First came the above picture of Wladimir Klitschko, "Heroes" star Hayden Panettiere and a dwarf. Or little person. Or person of short stature. Whatever. And it's just weird, you have to admit. Like they're recreating a still life of a banana, an apple and some grapes.

Second came the entertainment news outlets speculating that Klitschko and Panettiere are an item.

My rule of talking about boxers' personal life is this: It's none of my business until it affects their performance in the ring, or until it's funny. It's kind of funny, imagining the 6'7" Klitschko... shall we say, "cavorting with?"... a sub-5' woman. With a dwarf around.

That said, it kind of makes Klitschko more awesome. I dont think Mz. Hayden is as hot as a lot of people do -- she's kind of shaped like a rectangle, although she does have a cute face and if you throw any girl in a cheerleader outfit, she gets 8x hotter -- but if there's something annoying about Klitschko's reign as heavyweight champion, it's a lack of glamour. He's a hell of a charitable guy and a very skilled practitioner, but he's boring in the ring. Dating Hollywood starlets, or even hanging around them (with or without a dwarf), makes him way cooler.

*That asterisk in the headline is because it's all just speculation. Nobody knows a damn thing. Although they do look "cozy" in picture #2 below.

I'm usually all, like -- standards, guidelines, consistent principles, etc. etc., blah blah blah. But I've had three frozen pineapple margaritas at the sushi place, I'm still bitter about writing a full blog entry last night that I then failed to save and therefore lost, and I'm thinking to myself, "What the hell fights do I want to see this year?" So I picked 10, and here they are. All right, I have a couple rules -- don't use the same fighter twice, don't count fights that are already likely, put them in order by division. That's it.

You should add your own choices, mofos.

We recently ran down the Round of the Year for 2009 and the Round of the Decade. But what about the best rounds EVER?

Friend of the site Andrew Harrison, of Safe Side of the Ropes, contributes a highly innovative take on the question below. (And I'm going to stop introducing people now that there's a healthy flow of contributors coming in -- so if you're reading an entry and think, "This doesn't sound like Tim," everyone from now on should pay close attention to the "Written by" section of each entry.)

I've added video where possible to complement Andrew's engaging summaries of each round he highlighted. --Tim

If it seems like I'm not around quite as often this week, well, I have my reasons. The day job heated up, so much so that I'll be on MSNBC Saturday morning and C-SPAN Sunday morning; it's holiday season; I posted like crazy for all those 2009/decade awards and I'm a tad tired; there aren't any fights happening. But the biggest reason is that I'm in a funk over this Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight being in limbo. I'm in a serious state of woe about it. It's hard for me to get excited about the sport when what would be its biggest fight in decades is in such doubt. And it doesn't look good at all right now. Last we heard there was still some chatter from both sides, and nobody's signed fights with anyone else, but it looks bad.

Still, I haven't done a Quick Jabs in a couple weeks, so there's a decent amount to catch up on. There's the stuff in the headline, of course. What kind of jackass would put that stuff in a headline then not write about it? But there's also some more tidbits a ton more fights under discussion to, um, discuss, which would be the major focus of this year edition of the column.

If you stop 2009 on the afternoon of Dec. 22, the year boxing had ends up an unqualified success. Unprecedented pay-per-view sales and improved television ratings in the United States. Historic crowds and record television ratings abroad. Mainstream media recognition of the sport's revitalization, a far cry from the "mixed martial arts is killing boxing" foolishness that has reigned for years in the newspapers. Whereas 2007 and 2008 -- years when the revitalization began -- were in the "B" range, 2009 was more like an "A-."

The afternoon of Dec. 22 is when all of that success got tossed up into the air like the tray of a waitress who got tripped, and we don't know how it's going to land. It's when Golden Boy Promotions announced that, rather than us all thinking Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao was going to happen, in fact the fight was in jeopardy because of a dispute over drug testing. And suddenly the major driving force for boxing's revival -- fans getting the fights they wanted -- was about to come to a screeching halt at the moment where it mattered most, i.e., when even non-fans were on the verge of getting the fight they wanted.

