Former two-division titlist Ricardo Mayorga, idle since Shane Mosley stopped him in the 12th round in September 2008, resurfaces May 15 when he moves to mixed martial arts. He faces Din Thomas (trained by 1976 U.S. Olympic gold medalist Howard Davis Jr.) in a three-round bout at 160 pounds in the main event of a pay-per-view card in Fayetteville, N.C. Mayorga’s boxing trash talk has come with him to MMA. “I conquered the world in the boxing ring all the while I was puffing cigarettes and drinking beer, “ Mayorga said. “I won three world title belts and I stood toe-to-toe with so many legends, beating some of them. Vernon Forrest, God rest his soul, was a great boxer yet I beat him back twice. I cannot be denied as I am a force of nature. Now I will shock the MMA fans and I know so many of my fans from boxing will follow me as I expand my repertoire. They can’t deny me in MMA and I will destroy Din Thomas. I am going to smash him. To me, a fight is a fight in a ring, in a cage or on the street. Fighting is my middle name.”
I guess this fight didn’t happen, but still great quotes from Mayorga as per usual.
Here is what he is saying now:
“I can beat the Filipino. If his preference is to fight me, I’m ready. Pacquiao gave and opportunity to to Fight Margarito, and he could do the same for me,” Mayorga commented during a media worked held yesterday at the 5th St. Gym in Miami, Florida.
And:
“Cotto, Pacquiao, any of them will do. Everybody knows Cotto is from Puerto Rico. Cotto is nobody for me. I’m not afraid of anyone. I’ll go to Puerto Rico and fight Cotto there.”
I would pay to see either fight although the Cotto fight would actually make some sense and is guaranteed to be entertaining.
Side Note: The Legendary 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach has recently re-opened and I plan to be there soon. My father, Michael John Mason VI, used to take me there as a young pup and that was where I first met Muhammad Ali (among others). I can’t wait to go back. It’s already locked in stone on my schedule. Congratulations to Angelo Dundee, Ferdie Pacheco, Tom Tsatas, Matt Baiamonte and Dino Spencer for making it happen. This is a huge one in the win column and a true sign that The Apocalypse is Not coming. At least not yet anyway.
If you have never seen it (or even if you have), watch the Modern Day Classic of Ricardo Mayorga VS Felix Trinidad:
Juan Manuel Marquez retained his WBA and WBO lightweight titles with a bruising ninth-round technical knockout of Michael Katsidis on Saturday night.
Marquez bided his time in the decisive round before hitting Katsidis with a flurry of punches — a series of uppercuts and straight rights that had the challenger backing away.
Finally, referee Kenny Bayless stopped the fight at 2 minutes and 14 seconds, giving Marquez (52-5-1, 37 KO) a TKO over the rugged Katsidis.
“We knew it was going to be a difficult bout. It was so difficult he even surprised me,” Marquez said afterward through a translator.
The surprise? Katsidis (27-3) knocked Marquez to the mat with a left hook in the third round after the champ left himself wide-open.
Both Juan Manuel Marquez and Michael Katsidis are always worth the price of admission. (Michael Katsidis is the world’s best answer to the tragic passing of G Manifesto Hall of Fame Member Arturo Gatti, Click Here to watch Arturo “Thunder Gatti VS Irish” Micky Ward Trilogy Fight Video) Putting them together in the same ring was a no-brainer all action fight, like I said it would be.
Katsidis dropped Marquez with such a classic left hook it was unbelievable. Katsidis also has one of the strangest short right hands on the inside I have ever seen. Not that effective.
Juan Manuel Marquez is an incredibly accurate puncher. Especially on the inside or while backing up under pressure. It makes it all the more amazing that Mayweather was able to make him miss so much during their fight.
Marquez’s left hook to the body is a thing of violent beauty. Puro Mexicano.
HBO Boxing: Juan Manuel Marquez vs. Michael Katsidis Highlights (HBO)
However, the best thing Marquez does is he stays so calm when he is under tremendous pressure. He actually loves it and is at his best in this position. This is the reason he arguably beat Manny Pacquiao both times. And the reason he was shut out by Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
If we can’t get Floyd Mayweather, Jr. VS Manny Pacquiao, I would be certainly happy with Juan Manuel Marquez VS Manny Pacquiao III.
