TUCSON – Juan Diaz remembers when he was younger. When he was busy. Real busy.

He was known as much for a whirlwind pace as he was for his nickname, Baby Bull. He threw punches at the rate of a propeller at take off. They were hard to see and often erratic.

It was fun. But not always effective. About a decade later, Diaz looks back and smiles at what has to look like a hyper-active, four-time champion.

“I don’t know if I could have beaten the Baby Bull who started winning titles,’’ he said. “But I could beat the Baby Bull who was fighting just before he retired.’’

An older, wiser, more patient and a lot more deliberate Diaz (42-4, 21 KOs) has emerged in his comeback. It continued Saturday night with a stoppage of Cesar Vazquez (27-4, 16 KOs, whose corner called it quits at 2:09 of the eighth round of a UniMas televised bout.

“I’m more precise than I was when I was younger,’’ said Diaz, who is 7-0 in his comeback. “I see things now that I didn’t before. I can see punches coming at me, almost like they’re in slow motion. I’m thinking, adjusting.’’

At 32, Diaz hopes his comeback has put in line for a shot at another lightweight title, perhaps against WBA champion Anthony Crolla or WBO champ Terry Flanagan. Both are from the title-rich UK.

“Let’s go to England,’’ said Diaz, who owns a a transportation company, JD Trucking, in his hometown, Houston. “I’ll fight them there. I’ll fight them anywhere.’’

On the Undercard
The Best: Alexander Besputin , a Russian super-welterweight trained by Robert Garcia, didn’t need much time to get the show started. Two minutes and eight seconds after first bell, Besputin (4-0, 4 KOs) landed a left hand for a first-round knockout of Kevin Womack (7-12-3, 2 KOs) of Baltimore.
The quick stoppage left Besputin manager Egis Klimas lots of time to watch Andre Ward against Alexander Brand in a tune-up for the Ward-Sergey Kovalev clash in November. Klimas also manages Kovalev.

Surprise, Surprise: On the first full day of the Rio Olympics, 2012 gold medalist Egor Mekhontsev was lucky to get a majority draw versus Alexander Johnson of Oxon Hill, Md. Mekhonstsev (11-0-1, 7 KOs) was staggered by a right in the third.

The Russian light-heavyweight survived the next five, but his unbeaten record sustained a blemish. He won on one card, 78-74. It was 76-76 on the other two. If Johnson (16-4-1, 7 KOs) had been his opponent in Olympic prelims four years ago in London, Mekhontsev might never have reached the medal stand.

The rest: Phoenix light-heavyweight Trevor McCumby (23-0, 18 KOs) stayed unbeaten, scoring a TKO of Dion Savage (12-10, 6 KOs), a Flint, Mich. fighter whose corner called it quits after the fourth.

Tucson super-lightweight Alfonso Olvera (8-2, 3 KOs) had one key advantage: He was bigger. His size added up to points in a unanimous decision—60-54 on all three cards over a shorter Jose Maruffo (8-5-2) of Phoenix.

Tucson super-featherweight Jesus Arevalo (2-0) won a majority decision over Manuel Lopez (1-2-1) of Phoenix.
Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

HOUSTON – In the good times there was a lameness to this city that didn’t make the brochures; places closed early, nothing opened Sundays, and when folks told you how proud they were of their city it felt strained. That lameness has been replaced by a sort of anger that happens to cities that once boomed then stopped booming then stopped telling others how much they were booming (salesmen necessarily being the most oblivious of rejection) and then resigned themselves to settling in, and whose transplants now look about and realize they didn’t want to live here in the first place.

We were gathered in this city, just the same, for an eight-match Top Rank card that featured the returns of hometowner Juan Diaz and Colorado’s Mike Alvarado, and both men won by knockout, but only one of them, Diaz, should continue fighting.

No one ever told me he moved to Houston and loved it. There was money here, though, and that money calmed the slight uneasiness one feels when he’s uprooted himself for something that isn’t quite-quite. Two years ago crude oil was trading over $100 per barrel. Today it is heaving to return to $40. This city’s humor rises and falls with those prices, and right now its humor is lower than it has been anytime in the last decade – except last month; oil is up $10 since then, and it’s springtime after all, so how about them green shoots?

The boom times are not reflective times, and what a city does with its wealth while it booms sets a floor of sorts for where it goes when it busts (except in prolonged cases like Detroit, the one ever-busting American city of the last halfcentury). This city did some Texas tackiness, big hair and sparkly things, sure, though nothing that approached Dallas’ scale, and its skyline remains alluring, but it neglected wholly its infrastructure. With all the money that sloshed about, one wonders, and did wonder, why are its surface streets barely fit for urban attack vehicles (ah, the Hummer – enduring symbol of a different bust: Phoenix housing market) and otherwise unfit for any sensible car?

Back when Austin, this state’s capital, was actually weird – not “keep Austin weird” weird – it got by with a hippy sensibility like: we’re all in this together, so yield the right of way when you know I can’t see round the tree at the intersection. Houston’s eroding infrastructure is making it weirder every day, though without any sensibility but greed to bind its citizenry; in Houston, now, you drive like a maniac because some primal intuition tells you you’re safer that way, and you are – because when you’re moving faster than the loons on either side, you regain half your attention by no longer needing a rearview mirror.

Arena Theatre was a fine, if well-hidden, venue to watch a fight Saturday, and only a sucker paid for better than the cheapest seat, since there wasn’t a distant view in the entire bowl, and the ring sat up shiny in the venue’s very center. Heard in the Top Rank section: “Small rings make for great matchmakers.” The ring was tiny; no one larger than a middleweight set foot in it during the card’s eight matches, and everyone looked large.

There’s a slapdash South American-mercado feel to much Spanish-language television, the don Francisco style of having the host perform commercials onstage during a show, and it interrupted the pleasure of Saturday’s card, some. Television owns boxing, of course, the programming director tells the commission when it may ring the opening bell, but the delays of a show performed for Spanish-language television are, even by the known standard, a touch gratuitous. Seated a few rows behind the UniMás commentary team with a clear view of their monitors, one sees the main event is being delayed by week-old commercials advertising the co-main event that already went off; it’s a sloppy, sales-blitz mentality wherein the host sees himself as an emcee, not a journalist, and his target demographic meanwhile slumps its shoulders and trudges back to the beerline.

Saturday’s crowd was the usual mix of hometown fight figures and familiars and friends and hangerson, and local businessmen reveling in others’ danger. A lawfirm gathered in the row behind me, and when they weren’t hellbent on outnamedropping one another, they were admonishing the fighters to “punch him in the neck” or “knock his head off” or “finish him”! And so.

Mile High Mike looked exactly the same Saturday as he did the last time you saw him, and that’s a problem, obviously, because the last time you saw him he was stopped by a limited fighter, albeit a former champion, and this time he plied his wares against a lighthitter with 10 knockouts and six losses in 25 matches. Eventually Alvarado bludgeoned him down with wild righthands, but Mile High Mike and his rehabby salespitch, “I’ve been fighting my demons as much as my opponents,” are through with major championship prizefighting.

The Baby Bull looked about the same, too, and that’s a really good thing. Never the bearer of a pinup physique, Juan Diaz still weighs and fights the exact same way at 32 as he did at 22. He does not set on any punch so he does not have concussive power, but he doesn’t need it: Because he’s somehow stayed in the same weightclass, where his chin is proven, and because he possesses more belief in his own conditioning than just about anyone in the game today, and because there’s exactly no chance of another Nate Campbell or Juan Manuel Marquez or even Paulie Malignaggi showing up at lightweight in the next five years, Diaz will make a competitive and fun title match with anyone he fights.

It was good to see Juan Diaz do so well in front of his friends and family.

The best sight of all, though, was Israel Vazquez, the color guy on the UniMás broadcast team, being as unassuming in retirement as ever he was vicious in the ring. The fans queued up for photos with him, and Izzy lost himself in their adoration, requiring several times the program director to scold him for nearly missing cues. Vazquez’s delta – violence in combat to gentleness in society – is the greatest I’ve seen in our sport that has so very few happy endings, and how properly joyful it makes me to think Israel might be one of them.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Former Lightweight champion Juan Diaz stopped Fernando Garcia in round nine of their scheduled 10-round super lightweight bout at the Arena Theater in Houston, Texas.

Diaz, 136 1/2 lbs of Houston, Texas stopped Garcia at 2:24 of round nine to raise his mark to 41-4 with 20 knockouts. Garcia, 136 1/2 lbs of Tijuana, MX is 30-8-2.

Former world champion, Mike Alvarado scored a 3rd round stoppage over Saul Corral in a scheduled 8-round welterweight bout.

Alvarado landed a big right hand in round three that set off a big barrage in the corner. One more big right hand sent Corral down and the fight was stopped at 1:25

Alvarado, 147 1/4 lbs of Denver, CO is now 35-4 with 24 knockouts. Corral, 146 1/4 lbs of Monterrey, MX is 19-7.

Arturo Marquez made a successful pro debut with a 2nd round stoppage over Justin Henderson in a scheduled 4-round battle of Houston based welterweights.

Marquez dominated the fight and dropped Henderson in the 2nd round. Marquez continued to pour on the pressure until referee Laurence Cole stopped the bout at 2:50.

Marquez, 146 1/2 lbs is the son of former junior middleweight world champion Raul Marquez. Henderson, 146 1/4 lbs is 0-2.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Arena Theatre in Houston, Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz and “Mile High” Mike Alvarado will return to prizefighting on an UniMás telecast. Diaz will fight a Mexican lightweight named Fernando Garcia, and Alvarado will fight a Mexican welterweight named Saul Corral. Garcia and Corral appear to be statement-type opponents; Diaz and Alvarado will either use such men to make flattering statements about their futures by dominating them, or there will be statements made by others about overdue retirements.

I’ll be there because I did not expect to be ringside again for a fight featuring either man, let alone both, and I do not expect to have such a chance again, and I wish our sport comprised more men like Diaz and Alvarado once were.

I have been ringside for four of Juan Diaz’s last six fights, and while I did not realize it till time came to write this column, in retrospect, I’m glad it’s been that way. I knew little about the Baby Bull when I sat ringside for his 2006 match against Fernando Angulo at Chase Field, but his activity was infectious, and his selfbelief exceptional for a fluffy lightstriker. Volume punchers, men like Diaz and Timothy Bradley, are compelling fighters because of their limitations, because their offenses are more pesky than concussive, unlike sluggers’, and their defenses are steady applications of offense with a dusting of head movement, unlike boxers’.

There are few fighters whose style I enjoy more than Diaz’s – and one of those few is Juan Manuel Marquez, the man whose style ruined Diaz in one of the very best matches I’ve covered from ringside. That match happened in Houston more than seven years ago, a fact that dates this column sympathetically or ruthlessly whatever one’s philosophy of time, and it marked an apogee of sorts for Marquez, a moment of lightweight supremacy just before his own greed and his promoter’s greed and guilelessness got him humiliated in a sparring match with the world’s best welterweight, Floyd Mayweather. (The lesson from that match: Tossing boulders at altitude and drinking your own piss, training in the naturalest way possible in other words, is dimwitted; a year or so later, Juan Manuel contacted Memo and things got supernatural for his second campaign at welter.)

By the time Diaz fought Marquez the first time, in a Toyota Center that was full and loud, he was no longer undefeated, having been beaten by Nate Campbell in a Don King-special event conducted in a Quintana Roo bullring, the culmination of a weird promotional relationship initiated in 2006 when King, realizing he’d never sellout a Phoenix baseball stadium with a Belarusian and Shannon Briggs, heard a Latino ticketseller named Diaz might be about to sign a contract with Golden Boy Promotions, and finding Diaz’s pen dangled cautiously over his new Golden Boy contract, King slipped a King contract in its stead.

