The exciting Jermell Charlo-Tony Harrison rematch Saturday was the second most-watched boxing match of the year, according to a report.
So much for the notion that boxing fans are too busy during the holidays to enjoy a good fight.
The entertaining rematch between Tony Harrison and Jermell Charlo on Fox Saturday had an average audience of 2.223 million, according to a report on BoxingScene.com. The website’s source was Nielsen Media Research.
The Premier Boxing Champions card peaked at 2.233 million during the main event, in which Charlo scored an 11th-round knockout to avenge an earlier loss to Harrison.
Those figures make Harrison-Charlo the second most-viewed boxing match of the year, according to BoxingScene. Only the Keith Thurman-Josesito Lopez (which peaked at 2.765 million viewers) had better numbers.
The telecast was Fox’s last of the year. The network’s 10 boxing shows averaged 1.403 million viewers, which is 12% higher than last year’s average.
Also, PBC on Fox averaged 103% more viewers than Top Rank Boxing on ESPN, which averaged 692,000.
Terence Crawford received more resistance than expected from Egidijus Kavaliauskas but responded like the champion he is.
GOOD
I’m sure there are people who believe Terence Crawford was exposed somehow in his title defense against Egidijus Kavaliauskas on Saturday night in New York. I don’t agree … at all. In fact, I think more of him now that I did before the fight.
So a good fighter (which is what Kavaliauskas is) landed some flush punches to Crawford’s face and body in the first half of the fight. So what? Fighters who take risks also take punches, even great fighters (which is what Crawford is). Crawford’s moments of vulnerability mean nothing to me.
And it’s not as if Crawford acted confused or disheartened when the clever Lithuanian had success. Instead, he got angry. He dug in, refusing to retreat, as if to say, “I’ll show you who the better man is,” and then did.
Crawford switched to an orthodox stance in the seventh round, which made it more difficult for Kavaliauskas to land his right. That was the turning point in the fight.
In the next two-plus rounds, Crawford, on fire with determination, put Kavaliauskas down three times – once in the seventh and two times in the ninth – and hurt him in the process. The referee saved the challenger from further punishment 44 seconds into Round 9.
Was it the most dominating performance ever? No. It was impressive, though. I loved Crawford’s reaction to Kavaliauskas’ success. I thought when it became clear that Crawford was trying to knockout his tormentor, “Those are the instincts of a champion.” And the way he finished off Kavaliauskas was breathtaking, both in its efficiency and thoroughness.
That’s what a great fighter does, battle fearlessly through adversity and win in spectacular fashion.
BAD
Richard Commey fell into a desperate situation very quickly. Mikey Williams / Top Rank
I’m using the word “bad” here as something positive, as in Teofimo Lopez is a “bad” man.
The Honduran-American’s fight against lightweight titleholder Richard Commey on the Crawford-Kavaliauskas card was supposed to be a 50-50 proposition. Instead, it was a showcase for the next great star.
Lopez essentially ended the fight with a crushing right hand that put Commey down and left him discombobulated early in the second round. The Ghanian managed to get up but a vicious barrage of hard shots from Lopez ended the fight, giving him a major 135-pound title in his 15th fight.
That’s what you call a career-defining victory. And he’s only 22.
A star was born? No, a star was born 22 years ago. Lopez has unusual God-given gifts, which have been finely honed over the years. Add to that his power, his killer instinct, his poise and his ability to do a back flip and you get a truly special fighter.
And he’s just getting started.
Next up? Could be Vasiliy Lomachenko, which is playing with fire. All the momentum he has built could come to a sudden halt against the No. 1 fighter pound-for-pound. One thing, though: Lopez is naturally bigger than Lomachenko. Is that equalizer?
Should be interesting.
WORSE
Terence Crawford reiterated after his victory on Saturday that he’ll fight anyone, anytime. Let’s hope his top rivals were listening. Mikey Williams / Top Rank
I agree with those who say this: If Crawford wanted to fight the welterweights at Premier Boxing Champions, he probably shouldn’t have signed a long-term contract with Top Rank.
That said, I also agree with the thrust of Tim Bradley’s ringside diatribe against the PBC 147-pounders for refusing to cross promotional barriers and fight Crawford.
Like it or not, Crawford is the top welterweight and arguably the best fighter in the world. And fighters constantly say, “I want to fight the best.” Fighters also say regularly in so many words, “I want to give the fans the fights they want.” It couldn’t be more obvious that the fans want to see the PBC welterweights fight Crawford.
So why haven’t any of the them – Errol Spence, Shawn Porter, Keith Thurman, Danny Garcia, Manny Pacquiao, et al – taken the steps necessary to make it happen?
I can only come to two conclusions: One, they don’t want to fight the best. And, two, they really don’t care what the fans want. If they did, they would demand to fight Crawford. None of them have, not even Spence, the one fighter fans had been dying to see in the ring with Crawford before his car accident.