I know I was just saying the other week how you have to judge the elapsing decade's best fighter by what he did in the decade, rather than wait for Pacquiao and Mayweather to fight to prove it. I stand by that. Any fight that transpires outside the decade shouldn't determine which fighter ruled the decade. But this state of suspension for the standpoint of the health of the sport -- it makes it hard to judge. 2009 could be the year boxing returned to the ghetto, because it could go down as the year when the fight that mattered more than any in 20 years or so collapsed. The year could end up being an "F."

So let's review the year as it stands now, then circle back at the end to that driving force.

Yesterday, something like a breakthrough occurred in the dreadfully disheartening negotiations to make Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao, only very likely the biggest-selling fight ever. For the first time, Bob Arum, Pacquiao's promoter, opened the door to the random drug testing Mayweather, represented by Golden Boy Promotions, sought. GBP put out a news release saying it found footage of Pacquiao getting blood drawn 14 days before the Ricky Hatton fight he won by 2nd round knockout, which would contradict Pacquiao's stance that he isn't comfortable giving blood 30 days before the Mayweather fight. That prompted Arum to say he'd try talking to Pacquiao and convincing him that they could do some testing in that 30-day window.

Today, the opposite of a breakthrough happened in the painfully unpleasant effort to give Mayweather and Pacquiao $40 million each to fight one another. Pacquiao's team discovered that the footage actually was from closer to 24 days before the fight. That was closer to 30 days than 14, which meant Pacquiao's team felt justified in their 30-day stance. In a news release, Pacquiao uttered this gem of a quote in response to a claim by GBP that nobody from GBP or the Mayweather team had accused him of using performance-enhancing drugs: "Liars go to hell." Lawyers are being dispatched for lawsuits and promotional disputes. Arum began laying the groundwork for Pacquiao to move up from welterweight to junior middleweight to fight Yuri Foreman, a fight nobody in their right mind cares one iota about. Mayweather's team began laying the groundwork for Mayweather to fight Matthew Hatton, a fight nobody who enjoys boxing cares one iota about.

Maybe this fight still happens in March. Maybe this fight happens instead in September. Maybe it never happens. Whatever the case, it is increasingly the case that damage is getting done, for everyone. In an appropriately scathing article that calls out all parties involved for their terrible hypocrisy, Kevin Iole offers:

The point here is that nobody in this mess has clean hands. The best thing to do would have been to clearly and succinctly lay out the position of each side and then work quietly toward a solution. Instead, the endless back-and-forth has given the impression that boxing is a lawless sport run by those looking for what they can take out of it, not how they can build it.

Boxing needs Mayweather-Pacquiao. The attention the fight will generate is enormous and it will serve as an exhibition of the many good things that have been occurring, largely unnoticed, in the sport over the last several years. Hopefully, those who stand to benefit the most from the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will remember that, before the rest of us shrug our shoulders and move on.

And that's really just the beginning of what ill might come.

It's hard to believe that anybody would throw all this away. It would take a toxic mixture of stupidity, stubbornness, overweening pride, poor thinking, excessive emotion and a complete lack of forethought that exceeds the reckless foolishness of just about any single decision in the sport, ever. Mayweather-Pacquiao would make history if it happened. If it doesn't, it still will go down in history -- but as one of the sorriest episodes in a sport that has a long list of sorry episodes.

When I asked some friends recently what kind of categories they'd like to see in The Queensberry Rules' year-end awards, Lisa Creech Bledsoe of The Glowing Edge volunteered: Howsabout the best in women's boxing for 2009?

I thought it was a good idea, but I needed someone far more attuned to women's boxing than me to do it. Who better, then, than... Lisa Creech Bledsoe?

With that, I give you her take, which makes a convincing case that in 2009, women's boxing (including Lucia Rijker, at right) came a long way. -- Tim

I have to invoke The Queensberry Rules mascot in the art of constructing pound-for-pound lists, Rene Descartes, to modify a guiding principle or two for the last pound-for-pound list of 2009. By the way, doesn't Rene look dashing sans mustache?

