs taking a dive followed by troubling reports that Briggs wasn't healthy enough to fight one iota. Don't forget this one and this one and this one and this one and this one, either.

2010 has been a small year in many ways for the sport, but when it comes to weird endings to boxing matches, it's come up way big.

I'm not sure if what happened on the undercard of Tomasz Adamek's heavyweight bout with Michael Grant -- when borderline junior welterweight prospect Jeremy Bryan got a 1st round stoppage win over Daniel Mitchell -- tops them all. But it sure doesn't look right. It appears as though Mitchell fakes an injury, then forgets which injury he faked. If you didn't buy the card, check out the video above, via BoxingChaos.

Below, a gallery of some of the rest of 2010's funkiest endings, in no particular order. As always, videos stay up as long as YouTube lets them stay up. If I left some major ones out, lemme know.

(Above are a couple panels from my brother's web comic running now at kylestarks.com. It depicts a big ol' punch, which is the thinnest reed I need to use it as an excuse to promote my little bro, who's suddenly getting well-deserved widespread attention on sites like io9 and ComicsAlliance for his work.)

When it comes to Showtime's Super Six, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, "Don't Panic!" It was big news this week when Mikkel Kessler dropped out of the tournament due to an eye injury, but like almost every single bump the tourney has encountered, I'm confident the event will manage just fine. At every point there's been a bit of misfortune in the tournament -- Jermain Taylor's departure, a fight being pushed back, etc. -- a bunch of people flip out and become convinced that this whole thing is on the verge of cataclysm. Instead, what looks more likely to happen is that Allan Green simply gets left out of the final round-robin leg of the event to be rewarded later with a Showtime date, then Andre Ward-Andre Dirrell and Arthur Abraham-Carl Froch moves up to the semi-final, which approximates the current seeding anyway. Bam! That's still three more intriguing fights, including the finale, and one sure-fire Fight of the Year candidate in Abraham-Froch. Hell, there's a case this is GOOD for the tournament (assuming Kessler is going to be OK, which might not be the case despite his pronouncements of such).

Let's say that path somehow falls apart; Prince Albert II rejects Abraham-Froch, and the rumors of Dirrell having cold feet about fighting his buddy Ward are true and he pulls out. I doubt both things will happen -- at worst, I suspect both fights just get pushed back a little -- but it would be the end of the tournament. It would be disappointing, sure, and leave a sense of what might have been. But didn't we get some good fights out of it, some dramatic bouts featuring most of the best fighters in one of boxing's best divisions? Even in that far-fetched worst case scenario, wasn't it all worth it anyway?

Now, to the rest of your Quick Jabs, a day early:

Junior middleweight Antonio Margarito finds out as soon as this week whether he'll get his boxing license in Texas, but there have been two other seedy-seeming incidents overshadowed by that scandal. Although, as you'll soon see, both are a bit related to Margarito.

In one case, the media has stayed on top of it: the so-called "glorified sparring session" between heavyweights Alexander Povetkin and Bruce Seldon that sounds like anything but. Rick Reeno of BoxingScene has led the way on the story, with Thomas Hauser jumping in this week at Ring to add significant new detail. There are still mysteries, however.

We've heard less about the case of light heavyweight Tavoris Cloud and his glove switcheroo prior to a bout with Glen Johnson, but we might as well revisit it because it hasn't received much attention.

(BTW: It's been an eventful period for kerfuffles of this sort, with boxers and boxing people running afoul of regulators. Last month, we had the whole Golden Boy/New York State suspension, which has apparently been resolved, even if we still don't know for sure where some of the money went.)

Forget the whole "unification" aspect of Ivan Calderon-Giovanni Segura this weekend, even if there hasn't been a junior flyweight alphabet belt unification bout since 2003. It's for Calderon's Ring magazine lineal championship, which is all the belt anyone needs, but it's more than that. In a 2010 where you can only point to a couple cases where the best boxers in a division faced one another, this is the clear division kingpin against his clear #1 contender, and the reprieve is most welcome.

