There was a time when the opponent hardly mattered, when he might charge admission to watch him box his shadow, pummel a heavy bag, harrow a skipping rope. But the opponents mattered to him then, […]

Plenty laughed in November, malicious little chortles at a rare moment of weakness from a fighter who seemed without any. Terence Crawford heard them. They questioned his nerve, his heart, and through that jaundiced lens, […]

It was a harbinger of his undoing, that talk of toughness, that little kindness from the commentary team offered barely fifteen minutes into the action. And true too. But the timing of that gesture was […]

“Do I still got it?” What was your answer? When Teofimo Lopez, wearing a wry smile and as many belts as his junior-welterweight frame could support, asked the soldout crowd in The Theater at Madison […]

His nose, that bulbous bullseye stuffed with gauze, secured by tape, bled determinedly into his mouth; a handkerchief wrinkled and spattered returned rhythmically to dab the claret trickle. With a voice warped by the carnage […]

Like so many of his devotees, were they graced with a private moment in his presence, Ryan Garcia got on his knee and let it come. There he stayed until it was over, and the […]

I have been here before, intentionally, if not by design. It is a strange place, particularly for one who has lived for so long looking down, not haughtily, not arrogantly, but by necessity, for my […]

How many grudge matches fulfill their promise? What satisfaction a man might take from punishing another is mitigated by his limitations, by the strengths of his opponent, by the third man in the ring. The […]