Anyway, the major guiding principle for my list as always is quality wins, with an emphasis on recent activity. A minor principle is the "I know it when I see it" eyeball test, which works for pornography and to a lesser degree P4P assessments. Another minor rule is that anyone out of action for a year does not qualify. But I've noticed a gap between those three principles has led to results that are not as defensible as I'd like. I have historically not moved people down sans a loss so much as I've moved other people up. By this I mean, a highly-ranked boxer usually has to be passed by someone who has racked up quality wins. That translates to cases where boxers can effectively "sit on" their rankings in my system by fighting weak competition, only to be toppled when somebody does something dramatic to beat them. Likewise, a fighter with a weak strength of schedule can move up merely by waiting for someone else to lose. (I'm not saying they do these things BECAUSE of my rankings -- I'm just describing the effect.)

One example of where this gap has caused problems on my list is that middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik -- whose last truly significant win was in February of 2008 -- stood to be my #7 pound-for-pound fighter with this update, by virtue of losses above him and the failure of anybody just beneath him to do anything in recent months to leapfrog him. These things are subjective as subjective gets, but as I've often said, there are "more defensible" subjective views and "less defensible" subjective views. I don't think anybody would think Pavlik at #7 makes much sense. I don't either.

So the modification is as follows: If a boxer hasn't faced top-notch competition in a full year -- I'm thinking, top-10 divisional opponents, at minimum -- I might move them down even if they are winning fights against subpar opposition. It will be situational, and won't usually result in a major demotion, but it can still result in a drop; I think there's a value in not dropping people in a reactionary way, as too often people's rankings seem subject to arbirtrary whims of the moment. Demotions will likely depend on the eyeball test, too. The new modification affected Pavlik's ranking this time, as well as the ranking of cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek. And it led me to drop featherweights Rafael Marquez and Israel Vazquez, #15 and #16 last time out, entirely.

The simpler the formula, Descartes would probably tell us, the better. And ultimately, "quality wins, especially of recent vintage" remains the simple version of the formula. But I think this slight modification results in a better list.

One more thing: I've settled on a once every-other-calendar-month update schedule.

I've been trying not to get worked up about the bumpy negotiations between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao over what would be the richest fight in boxing history, because everybody who knows anything knows that a fight negotiation is an elaborate bit of kabuki theater. But I'm starting to get worried. I still have a tough time imagining both fighters leaving about $40 million apiece on the table over as idiotic an issue as drug testing, yet for the fight to get promoted the way big fights like this usually do, they do need to wrap it up soon. And the compromise offers both sides have talked about are a bit far away for my tastes.

The bottom line is the headline: Is any of this game of chicken worth it? Let's say Mayweather's side is going for some psychological advantage, like the mind game it always smacked of. Is that worth jeopardizing the tens of millions of dollars that Mayweather will lose not just for this fight, but the tens of millions he stands to lose in the future when everyone rightly turns their back on this sport because Mayweather-Pacquiao never happened? Let's say Pacquiao has taken this personally, as his threat of a lawsuit suggests he has. Should his pride stand in the way of the tens of millions more worth of charity good or political campaign bankrolling he could do? And if it's some byzantine plot to use controversy to sell the fight, is all of this doing more harm than good?

Happy Holidays, everybody. I hope you'll be enjoying some quality family time, gaining a few pounds and relaxing for a couple days. I'll be doing some of that myself, so I won't be blogging as much as usual over the next few days, I expect.

I did, however, want to take this occasion to do three things: review the blog's 2009, meta-style; offer a sincere thank you to the people who read and contribute to this blog for making it one of the more fulfilling elements of my life; and encourage you to help me take it the blog the next level by contributing even more -- with your own blog entries.

(This may all come off as a bit self-congratulatory, by the way, but it's really as much about you as it is about me, plus it's the holiday season and I'm thinking about what I'm thankful for, and to whom I'm thankful.)