Feel free to help yourself to the weird UFC boxing/mixed martial arts freak show Saturday, but Calderon-Segura is sweet sustenance for boxing fans who care more about substance than mere curiosities. You can check Calderon-Segura out via Integrated Sports pay-per-view. Stylistically, it offers the classic boxer/puncher match-up, only magnified by 10. There aren't purer technical boxers than Calderon, and there aren't many heavy-handed, crazed brawlers like Segura. That almost certainly won't produce a classic fight, because Calderon bouts are notoriously slow for those who can't appreciate all that ducking, dodging and tapping. That doesn't mean it won't be a part of history. Calderon, a Puerto Rican, and Segura, a Mexican, will add another chapter to the long boxing rivalry between their two respective peoples. And for once in a fight involving Calderon -- one of the all-time greats in his division and, for a long time, a consensus pound-for-pound top-10 player -- there are very, very good reasons to pick against him.

When I was in high school, I'd long been a fan of what was then called "alternative rock." I'd liked it because I was an outsider, alienated from the popular kids, and much of that music was made by outsiders who were odd in some way. I hated, in turn, all the things that the popular kids liked, as a matter of principle. So I found myself in a peculiar position when Nirvana crossed over and suddenly the most popular music was the music I had liked as an outsider. I struggled with this dilemma for years. For a while, I retreated further into the alternative rock fringes, but eventually most of those acts got discovered and became popular, too. For a while, I held it against the bands themselves: How could they sell me out like that by becoming popular, thereby making themselves no longer the outsider music I loved?

But, eventually, I figured it out: I would like what I liked, everyone else's opinion be damned. What was "good" had nothing to do with how many people liked it, or didn't.

That long anecdote is about something related to boxing, or I wouldn't be sharing it. There are a number of boxing fans who automatically dislike a fighter the moment he becomes an "establishment" fighter, or a "hyped" fighter -- usually, when he starts to get a ton of love from HBO, or when his promoter talks about him being one of the best in the world before he actually is, that kind of thing. And I won't pretend I can disabuse someone of disliking a boxer for whatever reason they dislike him: Things such as "like" and "dislike" are often arbitrary and emotional, and while they might be founded on irrational notions, at a certain point someone's feelings are what they are and you can't argue them out of it.

Ah, but it's a different thing to argue about whether the person they dislike is "good" or not. And, amongst the set of people who dislike a fighter because he's overly beloved by HBO or whatever, many or even most of them also happen to think that the fighter is actively bad. That, I can argue with.

(The crowd at Tomasz Adamek’s fight is almost as interesting as the fights themselves.)

The streets of Newark were a sea of red as I approached the Prudential Center for the heavyweight bout between Tomasz Adamek and Michael Grant. Adamek’s legions of supporters are nothing like the Hollywood-esque fans that stroll in only for main events in Las Vegas. There were lines of Polska-clad fans eagerly awaiting entry into the Prudential Center when I arrived, nearly an hour before the first bell of the opening bout.

Heavyweight Tomasz Adamek was supposed to get an elementary introduction to gigantic, 6'7"-style boxers -- that is, the Klitschko brothers -- with 38-year-old, once-promising Michael Grant. For all but about 10 seconds of the first six rounds, he was handling it with ease, with Grant looking like such a big stiff it was hard to tell how, other than his dimensions, Grant presented anything that replicated the Klitschkos. Then, at the end of the 6th, Grant landed a big right hand that wobbled Adamek, and for the remaining six rounds, Adamek and Grant fought, shockingly, on pretty even terms.

In the end, Adamek got the deserved decision, but his viability as a future heavyweight king took a lump or two. Consider that, with the exception of his drubbing of Andrew Golota, Adamek has been in three close-ish fights at heavyweight against Jason Estrada, Chris Arreola and now Grant; that's three fighters of varying degrees of talent and experience, and all of them have given him trouble. Adamek is a top-5 heavyweight, according to Ring magazine, and he should be. But he's really a cruiserweight who's overachieving.

LeGarrette Blount should just give up and become a boxer already. I gather from HBO's "Hard Knocks" that punching teammates in practice is, at times, situationally, encouraged, and that the Tennessee Titans coach had no problem with this particular punching above. But there are at least three punching incidents involving Blount that we're aware of, and at some point the guy is going to realize his calling in the boxing ring, one hopes.

