(Jermain Taylor, right; Arthur Abraham, left. Photo credit: Howard Schatz)This is how tight this Showtime super middleweight tournament is: Arthur Abraham is the man to beat in the opinion of a great many; Jermain Taylor is the worst of the six in the opinion of a great many; and I don't at all think it's obvious who's going to win when they meet Saturday.You know what it makes me think of, Abraham-Taylor? It's got a little "No Country For Old Men" kind of plot going on. Abraham is Anton Chig... Read Full Story

(The Six of the Super, from left to right: Andre Ward, Arthur Abraham, Carl Froch, Jermain Taylor, Mikkel Kessler, Andre Dirrell)A man could go crazy correcting every lazy reporter who reports the imminent death of boxing, a near-daily journalistic phenomenon mere weeks after a fight in the United States generated 1 million pay-per-view buys the same night a UFC event aired before far fewer viewers, and a few months after a fight in Germany drew a larger crowd than any boxing match in that co... Read Full Story

YouTube pirates have let me down, as no one has posted the full Fight of the Year candidate from this weekend between junior featherweight Juan Manuel Lopez and Rogers Mtagwa. Nor has anyone put up the featherweight return of Israel Vazquez. So, for this edition of Weekend Afterthoughts, I'm flying semi-blind. I've relied on a Lopez-Mtagwa highlight clip, some ringside footage of the ending to Vazquez' fight above, somebody filming the final moments of Yuriorkis Gamboa's fight off his televis... Read Full Story

It almost doesn't make sense to spend much time arguing for pound-for-pound criteria, because of how subjective it is, but dammit, like I've said, there's more defensible and there's less defensible. I've said time and time again that pound-for-pound standings ought to be based on record of actual accomplishment, rather than what people imagine a fighter might accomplish. This weekend vindicates that point of view, if you ask me.I must say, I didn't watch the junior featherweight Juan Manuel ... Read Full Story

I've been as big a booster of Jorge Linares as anybody. The junior lightweight prospect really looked like the goods -- speed, technique, power, heart. I wonder if him getting knocked out in one round in the video above shows everybody who's been high on him is wrong, or if the unproven Juan Carlos Salgado turned out to be the real deal, or if it's just a fluke thing. It's hard to tell which if any of those things are true from the video, which features Salgado landing a nice left hook/overh... Read Full Story

The kitty prays for me because he knows MVN is making a transition to another platform tonight and he wants that TQBR not experience severe technical difficulties in doing so. After all, severe technical difficulties are more the norm under the current platform than not, as you would know if you've found yourself leaving eight comments on accident or noticed ads floating in strange places or tried to do an archive search only to get a blank screen or clicked on the categories column in the le... Read Full Story

I'm in full-on skeptical mode about anything anybody says about HBO right now, including what HBO says about HBO, but Yahoo!'s Kevin Iole has an extensive piece on the network that has some mighty interesting good news in it... if it's true.Coming on the heels of the scathing HBO piece from last week by SecondsOut.com's Thomas Hauser and its eye-popping news about deep budget cuts in the network's boxing future -- which ESPN's Dan Rafael subsequently questioned (back to that in a minute) -- I... Read Full Story

With the return of Floyd Mayweather, Jr. has come the return of some of his more fanatical followers, as recent weeks here prove. As with all fans, there are some who are quite intelligent and respectful in their defenses of Mayweather, but there is a segment that thinks "I bet you don't get much ass" is a real argument worth making [<--- real comment left in this space].As with Manny Pacquiao's fanatics, responding to some of the more rabid members of the Mayweather cult has become a rath... Read Full Story

(Israel Vazquez at an open workout last week; Gene Blevins, Hoganphotos/Golden Boy Promotions)It's good to see Izzy again, ain't it? His return to the ring this week is naturally the highlight of the boxing schedule, thus his giant photo highlighting a blog entry about the week's schedule. We get started early this week because there's a meaningful fight Tuesday. But for reasons I'll explain momentarily, I might have updates on the televised/webcast schedule in the Twitter feed at right and/o... Read Full Story

With haste, happenings from the weekend:I'd had that suspicion that Shane Cameron wasn't ready, and the heavyweight got demolished in two rounds by David Tua in the New Zealand Fight of the Century. You can watch the fight here, at least until YouTube takes it down. Tua at 237 was in the best shape he'd been in a while, and he clearly still has just a teensy bit of punching power (you think?). I do think Tua should have been at least penalized for twice punching Cameron while he was down, but... Read Full Story