In The News #3

Relegation form

Oh, brother! Following modern boxing is already painfully laborious but every now and then you watch something like the Fury-Makhmudov card and feel like an ancient pleb, wondering if the gods felt like punishing you with bad weather and worse boxing. The curse at White Hart Lane was previously restricted to their soccer team but on Saturday it expanded to one of the most sorry broadcasts in a good while.

And then, the news that former heavyweight champion will be fighting... Kristian Prenga! Who is Kristian Prenga, you ask? Why, he's none other than Albania's 2nd best active heavyweight (behind 41-year-old Nelson Hysa, 24-0, 22KOs). Prenga, age 35, has a record of 20-1 (20KOs) with the one loss coming to Giovanni Auriemma in 2017. According to Boxrec, Auriemma was 1-2 at the time and currently sports a record of 2-6.

Don't be fooled by Prenga's knockout ratio, his 21 opponents have a combined record of 258-168-18, and the few opponents he faced with decent records are all bums and set-ups. It's the kind of cynically pathetic matchmaking that Matchroom absolutely adores, this is peak Hearnslop. Next to no risk of Joshua being knocked out while a n0-hope, no-name nobody from nowhere in Eastern Europe is hyped up as a knockout artist, a 'solid puncher' and a 'tough test'. This warm-up fight is a bucket of cold sick, the only thing being tested is people's patience and sanity.

Thankfully, there's else nothing happening in the Middle East currently which could derail this Riyadh Season event in the next 3 months. For those who still want it for some reason, Joshua-Fury any day now! To stack insult upon insult, they snuck it out alongside a press release that the long-awaited and now out-of-date match up has been signed and is expected to happen at the end of the year (naturally, there's no location/venue/date information). Since all they've said is "Q4", I wouldn't bet against Fury also taking a warm-up fight against a bum or an e-celeb to sneak in a payday before the Joshua fight. If he does (and there are somehow no contractual restraints against him doing so), take it as a sign that he knows he's more likely to lose the main event.

Wayyyyyy back!

A lot of people are giving Max Kellerman stick for being a shameless Zuffa shill and too right! What would Kellerman be saying if he wasn't whoring himself out for money? Maybe there's a clue in this old interview Dave Cool did on fightnews.com back at the turn of the century. When asked if he was muzzled on Friday Night Fights, Kellerman responded:

“No. I’m not censored at all. The only talking to I ever got at ESPN was at one point they were afraid of libelous speech. They don’t want me to be slanderous towards anybody. We sat down, you know, they had a lawyer explain to me what libelous and slanderous speech is. It turns out I wasn’t being libelous or slanderous. I can criticize our own matches; I can criticize our matchmaking; I can criticize fighters on our air. Hey, I’ve criticized myself before, many times. I see my position as one of consumer advocate.”

Someone should ask him that again and see if he still has the same answer these days.

The First Step

I should really start calling these 'In The Olds'. Sometimes I'll read something and think "that doesn't make any sense" and then fall down the rabbit hole of why nobody else questioned it. The most recent example comes from the long-running and regularly-delayed Japanese comic book series 'Hajime no Ippo'. Many years ago, a friend who knew I was into boxing and partial to anime suggested this series to me and it was a good call. Pre-digital cel animation, great music, creative sound effects, fitting voicework, and some of the most delictable sakuga boxing has ever seen. The manga started in 1989 and passed 1500 chapters back in August 2025, with volume 145 coming out in Japan in January of this year. This series has been going on at a snail's pace for many years, and an official English translation began on Kodansha's K Manga service in September 2023. After an initial 10-volume dump, the rate of one new chapter a week means it'll catch up to the present day sometime in the 2040s, and by then there might still be another 20 years to translate.

Of course, manga was often unofficially translated by fangroups for years before any official release and Ippo is no exception. Today's post concerns an addition to boxing folklore by the original Ippo scanlator, SnoopyCool. Snoopy began translating Ippo in early 2002 and had a reputation for being... a sensitive soul, what I mean by that is he wore his heart on his sleeve and his opinions in editor's notes. And like all true denizens of the old internet, he had a forum and went mad with power. A May 2004 post titled 'Announcement: No more Ippo questions.' was later updated to read 'Announcement: No more Ippo questions, they're too fucking annoying.' Presumably, the questions that bothered him were about when new releases would be coming out and where they could be downloaded from. The anime series was fansubbed by Anime-Keep and Infusion in 2003, which would've only increased demand from people who wanted to see how the story continued (note: the first anime had 76 episodes which reached the end of 30/start of volume 31).

In May 2005, a new group called Ignition-One (I-O) picked up Ippo and started releasing new chapters much quicker than SnoopyCool did. Contrary to the now standard method of releasing chapters as soon as you've finished translating them, SnoopyCool preferred batch releases, he would store up several chapters/volumes of scanlations and release them all as an early Christmas present or sometimes as a literal Christmas present. After getting up to volume 51, the series was poached by I-O who started releasing daily chapters, and SnoopyCool's final release was completing the final two chapters of Volume 69 and the first two chapters of Volume 70 as a 4/20 present in 2006. If you look around you can directly compare SnoopyCool and I-O's releases from when they were competing for a year, in my humble opinion I-O's translations were never good. Neither were MangaDex's. Even the latest group to pick up the unofficial English mantle (French scanlation group HnI-scantrad) commit the sins of gratuitous profanity, edgy fonts, and questionable grammar.