Quick Jabs!

"Prehistoric terror bird jabbed like boxer," reads the headline describing the newly-discovered killing methods of the creature above. Circle, stick and move has worked for that long, at least: 60 million years. Some pro boxer, some day, must take the nickname "Prehistoric Terror Bird." If I could, I would, and I'd combine it with a Cuban name, like Yurtimethy "Prehistoric Terror Bird" Starkeaux.

And in a likewise circular motion, the carousel of fights in the works spins round and round and round and round...

Even with the way my boxing news feed fills up with stories about James Toney vs. Randy Couture, each day that goes by without me mentioning it feels like a personal triumph. Many of the headlines are along the lines of "Mixed Martial Arts and Boxing Face Off with Couture vs. Toney" or something, and usually appear to be written by people who never have covered either sport. They are so ill-informed as to not even warrant a response in this space, as others have more than capably explained how wrong they are.

A very encouraging percentage, though, perhaps the majority, recognize that Toney-Couture on Aug. 28 proves nothing whatsoever about either sport.

But there's a "but" to the "but." Within the percentage of articles about how Toney-Couture proves nothing whatsoever, there are some which manage to make it sound like Toney is any kind of relevant boxer today. He is not. It's accumulated to the point that there will be no personal triumph for me today.

In an otherwise good piece at Yahoo recently, Steve Cofield wrote:

Toney has plenty left, especially if he got down to cruiserweight where he belongs. He's still a top-10 heavyweight, with a granite chin and defensive abilities as good as anyone in the sport.

In an otherwise good piece this week, Todd Martin wrote for ESPN:

As a result, the stage was finally set for the long-anticipated showdown between an elite MMA fighter and an elite boxer. Multiple-division boxing champion and future boxing Hall of Famer James Toney saw the opening and began a campaign to get a UFC fight. UFC decision-makers were initially cold on the idea, but Toney eventually talked himself into a fight with UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture on Aug. 28 at UFC 118.

And just today, USA Today's Bob Velin wrote:

Toney, 41, will become the first elite boxer to step into the octagon when he meets heavyweight Randy Couture, 47, in the main event at TD Garden.

No, and no.

Toney is not a top-10 heavyweight. He hasn't been since 2006. He is not an elite boxer. He hasn't cracked Ring magazine's top-10 pound-for-pound since 2003. The last top-10 opponent in his division he beat was John Ruiz in 2005, but that was turned into a no-decision because Toney failed a post-fight drug test. The last top-10 opponent in his division he beat officially was Evander Holyfield in 2003, and even then Holyfield looked that night like a fighter whose career was over. Toneys was good enough in 2006 to lose narrowly to Sam Peter and draw with Hasim Rahman -- two men who passed for quality heavyweights in that day and age -- but by 2007, Peter blew him out easily. In 2008, he got a decision win over journeyman Fres Oquendo in what some considered the robbery of the year, so thoroughly did Oquendo outbox him. He hasn't done anything of note in a boxing ring since. Outside the ring, he's taunted the Klitschko brothers endlessly, but if the Klitschko brothers had fought him, they would have faced widespread criticism for choosing to fight an old, maybe-shot heavyweight who hadn't scored a significant win in the division in years and years.

I say that with remorse, as Toney is one of my all-time favorite fighters. The only thing he has left is defensive skill and a granite chin, and both have degraded in recent years, as Peter showed by decking Toney with a jab and as Oquendo showed by hitting Toney more than he should have been hit. He's likely not even a top-20 heavyweight at this point. He is formerly an elite boxer, formerly a top heavyweight. And if that sounds like nitpicking -- after all, Toney for the balance of his career was an elite boxer, so maybe using the present tense isn't so bad -- consider that if Muhammad Ali got in the octagon with Couture, nobody would say "Ali is the first elite boxer to step into the octagon." Ali's a good deal more beyond his best days than Toney, of course, but neither are currently elite boxers, and what Toney is now matters more for Aug. 28 than what he once was or what he was for most of his career. To call Toney "elite" today is misleading at best.

Everyone who writes that Toney-Couture will prove nothing about boxing vs. MMA is right. But it proves even less than some of them think.