(Continued from part I.)
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(Dierry Jean)

Don't mistake this list as one to bank future successes of any of these fighters on, though I have faith that more than a handful of them will break through to the top level of the sport. No, what this list serves as is my 25 favorite prospects that I will be keeping an eye on in 2012 and beyond. What this means is the rubric is more than just in-ring ability. It takes into account whether or not they likely will emerge as big time ticket sellers, as determined by their fighting styles and personalities, among other things. One thing you can count on is this list features quite a number of names you won’t see elsewhere.
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We're back to normal operations and action stations. This week's boxing schedule isn't crowded, but it's not bad for the first week of the year. What could be a better way to welcome in the new year than watching people punch each other? I can't think of anything, but that might have something to do with my impaired brain function after New Year's Eve.

There are two cards worth keeping an eye out for, both on Friday night. Dyah Davis and Alfonso Lopez do battle on ESPN's Friday Night Fights season opener and Luis Ramos and Ray Beltran clash on Shobox. Happy New Year!

• Dyah Davis vs. Alfonso Lopez, Friday, ESPN2, Key West. A good fight to get the 2012 Friday Night Fights season going. Super middleweights Davis and Lopez both have something to prove. Davis (20-2-1) is the son of 1976 gold medal winner Howard Davis. Despite that, he hasn't had it easy coming up the professional ranks and has put in some lacklustre performances, like his loss to Aaron Pryor Jr. in 2010. He was the subject of a great profile by Mark Ortega on this very website last month. Lopez' (22-1) only previous moment in the spotlight was a surprisingly competitive loss to Kelly Pavlik in May. Whether that was due to Lopez' busyness and grit or Pavlik's personal issues will be up for debate until Friday evening. I've got a feeling I know which side Lopez will be arguing, likely pressuring the spindly Davis into a good fight. On the undercard junior middleweight prospects Steve Martinez (11-0) and Denis Douglin (13-1) are set to get it on. In the fighting sense...
• Luis Ramos vs. Ray Beltran, Friday, Showtime, Indio California. Lightweight prospect Luis Ramos should get some good exposure by fighting on Showtime during its free preview weekend. Ramos (20-0) obviously has a thing for fighting Manny Pacquiao's sparring partners since his last victory, a body shot KO, was over David Rodela. Beltran (25-5) is a classic boxing character: the good fighter who, due to a combination of bad luck and conspiracy, never reached the next level. Ramos, however, is a very good fighter with a little bit of everything but crushing power. Beltran has a proven track record of toughness though and if he can drag Ramos into a dog fight like he did to Sharif Bogere in May, then he's in with a chance. After this, Ramos is likely ready to take on a top 10 lightweight. Lightweight prospects Michael Perez (15-0-1) and Omar Figueroa (13-0-1) are up against each other on the undercard.
• The Rest. The Ring's number 10 flyweight, Edgar Sosa (43-7) defends some trinket against Roilo Golez (13-7) in Mexico City on Saturday.

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We haven't Open Threaded in a while, so let's dip our toe in it.

I want to start by saying, on this New Year's Day, how grateful I am to all the readers, commenters, contributors and staffers who made TQBR what it was in 2011. This year we got declared "the best boxing blog" by Gawker, got linked to by RingTV and The Sweet Science and BoxingScene and papers all over the world, and generally just did really well, at least I think.

This staff concept we implemented at the beginning of the year has worked out terrifically, and that's not even me bragging on myself -- I really do read with pride regularly the work of the people who contributed to us in 2011. The "thank you" honor roll includes contributors Corey Erdman, Paul Kelly, Mike Coppinger, Noel Tanap, Eric Raskin, Josh Snyder, Lakota Crofut, Evan Holober, James Foley and Mark Ortega. Special thanks to current staffers Alex McClintock, Andrew Harrison, Gautham Nagesh, Jeff Pryor, Karl Greenberg, Patrick Connor and Scott Kraus.

Now, with all that sentiment and treacle out of the way, let's discuss some sheeeeeeit.

What are your favorite memories from 2011? We've obviously revisited the hell out of it these past two weeks, most recently here, but we couldn't possibly cover everything, and "favorite" is relative. How about least favorite? How about anything else you wanna say about boxing's 2011?

Then: What are you looking for out of 2012? What hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, etc. do you have for the new year?

Your (very profane) musical selection is below, and then below that is where you say words and stuff.