Diaz and King were not a sensible match, and eventually Diaz was with Golden Boy Promotions, and through fifteen minutes appeared ready to devour Marquez at Toyota Center. Those of us ringside fretted openly about the cost of Marquez’s pride; Diaz did not strike hard enough to unseam Marquez with one punch or 20, and as Marquez looked old and worn and Diaz appeared much the larger man, we verily worried something tragic might befall Marquez before the 12th round concluded.

Goodness, but we were wrong. Marquez made of Diaz his most gorgeous finish (until the Pacquiao icing years later), stubbornly wagering his straight punches would best Diaz’s crooked ones no matter their quantitative disparity. Diaz fell prey to the uppercut like every volume puncher must, tallying shots on Marquez so feverishly he neglected to notice his weight fully spilled overknee, and Marquez, his era’s master closer, brought Diaz’s unconsciousness with a customary precision and lack of ruth.

Their rematch was a dud fought in a soulless casino while the Vegas economy experienced gravity in a vacuum. And with that the Baby Bull was finished with boxing and ready to become a lawyer. Initially I didn’t care when he returned because it felt, like most of our sport’s comebacks, a fated mix of betrayal and desperation.

Writing of which, “Mile High” Mike will be in Saturday’s co-main, his first ringside sighting since the autohumiliation he perpetrated on himself and his fellow Coloradoans 14 months ago in his second rematch with Brandon Rios. The standard ploy, changing trainers and promising rededication, was not going to be enough for Alvarado to sell his return, and so he attended rehab and got married.

Promoter Top Rank forgives Alvarado his numerous transgressions because Alvarado atones properly; Alvarado has fought five times since 2012, when his career was reresurrected after legal issues aplenty, and what fights were not with Rios were with the aforementioned Marquez and Ruslan Provodnikov – five consecutive fights with any combination of Provodnikov and Rios and Marquez exceeds in peril the product of every 2015 PBC main event multiplied by 50, and so Alvarado gets forgiven. The beating Alvarado took from Provodnikov in 2013 was mansized and vigorous; it was the only time I recall seeing at ringside a defending champion wince in the first round of a title fight, as Alvarado did after several of Provodnikov’s facinorous blows befell him.

I’m an unapologetic fan of Diaz and Alvarado both; I’ve traveled to Nevada and Colorado to see prime versions of the men and consider those trips time and resources well-consumed. Neither is good enough, anymore, for me to leave the state of Texas to see, but either is worth the 200-mile drive to Houston, and the two of them together, a treat. This nostalgia tour continues along happily.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Former world champions Mike Alvarado and Juan Diaz have their opponents set for the March 19 fights in Houston, Texas, according to Dan Rafael of espn.com.

Former unified lightweight titleholder Diaz (40-4, 19 KOs), known as the “Baby Bull,” will face Mexico’s Fernando Garcia (30-7-2, 19 KOs) in a 10-round lightweight match.

Former junior welterweight titleholder Alvarado (34-4, 23 KOs), of Denver, will face Saul Corral (19-6, 10 KOs), of Mexico, in an eight-round welterweight fight that will open the Unimas telecast.

“It was a serious rotator cuff injury that caused the long layoff and this is the first step back,” Top Rank vice president Carl Moretti told ESPN.com. “He’s hoping to regain the momentum he had before the layoff when he was on the verge of a world title shot. Diaz is ready to go. He feels 100 percent. He’s really amped up to get back in the ring and get this going again. Because the fight is in Houston, there’s more motivation for him to perform as best as he can. The place holds about 3,500 and I think we’ll be full, and Diaz has always loved to fight at home.”

Alvarado has since been to rehab and is said to be clean and sober as he attempts to salvage his career.

“His issues were outside the ring, not an injury like Diaz had,” Moretti said. “But all indications are that he’s taken care of them and he’s been in the gym. We’ve had no calls or reason to doubt him. He’s stayed on the straight path and he knows he has a lot to prove to himself and to his fans. This is the first step to doing that.

“He doesn’t want to go out like he did against Rios. He has pride. It’s a different situation that Juan Diaz’s situation but how do you not give [Alvarado] another opportunity?”

Former lightweight title holder Juan Diaz tore his rotator cuff in his left shoulder and had to pull out of his May 1 title bout with Takahiro Ao that was set to take place at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas and according to Dan Rafael of espn,.com, Raymundo Beltran will replace Diaz.

“Juan was sparring with a southpaw and he threw the shot and winced in pain,” said Diaz manager Brian Caldwell. “He kept going for the rest of the round but when he came back to the corner he said he hurt his shoulder.

“We did conditioning work the next day and the shoulder was still giving him problems, so he went to the doctor the next day. He ended up seeing three doctors and all three concluded that, after looking at the MRI, he needs surgery. They said his rotator cuff is attached by a thread so it was inevitable that he would have had a complete tear if he continued to use it without getting surgery.”

“I feel bad for Juan because of the effort and time he has put into his comeback. Everything was on track for him to get another world title,” said Carl Moretti, vice president of Diaz promoter Top Rank. “He had really put in the work to get back to the level of being able to fight for a world title again.”

Said Caldwell, “Juan is pretty bummed out but he’s really optimistic. His thoughts are, ‘Let’s have the surgery and recover and get back on track.’ He is definitely not giving up the dream of getting another world title.

“So he’ll be out for about six months. It’s too bad because the fight [with Ao] was a winnable fight. Tell Beltran and Ao that in six to eight months we’re coming for that title.”

Former world champion Juan Diaz scored a 10-round unanimous decision over Carlos Cardenas at the Laredo Energy Arena in Laredo, Texas.

Diaz, 135 1.2 lbs of Houston, TX won by scores of 99-91, 98-92 and 97-93 and is now 40-4. Cardenas, 135 lbs of Barina, VEN is now 21-9-1.

Casey Ramos remained undefeated by scoring a 6-round unanimous decision over Angel Hernandez in a Lightweight bout.

Ramos, 134 lbs of Austin, TX won by scores of 59-55 and 58-56 twice and is now 18-0. Hernandez, 131 1/2 lbs of McAllen, TX is 8-3.

SAN ANTONIO – Houston lightweight Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz, a former world champion, found across from him in Saturday’s sixth and final off-television match a motivated opponent with a workable gameplan and little respect for Diaz’s resume. It was no matter – Diaz dispatched of him with time anyway.

Diaz (39-4, 19 KOs) whacked and wore-down Mexican Gerardo Robles (18-13, 9 KOs), snatching his will and decisioning him easily if not quite easily as official scores indicated: 100-90, 99-91 and 99-91.

After a spirited first round from Robles, one in which the rambunctious Mexican alternately countered and led Diaz with surprising effect, Diaz came off his stool in the second and reestablished the proper order of things, lashing Robles with signature hooks and activity, and reducing Robles’ activity considerably. Once order was returned Diaz then went to work on Robles like so many once-strong men before him, breaking the Mexican’s spirit with constant activity and relentless violence.

Though Diaz never managed to imperil Robles – and though Diaz found his own legs stiffened in the seventh, in an exchange that sent the Houstonian to the canvas but was ruled a slip by referee Jon Schorle – Diaz closed space, controlled time, and generally took the fight away from his less-experienced opponent.

Diaz is not what he once was, no, and hasn’t been since his first fight with Juan Manuel Marquez, but he is still entertaining, and still acquitting himself honorably every time he steps in a prizefighting ring.

Saturday’s fifth match saw undefeated Mexican featherweight Oscar Valdez (9-0, 8 KOs) score a controversially concluded technical knockout victory over Dallas’ Samuel Sanchez (5-6-1, 1 KO), a limited opponent there for the beating, a beating that was concluded somewhat prematurely at 2:03 of round 3, much to Texas fans’ bemusement.

Local lightweight Ivan “Bam Bam” Najera acannot help himself, for there are two things in a prizefight he loves to do: Devour opponents’ right hands, and make an intense and intensely suspenseful match with every man he faces.

The fourth bout of Saturday’s eight-fight Alamodome card saw Najera (13-0, 9 KOs) win yet another firefight, this time with a fellow Texan, McAllen’s Angel Hernandez (8-2, 4 KOs), a man Najera dropped with a gorgeous counter left hook in round 1 and then got dropped by with a stiff right cross in round 2. And then after that, it was like every other Najera fight, with both men landing repetitively throughout, and Najera remaining undefeated by unanimous scores of 78-72, 77-73 and 77-73.

Tough and entertaining as he is, Najera continues down a path of making caveman-like spectacles that promise no longevity. He is aware of everything in and around a prizefighting ring, it seems – even taking time to blow a kiss to a ringside female journalist during Saturday’s fourth round – everything that is, except the glove an opponent wears on his right fist. Of right hands, Najera is seemingly oblivious, dropping his own left hand through every fight, and getting cracked continually by most every right thrown his way.

So long as he lasts, though, Najera is the stuff of which local attractions are made.

ALEX SAUCEDO VS. GILBERTO VENEGAS
Undefeated Oklahoma welterweight Alex Saucedo has stalled in his development. Once a darling of insiders, Saucedo has been moved perhaps too prudently and now finds himself getting hit far too hard by journeymen types who do not move backwards or go down when first struck.

Saturday’s second match saw Saucedo (13-0, 9 KOs) win most every minute of his six round match with Illinoisan Gilberto Venegas (12-13 4 KOs), and win a lopsided decision judges scored unanimously, 60-54, 60-54 and 59-55. But those scores tell nothing of the two or three flush Venegas left hands that snapped Saucedo’s head leftwards. This match was a step-up affair for Saucedo – and against a .500-fighter, that is something of an indictment.

UNDERCARD
Saturday’s third fight saw undefeated California welterweight Jose Zepeda (19-0, 17 KOs) go directly through overmatched South Carolinian Johnnie Edwards (15-7-1, 8 KOs), stopping him at 2:10 of round 2, in a fight that showed nothing but questionable merit.

The evening began with a competitive if light-hitting scrap between undefeated Houston featherweight Jerren Cochran (11-0, 4 KOs) and Mexican Aduato Gonzalez (11-10, 4 KOs), a match that saw Gonzalez dropped in round 5 and bleeding throughout though game to the end. Judges scored the match unanimously for Cochran: 59-54, 59-54 and 60-53.

Cochran, whose punches are accurate not hard, showed certain class but remained surprisingly susceptible to looping overhand rights thrown blindly by his limited opponent.

Opening bell rang on a cavernous Alamodome at 5:17 PM local time.

Julio Cesar Chavez 167.5 – Bryan Vera 167.5
Orlando Salido 128.25 – Vasyl Lomachenko 125.5
Juan Diaz 134.5 – Gerardo Robles 134.5
Oscar Valdez 127.5 – Samuel Sanchez 127.75
Ivan Najera 136.5 – Angel Hernandez 133.25
Alex Saucedo 146.5 – Gilberto Venegas 1498.5

HOUSTON – Returned to Texas’ largest city and the fourth-largest city in our country, a day before a day we celebrate the father of our country’s birthday by acknowledging all the presidents’ birthdays in a single day because federal holidays, if mismanaged, might force the private sector to pay time-and-a-half, I looked across boxing’s landscape, barren yet again, and thought making a reciprocal tribute of sorts to a tribute of sorts was a workable idea. To wit:

This city’s Museum of Fine Arts’ “Age of Impressionism” is an exceptionally good exhibition that has little to do with boxing but may be instructive in its parallels to boxing writing, a discipline that requires a weekly entry even though nary a meaningful thing is yet to happen in prizefighting this year, as we enter 2014’s eighth week. And so, afforded a chance to celebrate Presidents Day, I made a Friday decision to spend Saturday and Sunday at Museum of Fine Arts’ outstanding exhibition, one I initially partook of in December and was prompted to revisit by a guest piece Kelsey McCarson wrote for us Tuesday.

