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Sitting next to me in The Times office is seasoned sports editor Archie Henderson. Balding, greying and wrinkling, he would be the last person to discriminate against someone on the basis of age.
But Archie quickly took a bet today against Michael Schumacher winning a single race in his comeback bid. Sure, Schumi’s decision to return to the track has sparked plenty of interest – even for me, not the planet’s biggest Formula 1 fan. After all, every sports fan loves a comeback – a la George Foreman!
Lance Armstrong’s return made the 2009 Tour de France far more interesting for me, and I’m sure many other fans. Armstrong did well, I thought. He may not have won, but coming third overall wasn’t too bad.
There’s always something intriguing when a great sportsman returns to the battle field, although I must admit I’ve heard a rumour of Corrie Sanders coming back to take on Fransie Botha. That would have been a great fight 10 years ago, probably even five years ago, but not now. Muhammad Ali’s return to take on Larry Holmes in 1980 was a sad tale too.
But it’s not only boxers who feel the urge to return to the limelight – swimmer Mark Spitz did it too (unsuccessfully).
In the case of Schumi, I agree with my colleague Archie – he won’t relive his glory years. Brian Mitchell made a two-fight comeback in the mid-1990s and afterwards admitted it was a mistake (even though he won both bouts). As Mitchell likes to say: “You can’t buy experience, but you can’t buy youth either.”
Good luck, Schumi. I’ll be watching, but not hoping.
Cameron van der Burgh is the new poster boy of South African swimming, after adding the 50m breaststroke World Championship gold in Rome on Wednesday night to the 100m bronze medal he claimed the other night.
His teammates have produced some sterling performances this week, but it appears that some of them are doing something wrong – because they’re getting slower as the competition progresses.
Swimmers are supposed to get faster as they compete through the heats, semifinals and then finals (by the way, there are no semifinals for events longer than 200m). Yet no fewer than four SA swimmers have found themselves performing better in the heats than the semifinals and finals.
1. Roland Schoeman cracked a championship record in the 50m butterfly heats and then slowed so much in the evening semifinal that he failed to qualify for the final;
2. Wendy Trott set an SA record in the 1500m freestyle heats, and then went slower in the final;
3. Lyndon Ferns broke his SA 100m freestyle record in the morning heats, then slowed in the semifinals, although he at least still qualified for Thursday’s final; and,
4. Sebastien Rousseau cracked an SA record of 1min 54.52sec in the 200m butterfly heats, then slowed to 1:54.71 in the semifinals, and then slowed even more in the final on Wednesday evening.
Is this a coincidence or a worrying trend? The irony is that this was a problem at the Beijing Olympics too. But then, if you remember, they at least faced the absurdity of racing heats in the evenings and the semifinals and finals in the mornings (accommodating US television audiences).
But in Rome, the race schedule is back to normal, which presumably means the SA swimmers are doing something wrong. Hopefully they can sort it out.
Where is Bongani Mwelase going?
“The Cyclone”, who turned professional after winning the welterweight gold medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, is scheduled to fight Attila Kovacs for the marginal WBF’s light-middleweight crown in Bloemfontein next Friday night.
Talk about a nothing opponent! Yes, you could call him Attila the Hungarian, but not Attila the Hun! Attila the Bum would probably be a better description of his boxing prowess, having lost two of his last three bouts.
Actually, Kovacs has what appears to be a decent record of 25 wins (17 KOs) and three defeats. That doesn’t make him sound like a chump, does it? But in his last victory, his opponent, Gabor Balogh, apparently came with a record of one win, 42 losses and five draws! And in his previous win, Attila stopped Anton Glofak, who had an even more illustrious record of two wins, 76 defeats and eight draws. You can’t fault Glofak for lack of perseverance – he recorded his first victory in his 44th professional bout (Brian Mitchell had 49 fights throughout his career).
Kovacs boasts a 2007 TKO win over American Robert Frazier, who in 2001 went the distance against Winky Wright while challenging for the IBF junior-middleweight crown. But Frazier never boxed again after losing to Kovacs. When evaluating boxers one must look at their opponents and see, not only what they achieved before the fight, but afterwards too! If they did nothing afterwards, then what was their real callibre when they fought the boxer in question?
Anyway, back to 26-year-old Mwelase, who truly has (or had) a promising career. The last time he fought, however, he was stripped of the WBF welterweight title because he couldn’t make the weight. The reason was evident when he entered the ring – sporting a stomach that lacked muscle definition! Perhaps his enthusiasm for the sport has been dented along the way.
In winning his Commonwealth Games gold, Mwelase beat Vijender Kumar of India in the final. While Mwelase turned professional, Kumar stayed amateur, and he went on to lift an Olympic bronze in Beijing last year, becoming the first Indian boxer to win a boxing medal. Today it was announced that Kumar will receive India’s highest sporting prize, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, late next month.
Mwelase, meanwhile, faces Attila the None.
The Springboks may have beaten the All Blacks 28-19. Some may think that the margin would – and should – have been even bigger had Ruan Pienaar not missed so many kicks. That’s true.
But don’t forget, this must have been one of the worst New Zealand performances in a long, long time. That final try by Jaque Fourie came after two poor All Black passes. Thankfully, Pienaar’s try was a fairly well worked one, although you’d think there’s room for better defence by the All Blacks.
I apologise if I’m sounding so bleak – I just have this horrible feeling that the All Blacks can only improve, while the Boks can’t get too much better. Let’s see what happens in Durban.
