Ref forces Manny Pacquiao to batter Antonio Margarito -- Boston Herald

By George Kimball, Boston Herald

When the Texas boxing commission confirmed its outlaw status by granting a license to the disgraced Antonio Margarito two months ago, we spoofed the news with a column for TheSweetScience.com purportedly announcing that another boxing pariah, Panama Lewis, would train Margarito for his fight with Manny Pacquiao, and augmented the joke by whimsically predicting that the Texas commission would appoint the notoriously incompetent Laurence Cole to referee the fight at Cowboys Stadium.

Turns out it was more than a joke. Cole was the third man in the ring last Saturday night.

That wasn’t the reason Pacquiao knelt in his corner to pray just before the opening bell. Pacquiao kneels in his corner before every fight, praying not for victory but for a good fight in which nobody gets hurt. That isn’t always achievable, particularly when Cole running the show, and Pacquiao spent the last two rounds vainly pleading with the referee to stop the fight and spare his opponent further punishment. Margarito was taken to the hospital after the beatdown, where he spent the next four days while doctors waited for the swelling to go down enough to allow surgery to repair a fractured orbital bone. When he was finally released on Wednesday, Margarito received a message from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who told him he had “made a friend for life.”

Between Pacquiao’s dominance of another much larger foe and the apparent intransigence of Floyd Mayweather Jr., much of the subsequent speculation had the world’s best fighter looking around for yet another Goliath - the winner of last night’s Sergio Martinez-Paul Williams fight, or even soon-to-be 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins, should he prevail in next month’s challenge to light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal.

But bigger isn’t necessarily better. Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach suggested that the novelty of taking on larger opponents may have run its course. The truth of the matter is that while he hasn’t fought there in nearly two years, 140 pounds probably remains Pacquiao’s optimal fighting weight, and upcoming bouts between Amir Khan and Marcos Maidana (Dec. 11 in Las Vegas) and Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander (St. Louis on Jan. 29) could well produce the next Pac-Man foe.

Sanction junction

Beyond the obvious conflict of interest represented when a magazine owned by a boxing promoter starts handing out championship belts, our position on The Ring’s self-proclaimed “titles” has always been that the last thing the boxing world needed at this stage was yet another sanctioning body.

Last week, Larry Hazzard, the former chairman of the New Jersey boxing commission and, more recently, a championships official for the International Boxing Federation, announced, in conjunction with former IBF president Marian Muhammad, the formation of a new sanctioning body called the Combative Sports Federation. The organization proposes to rank boxers by weight class throughout the world, and to extend its umbrella to incorporate mixed martial arts as well. Former New York State Athletic Commission chairman Randy Gordon will serve as the head of the CSF’s ratings committee.

We’re no more eager than ever to see yet another set of increasingly meaningless championship belts tossed around, and it strikes us that the organization is probably doing itself no favors with its unqualified embrace of the cage-fighting set. Since MMA franchises operate independently of one another and their “champions” never meet, a valid rating system encompassing that mob would seem doomed from the outset (why not rank WWE wrestlers while they’re at it?), and the process will inevitably taint the CSF’s boxing ratings as well.

While we have our well-founded misgivings about the upstart sanctioning body, the credentials, stature and boxing experience of Hazzard, Muhammad and Gordon do lend it certain bona fides notably absent in the fly-by-night would-be sanctioning bodies. It might also be noted that two of today’s four generally recognized sanctioning bodies, the IBF and the WBO, originated as spinoffs created more or less from the rib of the WBA by disaffected former officials of that organization. Who is to say that the CSF might not achieve similar stature?

But if it does, it will most likely be at the expense of the IBF. Muhammad and, in recent years, Hazzard, have been as responsible as anyone for whatever credibility was restored to that body in the wake of the Bob Lee scandal and the era of federal receivership. Even without the CSF, their absence would have to be regarded as a body blow to the IBF, and if the new organization does come to enjoy widespread acceptance, it will more likely be regarded as a fourth, not a fifth, sanctioning body - one that has swallowed its predecessor whole in its climb to prominence.

Rodriguez logs OT

Worcester super middleweight Edwin Rodriguez, who ran his record to 17-0 with his TKO of James McGirt Jr. in Fargo, N.D., two weeks ago, didn’t have much time to savor the victory. A couple of days later he was on a plane to London, and has spent the past 10 days working as the principal sparring partner for Carl Froch, who faces Arthur Abraham in Helsinki Saturday in a fight for the WBC title that will also sort out the pecking order for Showtime’s “Super Six” semifinals.

Rodriguez, who stopped McGirt in nine, will face the son of yet another boxing legend in his next outing - Aaron Pryor Jr., who outpointed Dyah Davis on the Fargo card. Rodriguez-Pryor will be the co-feature of Lou DiBella’s Jan. 14 card in Key West, Fla., with another New Englander, Peter Manfredo Jr., in the main event, facing an opponent to be determined. . . .

Irish middleweight Andy Lee, who accompanied manager/trainer Emanuel Steward to Atlantic City, N.J., where Steward worked the telecast of last night’s Martinez-Williams fight, are headed to Austria, where Wladimir Klitschko is training for his Dec. 11 heavyweight title defense against Derek Chisora. Lee will fight on the undercard of the Mannheim, Germany, bout. . . .

In 1980, the first year we covered boxing for this newspaper, there were 20 fight cards in Massachusetts alone. Unless somebody rings in with a late entry, Mike Acri’s show at the Mohegan Sun last night will have been the 16th and last of 2010 in all of New England. Half of those took place at the Connecticut casinos (six at the Mohegan, two at Foxwoods). Rhode Island hosted five cards, all at the Twin River Events Center, Massachusetts two, New Hampshire one. . .

Happy birthday, Antonio Tarver.

Source: bostonherald.com