the-fights Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Floyd Mayweather Sued By Ex-Fiancée He Accused Of "Killing Babies"
Floyd Mayweather is being sued by ex-fiancée Shantel Jackson. You'll remember her as the woman whose old sonogram Mayweather posted on Facebook, claiming he broke up with her because she got an abortion. "And I'm totally against killing babies," he wrote....
UFC Runs Disastrous, Embarrassing Card, Blames Fighters And The Media
On Thursday, UFC 177 was positioned to be a terrible pay-per-view event, just really bad by any objective standard. At the risk of being accused of doing what promoter Dana White calls "the most disgusting fucking despicable thing," I would have discouraged fans from purchasing it, if asked. It wa...
The UFC Fucked Up Badly This Weekend, Says The UFC
On Saturday, the UFC held a fight card in Macau, which would in no way be notable if not for the fact that UFC figurehead Dana White, not liking the way judge Howard Hughes scored the first two bouts, actually made him stop judging during the event. Hughes didn't work any more fights for the rest of...
Stretch For Power: Sergey Kovalev's Krusher Workout
Sergey Kovalev, the WBO light heavyweight champion of the world, flew into New York last Friday from his training camp in Florida and took a car directly to the Russian part of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He was heading to the Underground Boxing gym, which is on the third floor of a building just next...
Robbie Lawler Returned From Oblivion To Impose His Will On The World
Sometime shortly after Robbie Lawler started hitting Matt Brown unreasonably hard in San Jose, Calif. Saturday night, a low rumble shook my apartment. It felt and sounded strangely like—and turned out actually to be—fireworks. This was silly, entirely too literal, but given that the fight featured L...
Donald Cerrone And John Lineker Are What's Right With Fighting
I love body shots. There is a horrible, wonderful noise generated when a professional athlete hits another professional athlete in the torso, a thudding slap of skeleton and meat. It sounds like a Foley artist's garish exaggeration of what you think a body shot should sound like. I love this sound...
The Trouble With Floyd Mayweather
Last week, Floyd Mayweather announced that he will fight a rematch with Marcos Maidana on Sept. 13. Their first fight, two months ago, was Mayweather’s closest challenge in years, with many in the boxing media believing that Maidana had earned the decision. And while that bout may have failed to mee...
How The UFC's Biggest Show Of The Year Turned Into A Fiasco
If you follow mixed martial arts long enough, even at a casual level, and if you are capable of feeling shame or outrage, the sport will eventually embarrass you. For those of us who follow the sport intently, especially those of us who deeply love it, this is a regular, sometimes daily, occurrenc...
Whatever Happened To The UFC?
Imagine if the NBA added 30 expansion teams over the next two years, and then sent out a favored reporter to lecture the public about how true fans should appreciate the diminished quality of play. This sounds impossibly stupid, and yet it's more or less what's happening in one increasingly dim corn...
Miguel Cotto Is Golden Arms
In kung fu flixtory, Golden Arm is the leader of the Chi Sah gang. ("Both of his arms are as hard and solid as gold and are invulnerable to anything.") In boxing, Golden Arms is Miguel Cotto. Heavy arms, heavy hands, he touch you, you go backwards. ...
HIV, Hepatitis C, And More: New York's Amateur MMA Scene Is A Disaster
Things get bloody not long after the fight goes from technical battle to all-out brawl, and the former Hofstra wrestler and the kickboxer from Brooklyn up the tempo, mixing thudding kicks to the thigh with straight shots to the face. The venue—an event space in Chinatown called the Capitale—echoes w...
Matt Brown Got Violent This Weekend, And It Was Awesome
On Saturday night in Cincinnati, Ohio, Matt Brown and Erick Silva beat the hell out of each other for a while, and then things turned. In the end, it was Brown delivering and Silva absorbing a frightening thrashing, to the delight of nearly all, both his local fans in the arena and all those watchin...
How Marcos Maidana Almost Beat Floyd Mayweather
Floyd Mayweather and Marcos Maidana are not just different; they're near-perfect opposites, each possessing the inverse of the other's attributes. The clearest way this manifests itself is that Floyd Mayweather is the world's most masterful boxer, while Marcos Maidana fights like a man who has never...
Jon Jones Defends Light Heavyweight Title With A Perfect Fight
Going into last night's title defense, the question for UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones wasn't whether he'd win, but how. His opponent was Glover Teixeira, a tough but limited fighter whose main attributes are heavy hands and a hard chin, and whose principal skill is working inside with a s...
How Jon Jones Makes An Ugly Sport A Beautiful Thing
April 11 was the kind of day that makes you wonder if the problem with fighting is that it can't be justified....
Why I Fixed Fights
I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportuni...
Manny Pacquiao Is Back, But Will Manny Pacquiao Ever Be Back?
Manny Pacquiao worked Brandon Rios over for 12 rounds early this morning in a fight that more resembled sound check at a reunion tour than a match in contest. Whether or not that's enough to launch Pacquiao back into the realm of "men who might actually be able to knock Floyd the hell out" remains t...
When To Stop A Fight
On Nov. 2, heavyweight Magomed Abdusalamov fought 10 hard rounds against "Irish" Mike Perez at Madison Square Garden. Today, Abdusalamov sits in a bed in Roosevelt Hospital, in a medically induced coma. It's worth reflecting on when fights should be stopped....
Former Heavyweight Ken Norton Sr. Dead At 70
Ken Norton Sr. died today at 70 in an Arizona hospital while rehabilitating from a stroke he suffered last year. Norton eventually finished his boxing career with a 42-7-1 record and one Muhammad Ali broken jaw. He later enjoyed mild success in acting, appearing in 80s staples The A-Team and Knight ...
The Scariest Man Alive Wears A Cardigan: A Day With Gennady Golovkin
Gennady Golovkin has what they call a moon face: Open, apple-cheeked, with wide lips and a toothy grin and a haircut that looks like a buzz cut that's been allowed to grow too long. Moon faces imply guilelessness. Such faces seem at home on simpletons. Less so on one of planet Earth's most feared hu...