By the way, if you thought it was a strange coincidence that two Currie Cup matches on Friday night ended in 19-13 scorelines (with Western Province and the Sharks winning), consider this: In the opening round of WP league matches at Newlands in 1981, two of the three games ended drawn – UCT with Victorians, and later that afternoon Maties with Defence. I seem to think the scores in both matches were 22-22!
Jan Bergman possessed a potent left hook
I had lunch today with Jan Bergman, the former world junior-welterweight title contender who impressed – but failed – against champions Kostya Tszyu and Zab Judah so many years ago. Now 38, Bergman insists he still has a few fights left in him and is hopeful of lifting the SA junior-middleweight title in the near future.
I’m not entirely convinced that Jan should be mixing it in the ring at this stage of his life, but don’t mind me – I’m ultra-conservative when it comes to guys getting their brains scrambled in the ring.
Nonetheless, we had a nice chat, touching on the informal inquiry, set up by Sport Minister Makhenkesi Stofile, that is being conducted into SA boxing. Pugilism in this country needs a major overhaul – that’s obvious. In fact, in a recent Parliamentary question, Stofile said if the Boxing Act allowed him to, he would have dissolved Boxing SA’s board last year already.
There is a myriad problems within the sport, but our conversation got me thinking – is there any correlation between the decline of boxing worldwide, and the fact that this is the only once-mainstream sport that is not run by a central governing body? I believe so.
Soccer has Fifa, cricket has the ICC, rugby the IRB and so on. But when it comes to boxing, there are a whole bunch of world sanctioning bodies (WBC, WBA, IBF, etc) as well as a horde of promoters who are pretty much in cahoots with the world sanctioning bodies. These organisations earn their money from sanctioning fees paid by promoters, who in turn make their millions from TV rights, tournament sponsors and site fees.
Take a close look, and you’ll notice that sanctioning bodies rate boxers who are handled by the promoters they work with. That means good boxers who don’t have connected promoters get overlooked – how unfair is that?
Promoter Rodney Berman once said that boxing is not a sport, it’s a business. And perhaps that is the problem. Maybe it’s time for boxing to centralise under a single organisation, and get rid of the promoters. Don King and most of his colleagues would happily stage a bout between Superman and Mickey Mouse if they thought there was money to be made. Profit is their only concern – not necessarily the issue of whether it’s a genuine sporting contest. Having promoters in sport is an old-fashioned concept – they are dinosaurs and they will surely die out.
The promoters are effectively the middle men, so why not cut them out? Imagine how much extra money the TV companies and sponsors could save, or how much morre would be available without Don King, Bob Arum and the likes taking their lucrative cuts?
It’s time for boxers around the world to revolt and form a single world federation to resurrect their sport.
So Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao will take on world welterweight champion Miguel Cotto after all. I must admit, I didn’t think this fight would happen (read the story: http://www.thetimes.co.za/Sport/Article.aspx?id=1037441).
If you think about it, Pacquiao’s forays above the lightweight limit have been against a washed-up Oscar De La Hoya and an over-rated, tin-chinned Ricky Hatton. But against Cotto, he will face a big-hitting welterweight who can take a punch. As they say, a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un.
This should have been a dangerous fight for Pacman. But enter the sly manipulators of modern-day boxing – the fight won’t be held at the welterweight limit of 147 pounds, but rather at 145. The reason for this is obvious – to favour the lighter Pacquiao and disadvantage Cotto. The promoter – in this case Bob Arum – clearly wants Pacman to win (I can’t blame him because Pacman is a lucrative meal ticket).
Weigh-ins usually work like this: fighters must make the stipulated limit 24 hours before the fight, and then they can indulge as they please after that, often coming into the ring several pounds above the limit. Many boxers struggle to make the weight, dehydrating themselves for the scales, but they’re easily able to rehydrate overnight to be in pristine condition by the time they climb into the ring.
But it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility for the Pacman-Cotto fight contract to impose extra weight-limit requirements on Cotto. Perhaps there’s a clause promising him a decent sum to weigh in at 145 pounds again no more than a few hours before the tournament starts – so he has insufficient time to rehydrate or gain extra weight. Such a clause would not necessarily be made public, but I’m probably being a conspiracy theorist here.
I have a lot of respect for Pacquiao, and I would love to see him fight Floyd Mayweather, but this fight against Cotto has a ring of artificiality about it.
At 145 pounds, this becomes a catchweight encounter. That’s really odd! There have been many stars who stepped up in weight to challenge champions heavier than they were – and they lost without losing their reputations. The list includes middleweight Stanley Ketchel v heavyweight Jack Johnson, middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson v light-heavyweight Joey Maxim and light-heavyweight Bob Foster v heavyweight Joe Frazier.
That’s how boxing used to work. Not anymore, it seems.
When it comes to assessing sports administrators, one must assume that every single one of them starts out in officialdom as a giant douche bag (GDB). Then it’s up to them to prove otherwise.
Without a shadow of a doubt, there’s a GDB (or two or three…) at the bottom of the Wanderers fiasco between Cricket SA and the Gauteng Cricket Board. Whoever is wrong or right, Cricket SA were undoubtedly offside when they stripped the Wanderers of its international status. Why kick the fans in the teeth if, and I repeat IF, the Gauteng GDBs are out of order? Maybe we fans should hit back and boycott the England tour matches.
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