In “Juan Diaz and the Age of Impressionism,” McCarson juxtaposes Juan Diaz and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others, in a way I’d not considered, or at least not quickly as I’d considered juxtaposing McCarson and other fine young boxing writers, Jimmy Tobin in particular, with mid-19th-century Paris’ Salon de Refusés, a groundbreaking show in 1863 that came about when works by Impressionism’s predecessors – Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, most notably – got rejected by the Paris Salon, the French state’s annual recognition of its best painters, and held an exhibition of rejects that was successful enough to erect a bridge between an academic style Manet mastered and an entirely new movement whose greatest practitioner, Claude Monet, initially found himself accused by Manet of stealing the great man’s name. McCarson and others who write regularly and seriously about our beloved sport, and take the craft of writing seriously, have been denied entry in the Boxing Writers Association of America, our craft’s equivalent of the Salon, and might be well advised to form their own association of rejects – an idea McCarson toys with on Twitter.

This city’s Juan Diaz remains one of my most favorite fighters I’ve covered, though I cannot think of a painter or movement to whom I would readily liken his style. He’s not an Impressionist, he’s not experimental enough, and he’s not an academic or Renaissance type, either, as his use of offense as defense offends purists’ sensibilities. He might be a Modernist or Surrealist but for his never effecting stylistically radical devices; he’s not endeavoring to interpret anything so much as strike his opponent often as he can.

The worst part of visiting an art museum is its patrons. Most are not interested in seeing art so much as being seen seeing art – Kelsey McCarson and his wife, of course, being noble exceptions – and the audio tours and white-plate explanations museums proffer do not palliate this. Viewing others viewing “The Age of Impressionism” shows all too clearly what is wrong with fields like art history, where future curators expend many times more time memorizing biography than practicing technique.

What makes unique the Impressionist painters, Monet and Eugène Boudin, especially, but also Renoir when he is best, as he is in MFAH’s current exhibition, is not that they painted outside or quickly or with fewer layers than Renaissance masters but that they offered an original rebuttal to the invention of photography, not an effort to imitate it. Perhaps the best piece in MFAH’s exhibition is Monet’s “Spring in Giverny,” a landscape done in light pastels. It is best, and Monet is his movement’s best artist, because it improves proportionate to the time one spends before it.

Writing about Renoir’s “Sunset at Sea,” McCarson partially captures why: “Isn’t this completely unlike any picture even the most advanced camera could help you collect?” It is exactly that because it is binocular, using the requisite imperfection of images pieced together with data from two different points, à la human sight, and not monocular, as photography is. Impressionism captures a moment, and in any moment, a human eye is unable to see with its fovea, the part that perceives fine detail (the part of the eye with which you are able to read no more than two of these words at a time, regardless of font), more than a comparatively tiny percentage of what its eye perceives. All the rest is perceived in the periphery and necessarily coarse.

Human peripheral vision is marvelous and comprises what stimuli necessarily compose our senses of things. Peripheral vision, and the brain’s handling of its coarse data, are what the Impressionists were after, and for this reason, as one’s eyes fatigue, causing their neurons to misfire, the best of Monet and Renoir’s works begin to dance on the canvas, coming to life the same way, and for the same reason, Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” smiles when you look her in the eyes but not the mouth.

The first work in MFAH’s “Age of Impressionism,” somewhat ironically, is a large portrait by William Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic painter whose later work “Admiration” received the highest award in the 1900 Paris Salon, 37 years after the first Salon de Refusés. And today, Claude Monet’s name is known even to philistines, while Bouguereau’s is lost to all but connoisseurs – something the BWAA’s membership committee might note.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrrys.email (at) gmail.com

In the 1870s, a group of artists in Paris, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, decided to stop submitting their works to the official annual exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, also called the Salon. Dubbed “Impressionists,” these brave new visionaries instead mounted eight independent exhibitions of their own, featuring works done in a new, informal style based on modern subjects of everyday life and leisure, an idea which had originally been pioneered at and rejected by the Salon.

At least, that’s what the sign outside the door told me as I entered the Houston Museum of Fine Arts last Saturday afternoon after spending the morning watching former lightweight titlist Juan Diaz train and spar at his new gym, Baby Bull Boxing Academy.

I don’t know as much as I should about art. My wife and I are members at the museum, but only because we like to look at the paintings. I don’t know much about history or theory, but when we travel through the giant halls of paintings and such, I can’t help but read all the boxes of text surrounding these magnificent works.

This particular collection, The Age of Impressionism, has traveled all around the world. It was put together over time by Sterling and Francine Clark, heirs of the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune. It features 73 paintings by artists such as our friend Renoir, as well as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley and others. This was the last stop of the tour. After traveling to Tokyo, London, Barcelona, Milan, etc., etc., etc., the collection would stop in Houston before returning back home to The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Juan Diaz has traveled the world, too. He’s the heir to his own fortune, though, wrought the hard way and from a very young age. Diaz was born Sept. 17, 1983 in Houston, Texas to Fidencio and Olivia Diaz, a young couple from Guerrero, Mexico. When he was just eight years old, Fidencio, a rabid boxing fan, took little Juan to Willie Savannah’s boxing gym.

Diaz entered and won his first tournament at 12. At 16, he qualified for the Mexican Olympic team, but was three months too young to compete at the 2000 Summer Olympics. Later that year, with a 105-5 amateur record, Diaz decided to turn pro.

Diaz had a solid career as a professional. By the end of things, he was one of HBO’s regularly featured darlings. He won lightweight title belts and even fought two big money fights against all-time great Juan Manuel Marquez for the lineal lightweight championship. Diaz was a fan favorite during his heyday, and after the second loss to Marquez he seemed to be getting out of the fight game while the getting was still good. At age 27, with all brain and bodily functions still intact, Diaz decided to hang up the gloves and get on with the rest of his life.
But Diaz is back in boxing now. After almost three years of pause, Diaz unexpectedly returned to the ring and knocked out Gerardo Cueves in April 2013 in six rounds. Houston’s most popular fighter rounded out the year with two more wins over similar fare, knocking out Adailton De Jesus in five and going the 10-round distance with Juan Santiago.

Diaz is older now. He does not fight with quite the same frenetic energy but he still appears aggressive and hungry. At 30, he has won three straight on his way back up the ranks, and he’s still able to make the lightweight division with relative ease, something that should only help him in his effort to recapture former glory. And that’s what it’s all about for him.

“It’s not about money,” Diaz said. “It’s about world titles.”

I don’t know as much as I should about boxing. My wife and I cover the fights for various websites, but only because we like the sport. I like boxing history and theory but wouldn’t consider myself a great historian or anything. I’ll read a boxing book if I come across one that suits me, though, because I can’t help but read about these magnificent figures of sport.

As I watched Diaz spar that morning, I mostly wondered what he’d look like when he steps up past tomato cans like March 1 opponent Gerardo Robles. Diaz thinks he’ll be the same champion he was before, only smarter and more skilled. But fighters always think that. They have to. The minute they start believing otherwise is the minute their careers are over.

This is what I’m thinking about during the brief seconds between standing and staring at paintings at the museum. I don’t know many genres of art, but the Impressionists always seem to catch my eye. To me, they capture the beauty and the power of life but in a way that appears at once magical and realistic.

Take Renoir’s Sunset at Sea. Is this not what you’d see looking across the ocean at the glimmering majesty of the setting sun? But at the same time, isn’t this also completely unlike any picture even the most advanced camera could help you collect? To me, Impressionism is both less and more than life.

Diaz sparred eight rounds that morning. He went three against TV fighter Lanard Lane and five against local lightweight Danny Garcia. Diaz was aggressive but not stupid. His corner men, Derwin Richards and Timothy Knight, hurled instructions at him from across the ring, telling him more or less exactly that.

“Bend your knees,” said Richard. “Now turn…turn!”

“Keep that jab going,” added Knight. “Jab!”

Diaz did all these things, but he threw hooks and uppercuts to the body and torso of his opponent less like a man who wants to box smart and more like a man who just wants to be in a good fight. That kind of thing is what made him so popular in the first place, I suppose, but it was also his undoing.

But Juan Diaz is going to be Juan Diaz, and that’s something we could probably all learn from.

After witnessing the two Saturday exhibitions, Juan Diaz and The Age of Impressionism, I can’t help but wonder if Diaz will be able to pull off what the Impressionists did all those years ago. Reactionaries to the prevailing sentiment at the Salon, artists like Renoir have now become measuring sticks for others. No one who studies art skips over what they did during their time. And no one has forgotten them now that they’ve turned to dust.

In a similar way, our present culture’s Salon doesn’t think Diaz should be boxing anymore either. After all, they reason, Diaz has a college degree and several successful businesses. More than that, he’s smart, sharp and affable enough to get along better than most everyone else without trading punches in the ring for money.

So I think Diaz’s comeback might also be a reaction, one to the idea that men should only fight if they have no other way to earn, the one that says boxing isn’t suitable for Diaz now because he could make money doing other things. It’s as if we are to believe the dignity of a human being, the value of a soul, is something that can be measured by one’s capabilities or by how one chooses to make his way through the world.

Diaz rejects this premise. And who knows? Perhaps 150 years from now, some silly writer and his wife will roam around a museum on a Saturday afternoon to revere Diaz the way we did Renoir and the Impressionists.

I wonder what they’ll do that morning.

Philadelphia (October 18, 2013)—On April 28, 2007 Ruslan Provodnikov scored a 1st round stoppage over Antwon Barrett in his American debut.

The result maybe was just a blip on the radar that night because it was a four round bout on the undercard of a highly publicized Lightweight unification bout between Juan Diaz and Acelino Freitas.

Fast forward six and a half years, Provodnikov, Diaz and Freitas will be featured in different capacities when Provodnikov fights WBO Jr. Welterweight champion at the 1stBank Arena in Broomfield, Colorado.

The bout which is promoted by Top Rank and Banner Promotions will be televised live on HBO Championship Boxing.
In what most experts are calling a Fight of the Year candidate, Provodnkov (22-2, 15 KO’s)will vie for a world title for the second consecutive when he takes on Mike Alvarado (34-1, 23 KO’s) in the highly anticipated bout.

Diaz (37-4, 19 KO’s) will continue his comeback when he takes on Juan Santiago (14-10-1, 8 KO’s) in a ten round bout.

Freitas will be in the corner of his nephew Vitor Jones De Olivera when the Featherweight participates in a four round bout against Martin Quezada.

“I am very bless to be the main event on Saturday”, said Provodnikov.

“To be the main event is a big accomplishment.“

“Those types seem so long ago and the time has passed and now I am the main event and I am very glad things have gone the so well for me.

“Said Acelino Freitas, “I only remember Provodnikov as being a nice kid at the time. The events of Saturday night proves that god’s destiny was for us to reunite this Saturday.”

Former Lightweight champion Juan Diaz has signed a promotional deal with Top Rank according to Dan Rafael.

Diaz is scheduled to fight Juan Santiago on October 19th as part of the Mike Alvarado – Ruslan Provodnikov undercard in Broomfield, Colorado.

Diaz told ESPN.com that he signed an 18-month, six-fight deal with Top Rank, mainly because of his close relationship with company vice president Carl Moretti, who had worked with Diaz during the early part of his career when they were both with Main Events.

“I’ve known Carl for a long time, since the Main Events days [in the early 2000s], and it kind of made it easier for me to have more trust in Top Rank since I dealt with Carl before,” Diaz told ESPN.com. “I generally think the conversations I’ve had with Carl are genuine, and I believe he and Top Rank want the best for my career, so we signed the deal and I’m looking forward to being with them.”

“Juan and his team are great people to work with, and together we have a strategy that will bring Juan to the top of the [lightweight] division once again,” Moretti said. “Juan Diaz is still one of the most recognizable names to all boxing fans because of his fan-friendly style and the positive manner in which he carries himself in and out of the ring.

“What’s there not to like about him and the excitement he creates? For Top Rank, this was no-brainer to be involved with Juan and his career.”

“They’re just waiting to see what guys are available for me to challenge,” Diaz said. “Top Rank already promised me a title shot next year. Whether it be the summer or the end of next year, I know I’ll get that title shot, which put the exclamation point on everything, so I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ and I signed.

