Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk meet on Saturday at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Barring a draw, the match will produce the first undisputed heavyweight champion in the four-belt era.

The bout is supported by an outstanding undercard that includes a heavyweight fight that may prove to be more entertaining than the headline attraction.

On paper, there’s little to separate Agit Kabayel and Frank Sanchez. Both are listed at 31 years old, arguably the optimal age for a heavyweight. Both are 24-0. Sanchez has 17 knockouts to his credit; one more than Kabayel. Both appeared in this ring on Dec. 23, so neither in theory has any rust.

Kabayel, born in Germany of Kurdish descent, upset the odds in a career-best performance, stopping Arslanbek Makhmudov in the fourth round. Heading in, the “Russian Lion,” who carried 262 pounds on his six-foot-six frame, was 18-0 with 17 knockouts, of which 12 came in the opening round.

This was no fluke knockout. Kabayal chopped him down, scoring three knockdowns with body punches until the fight was waived off.

On the same bill, Frank Sanchez scored a seventh-round stoppage of New Zealand’s Junior Fa. This fight took a long time to heat up, but when it did, the kiwi was outclassed.

Of the two, Sanchez is the smoother boxer. His signature win was a comprehensive 10-round decision over otherwise undefeated Efe Ajagba. He’s also taller than Kabayel who is generously listed at six-foot-three.

As an amateur, Sanchez was purportedly 214-6. And although that record was manufactured from thin air, there’s no doubt that the Cuban Flash, whatever his true amateur record (boxrec has it 43-12), was top-shelf in a pod replete with some of the world’s top amateurs.

By contrast, Agit Kabayel reportedly had only five amateur fights before turning pro.

Sanchez has been training at Eddy Reynoso’s compound in San Diego. That’s another “plus” for him on the handicapping checklist. However, Kabayel is the harder puncher and we suspect that Sanchez is actually older than his listed age, a common deception among Cuban athletes after they leave the island.

Kabayel will have more rooters, which may or may not affect the betting marketplace. His style is more fan-friendly and he’s had a harder road to get to this point in his career. After upsetting Derek Chisora in 2017, he fought only once in each of the next five years, a slowdown related to Covid, managerial issues, and fights falling out.

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The WBC has sanctioned Kabayel vs Sanchez as an eliminator with the winner next in line to fight the winner of Usyk vs. Fury. But don’t hold your breath. The Fury-Usyk fight has a rematch clause and if the Gypsy King wins, Anthony Joshua will almost certainly leapfrog to the head of the queue.

History informs us that whoever wins the Usyk-Fury fight likely won’t stay undisputed for very long. One or more of the organizations will strip the title-holder for failing to fulfill his mandatory.

That’s what happened to Lennox Lewis after he won his rematch with Evander Holyfield. Nine months later, after Lewis demolished Michael Grant and Frans Botha, Holyfield won the vacant WBA world heavyweight title with a narrow decision over John Ruiz in the first of their three meetings.

In boxing, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

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Midway through reading Dave Kindred’s most recent book – My Home Team (published by Public Affairs) – I said to myself, “Kindred is such a good writer.”

Kindred, now 83 years old, has won virtually every sports journalism award worth winning. My Home Team is a memoir that weaves together three love stories – Kindred and Cheryl Liesman (his high school sweetheart and wife for more than fifty years) . . . Kindred and sports journalism . . . And late in life, Kindred’s immersion in a high school girls basketball team (the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois).

The book is divided into two parts. The first (“Act One) details Dave’s career as a sports journalist and his personal life from early childhood through his retirement from big-time journalism. “Act Two” deals with the Lady Potters and the tragic stroke that ravaged Cheryl, leaving her bedridden and unable to control her environment or speak more than a few words in her final years. A short coda puts the final pieces in place.

Kindred wrote more than six thousand columns during his years at the Louisville Courier-Journal, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As his reputation grew, he covered virtually every major sporting event in the way he chose to cover it.

“Newspapers were never better nor did they matter more than in those days when they were rich with cash and ambition,” Dave writes. “Before the Internet, before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, newspapers were important in ways that social media could never be – as trusted messengers of the day’s news.”

“I was not a fan of a team, a coach, a player,” Kindred continues. “That relationship could only end badly. I was a fan of reporting and writing. Journalists root for stories. Whatever happens, good or bad, just make it something we can write. Sometimes we get lucky and the best story is the one we want to write.”