And it’s not like PBC and Top Rank are complete strangers. For example, the companies will work together on the Deontay Wilder (PBC)-Tyson Fury (Top Rank) rematch in February.
I understand the business of boxing. Promoters and managers are territorial. They want to keep their big fights – and the money they generate – in house if possible. To be sure, PBC and its welterweights aren’t breaking new ground.
It’s just a shame, from the standpoint of Crawford and the fans, that a fighter as good as he is can’t test himself against the best possible opponents because of boxing politics.
Whatever happens on Saturday night, Richard Commey and Teofimo Lopez have a future path. The same can’t be said for Terence Crawford.
NEW YORK – Whoever wins the lightweight title fight between champion Richard Commey and Teofimo Lopez on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden will have a lot more going on for him than just bragging rights or, in Lopez’s case, new hardware.
He’ll have a little something called momentum.
Commey-Lopez is not only the best on-paper matchup of the night, far exceeding the main event between welterweight titleholder Terence Crawford and Egidijus Kavaliauskas (we’ll get to that later). The winner could also go on to face Vasiliy Lomachenko in a unification of three of the four major lightweight belts next year. With apologies to newly minted lightweight titleholder Devin Haney, whose network allegiances make him a non-starter in this discussion, that is as about as good as it can get today in a sport beset by shoddy matchmaking and warring tribalism.
In other words, Commey-Lopez isn’t your typical boxing one-off that takes place in isolation, subject to a short half-life and a few forgettable column inches. No, its precise appeal is that it is freighted with significance beyond the 36 minutes (likely less) of combat that will unfold in the ring on Saturday night. And that’s a breath of fresh air, considering that the value of certain titleholders today are inseparable from the presumed significance of the particular alphabet-soup trinket they hold. One thinks immediately of WBO super middleweight titleholder Billy Joe Saunders and the WBO middleweight titleholder Demetrius Andrade, both of whom have fought virtually nobody of note to merit the high perch they occupy in their respective divisions.
Commey-Lopez is the latest brick laid down by promoter Top Rank toward what figures to be the edifice that will one day house the lightweight division’s most accomplished fighter. And the company did it by dutifully adding the most consequential 135-pounders, such as Ray Beltran, to their stable. They did it by scooping up Lopez from the 2016 Olympics, by getting in touch with Commey’s promoter Lou DiBella last year, by having Lomachenko outslug the likes of Pedraza and Luke Campbell (for a vacant title) earlier this year.
Commey-Lopez: Call it the big picture approach.
Alas, the same can’t be said for the fight that follows on Saturday night. Indeed, there is an air of banality surrounding titleholder Terence Crawford’s fight against undefeated Lithuanian contender Egidijus Kavaliauskas.
Even the fight’s usual carnival barkers seem to have caught on to this and have adjusted their brand of ballyhoo accordingly. Instead of selling Crawford-Kavaliauskas as a matchup of supreme consequence, they have sought to paint it as a rare opportunity to catch one of the great improvisers in the sport in action. During an ESPN segment, Teddy Atlas compared Crawford’s ring “instincts” to Jimi Hendrix riffing on the guitar, Bobby Fischer overlooking a chess board, and Louis Armstrong blowing the trumpet. “(Crawford) creates it as he does it,” Atlas said. “He’s got the greatest instincts I’ve ever seen.” Sitting beside Atlas, Max Kellerman, no stranger to rhetorical overkill himself, guffawed upon hearing that comment.
Actually, from a contemporary standpoint, Atlas isn’t entirely wrong. Few fighters have shown themselves to be as versatile and creative in the ring as Crawford. At some point, however, such claims must be born out in the ring against the very best.
Unfortunately, Crawford is Exhibit A in the ramifications wrought by the sport’s frustrating political divide. Unlike its lightweight stable, Top Rank simply does not have the key players at welterweight to fulfill on the promise of a generational talent like Crawford. Unlike Commey-Lopez, Crawford-Kavaliauskas doesn’t lead anywhere. There is no conceivable Lomachenko for Crawford waiting in the wings. Crawford’s best possible opponents – Errol Spence, Manny Pacquiao, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia and Keith Thurman – are all aligned with Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, which understandably prefers to do their own round robin of fights. Moreover, whatever hope there was that the two sides could come together to stage a Crawford-Spence bout appears to have gone out the window in the wake of Spence’s harrowing car accident in October. At the very least, that fight is on the back-burner.
Crawford’s seemingly hamstrung future has had the effect of completely whitewashing his opponent, Kavaliauskas, a two-time Olympian who is known to crack with both hands. Kavaliauskas is no schlub, but his last fight, a draw against a distinctly mediocre Ray Robinson, did much to lower his stock. But Crawford, to be sure, is simply graded on a different scale. It is difficult to imagine what Kavaliauskas could bring to the ring that will trouble Crawford.
A saving grace for Crawford may be the current crop of elite junior welterweights who will all likely move up to 147 at some point, including Top Rank stablemate Jose Ramirez, Josh Taylor and Regis Prograis. But that development might take a year or more, which is an eternity for a fighter who is already 32 years old.