“I’m a realist. I know that I have a good name in boxing, but I’m not Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather. I can’t be a free agent for the rest of my fighting career. I knew I’d have to settle down with one promoter and let them help me in my road to becoming a champion again.”

LAREDO, Texas – Saturday at this city’s Energy Arena brought nothing unexpected, and perhaps 1,000 or so spectators, with the red corner going 6-0 (5 KOs), and Houston lightweight Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz winning the second fight of his comeback by a technical knockout that brought two white terrycloths flying in the ring from the corner of Diaz’s Brazilian opponent, Adailton De Jesus, in round 5. Saturday also brought recognition Diaz did not dissipate during his brief consideration of a career in pettifogging instead of prizefighting, and perhaps a wee bit of observational inadequacy too.

Even sitting 15 feet from Diaz and making him one’s sole point of concentration yields few fruitful revelations about the origins of his stamina. The question was got at a number of times from different angles during Diaz’s reign as lightweight champion, and usually, and properly, attributed to the smoothness of his physique, the languid shape and execution of his fatty-wrapped though not-nonexistent musculature – won by hours swimming laps in lieu of pumping reps, a physique naturally warmed by driving a baseball bat in a heavybag rather than snapping bicep-tightening uppercuts at a trainer’s handpads.

Diaz’s footwork is not spectacular, though he is rarely off balance in any way but one customary to volume punchers: weight too far forward, body draped over the left knee. Diaz remains, as ever, a proverbial sucker for the back uppercut, the punch Juan Manuel Marquez finished him with in the second loss of his career, a punch it takes a gambler to throw since it opens his chin to a left hook, a punch Diaz throws nearly well to the head as he throws to the body.

Diaz does that with an untold ferocity; it was the only part of being ringside for his Saturday fight with Adailton De Jesus that carried something unexpected: Diaz does not know he does not possess one-punch stopping power, or at least he fights like a man who does not know. He is instead a man who must apply geology’s study of pressure and time to undo the wills of other men who hurt other men for a living, to snatch their desire to punch him by showing them a different nature, a beast they’ve not seen, one who will not tire and will not stop punching them. While there is not one Diaz punch or even one Diaz combination that makes an opponent wince at the championship level, there is a relentlessness that raises an exasperation the peerless Larry Merchant once captured in a fittingly exasperated voice: What do I have to do to make this guy stop hitting me?

Opponents, and more so bystanders, see Diaz’s flaccid physique, the way his flesh tumbles harmlessly over the black waistband of his babyblue trunks, and suspect whatever viciousness he brings to the opening minutes is mere hot blood, akin to prison-yard fury. It’s not till the 15th minute opponents, and more so bystanders, begin to wonder what detail they missed about this friendly college grad any barroom tough would unhesitatingly accost, how in the holy hell Diaz has not relented one moment, how he could appear so physically unprepared for a craft he is so masterful at.

That’s when many a Diaz opponent makes the worst possible calculation, to try rope-a-doping a smart guy, to begin stopping each of Diaz’s punches with his body rather than slipping or ducking them – because, really, what could be the harm: The Baby Bull famously does not hit hard. The harm is this: by stopping Diaz’s punches for him, doing half his physical work, an opponent reaffirms Diaz’s fighting philosophy relentlessly as Diaz’s punches can be thrown. “This is comfortable,” Diaz thinks, “this feels right, this is like we do in the gym on those days when if they didn’t yell ‘Time!’ a 23-minute round could happen because when I’m in my place, turning into each punch turns me away from the next punch till the motion takes care of itself and I barely know or remember what happened that last half hour.”

Diaz keeps his hands open wide as his battleship-gray gloves allow until the last three or so inches before they crash against an opponent’s body, and at that instant he closes them into fists, providing just enough torque to make another prizefighter know he’s being hit by a prizefighter, not a soft, local-attraction, college-kid-makes-good, slapper, twisting his knuckles in the man’s elbows and shoulders and ears till that man’s capacity for proper defense is pulverized, and Diaz’s knuckles start to taste what’s tastier: ribs, cheeks, chin, liver. Diaz follows every clean punch with another clean punch; he does not pause if a left hook makes another man’s bones momentarily feel like lard on his fist, he does not “take a snapshot” – as promoter Oscar De La Hoya rightly accused Danny Garcia of doing in Diaz’s native Houston against Erik Morales – but instead watches with eyes big the other man’s sternum, a head’s length below the man’s now exposed chin.

What Diaz does to another in a prizefight is an entirely impersonal event, it is a fitness contest with a heavybag that occasionally punches back, and whether that man tires or does not is an afterthought to Diaz who has a tally of fully thrown punches to reach, 600 at least though perhaps 900, before he asks what his opponent is doing. It is a mindlessness mindfully planned that makes Diaz susceptible only to men who are more accurate than he, and derive deeper pleasure from meaningful punches perfectly delivered, and such men are rare.

That is why Adailton De Jesus’ cornermen threw one white towel over the rope just after the midway point of round 5, and when that didn’t make referee Jon Schorle make Diaz relent, they hurled a second towel at Schorle himself, bypassing decorum to demand mercy for their charge.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

LAREDO, Texas – A small but committed group of partisan-Mexican fight fans gathered to see how real Juan Diaz’s comeback was in its second test. The crowd was relieved to find it pretty serious thus far.

Saturday before a sparse crowd at Laredo Energy Arena, Houston lightweight and former world champion Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz (37-4, 18 Kos) outworked and outhit Brazilian Adailton De Jesus (30-8, 24 KOs), eventually causing the De Jesus corner to stop the match before its midway point, at 1:51 of round 5.

From the opening moments of Saturday’s main event, Diaz swarmed and struck De Jesus, attacking him as if after the Brazilian’s very spirit. De Jesus, who wore a noble face and made manly gestures of indifference through the next 15 or so minutes, was not in the fight and knew he was not in the fight, finding himself in the position so many Diaz opponents have, the realization that punching back at Diaz is the only way temporarily to make him stop punching you, until you tire – which you inevitably will.

“I went right to the body to break him down,” Diaz said after stopping De Jesus. “I felt good doing it.”

Each round became like its predecessor, by its closing bell, with Diaz whacking elbows and gloves when he could not find De Jesus’ softer spots, and each new round began with the waistband of De Jesus’ gray trunks pulled higher and higher in the hopes of fooling referee Jon Schorle into warning Diaz, but Schorle was not fooled.

“I threw a lot of hard, accurate punches,” Diaz explained.

The assault continued, with Diaz’s trademark activity rate, until De Jesus’ corner could abide no more and threw not one but two white towels in the ring, bringing an end to the match and a continuation to Diaz’s comeback, one promoter Top Rank envisions eventually concluding with a title match.

“I am still young, only 29,” Diaz said. “And I have a lot of fight left.”

IVAN NAJERA VS. ROGER ROSA

Undefeated San Antonio lightweight Ivan Najera goes by the nickname “Bam Bam,” and every fight symmetry dictates Najera supply one Bam, and collect the other. With an action-making style that relies on a flying chin and talent for turning into opponents’ blows, Najera has yet to encounter a man who is unskilled enough for the San Antonian to make a dull fight with. And Najera’s Saturday opponent, Brazilian Roger Rosa, was not unskilled as his record indicated.

The evening’s third match was its undercard’s best, with Najera (12-0, 9 KOs) winning a unanimous decision by scores of 59-54 and 58-55 and 58-55 over Rosa (4-4-1) – a man of small stature, short muscles and enough chin and confidence to test Najera several times in their six rounds together.

A Najera counter left hook dropped Rosa in round 1, making the official scorecards somewhat wider in margin than the fight they evaluated. The right man won ultimately, but aficionados can be forgiven their concerns about the longevity of a prospect like Najera who makes wars in six rounders against opponents without knockout power.

ALEX SAUCEDO VS. RAMON PENA

There is one young fighter matchmaker Bruce Trampler travels to see wherever he fights, and he is Chihuahuense Alex Saucedo, an undefeated 19-year-old welterweight who calls himself “El Cholo” and fights out of Oklahoma City. And each time Saucedo steps in a ring, Trampler’s wisdom is confirmed more deeply.

Saturday’s second fight saw Saucedo (10-0, 7 KOs) hurt Mexican opponent Ramon Pena (7-4, 5 KOs) with every punch he threw, and hurt him badly with every punch he landed. It was a Saucedo left hook to the head, officially, that was the match’s final punch, at 1:00 of round 1, but it was actually a couple left hooks to Pena’s liver that stopped the overmatched man from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, and kept Saucedo’s record perfect.

DENIS SHAFIKOV VS. SANTOS BENAVIDES

Promoter Top Rank is well known for cultivating talent, but undefeated Russian lightweight southpaw Denis Shafikov appears to have come to them ready-made. Much like Shafikov’s opponent, Nicaraguan Santos Benavides, came to Shafikov in Saturday’s opening match, a 10-round affair that was effectively finished after its first minute, though didn’t end officially till the bell rang to conclude round 6 – when Benavides’ corner wisely called an end to their guy’s evening.

One minute was how long it took Shafikov (32-0-1, 17 KOs) to decipher the secret to Benavides’ (23-4-2, 17 KOs) jab, the southpaw brings it home slow, and begin blasting him with left crosses that made Benavides’ legs shake every time they landed. And they landed with more ferocity as rounds went on until Benavides’ corner did the sage and merciful thing and ended the mess.

Shafikov might just be good as his record anticipates.

UNDERCARD

Saturday’s first televised fight was a 66-second drubbing that saw U.S. Olympian Jose Ramirez (5-0, 4 KOs) drop hopeless Oklahoma super lightweight Mike Maldonado (6-2, 1 KO) three times, twice with body shots, bringing an end to the match barely a minute after it started.

Rangy California super welterweight Danny Valdivia (1-0, 1 KO), who appears extremely tall for a 154-pound fighter but doesn’t seem to know it, fighting behind a short man’s high guard and relying on inside punching, blasted-out Texan Jamaris Chaney (1-2) in fewer than six minutes, Saturday, winning his professional debut at 2:51 of round 2 and then launching an exuberant cheering routine of jumps and kicks.

The evening’s final match, a six-round super bantamweight tilt between Connecticut’s Tramaine Williams (8-0, 2 KOs) and Californian Raymond Chacon (4-6), ended in a no contest at 0:51 of round 3.

Opening bell rang on an empty Laredo Energy Arena at 7:05 PM local time.

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday at Laredo Energy Arena, about 150 miles southwest of here, Houston’s Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz will make a 10-round match with Brazilian Adailton De Jesus, as part of the second fight of a however-many-fight comeback Diaz plans to pursue till peril massively outweighs treasure and he returns to a retirement he apparently did not enjoy in 2011 and 2012. I will be there because Laredo is not too far, Diaz is one of my favorite fighters – in part because of the match he made with Juan Manuel Marquez 4 1/2 years ago – and because Diaz’s new promoter, Top Rank, has not been in Texas nearly as much as hoped this year.

Juan Diaz’s comeback may be sincere and well designed and likely to succeed or it may not, and as there’s no way to tell at this point what it is, Top Rank has chosen for Diaz an opponent who may or may not be serious himself. Adailton De Jesus is a Brazilian lightweight whose talents do not travel particularly well. He was last seen in the United States losing an uncomplicated decision to Marco Antonio Barrera three years ago at Alamodome. That Barrera bore little resemblance to the man who twice decisioned Erik Morales; the Barrera who fought De Jesus returned from a 15-month sabbatical, almost three years after announcing a “retirement” caused by his one-way rematch loss to Manny Pacquiao (a forgettable fight historic only for bringing a cessation to Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions’ first feud) to investigate how much money Barrera could raise on the nostalgia circuit before he careered into broadcasting full-time.