But this post is to say that SnoopyCool's early releases had some comically bad errors too once upon a time, one of which went uncorrected for years. The original Japanese text is:

"おーっ前スマッシュ使うのか？
ラドックが使ってたスリークワォーターのアッパーだろ？
あのタイソンがグラついた。。。。"

How did SnoopyCool translate this?

The 'sleek water uppercut' - supposedly used by none other than Cinderella Man Jim Braddock. It's referenced by people on TV Tropes, Reddit, and the Ippo Fandom/Wikia (a company who decided that the problem with Wikipedia was that it didn't have enough ads and that information should be made even more untrustworthy.)

The K-Manga release of a few years ago got it right at the first time of asking.

Yes, it's actually the three-quarter(s) uppercut, sometimes referred to as a 'forty-five' (because of the 45° angle) or, my preferred name for it, the Mexican uppercut. The Tyson reference is because Donovan Ruddock was also known to use the 'sleek water uppercut'. Before you call him a baka, to be fair to SnoopyCool there wasn't much boxing information on the internet in 2002-2004. Ruddock and Braddock didn't have Wikipedia pages yet, and ones that existed were crappy. And while there is more information around now, a lot of bad data still floats around out there today and it will become entrenched by artificial intelligence tomorrow. Unless it's challenged, of course.

I'll have to get around to doing a proper review of the anime and reading all of the manga when the series is done. It might take 20 years, feel free to poach!

Surprise Boxing Reference of the Month

"I had to learn to read between the lines,
overboard when they mention me in Times,
know the Lord's intervention was divine.
Political and social tensions on the climb,
not to mention, they forget to mention
how I'm swingin' through like Sonny Liston in his prime."
Punch Drunk, Ye (2026)

What Is It Good For?

In an interview with The Guardian on fight week, Derek Chisora said: “I might hire a tank and then you roll up in it.” Followed by "“Someone suggested this,” Farage replies with a cheesy grin."

Farage is none other than Nigel Farage, a British conservative politician. He and Chisora have been friends since sometime in 2019, having been introduced to each other by an unnamed mutual friend. Chisora comes from a land-owning middle-class family, he was born and raised in Zimbabwe and attended Churchill Boys School, a private boarding school in Harare. After moving to the leafy, affluent North London suburb of Hampstead, he 'got into trouble' as he has put it over the years. To put it in more specific terms, his rap sheet includes assaulting a police officer, public order offences, possession of an offensive object (legalese for carrying something pointy/stabby), attempted burglary, and an arrest for assault where he "knocked the victim's teeth out". Eventually, his probation officer Peter Yates suggested he take up boxing, and the Metropolitan Police paid for his boxing equipment and gym fees.

It's worth keeping the timeline in mind. Chisora was born in December 1983. The story goes that he arrived to the UK when he was 16, so December 1999 at the earliest. And "It wasn’t until three years later, in 2002, that Chisora would join the now famous Finchley’s ABC boxing gym and start boxing."

So, an African teenager ("fighting-age", to use the parlance of modern times) migrates to Britain and immediately turns to a life of crime. Once in the system, he violates parole multiple times, and because of the luvvy-duvvy 'hug-a-hoodie' New Labour government he gets a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance to turn things around. Some people would say that it's odd he supports a rightwing tough-on-crime and tough-on-immigrants political party, but odd is the wrong word. It's too sanitary and neutral. The more accurate word is hypocritical.

As a result of reforms, if a teenage Derek Chisora came to Britain today under the exact same circumstances and got convicted of the exact same crimes, he would've likely received jail time and likely been deported. His picture would presumably be tweeted out by the likes of Nigel Farage and Elon Musk as the face of multiculturalism's supposed incompatability with Western society, the face of violent migrant crime. Video of his removal would feature in Tiktok videos by the new Blue Labour government, across the pond his 15 minutes of infamy might come from "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊" tweets from the White House.

Chisora does not dwell on this. He comes from a well-to-do background, has made a lot of money, and is outspoken in his support for the political project that supports well-to-do people with lots of money. None of this is surprising. It's the same reason why when Farage is asked about when he thinks Britain was last great he often lands on some time during the last Blue Labour government. Of course they would actually turn up in a tank á la Thatcher and her famous photo in a tank, it's not the first Farage tank stunt and it probably won't be the last. It obviously wasn't going to be Chisora's last fight either. After the ugly bout where the typically incompetent British officials almost robbed Johnny Foreigner blind, an uncomfortable question remained for Wilder's career prospects: if you can't knock out a 42-year-old Derek Chisora, who can you knock out?

Good news!

There are a couple of decent fights happening this weekend. The Mexican Monster David Benavidez will be facing Gilberto 'Zurdo' Ramirez on a PBC show at 200lbs in Vegas. Earlier that same Saturday, on the other side of the Pacific the second Riyadh Season Weaboo Night will take place in Tokyo, as the Japanese Mon-su-ta Inoue Naoya is up against undefeated compatriot Nakatani Junto, who was previously at 118lbs and is now at his second fight in a higher division to challenge for Inoue's undisputed belts at 122lbs.

Maybe it's just the way of the 21st century but boxing news doesn't really cut through like it used to, it still feels absurd that the biggest fight of 2024 was Mike Tyson's comeback at 58 years old rather than the first undisputed heavyweight title fight in a quarter century. But even Tyson news slips under the radar, like how he was still wearing a cast on his arm in an interview last week after calling it a "a little sprain" last month. In this new interview, Tyson (who turns 60 in June) revealed that he "fell down" and injured himself stopping his fall. The Mayweather-Tyson bout was originally scheduled for April 25th but has yet to announce a new date, a broadcaster, or even a venue. Here's hoping it doesn't take place, watch the good fights instead.