The difference with Hendrix and Armstrong? They were soloists whose virtuosities did not necessarily rely on anyone else. In boxing, they call that shadowboxing.
Terence Crawford admits that the inability to make deals to face his PBC rivals is frustrating.
Terence Crawford wants to fight his welterweight counterparts at Premier Boxing Champions. The fact he can’t, he said, “It’s frustrating.”
Crawford (35-0, 26 knockouts) is scheduled to defend his 147-pound belt against mandatory challenger Egidijus Kavaliauskas (21-0-1, 17 KOs) on Dec. 14 in New York City. He’d rather be fighting Errol Spence, Shawn Porter, Manny Pacquiao or Keith Thurman, all of whom are managed by PBC.
The problem is the fighters’ affiliations. Crawford is promoted by Top Rank, whose fights are televised on ESPN. PBC has a deal with Fox and Showtime. And cross-platform agreements are hard to reach, especially when one side (PBC) has all the fighters it needs to make good matchups.
Crawford expressed his feelings in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s frustrating but I look at it as a business move by them not to fight me,” said Crawford, referring to the inability to make these fights. “I’m not going to knock them or be a hater, but I know where I stand and I know the game they’re playing and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“I just have to focus on what I can do and keep making a living and keeping my name up there as the best pound-for-pound fighter.”
Crawford seems particularly pessimistic about a possible matchup with Spence, his greatest rival for welterweight supremacy. Spence, recovering from injuries suffered in a car accident, is expected to fight next year.
“I don’t know if that fight will ever happen,” he said. “That’s not something I can decide. It takes two people to fight, and it takes two companies to sit down and figure it out and decide what network we’re going to fight on, where we’re going to fight, what the purses are going to be. It’s not as easy as people think it is, but it could be easy if we finally sat down at the same table and made it happen.”
He went on: “I’m willing to fight all those guys, but it’s not up to me to decide if I’m going to fight them or if I’m not going to fight them. I’m open to fighting all those guys. I’ve been saying that from Day 1. Nothing has changed. I’m the best fighter in the division and I’m always willing to prove it.”
“… Bob is willing to make any fight happen,” Crawford said. “At the end of the day, it’s not up to Bob. It’s up to me. The fighters are the ones that fight, and without us, there’s no promotion. So if a fighter really wants a fight to happen, he can make it happen. You can tell them, ‘Listen, this is the fight I want and I’m not fighting until I get that fight.’ It’s simple. At the end of the day, they work for us. If we don’t fight, nobody is going to get paid, so they have to make the fights that the fighters want.”
Crawford, 32, told The Times that he wants to accomplish as much as possible before he retires in three to four years.
“I still want to be the undisputed welterweight champion of the world,” he said, “and I believe I’ll be the first to be undisputed in two divisions, back-to-back. I just want to leave a mark on the sport of boxing so people talk about me like they talk about the other great champions before me. That’s my goal before I retire.”
Manny Pacquiao said he could fight again this Spring, with many possible opponents.
Manny Pacquiao hopes to return to the ring early next year during a break from his duties as a Filipino senator.
Pacquiao told the Manila Bulletin Sunday that “he can fight in March, April.’’
Pacquiao’s hopes for a spring bout re-ignited speculation about his opponent. In a political season, the senator, who will be 41 on December 17, has more aspiring opponents than he might have running mates or rival candidates in his oft-rumored plans for a run at the Filipino presidency.
The list appears to be led by Danny Garcia and Mikey Garcia. Danny Garcia had been in line to fight Errol Spence Jr. after Spence’s decision over Shawn Porter on September 28 in Los Angeles. But it’s not clear what’s next for Spence after he was thrown from his Ferrari in a scary crash in Dallas on Oct. 10.
Meanwhile, Mikey Garcia has not fought since jumping up in weight and losing a one-sided decision to Spence in Dallas on March 16.
Not on the list – not yet, anyway – is Keith Thurman, who lost a split decision to Pacquiao for a welterweight belt on July 20 in Las Vegas.
Thurman disclosed in mid-September that he underwent surgery on his left hand after the bout. Pain in the hand bothered him throughout the fight, he said. The surgery was a bone fusion. He said he would not be able to fight until next year.
Thurman, who battled back from a first-round knockdown, turned the next 11 rounds into a back-and-forth battle that ended with Pacquiao winning 115-113, 115-113 and 113-114. It was a heck of a fight.
“I would love the rematch,’’ Thurman said then.
If the hand heals in time for March or April, Thurman figures to say much the same thing as speculation mounts about who’s next for Pacquiao.
Also, not on the list is Terence Crawford, perhaps the best welterweight on the planet. But that’s not exactly a surprise. Crawford is a Top Rank fighter, Pacquaio is a Premier Boxing Champions fighter and – blah, blah, blah – never the twain shall meet.