De Jesus’ career, a venture apparently paused when his first-round knockout of a 14-14-1 opponent in 2011 was nonviolent enough to warrant investigation by Brazilian officials, a knockout that came just three Saturdays after De Jesus was stretched in four rounds by Mexican Humberto Soto in Mexico, was a one marked by losses on the road complemented by resume-builder wins at home. Nothing about the Brazilian lightweight’s 19-month vacation, which will end Saturday in Laredo, indicates a new desire to compete; likely this is a fight made by a matchmaker who spoke to a matchmaker who spoke to a manager – “Adailton always was tough, and Diaz never could punch” – that will get De Jesus a new truck in Sao Paulo and/or VIP passes to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.

If the unforeseen comes to pass and De Jesus upsets Diaz, the Brazilian’s team will see if they can’t parlay the victory towards a guaranteed loss in a staybusy fight for Miguel Vazquez or Mike Alvarado or Brandon Rios or whomever Top Rank envisions someday feeding a plate of Baby Bull. Diaz-De Jesus, then, will determine nothing about the lightweight or junior welterweight divisions we do not already know, but it will afford an opportunity to see Diaz in action, which, for a small band of aficionados, is a treat not to be missed.

For a number of reasons Diaz was never popular with the masses as hoped; not as Don King hoped, when, by his own admission in 2006, King slipped a DKP contract over Golden Boy’s, with Diaz’s pen dangling portentously above, to get Diaz on a Liakhovich-Briggs card at Chase Field, when it became apparent nobody in Arizona knew Scottsdale’s Sergei Liakhovich, victimized just Friday on ShoBox, and the reliable Latino revenue stream would need be tapped. But Mexicans never much related with Diaz, a volume puncher with an everyman physique – long, loose muscles framing a midsection that jiggled – who possessed neither knockout power nor a fixation on opponents’ livers.

A couple years and some televised fights later, King got Diaz’s title lost to Nate Campbell in Mexico, which led Diaz, finally, to Golden Boy Promotions, an underappreciated decision over Michael Katsidis and the 2009 fight of the year with Juan Manuel Marquez, a man for whom, posterity now says with a chuckle, Diaz appeared structurally too large at 135 pounds, bulling Marquez for much of the match’s opening 18 minutes before succumbing to the finest counterpunching seen in a generation and being stopped by a gorgeous right uppercut in round 9.

Diaz’s rehabilitation tour did not go as planned; he decisioned Brooklyn’s Paulie Malignaggi in Diaz’s native Houston, and then Malignaggi premiered what can fairly be called his signature postfight speech about boxing’s evilest forces, money and corruption, being allied against a fighter from the economically irrelevant township of New York City. A lackluster rematch with Malignaggi got the “Magic Man” his desired decision, and eight months later got Diaz handed to Marquez in another rematch no one asked for – certainly not Las Vegas, the match’s unfortunate and unfortuned host, enjoying then its second year of 18-percent unemployment – and Diaz feinted at more fighting then said goodbye to attend law school or become a lawyer or some other narrative thread nobody pulls anymore because Diaz is a good guy and it’s unkind to ask if a rising Houston attorney would subject himself to other men’s fists for UniMás (formerly Telefutura) money.

How relevant is any of that to me? Not at all, honestly. Volume punchers are my favorites – whether their names are Juan Diaz, Timothy Bradley or Nihito Arakawa. Some aficionados have justified grievances with volume-punching types – they tend to outpoint the stylists whom purists pride themselves on adoring – and most casual fans hate them even more for neither scoring highlighted knockouts nor having what euphonious names garner from aficionados’ faces the admiring expressions casual fans love to cause at sportsbars. Diaz’s ability to relax in the presence of stronger punchers and stronger men, though, has enchanted me most of his career, and if his retirement did not go as planned, at age 29 he is welcome to keep plying his trade.

Expect me at ringside any time the Baby Bull fights in Texas.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, Former Lightweight champion Juan Diaz will return on August 17th against Adailton DeJesis in Laredo, Texas under the Top Rank banner that will be televised bu UniMas.

“I feel good and, of course, I felt good getting the ‘W’ against Cuevas,” Diaz told ESPN.com on Wednesday. “I haven’t had that feeling of winning in a while. I had to find my balance. It took about three rounds to get comfortable and find my distance, but once I got the feel of being back in there I felt good. It went as planned and I won. I saw that I needed to take one or two more of those kind of fights.

“Clearly, Juan showed in that last fight that there’s a lot left,” said Carl Moretti of Top Rank, which signed Diaz to a one-fight deal. “This isn’t a guy doing it for the money. He’s successful outside the ring (as owner of a trucking company) and he’s a smart guy (as a college graduate). He still wants to fight and his style has always been fan-friendly. That hasn’t changed. We’re looking forward to the fight on Aug. 17 and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

“It’s a one-fight deal,” said Moretti, who was close to Diaz when he turned pro with Main Events, where Moretti worked for several years as its matchmaker. “I met with Juan and (adviser) Brian Caldwell in Dallas (last month) at the Mikey Garcia fight. I’ve known Juan since his pro debut and we have a great relationship.

“We’ll take it step by step, but I’m looking forward to working with him for this fight and, hopefully, beyond. He’s in a division that we have a lot of interest in and it seems like it will be an interesting division in the next year.”

“He’s lost against top-level opponents,” Diaz said. “He’s a strong fighter, a durable guy and this is a step up. That’s helpful for me. I don’t want to be in the sport to take a punch. I want to become champion again and by stepping up the level of opposition and being victorious, it shows me I still have a lot left in the tank.

“So far things are going according to plan. The ideal situation is I would love to fight two more times this year, Aug. 17 and then another one and then start 2014 fast, you know fight a top contender or a world champion.”

Former world champion Juan Diaz made a triumphant return after a 3 year absence as he stopped Pipino Cuevas Jr. in a scheduled ten round Super Lightweight bout at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Diaz dmintaed the action and landed a big flurry in round nine and that fight was stopped at the fifty-five second mark.

Diaz, 135 1/2 lbs of Houston, TX is now 36-4 with 18 knockouts. Cuevas Jr., 137 1/2 lbs of Mexico City, MX is now 15-10.

Jerry Belmontes scored an eight round Majority decision over Daniel Diaz in a Super Featherweight bout.

Scores were 76-76, 78-74 and 79-73 For Belmontes, 130 lbs of Corpus Christie, TX and he is now 18-1. Diaz, 130 lbs of Managua, NIC is now 19-5-1.

Justin DeLoach scored a four round unanimous decision over Martin Gonzalez in a Welterweight bout.

Scores were 40-36 on all cards for DeLoach, 147 lbs of Augusta, GA and is now 2-0. Gonzalez, 144 lbs of Edinburg, TX had a cut over his right eye is now 1-2.

CORPUS CHRISTI, April 9 – Before former World Champion Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz steps into the ring for his highly-anticipated comeback fight against Pipino Cuevas Jr. on Saturday, April 13, fans at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas will be treated to a full slate of undercard action featuring local junior lightweight prospect Jerry Belmontes in an eight round bout against Nicaragua’s Daniel Diaz in the evening’s co-main event that will be televised on FOX Sports Networks, FOX Deportes and FUEL TV.

This exciting card is presented by Golden Boy Promotions and Leija & Battah Promotions and sponsored by Corona. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. PT on fight night and the first bell rings at 7:00 p.m. PT. The FOX Sports Networks telecast will air live at 10:00 p.m. ET/9:00 p.m. CT/7:00 p.m. PT. FOX Deportes will air the fights on Sunday, April 14 at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. FUEL TV will rebroadcast the fight on June 9 at 12:00p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT.

Tickets priced at $161, $152, $102, $47, $22 and $17 are available for purchase by calling Leija & Battah Promotions at 210-979-3302 or via email at m@leijabattahpromo.com, at the American Bank Center Box Office, H-E-B Ticketmaster Outlets, online at www.ticketmaster.com or via charge by phone at (800) 745-3000.

“The Corpus Christi Kid” Jerry Belmontes (17-1, 5 KO’s) will certainly have the crowd on his side on April 13 when he looks to bounce back from the lone loss of his career against Eric Hunter last December. A highly decorated amateur star, the 24-year-old turned pro in 2008 and won his first 17 bouts before the decision loss against Hunter. Now he gets his shot to get back in the win column and continue his journey to the top of the junior lightweight division in front of his hometown fans. Former world title challenger Daniel Diaz (19-4-1, 14 KO’s) has the experience and style to upset the hometown favorite on April 13 and despite moving up to 130 pounds for the first time, the 27-year-old from Managua has every intention of delivering the goods on fight night.

Also featured on the broadcast will be welterweights Justin DeLoach (1-0) of Augusta, Georgia and Edinburg, Texas’ Martin Gonzalez (1-1), as they compete in a four round fight.

Corpus Christi will be fully represented in undercard action as junior lightweight Ramsey Luna (10-0, 4 KO’s) puts his perfect record on the line against Dallas’ Jesus Rocha (2-3-1), welterweight Cesar Villa (2-0, 1 KO) takes on Laredo’s Alberto Espinoza (1-3), heavyweight Ernest Reyna (1-0) faces Houston’s Tony Wilcox (0-4) and Robert Vela (5-0-1, 3 KOs) faces Francisco Arellano (4-1) of Bay City, with all four fights are scheduled for four rounds.

Other undercard bouts include a six round fight between another Corpus Christi native, Greg Gutierrez (9-1, 2KO’s) and Dallas’ Jose Rodriguez (6-1, 2 KO’s) in a clash of lightweight prospects and San Antonio’s Kendo Castaneda (2-0, 1 KO) battling Laredo’s Olvin Mejia (4-5-3, 4 KO’s) in a four round junior lightweight match. In the four round junior lightweight opener, San Antonio’s Joseph Rodriguez (2-0, 1 KO) takes on Brownsville’s Carlos Orenday (0-4).

For more information, visit www.goldenboypromotions.com and www.AmericanBankCenter.com, follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GoldenBoyBoxing, www.twitter.com, www.twitter.com/LeijaBattahPR, and www.twitter.com/1Babybull and visit on Facebook at Golden Boy Facebook Page. For more information on FOX Deportes visit www.FOXDeportes.com, become a follower on Twitter at www.twitter.com/FOXDeportes and visit www.facebook.com/FOXDeportes on Facebook.

CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS (March 11, 2013) – On Saturday, April 13 at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas’ beloved “Baby Bull,” former World Champion Juan Diaz, returns to the ring for the first time since 2010 to face Pipino Cuevas Jr. in the main event televised on FOX Sports Networks, FOX Deportes and FUEL TV.

This exciting card is presented by Golden Boy Promotions and Leija & Battah Promotions and sponsored by Corona. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. PT on fight night and the first bell rings at 7:00 p.m. PT. The FOX Sports Networks telecast will air live at 10:00 p.m. ET/9:00 p.m. CT/7:00 p.m. PT. FOX Deportes will air the fights on Sunday, April 14 at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. FUEL TV will rebroadcast the fight on June 9 at 12:00p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT.

Tickets priced at $161, $152, $102, $47, $22 and $17 are available for purchase by calling Leija & Battah Promotions at 210-979-3302 or via email at m@leijabattahpromo.com, at the American Bank Center Box Office, H-E-B Ticketmaster Outlets, online atwww.ticketmaster.comor charge by phone at (800) 745-3000.

A popular figure in his native Texas and around the globe, Houston’s Juan Diaz (35-4, 17 KO’s) made legions of fans not only for his all-action fighting style in the ring, but also for his class outside the ring, where he insisted on getting his college degree while still competing in the world’s toughest sport. A former Unified Lightweight World Champion who held the title belts for nearly four years, defeating Acelino Freitas, Jose Cotto and Julio Diaz along the way, Diaz also went to battle with Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez, Paulie “Magic Man” Malignaggi and Michael Katsidis. Diaz retired from the game in 2010 following his rematch with Marquez in order to focus on his education and entrepreneurial endeavors. Now ready to make another run at a world title, the 29-year-old can’t wait to hear the bell ring once again.

Pipino Cuevas Jr. (16-9, 14 KO’s) is the son of the longtime WBA Welterweight World Champion and while he hasn’t been able to add a world title to the family’s trophy case yet, the 33-year-old from Mexico City has definitely inherited his father’s power, as evidenced by his 88% knockout percentage. The winner of two of his last three, Cuevas will look to make Diaz regret his decision to return to the ring on April 13.