I met Kindred in 1989 when I was researching a biography of Muhammad Ali. Dave had just written a remarkable piece of investigative journalism about a lawyer named Richard Hirschfeld who was exploiting Ali and imitating Muhammad’s voice in telephone calls to members of Congress. It was a notable example of the ways in which Ali was being used by hustlers to advance their own economic interests. Kindred pieced the story together brilliantly. In later years, I got to know him better as a writer and a person.

Dave was with the young Ali in Louisville when he was king of the world, the old Ali in Las Vegas when he was brutalized by Larry Holmes, and each incarnation of Ali in between. He wrote that Ali in his prime was “as near to living flame as a man can get” and added thoughts like:

*        “You could spend twenty years studying Ali and still not know what he is or who he is. He’s a wise man and he’s a child. I’ve never seen anyone who was so giving and, at the same time, so self-centered. He’s either the most complex guy that I’ve ever been around or the most simple. And I still can’t figure out which it is. We were sure who Ali was only when he danced before us in the dazzle of the ring lights. Then he could hide nothing.”

*        “I never thought of Ali as a saint. He was a rogue and a rebel, a guy with good qualities and flaws who stood for something. He was right on some things and wrong on others, but the challenge was always there.”

*        “Rainbows are born of thunderstorms. Muhammad Ali is both.”

In 2010, when Kindred’s sportswriting days on the national stage came to an end, he and Cheryl moved back to their roots in rural Illinois. They bought a house on a big plot of land and envisioned a comfortable old age surrounded by family and friends.

Then, in December 2010, Dave went to a Lady Potters basketball game to see the daughter of friends play.

Three years earlier, Kindred recalls, “Carly Jean Crocker [had been] thirteen years old, blonde and blue-eyed, tall and trim in blue jeans, stylish in a denim jacket and red canvas sneakers.”

This was long before Caitlin Clark set the basketball world ablaze.

A neighbor had asked, “Carly, are you going to be a cheerleader?”

“No,” Carly answered, “I’m going to be the one you cheer for.”

Now Carly was on the Lady Potters roster.

“I climbed three rows up at the Morton High School Gym,” Kindred recounts. “The game was the first sporting event for which I ever bought a ticket. Though I resisted saying the word, friends counted me as, quote, retired. With newspapers and magazines dying in the Digital Age, there was also the unhappy circumstance of nobody looking to coax geezers out of retirement. Without a press credential for the first time since I was seventeen, I was an official spectator.”

Before long, Dave was hooked. He began writing about the Lady Potters for the team website and Facebook. “I had no agenda,” he recalls. “It got me out of the house. It made me pay attention to something other than growing old.”

His pay?

Before each outing, the team gave him a box of Milk Duds to eat in the stands during the game.

“But I like Milk Duds,” Kindred notes.

Then tragedy struck.

Cheryl was the only girlfriend Dave ever had. Her place in his heart was sealed at their high school senior prom when the awkward young man confessed, “I’m a very bad dancer.”

“She took my hand and squeezed it,” Dave told me decades later. “And then she said, ‘Bad dancing is better than no dancing.'”

On December 6, 2015, Dave and Cheryl were at the movies. She was eating popcorn when a massive stroke hit.

“It’s like a bomb exploded in her brain,” one of her doctors said.

For the next five years, Cheryl lay in bed in a nursing facility – in Kindred’s words, “her spirit gone, her body smaller and smaller, life disappearing.” He made the 36-mile round-trip from their home to her bedside more than a thousand times.

“Some days, I don’t even think she knows who I am,” Dave told me after one of his visits. “But I hold her hand and talk to her. I hope it comforts her. And it makes me feel better to be there.”

Cheryl died on June 24, 2021.

Meanwhile, the Lady Potters had become a very good basketball team. During one five-year stretch, they won 164 games and lost only 13, leading Kindred to refer to them as “the Golden State Warriors, only with ponytails.” In 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019, they won the Section 3A Illinois State Championship.

“Basketball is beautiful when people move the ball quickly and surely to places where it can be put in the basket easily,” Kindred writes in My Home Team as he looks back on his journey. “It is beautiful, too, when people play defense as if it is the most fun a teenage girl can have. A couple of years in, I understood my real reason for writing about the Lady Potters. No professional athlete ever introduced me to his parents or asked about my family’s well being. Slowly, I understood that I cared about the Lady Potters games in ways I had not cared about all those that came before. We met good people and shared good times. I loved the little gyms, loved the games. [And] writing was my life. Writing anything gave me a reason to stay alive.”

Kindred’s writing is as smooth as silk with some sharp barbs woven into the fabric. In that vein, I’ll close this review with an anecdote from My Home Team that Dave shares in chronicling his days as a national journalist.

