Round by Round

Clash of Lightweight Titans
Boxing’s first must-see fight of the fall goes down tomorrow night on HBO, in a lightweight battle between two action fighters of the first order – Juan Diaz and Michael Katsidis. For a while now, both fighters have been stars in the boxing universe for their crowd-friendly styles, and both men are now coming off their first losses to face each other. Not by coincidence, both of those losses occurred this past March, one of the most exciting months of boxing in the last ten years. Diaz lost first, and lost a mighty stake as well, three lightweight belts from major sanctioning organizations, when he got schooled in an old-school performance by Nate Campbell. Katsidis, already branded as the sports’ next Arturo Gatti, then lost a seesaw slugfest to Joel Casamayor in one of the slew of fights that went down in March that had Fight of the Year potential (check out the highlights of that bout in the video below).

Casamayor puts his lineal lightweight title on the line next week against a newcomer to the division, Juan Manuel Marquez, on the same night that Nate Campbell will defend his belts against the crafty, Floyd Mayweather Sr.-trained fighter Joan Guzman. Amir Khan continues to build his young star in Great Britain with a fight tomorrow night in Manchester. And despite the fact that Manny Pacquiao is making a much ballyhooed jump up to the welterweight limit to face The Golden Goose, by all accounts he’s likely to settle back down to lightweight at some point to try to clean out the division in the same way he did at 130 pounds.

In other words, 135 is a crowded weight-class right now, packed with big-time talent, and there are some very big fights hanging around out there for the winner of Diaz/Katsidis tomorrow night. For that reason, and for the fact that each of these fighters has proven time and again that he only knows one speed – fast and furious – it’s quite possible that come the wee hours of Sunday morning, we’ll have ourselves another FOY candidate on our hands.

Are You Bloody Bleedin’ Kidding Me, Mate?
In that I’ve already invoked the sacred name of Floyd Joy Mayweather Sr. today, let me turn to this piece of news – Ricky Hatton has hired Daddy Floyd to be his trainer. Now if that doesn’t get our Ricky a good noggin-slappin’ at the pub, I don’t know what will. First he fires his eleven-years-and-counting bloke’s bloke of a trainer Billy Graham, claiming it was for Graham’s own good (while Graham counter-claims that he was unceremoniously sacked for no reason), and now he goes and hires the father of his sworn nemesis, Floyd Sr.? Doesn’t anyone remember the proto-racist harangues that Ricky and Graham were levying at the Mayweather clan in last year’s Mayweather/Hatton 24/7? Now suddenly the evil genius patriarch of that scene, the boasting, self-toasting, diabolical badass that is Daddy Floyd, the living antithesis of everything Hatton claims himself to be… this is the guy that Manchester’s Man of the People wants to share his near-beer with during training camp? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Hatton is so full of s*** it’s a wonder he can look himself in the mirror in the morning.