For more information, visit www.goldenboypromotions.com and www.AmericanBankCenter.com, follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GoldenBoyBoxing, www.twitter.com/www.twitter.com/LeijaBattahPRandwww.twitter.com/1Babybull and visit on Facebook at Golden Boy Facebook Page. For more information on FOX Deportes visit www.FOXDeportes.com, become a follower on Twitter at www.twitter.com/FOXDeportes and visit www.facebook.com/FOXDeportes on Facebook.

In what was one of the more inevitable things that was to happen in boxing happened on Tuesday as former Lightweight champion Juan Diaz retired from boxing to pursue a law degree according to Dan Rafael of espn.com

Two weeks after signing a contract to fight David Torres and announcing that he would end a one-year layoff, the former unified lightweight titlist withdrew from the fight Tuesday, telling promoter Leon Margules of Warriors Boxing.

Diaz, a graduate of the University of Houston Downtown, had recently been accepted to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Law School. He has talked for years about someday going to law school, but the lure of the ring seemed like it was too much.

“I have the acceptance letter from law school and I look at it every day and question myself every day if I am making the right decision,” Diaz told ESPN.com two weeks ago when he announced his comeback fight. “I put it to the side and say law school can wait. What I really want is to become champion again, so I’ve been emailing back and forth with the university to see if I can work something out where they will let me defer for a year because I don’t think I want to go yet.”

Willie Savannah, Diaz’s manager, faxed a hand-written letter to Margules telling him of Diaz’s decision.

“He had trained 4-5 days per week for months in anticipation of once again becoming a world champion,” Savannah wrote. “He made this decision last Friday and I support it 100 percent. I hope that Warriors and ESPN will understand.

“Diaz does not have a history of pulling out of fights like a lot of boxers do. I apologize for the inconvenience this will cause all parties.”

“It’s been awhile and I am very excited and very pumped about being back in the ring,” Diaz said. “Last time I fought was July 31 last year, so it’s going to be a year. So I’m looking forward to fighting again and showing people what I still have.”

LAS VEGAS – In the beginning, the arena looked like a vacant warehouse. The Mandalay Bay Events Center felt empty. It didn’t stay that way.

A crowd began to gather, maybe to escape the recession, or the desert heat, or the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao talks. There’s a lot to run from these days. But a good main event isn’t among them. Juan Manuel Marquez’ unanimous decision over Juan Diaz Saturday night wasn’t one of the best, not even as a rematch.

But it was an attraction in a year without many. Or any. It also was a good example of a fan base hungry for a real fight instead of just talk about one that has yet to happen and perhaps never will.

“If I never hear another word about whether Pacquiao will fight Mayweather, that’s fine with me,’’ said Rudy Perez, a Los Angeles fan who was one of 8,383 who began to fill the Mandalay Bay arena not long before opening bell for the rematch of Marquez’ stoppage of Diaz in the 2009 Fight of the Year. “I just wanted to see a couple of good fighters, good guys, really fight. I’m so sick of all that bull.’’

After his one-sided victory over Diaz, Marquez couldn’t resist talking about Pacquiao. He still wants a third shot at the Filipino Congressman, who has quit talking about Mayweather and apparently has an agreement to fight Antonio Margarito on Nov. 13.

“Everybody wants that trilogy,’’ said Marquez, who lobbied to keep himself in line for rich shot at Pacquiao if a licensing problem in the United States or some other issue knocks Margarito out of the November date. “It’s the one fight I want.’’

Perez is skeptical that Marquez will ever get that opportunity. So, too, is Golden Boy Promotions, the Oscar De La Hoya company that promotes the Mexican lightweight champion. In two fights, Marquez has been more of threat to Pacquiao than anybody since Erik Morales beat the Filipino in their first bout.

“Pacquiao should fight him,’’ Perez said. “But he won’t. No way that happens.’’

The good news is that Marquez probably will fight somebody as soon as he can. He’ll be there in the ring when there is only talk, rumors and denials on message boards.

LAS VEGAS – It was entertaining as a one-sided fight could be, but finally, “The Rematch” was a one-sided fight. Blame it on Marquez’s class – the ageless type.

Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, in a rematch of 2009’s Fight of the Year, Mexico City’s Juan Manuel Marquez (51-5-1, 37 KOs) and Houston’s Juan Diaz (35-4, 17 KOs) squared up to determine the lineal lightweight champion of the world. Twelve rounds later, it was the same guy as it was when the night began, with Marquez winning by unanimous decision scores of 116-112, 118-110 and 117-111.

The 15rounds.com scorecard concurred, scoring it 118-110 for Marquez.

Diaz’s strategy, to box and keep his weight from falling over his front foot, was a sound one for survival. But starting in round 1, and with only a brief exception in rounds 2 and 3, it was not a strategy that would ever bring him victory.

For his part, Marquez was the same master craftsman he has always been, riddling Diaz with left uppercut-right cross-left uppercut combinations whenever the younger man’s enthusiasm brought him within range. The rest of the time, Diaz was safe, but he wasn’t in the fight.

Afterwards, Diaz hinted at the possibility of his retirement, saying he still wasn’t sure about his future and thanking his hometown of Houston for its undying support.

Marquez, meanwhile, addressed the possibility of a rubber match with pound-for-pound champion Manny Pacquiao, after his victory.

“I think the third fight with Pacquiao is the one the aficionados want,” Marquez said. “And it’s the best thing for the fans.”

Class tells: Pirog ruins Jacobs
Golden Boy Promotions’ eye for talent has been questioned often since its inception. What Russian Dmitry Pirog did to Golden Boy prospect Daniel “Golden Child” Jacobs in the co-main event of “The Rematch” will make such questions all the more prevalent.

Pirog (17-0, 14 KOs) outclassed Jacobs (20-1, 17 KOs) in each round, using fundamental boxing to solve the speedy Brooklynite, before catching him flush with a perfect right cross, knocking Jacobs out cold at 0:57 of the fifth round to become the WBO middleweight champion of the world.

After a fairly even opening stanza, round 2 began with Pirog marching forward behind a right cross and extremely efficient footwork, entirely neutralizing Jacobs’ reflexes. Then Jacobs wisely began the third on his bicycle, circling away from Pirog, fighting part of the round as a southpaw and regaining his composure. Round four, too, passed in a somewhat even fashion.

Pirog came out in the fifth, however, backed Jacobs to the ropes and waited for him to start a tentative punch. At that moment, Pirog stepped fully into a right cross that landed on Jacobs’ chin and dropped him to the blue mat in a pile. Referee Robert Byrd wisely forwent his 10-count, waving an immediate conclusion to the fight.

Guerrero brushes away “Cepillo”

Boxing may never know Joel Casamayor’s true age, but Saturday it learned how old he now is: Too old.

In a junior welterweight scrap some in Mandalay Bay’s Events Center hoped would be competitive, California’s Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (27-1-1, 18 KOs) easily decisioned Cuban Joel “El Cepillo” Casamayor (37-5-1, 22 KOs) by lopsided unanimous scores of 98-89, 98-89 and 97-90.

Down in each of the match’s first two rounds and penalized a point for holding, the previously resilient Casamayor looked old and spent, Saturday, as Guerrero hurt him with every landed left hand. In round 2, a Guerrero left cross even stunned Casamayor to the point of dropping both gloves and looking around in disbelief before rallying to wrap his arms round Guerrero’s trunks.

Never a strict adherent to the Queensbury rules, Casamayor looked particularly sad in his opening six minutes against Guerrero, when he was reduced to fouling to survive rather than win.

After such a shaky start, though, Casamayor, whose chin has never been doubted, found enough of his stride to give Guerrero quality rounds. Still, a Guerrero left hand or two seemed to buckle Casamayor’s old knees in almost every round.

But as the fight progressed, and Casamayor threw more punches, Guerrero began to holster his left hand, gradually sapping the match of its emotion. By the ninth round, a few vocal fans began to boo the action in the ring while the large majority of the Events Center crowd expressed its displeasure with abject silence.

The final stanza, though, saw Guerrero over-commit to a left hand and impale himself on Casamayor’s outstretched right glove. But the suspense passed quickly when Guerrero rose and boxed to a comfortable victory.

Linares plays bus driver, takes Juarez to school

Venezuelan Jorge Linares literally towered over Houston’s Rocky Juarez at Friday’s weigh-in. Saturday night, Linares towered over him figuratively too.

In the first fight of “The Rematch’s” pay-per-view telecast, Linares (29-1, 18 KOs) easily decisioned Juarez (28-7-1, 20 KOs) over 10 one-sided rounds to win the WBA’s vacant lightweight title by unanimous scores of 99-90, 97-92 and 99-90.

The fight began as Juarez fights always do, with Juarez doggedly chasing his opponent, eating punches and unable to let his own hands go. Linares, who would look nimble in the ring with anyone, looked positively balletic across from the heavy-footed Juarez. Snapping jabs and dancing away, Linares gave Juarez a boxing lesson in the fight’s first four rounds.

Towards the end of round 5, Linares landed one of many left uppercuts, and this one caused Juarez to stumble backwards and drop to the blue mat, a place one rarely finds him. Unable to hurt Linares and now worried that Linares might hurt him, Juarez, who’s hesitant even when he’s winning, began trading two Linares uppercuts for his every landed jab – a formula destined to fail.

What few vocal fans there were gave a number of halfhearted “Rocky, Rocky” chants as the fight progressed, and Juarez’s eyes continued to close, but the arena was otherwise silent enough for the bell to cause echoes at the end of each round.

The final round saw most of the fight’s sustained action, but those three minutes did not feature nearly enough pressure from Juarez to undo the 27 minutes that preceded them. The problem for Juarez, finally, is not just that he is now 0-6 in world title fights. It’s that he’s losing by larger margins in his every subsequent challenge.

Undercard

It was a case of dog attacks man in “The Rematch’s” final off-television match, as undefeated junior welterweight Los Angeleno Frankie “The Pit Bull” Gomez (5-0, 5 KOs) went through Minnesota’s Ronald Peterson (2-3, 2 KOs) without a modicum of resistance. A Gomez left hook to Peterson’s liver ended the match at 2:14 of round 1, when Peterson chose not to continue.

The fourth match on the untelevised undercard might well have been its best, as unheralded Mexican lightweight Juan Manuel Montiel (6-3-1, 1 KO) swapped blows and taunts with Nevadan Mike Peralta (4-6, 1 KO) in a well-matched six-round bout, which Montiel won by unanimous scores of 58-55, 60-53 and 58-55.

Despite spitting blood for half the fight and appearing fatigued throughout, Peralta nevertheless entertained the local crowd with his heart and will. Finally, though, Montiel had too much class, and the judges did not see the fight competitive as fans did.

The night’s third bout came to a rapid and ugly end when Australian Sakio Bika (28-4-2, 19 KOs) fouled undefeated and unarmed Frenchman Jean Paul Mendy (29-0-1, 16 KOs) at 1:19 of the first round of their IBF super middleweight eliminator, losing by disqualification and bringing some well-deserved hostility from the desert crowd.

In a maneuver disappointingly reminiscent of a different super middleweight – Arthur Abraham and his right hand to a kneeling Andre Dirrell in March – Bika knocked Mendy to the canvas and then stepped forward and fired a point-blank right uppercut at the defenseless Frenchman. Mendy, who had almost no power to speak of while upright, tilted forward and landed on his own forehead. Referee Joe Cortez called an immediate end to the match.

Mendy was later able to walk from ringside unassisted.

At Friday’s weigh-in, ESPN commentator (and cruiserweight contender) BJ Flores said the man to watch on Saturday’s undercard was a Brit by the name of George Groves. Flores was right. Accompanied to ringside by heavyweight titlist David Haye and favoring a left hook-right cross combination, Groves (10-0, 8 KOs) chopped away at Mexican Afredo Contreras (11-8-1, 5 KOs) until a somewhat early intervention by referee Russell Mora halted the match at 0:48 of the sixth round.