Jenny Keller (a reporter for the New York Daily News) was assigned to cover the New York Jets and found herself in the team locker room confronted by a huge defensive lineman who held his male organ up for inspection and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

“Looks like a penis,” Jenny answered. “Only smaller.”

—

Ted Williams – arguably the greatest hitter of all time – had a Mexican-American mother. But he rarely talked about that part of his heritage. After retiring from baseball, Williams said of growing up in San Diego, “If I had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.”

As Williams’s mythic career was winding down, a 17-year-old named Ritchie Valens from California’s San Fernando Valley recorded a love song called Donna – one of the most popular love songs of its time. One year later, his life was cut short when he died in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson. Valens’s real name was Richard Valenzuela. But he’d been told to anglicize it so his records would be more saleable to mainstream America.

This is the world that Robert Seltzer was thrown into at age ten when he moved with his parents from El Paso to Bakersfield, California. His mother was a Mexican woman from Chihuahua. His father was a “gringo,” originally from Cleveland, who preferred Mexican culture to his own and took the pen name “Amado Muro” for much of his writing.

Amado Muro and Me recounts Seltzer’s first year in Bakersfield when he experienced racism for the first time and was mercilessly picked on as the only Mexican-American in his fifth-grade class. Through the prism of that year, he explores his relationship with his father, wrestles with his own self-identity, and recreates the multi-cultural world that he came from.

Seltzer is known to boxing fans as a past recipient of the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism. There’s not much boxing in this book. But it’s a wonderful read with a particularly reprehensible bully. And it reinforces the view that families are families regardless of race, religion, or national origin.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is an intensely personal memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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The third time was a charm for Vasyl Lomachenko who captured the vacant IBF world lightweight title mid-day Sunday (Saturday night in the U.S.) in the Western Australian city of Perth, winning the belt that had eluded his grasp in matches with Teofimo Lopez and Devin Haney. “Loma,” who had held other versions of the 135-pound crown, acquired the IBF bauble by defeating former unified lightweight champion George Kambosos Jr, who was in over his head against the 36-year-old Ukrainian “Matrix.”

When the end finally came in round 11, Kambosos’ face had the look of raw hamburger. The deciding blows were body punches, the first of which was a left hook to the liver that forced Kambosos to his knees. He beat the count but was a cooked goose, unable to withstand another assault. The referee waived the fight off just as Kambosos’ father entered the ring with the white towel of surrender.

Prior to the stoppage, it appeared that Loma won every round. To no great surprise, Kambosos, who declined to 21-3, was out-classed.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist who was purportedly 396-1 as an amateur (90-2 per boxrec), Lomachenko improved to 18-3 (12 KOs) in the paid ranks. There is talk that his next fight will come against the winner of this coming Saturday’s clash in San Diego between Emanuel Navarrete and Denys Berinchyk. That’s assuming that Navarrete wins, as expected. Berinchyk, in common with Lomachenko, is a 36-year-old Ukrainian and a fight between them, especially on American soil, would be a hard sell.

Semi-main

Cherneka Johnson dropped down in weight after losing her 122-pound world title to Ellie Scotney and picked up a title in a second weight class, dethroning WBA bantamweight title-holder Nina Hughes via a majority decision. The dyslexic ring announcer initially read the scores favoring Johnson wrong (98-92 and 96-94), but the correction was made before the combatants left the ring.

The Melbourne-based Johnson, whose tattoos pay homage to her Maori heritage, improved to 16-2. Hughes, a 41-year-old mother of two and four-time English amateur champion who returned to boxing at age 39, lost for the first time in seven pro fights.

Also

In the ESPN opener for an interim 115-pound title belt, Mexico’s Pedro Guevara scored a mild-upset with a split decision over Andrew Moloney. Two of the judges favored the Mexican by 115-113 tallies with the dissenter scoring it for the Aussie by 116-113.

The 34-year-old Guevera (42-4-1) became a two-division champion. Twelve years ago, he held a world title at 108 pounds. Moloney lost for first time in an Australian ring while suffering his fourth loss in 30 starts.

The decision seemed fair to those turning in on ESPN, but not in the eyes of Moloney who blasted the decision as corrupt and said he was through with the sport. He would eventually waffle, conceding he might come back for a rematch.

It’s been a rough month for the Moloney twins. Not quite a week ago, Jason Moloney lost his WBO world bantamweight title to Yoshiki Takei on the undercard of Naoya Inoue vs. Luis Nery.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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