Monday, November 02, 2020
No Holds Barred: Charles Farrell on Boxing's Stars of the Lighter Weights
On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman once again spoke with our colleague, correspondent, and the award-winning boxing writer, Charles Farrell.
We spoke with him by phone Sunday.
While the coronavirus pandemic is still raging in many parts of the world, there nevertheless have been many notable fights involving top boxers in recent weeks.
Among those fights we discussed were: Juan Francisco Estrada vs. Carlos Cuadras 2 and Roman "Chocolatito" Gonzalez vs. Israel Gonzalez on October 23, and Naoya Inoue vs. Jason Moloney, Gervonta Davis vs. Leo Santa Cruz, and Oleksandr Usyk vs. Derek Chisora, which were all on October 31.
Estrada, he said, "may be the best technical fighter fighting today. He does everything beautifully." His opponent in their rematch, Cuadras, "is brilliantly talented." This exciting, even matchup, where the outcome was in doubt until the very end, made this "the best fight I've seen in the last couple of years," he said.
The impressive knockouts on the same night by Naoya Inoue and Gervonta Davis have invited comparisons between the performances of these two boxers.
"I thought Inoue was the fighter of the night," said Charles Farrell. "I'm impressed with Davis's performance, but I was impressed with Santa Cruz's performance, too."
He added, "We already know that Davis can punch." But he cautioned, "I would say that, anybody that size who is hit with a punch like that, it would have the same effect. He'd knock them out cold. But I do think that some questions opened up that maybe we didn't have before."
After discussing more on all these fights and the current state of boxing, we moved on to Charles Farrell's memoir, which is due out in June 2021. It is entitled (Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob. That led us into examining the connections between boxing, jazz, and the mob, and how boxing can only be understood as part of culture and not just a sport.
All this discussion of these fight of the year and knockout of the year candidates, as well as what might happen in 2021 in boxing especially with the heavyweights, makes this lengthy show the boxing podcast of the year.
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