While Contreras did not appear to be in any trouble, and never went down, Groves, for his part, appeared to be committing fully to each of the right crosses with which he tagged Contreras with increasing frequency.

Before that, “The Rematch” got off to a quick and violent start Saturday afternoon as Maryland heavyweight Seth “Mayhem” Mitchell (18-0-1, 12 KOs) went directly through overmatched Philadelphian Derek Bryant (20-6-1, 17 KOs), stopping him at 1:45 of the first round.

After firing a succession of left hooks to Bryant’s body, Mitchell went upstairs with lefts and rights to the head and continued his assault till referee Kenny Bayless had seen enough.

The opening bell rang on a sparse Events Center crowd at 2:40 PM local time.

Photo by Tom Hogan/Hogan Photos

Back when things were in Black and white and Boxing had only 8 weights classes, Lightweight was one of the toughest division’s to make a name for yourself fast forward to today things haven’t changed much. Lightweight still has some of the elite performers in the game. Granted things aren’t as hot at 135 as they have been in the past years. That could all change this weekend when Juan Manuel Marquez heads back to the more cosy confines of Lightweight after his sojourn to a Welterweight catchweight against Floyd Mayweather. His opponent this time at least seems mortal, a rematch with Juan Diaz. Last February Diaz’s youth, size and strength seemed as though they would help him gain the biggest win of his career to date. Slowly but surely Marquez refined and tuned his considerable skills, creating gaps in Diaz defence until landing two howitzer right hands that dropped Diaz before conclusively ending the argument with a devastating right uppercut. It was ultimately one of the top fights of 2009.

Also on Saturday’s card will be Robert Guerrero & Joel Casamayor, though the fight is a few pounds above the Lightweight limit the winner will most likely look to fight the winner of the main event. Just a few pounds south at 130 Jorge Linares and Rocky Juarez duel in an intriguing fight in which the loser has no place to go. It’s not quite the Lightweight Lightening that took place last April when eight of the top Lightweights were scheduled to face off, though it never quite worked out. This could end up having more of an effect on the Lightweight demigraphic.

A few months ago Michael Katsidis scored possibly the best win of his career to date when he went into the lions den and stopped unbeaten Kevin Mitchell in three. Afterwards Katsidis declared he wants to fight the winner of Marquez-Diaz 2 this fall. The Lightweight confines also house the legendary Marco Antonio Barrera who recently ended a year long hiatus, he’s expected to return again in late summer before fighting another Mexican Humberto Soto for Soto’s WBC crown. Soto himself is angling for a big fight and would be a handful for anyone at 135.

In the past the Lightweight division has been the home to a murders row of greats including Joe Gans, Benny Leonard, Tony Canzoneri, Carlos Ortiz, Roberto Duran, Pernell Whitaker and Shane Mosley, even briefly Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather & Manny Pacquiao.

Here’s a look at some of the guys who created havoc at 9 stone 9 pounds.

The Old Master Joe Gans fought in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, reigning from 1902-1908 making 15 defence’s. He died of tuberculosis in 1910, at just 35 years old with a record of 138-10-15(96) and considered one of the greats of Boxing. Sadly Gans passed away at just 35 from tuberculosis.

A year after Gans sad demise Benny “Ghetto Wizard” Leonard made his debut, losing a third round KO. It was hardly the start to a career that would make anyone forget Joe Gans. Over the next 6 years Leonard learnt his trade and stayed busy developing his skills. It was at this stage he won the Lightweight crown beating Freddie Welsh making 9 defence’s reigning from 1917-1925. In 1918 he even dared to go up to Welterweight where he drew with Ted “Kid Lewis, he again made that move in 1922 though lost a thirteenth round disqualification to Jack Britton, when he hit Britton while Britton was down. Leonard retired as the reigning Lightweight champion in 1925. Before briefly trying to make a return in 1931.

Like Leonard before him Tony Canzoneri fought out of New York. Canzoneri won the Featherweight world title in the late 1920’s before heading up to Lightweight where he demolished Al Singer in the first round in late 1930. He even went up to Light Welterweight where he beat Jack “Kid” Berg reigning at both weights consecutively. Canzoneri would reign until the summer of 1933 when he lost a majority decision to another Lightweight legend Barney Ross then losing a split decision 3 months later. It was at this stage he really showed his metal staying busy when most though he’d seen better days and winning his old Lightweight title back nearly 2 years later against Lou Ambers though he eventually lost it back to Ambers.

Puerto Rico Carlos Ortiz fought for 17 years and won the Light Welterweight crown four years after debuting in 1959 after one defence he lost the title. Ortiz then dropped to Lightweight where he had even more success beating Joe Brown for the title then reigning for 3 years making 4 defence’s before losing a very close decision Ismael Laguna in Panama. Not deterred Ortiz reclaimed the crown 7 months later outpointing Laguna in Panama making a further 5 defence’s until he lost to Carlos Teo Cruz in 1968. He continued until 1972 when he lost to Ken Buchanan.

The Pride of Panama Roberto “Manos De Piedra” Duran was a force of nature that for over 5 years in the 1970 was a wrecking machine. He devastated all before him, that version of Duran many believe was the greatest Lightweight to ever draw breath. He bludgeoned all 12 title challengers into defeat with only one lasting the course. Duran went onto become a 4 weight world champion fighting well into his forty’s and decades past his prime. His relentless pressure, unbridled ferocity coupled with no lack skill saw off all comers. Similar to Mike Tyson years later Duran beat many opponents before they stepped in the ring with him. Through out his storied career Duran beat some fantastic fighters most notably Sugar Ray Leonard thought that was up at Welterweight.

Having won Gold at the 1984 Olympics Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker was long known for his outstanding boxing skills, fantastic defensive ability along with an uncanny knack of making Hall of Fame Fighters look like novices. Whitaker was so gifted that it was difficult to find rounds he would lose let alone fights. Whitaker like Duran would go on to become a 4 Weight world champion. Both fighters were poles apart with Whitaker a modest puncher at 135 though he would end up using his mastery to conquer 140, 147 & 154 defeating many good fighters including Azumah Nelson, Jose Luis Ramirez, Buddy McGirt and in the eyes of everyone except the two judges who scored it a draw he beat Julio Cesar Chavez Snr.

After a stellar amateur career in which “Sugar” Shane Mosley narrowly missed out on taking part in the 1992 Olympics he embarked on a pro career starting out at Lightweight. Though many insiders and Los Angeles aficionados knew Mosley’s potential fans and media alike seemed to miss out on the secret that was Shane Mosley. Infact he arguably didn’t gain his full adulation until he relinquished the IBF crown he had defended 8 times all inside the distance, going straight to Welterweight where he posted an outstanding victory over a prime Oscar De La Hoya. Mosley joined Duran missing out Light Welterweight and heading straight to 147.

In the last decade or so Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather & Manny Pacquiao all had brief layovers at 135 before heading to Light Welterweight and then Welterweight.

De La Hoya lasted 18 months and 7 fights before he out grew the division. Though in that time he did post impressive stoppages over Rafael Ruelas, Jesse James Leija & Genaro Hernandez & a points win over seasoned veteran and former world champion John John Molina.

After an outstanding run at Super Featherweight Floyd Mayweather won his second world title at his second weight class when he barely squeezed past Jose Luis Castillo in early 2002. To shut up all the doubters he fought Castillo in a rematch and was far more convincing 8 months later. After two defence’s against average opponents in Victoriano Sosa & Phillip Ndou, Mayweather abdicated his thrown.

In the summer of 2008 Pacquiao made a brief pit stop of just a single fight when he flattened David Diaz to collect the WBC crown.

Another shooting star Edwin Valero threatened to join the elite at Lightweight before his untimely demise.

Just who joins the list of immortals in the future remains to be seen but one thing is likely to continue and that is that the Lightweight division will thrive as one of the strongest weight classes in Boxing just as it has over the past 100 or so years.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”

And so it is with a prizefighter’s energy and legs. He begins a championship fight doing as he planned. He loses strength at predictable intervals, familiar intervals, intervals commensurate with his opponent’s. Then suddenly he finds himself weak and discomfited.

So go championship prizefights. So go champions’ careers.

That race, right there, who gets from gradual bankruptcy to sudden first, will determine the loser of “The Rematch” at Mandalay Bay. That is what they’re calling the second fight between Ring magazine lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz, to remind us Marquez-Diaz I was 2009’s Fight of the Year.

Think of this fight as a race – Marquez’s legs against Diaz’s energy – where the loser will be lightweight champion of the world. The gradual bankruptcy of Marquez’s legs can be measured in years. The gradual bankruptcy of Diaz’s energy will be measured in minutes. And then, suddenly, one of those will be measured in instants.

Something like that happened when Marquez and Diaz fought the first time, in Diaz’s hometown of Houston, 17 months ago. Few of us knew it at the time, and no one knew it at ringside. The closest anyone came, probably, was Marquez’s trainer Nacho Beristain. He couldn’t be sure his fighter’s legs wouldn’t wilt under the heat and humidity of Diaz’s relentlessness, but he knew his fighter’s spirit was implacable and courage unquestionable. And he knew he wasn’t going to stop the fight regardless.

“Juan is not fragile.” That’s how Beristain explained it an hour after his fighter knocked-out Diaz in round 9. Beristain was certain to a point of dismissive about his charge’s fortitude in those opening rounds when Marquez’s mouthpiece was visible for two of every three minutes. He was amused by an inquiry about his own state of mind when Marquez was bullied to the ropes by the “Baby Bull” time and again. No, Beristain wanted it understood, he couldn’t have been less preoccupied by what he saw.

He was about the only one. Diaz appeared to have his way with Marquez in the fight’s opening half. He had me fooled; I scored the opening six rounds 4-1-1 for Diaz. And after round 6, when an esteemed fight scribe leaned over and said Marquez wouldn’t get out of the eighth, I nodded.

But by then Marquez had begun to do something we mistook for a ruined spirit. He’d begun to pivot away from Diaz rather than fighting Diaz off him. It was uncharacteristic of Marquez. He was the more accurate puncher in every minute, of course, but he was also the smaller and older man. His sudden change of strategy appeared, if not a surrender, certainly the opening sentence of an unfavorable treaty: You let me finish on my feet, and I’ll stay out of your way.

What had really happened, though, was different. Marquez had seen the first cracks in Diaz’s relentless spirit. Those cracks lent Marquez time enough to take a look around. And when he did, he realized he was not being outmaneuvered but cowed. Diaz was not pinning him to the ropes with superior footwork but merely corralling him with activity. And that reminded Marquez he hadn’t survived the rings of Mexico City without discouraging a few relentless left-hookers.

That was when the 35 year-old switched from brawler to dancer to assassin. He pivoted away from Diaz and struck the younger man now searching for an abruptly elusive target. He stopped trying to break Diaz on Diaz’s terms and began to stretch him on the rack of fundamental boxing: straight punches hurt more than crooked ones.

Diaz must have been surprised. He had, after all, faced larger, tougher men at lightweight, wearing each down with his knuckles, the cuffs of his gloves, the commitment of his blows, his self-belief. Here was a smaller man whose temples he’d assaulted with 20 minutes of hooks. Here was a lighter man whose neck he’d whiplashed with battering-ram jabs. Here was a boxer, a craftsman, whose sensibilities he’d surely offended.

And now he pivots away on fresh legs? And now my knees are suddenly hollow?

But Diaz did the right thing when bankruptcy visited him suddenly: He pressed forward. He was either about to fool Marquez, or bring a mercifully quick conclusion to his evening. And Marquez wasn’t fooled.

Marquez is hard to fool. Ask Floyd Mayweather. Mayweather apologists – a species the great man himself is rendering extinct – may still insist that after knocking Marquez down in the second round of their mismatched fight, Mayweather didn’t press because he “needed rounds.” But that’s inane. Rounds to do what, sharpen his potshots on a man 15 pounds smaller? Mayweather could get better work in the gym.