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If you ask the two top promoters in boxing how things are going in boxing, they'll give you a shit-ton of shiny happy talk about how terrific the sport is these days, and how the future is so very bright. They are, though, "promoters." The salesman accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative. "This car goes really really fast," a salesman will tell you, and doesn't tend to volunteer the part about how it also breaks down every three months. I'm not holding it against promoters for promoting. And it's not as if the car driving boxing isn't sometimes going fast. It's just that it also breaks down every three months.

From a business standpoint,nothing about boxing's 2011 really knocked my socks off. When I look at how the year went, I see some ups, some downs, some fleeting progress, some deterioration. There was a time where I could be happy with that. The early 2000s were marked by a lot of floundering and a whole lot of backward steps, with the occasional high moment. The year 2007 saw a quantum leap forward when Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya fought one another and broke pay-per-view records, and in 2008 more often than not good fights were being made, then in subsequent years there has been more progress in fits and starts, with increasing recognition in the mainstream media following shortly behind that boxing was neither "dead" nor "dying," but in fact was getting healthier.

Problem is, baby steps don't do it for me anymore. It's easy to forget about what's wrong with the business of boxing when there are bonkers television ratings in Europe, when pay-per-view stars are raking in the cash in record ways, and those aren't things that used to happen so often. Now, it's the norm. And it feels to me like there's been a plateau.

Boxing and mixed martial arts aren't the same sport. They can co-exist. They compete, however, at least marginally, for some of the same audience. So nothing throws such heat-lamp light on the boxing business' inadequacy like the deal the UFC signed with Fox this year to air MMA. Early in 2011, a lot of boxing writers (myself included) were celebrating the fact that CBS was airing any boxing-related programming at all, even if it was only a documentary/marketing series on Saturday afternoons aimed at selling the Manny Pacquiao-Shane Mosley pay-per-view on Showtime. It offered an in-road to boxing's return to network television. Along came this UFC deal, and I thought to myself, "Wait, why was I celebrating that CBS thing?" And when the in-road to boxing's return to network television quickly evaporated as Pacquiao's team took his next fight back to HBO, it made the whole CBS thing seem so very small, hardly worth any of the attention it generated whatsoever.

This blog entry isn't meant to propose a cure to the boxing business. It's something of an evaluation of the symptoms, but even that can't lead to a diagnosis. There are a lot of salesmen in the boxing media who will tell you, "If boxing just did X, everything would be great!" Problem is, there simply isn't enough evidence from the symptoms to suggest that any of those potential miracle cures work as advertised on a consistent basis. In 2011, boxing was messy in the ring, and it created a lot of uncertainty, as friend of the site Adam Abramowitz wrote here. In 2011, boxing was messy on the business end, too, and it goes into 2012 with a similarly uncertain picture.

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Pu Pu part two! Sillier than part one. Remember: Add "of the year" to everything.
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2011 has already been denounced in some quarters as an annus horribilis for British boxing. As viewpoints go, it’s a tad short-sighted and one probably informed by the nation’s dismal away record in alphabet world title fights and little more. Closer inspection reveals a bustling domestic scene packed with highly competitive and action-packed contests, many of which were attached to British, Commonwealth or European championships. Rather than being one to forget, it was in fact a year to remember on the home front.
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Your Pu Pu Platter of boxing awards has arrived. So sorry it's late to your table. It's still 2011, so it remains warm to the touch. Please savor its many flavors.

In the first installment, that flavor is heavy and serious. In the second one, that flavor is light and fluffy. Just add "of the year" to every category below and devour 'em all. Feel free to send them back to the waiter, your blog host Tim Starks, if you'd prefer something else.

(And don't forget to consume all the major category nominees and winners from the past week's blog entries, if you haven't yet.)
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Much like the buzz that built about the fight as it circulated from boxing forum to boxing forum, from Twitter follower to Twitter follower, Akira Yaegashi-Pornsawan Porpramook was a slow burn at the beginning. I compared it originally to a motorcycle revving up -- loud and dangerous, but the brakes were still applied. By the middle rounds, it had taken off. By the 7th round, it was leaving trails of fire. Watching that round, you think, "No way this gets any better."

And then, in the 8th, somehow, it does. In that round, Yaegashi and Porpramook took turns dominating the action, or just took turns teeing off on each other, and at various moments it looked like one would drop or stop the other; I literally gasped when Porpramook, his back against the ropes and seemingly in a bad way, suddenly sent Yaegashi stumbling backward. Finally, in the 10th, the ride came to a halt.