No, Mayweather didn’t press Marquez because, 15 pounds or 50, you don’t stop Marquez without making a slow tour of hell to get there. That’s not Mayweather’s style. Even when Marquez was hurt, especially when he was hurt, he fought back with harshest intentions. Mayweather was against the best counterpuncher he’d ever faced, and he backed off. Mayweather couldn’t stop Marquez in 100 rounds of trying.

Diaz, on the other hand, hasn’t Mayweather’s luxury of reflexes or class. He will have to go straight at Marquez because it affords him the best chance of making Marquez’s now-36-year-old legs go bankrupt. And in so doing, Diaz will afford Marquez a chance to take Diaz’s energy to bankruptcy, by pivoting away earlier and finishing Diaz quicker than the first time.

Marquez has been losing his legs gradually since he moved from featherweight. So is it possible they could go bankrupt suddenly on Saturday? Yes. Does Diaz have the style to cause it? Yes. Does Diaz have the energy to do it? I don’t think so.

I’ll take Marquez: KO-7.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

The Juan Manuel Marquez-Juan Diaz sequel to the 2009 Fight of the Year on July 31 at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay has a simple marketing label: The Rematch. Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar De La Hoya and CEO Richard Schaefer also could have called it The Relief.

Let’s just say that Marquez-Diaz II and its compelling undercard are a timely refuge from talks – or whatever they were – for Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. A couple of testaments, old and new, could be filled with all that has been said, written, rumored, alleged and denied about a fight that has yet to happen and perhaps never will.

Attention on Pacquiao-Mayweather is sucking the wind out of a sport full of good stories, of which there are many on the Diaz-Marquez card. There is Robert Guerrero, who faces Joel Casamayor. He fights for his wife, Casey, who has fought leukemia and knocked the cancer into remission.

There’s Diaz, an aspiring lawyer and proud son of Mexican immigrants who is fighting to keep his career alive while he argues for rights that he believes are under assault in the wake of Arizona’s tough new immigration law.

There’s Rocky Juarez, who faces Jorge Linares. Juarez, who is 0-5-1 in world title fights, was robbed at the 2000 Olympics of a gold medal and left with silver that he says reflects a career full of frustration. Yet, he is still pursuing a world title, still trying turn silver into gold.

Guerrero, Diaz and Juarez are just a few of the stories that once put a gritty face on a sport that, in large part, has been about comebacks, second chances and redemption. Now, however, all of the focus appears to be on nothing, which worked on Seinfeld but won’t in boxing.

It’s been there before, following Mike Tyson to nowhere. Tyson was the train wreck that kept everybody looking only for the next accident instead of the next prospect. Tyson moved on and mixed martial arts moved in.

De La Hoya, Pacquiao and Mayweather helped boxing diversify and it began to recover. Yet, suddenly it is back at an intersection where one story, and only one, seems to matter. Who to blame? From promoters to regulators, the usual suspects are there.

But the internet, the only media that covers the sport regularly anymore, also deserves its share. Determining a good story isn’t much of a choice anymore. It’s all about numbers, hits. Plug in the right words and you’ve got a winner recognized by the Google algorithm. That means Pacquiao and Mayweather, over and over again.

The internet equation often means the media follows the mob instead of the stories. Guerrero, Diaz and Juarez offer an old-school, perhaps quaint opportunity to reverse that trend during the next week. Each has different motivations. Yet, each is confronted with a fight the looms as decisive in what they do next.

“I see this as a win-win situation,’’ Diaz said during a conference call when asked about the significance attached to chances at avenging his 2009 loss by knockout to Marquez. “This fight is going to prove to me whether I have it or I don’t. This fight right here is what’s going to take me to the top and make me the super star that I’ve been wanting to be in the lightweight division.

“But if it doesn’t happen then that means it’s not meant to be and I’ll move on to bigger and better things, which could be start from the bottom and pick up the pieces to rebuild myself up or just completely do a 360 – I mean a 180 – and just go in the opposite direction.

“This fight here, a lot of people have been mentioning to me that it’s a do-or-die fight. Well, I don’t think it is do-or-die. I think it’s win-win because either I become a world champion once again and become a super star or it opens up doors for me to do other things and focus on other aspects of my life.’’

Real-life.

For now and perhaps forever, that represents a real chance at future business, unlike Pacquiao-Mayweather, which is beginning to look like fantasy that will never be more than a video game.

According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, an intriguing IBF Super Middleweight elimination bout between undefeated Jean Paul Mendy and former world title challenger Sakio Bika has been added to the off-tv portion of the packed cardthat will feature the Lightweight title rematch of the 2009 fight of the year between Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz that will take place July 31st in Las Vegas.

The winner of Bika-Mendy will earn a mandatory shot against 168-pound titleholder Lucian Bute.

“This is truly a ‘Fight Freak’ card for the ages,” said Richard Schaefer , CEO of Golden Boy Promotions who will promote the card. “We are going all out to make July 31 a night to remember for boxing and sports fans. The addition of Bika versus Mendy is another all-action fight which supplements a card which I consider to be one of the best top to bottom boxing events in the past few years.”

Schaefer said Bika-Mendy will take place just before the HBO PPV telecast begins but that highlights of the bout would air during the broadcast. However, he said is working on having the fight, along with another undercard match featuring blue-chip junior welterweight prospect Frankie Gomez, shown live as a free preview in the hour preceding the start of the pay-per-view telecast.

“We’re trying now to secure the free window from the PPV channels,” Schaefer said. “Looking good.”

No, the upcoming rematch between Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz does not belong on pay-per-view. Two fighters whose cumulative record is 1-2 since their first match should not charge extra for a second go. And no, this fight does not belong in Las Vegas. Chilango versus Houstonian, surely, has more appropriate host cities.

There, that takes care of the disclaimer. In keeping with the sprit of this long weekend, in fact, let’s call what’s above a Preamble. Now for the salvaging.

On July 31, Marquez and Diaz will fight for Marquez’s WBA, WBO and Ring magazine lightweight titles at Mandalay Bay. It will be the first fight for Marquez since his 10-unanimous-rounds-to-none loss to Floyd Mayweather in September. It will be the first fight for Diaz since his one-sided loss to Paulie Malignaggi in December.

It will also be a rematch of 2009’s Fight of the Year. That lends the match a distinction its combatants’ recent showings cannot sully. Yes, Marquez was foolish to make the mercenary’s choice and take that high-paying fight with that high-weighing superstar. And yes, Diaz was nobly foolish to grant Yankee Fan an immediate rematch on neutral ground. But there we are.

Where we also might consider being in four Saturdays is Las Vegas. Marquez-Diaz I really was that good – especially if you were in Houston’s Toyota Center to see it.

I was in Houston 16 months ago. That’s why I’ll be in Las Vegas later this month – to honor the combatants and see if they can do it again.

A doubtful proposition. After all, there was a reason Diaz began the post-fight press conference by assuring his mother he was OK. There was a reason Marquez called-out Mayweather – aside from Manny Pacquiao’s not wanting a rubber match. It was because none of us who sat in that Toyota Center conference room hankered for Marquez-Diaz II.

The fight was excellent. Sensational, actually. But it left few questions unanswered. Act One saw Diaz apply great pressure, assaulting Marquez’s vanity with the rude force of his youth. Act Two saw Marquez change from veteran boxer to hot-blooded finisher. The fight’s arc resembled that of Margarito-Cotto, but with a more decisive ending and no later allegations of foul play. Its decisive ending also saw Marquez set a new standard in right uppercuts.

You had another chance to see that right uppercut, Friday night, when Golden Boy Promotions replayed Marquez-Diaz I in something of a Telefutura infomercial on its weekly “Solo Boxeo” program. The purpose of that 90-minute program was to promote “Marquez-Diaz 2” of course. But Golden Boy Promotions deserves credit for another thing it did, and has been doing: Easing Israel Vazquez into retirement.

For the third week in a row, Vazquez was a major part of the Telefutura broadcast. You hope he enjoys his time in front of the camera enough not to return to the ring. Looking at his face and listening to his speech gives you the impression that if a pending retirement comes in time for Izzy, it will be just barely.

But Golden Boy Promotions also has a different kind of infomercial it routinely does that is less creditable. That would be the emphasis it places on sponsors in conference calls and press conferences – ostensibly media events. This has never felt right for reasons that couldn’t quite be identified.

Until the opening part of last week’s conference call when CEO Richard Schaefer recognized Cerveza Tecate, AT&T and NCM Fathom. It sounded exactly like a Wall Street earnings call – that quarterly tradition in which an executive tells analysts why others should invest in his company.

Which is where the incongruity sets in. Golden Boy Promotions is not a publicly traded company; no one on these calls or at these press conferences is a potential investor. It’s akin to a Hollywood studio inviting critics to a movie screening and then discussing concession sales. It seems to miss the point of American journalism.

We’ve gone along with it for years as part of our advocacy for a thing Top Rank’s Todd DuBoef recently called “brand of boxing” in an interview with Thomas Hauser. We want the sport to succeed. We were ecstatic when we thought corporate sponsorships would somehow lead to mainstream interest. That hasn’t happened. Instead, these sponsorships are but another way to help millionaires get richer.

Which is fine. It’s part of the system formerly known as democratic capitalism. But it is not news, and it should not be treated as such. Journalism is not public relations.

Got it? Good. Now let me don my PR cap.

Las Vegas needs your help. No city has felt the depredating effects of the Great Recession more. It looked desperate, starving even, last November. And since then, there’s nary a report of its having improved.

Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz, too, could use your help. Both need to strike their most recent fights from folks’ memories. They promise to make a compelling match – master boxer-finisher against young volume puncher – any time they share a ring.

And the brand of boxing? It should be championed. Supporting a city that has been an important part of that brand is an admirable thing to do. But the best reason to attend Marquez-Diaz II is this: We cannot allow our sport to be held hostage by a fight unlikely to happen.

We must celebrate the fights we have and the fighters who make them. There’s no need to waste words or time on others. No need to waste them on sponsors, either.

See you in Las Vegas.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry

Photo by Gene Blevins/Hogan Photos

It will be a battle of former world champions according to Dan Rafael of espn.com when Joel Casamayor battles Robert Guerrero on July 31st as part of the Juan Manuel Marquez – Juan Diaz rematch undercard.

Casamayor-Guerrero, a scheduled 10-rounder at a maximum contract weight of 139 pounds, rounds out the four-fight telecast that will include Marquez-Diaz II, 2009 ESPN.com prospect of the year Daniel Jacobs facing Russia’s Dmitry Pirog for a vacant middleweight title and a lightweight bout between former two-division titlist Jorge Linares and perennial contender Rocky Juarez.

“I made a promise to the ‘Fight Freaks’ that this would be a freak card and I think I’ve delivered that,” Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer told ESPN.com. “I love Casamayor against Guerrero. It’s a big step up for Guerrero and a big opportunity for Casamayor. It’s one of those true crossroads fights. We have Linares-Juarez done and we have Jacobs fighting an undefeated fighter for a world title. I think the rematch of the fight of the year has become more than just that. I think it’s going to be the night of the year.”

“We are finalizing the contract, but we have an agreement by e-mail and have agreed on all the deal points,” Schaefer said.

“Joel is a veteran and he wanted a bigger fight. He wanted Khan,” manager Luis DeCubas Jr. told ESPN.com. “But if it’s not Khan, he’ll fight Guerrero. I think we’re in a different league than Guerrero. Robert is a great young fighter, but he’s never been in there with anyone like Joel. He’s real green. We’ll go through Guerrero first and then we’ll go get Khan or (junior welterweight titleholder Timothy) Bradley, or anyone else.”

“I think to have Linares back [fighting in the U.S.] and fighting a credible opponent like Rocky, I think it’s a big test for Linares, and it’s high noon for Rocky,” Schaefer said. “It’s a very interesting matchup.”