Akira Yaegashi-Pornsawan Porpramook is a testament to the greatness of the Internet. If not for YouTube, this fight gets confined to classic status only for the fine people of Japan who hosted it, watched it and delivered the winner, Yaegashi. Instead, diehards in America were able to belatedly catch up to a fight between two tiny, frenzied men on the other side of the world, and spread the gospel. (It was also a good year for tiny Thai fighters named "Porpramook" to be in YouTube gems, too, with a nice little honorable mention Fight of the Year coming this weekend via Kompayak Porpramoook vs. Adrian Hernandez.)

Despite all the Internet love, there were more prominent Fight of the Year candidates in 2011, the kind that aired on Showtime or HBO or ESPN2. But boxers this small -- they were strawweights (105 lbs.), as small as professional fighters get -- had no business ending up having a fight this big, one that stood above them all for raw, unhinged action. no comments

What to do with Andre Ward? The super middleweight is as talented and skilled as they come, but even purists who love inside fighting sometimes can't stand to watch those stretches of Ward fights where he mauls his man. Outside the ring, he carries himself like a mixture of Michael Jordan and Tim Tebow, the kind of poised all-American athlete who you could imagine pitching McDonald's but who also could irritate people with his upfront religiosity; he goes by the nickname "S.O.G." -- Son of God -- and strolled into his fight against Carl Froch to a Christian rap song about him. (And Him, I guess.) His promoter, Dan Goossen, gets his share or criticism, and while Goossen sold him pretty well in Ward's native Oakland against Edison Miranda and Mikkel Kessler, interest dropped sharply for Ward's fights against Sakio Bika and Allan Green. Was Goossen not doing his job? Had fans in Oakland lost interest in one-sided Ward victories that weren't exactly thrilling spectacles? What gives, when a former U.S. Olympic gold medalist with charisma who's one of the best fighters in the world can't get more people to pay attention to him?

Here's one thing you can't do with Andre Ward, at least not yet: beat him. No one has defeated Ward in a boxing match since 1998, when Ward was a 13-year-old amateur. In 2011, Ward reached the peak of his in-ring career. That gold medal was a great start, certainly. The Miranda win was eye-opening, and the Kessler win -- his first over a world-class, top-ranked fighter -- was even more eye-opening. For two years, Ward had been pursuing victory in Showtime's Super Six tournament, a quest that began with the win over Kessler, the early-tournament favorite. Over that span, he lost only a handful of rounds, most of them by a pretty narrow margin, and the rest of the time has utterly baffled his opponents. It starts with world-class speed and reflexes, but that only tells part of the story. His biggest weapon is a boxing brain that only two fighters in the sport right now can rival: Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Bernard Hopkins. That brain has produced remarkable versatility: Ward can beat you as a left-hander or a right-hander, to your body or to your head, on the inside or the outside, leading or countering.

That two-year quest ended in 2011 with a May victory over Arthur Abraham and a December victory over Froch. Froch, coming in, had the most grueling three-year stretch of any fighter in the world, and had come out of it pretty well: Jean Pascal, Jermain Taylor, Andre Dirrell, Kessler, Abraham. Ward was a whole 'nother story. After their fight, Froch had unkind words for Dirrell, a boxer some thought beat Froch in a decision Dirrell didn't get on Froch's home turf in England. Froch did nothing but complain about the decision loss to Kessler for a long time thereafter, and if you brought it up today he'd probably tell you for another 15 minutes about all the reasons he deserved to win. In losing to Ward, he was nothing but graceful. Froch is a headstrong guy, for sure. But even he knew he'd gotten outclassed. Froch, whom I'd argued was one of the top 10 fighters in the world based on resume, was made to look as ordinary as many once thought he was prior to the Super Six tournament. And Ward did it all with a broken hand.

By beating Froch, Ward took home the Super Six trophy. He became the lineal super middleweight champion of the world. He arrived as a consensus top-5 fighter in the sport, regardless of weight class.

Maybe that's the answer to the question. Perhaps he could use some extra promotional oomph, and perhaps he could stand to score a knockout soon -- he looked to me as though he might get it against Froch, prior to the hand injury. Just winning is a great start. Less charismatic and less exciting fighters have become attractions simply by being good; Winky Wright, for instance, never really sold many tickets, but many of his fights did excellent television ratings, somehow, probably because he was so good people wanted to see how he'd do against other top fighters. Winning is something Ward does very, very well, and because of how he won in 2011, he's the TQBR Fighter of the Year, and probably will be everyone else's, too.

You can imagine him winning more of those awards in coming years. It's easier than imagining someone who can beat him, anyway. no comments