Top 4 Pound for Pound Fighters in The World
1. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao (tie)
3. Sergio Martinez
4. Juan Manuel Marquez
Simon Black of Sovereign Man, who believes “that in order to achieve true freedom, you have to be able to make money, control your time, and eliminate the mindset that you are subject to a corrupt government that is bent on degrading your personal liberty” (basically, the cat has a pretty dope site), has been busting out some good Data Sheets lately:
Tell me if you think it’s worth fighting for
In 43 BC, over 2,000 years ago, warring consuls Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian were duking it out with each other over control of Rome following Julius Caesar’s assassination the prior March.
Each had legions at his disposal, and Rome’s terrified Senate sat on its hands waiting for the outcome.
Ultimately, the three men chose to unite their powers and rule Rome together in what became known as the Second Triumvirate. This body was established by a law named lex Titia on this date (give or take depending on how you convert the Roman calendar) in 43 BC.
The foundation of the Second Triumvirate is of tremendous historical importance: as the group wielded dictatorial powers, it represents the final nail in the coffin in Rome’s transition from republic to malignant autocracy.
The Second Triumvirate expired after 10-years, upon which Octavian waged war on his partners once again, resulting in Mark Antony’s famed suicide with Cleopatra in 31 BC. Octavian was eventually rewarded with rich title and nearly supreme power, and he is generally regarded as Rome’s first emperor.
Things only got worse from there. Tiberius, Octavian’s successor, was a paranoid deviant with a lust for executions. He spent the last decade of his reign completely detached from Rome, living in Capri.
Following Tiberius was Caligula, infamous for his moral depravity and insanity. According to Roman historians Suetonius and Cassius Dio, Tiberius would send his legions on pointless marches and turned his palace into a bordello of such repute that it inspired the 1979 porno film named for him.
Caligula was followed by Claudius, a stammering, slobbering, confused man as described by his contemporaries. Then there was Nero, who not only managed to burn down his city but was also the first emperor to debase the value of Rome’s currency.
You know the rest of the story– Romans watched their leadership and country get worse and worse.
All along the way, there were two types of people: the first group were folks that figured, “This has GOT to be the bottom, it can only get better from here.” Their patriotism was rewarded with reduced civil liberties, higher taxes, insane despots, and a polluted currency.
The other group consisted of people who looked at the warning signs and thought, “I have to get out of here.” They followed their instincts and moved on to other places where they could build their lives, survive, and prosper.
I’m raising this point because I’d like to open a debate. Some consider the latter idea of expatriating to be akin to ‘running away.’ I recall a rather impassioned comment from a reader last week who suggested that “leaving, i.e. running away, is certainly not the proper response.”
I find this logic to be flawed.
While the notion of staying and ‘fighting’ is a noble idea, bear in mind that there is no real enemy or force to fight. The government is a faceless bureaucracy that’s impossible attack. People who try only discredit their argument because they become marginalized as fringe lunatics.
Remember John Stack? He’s the guy who flew his airplane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas earlier this year because he had a serious philosophical disagreement over tax issues.
While his ideas may have had intellectual merit, they were immediately dismissed due to his murderous tactics. Violence is rarely the answer, and it often has the opposite effect as intended, frequently serving to bolster support for the government instead of raising awareness of its shortcomings.
Unless/until government paramilitaries start duking it out with citizen militia groups in the streets, this is an ideological battle… and it’s an uphill battle at best.
Government controlled educational systems institutionalize us from childhood that governments are just, and that we should all subordinate ourselves to authority and to the greater good that they dictate in their sole discretion.
You’re dealing with a mob mentality, plain and simple. Do you want to waste limited resources (time, money, energy) trying to convince your neighbor that s/he should no not expect free money from the government?
You could spend a lifetime trying to change ideology and not make a dent; people have to choose for themselves to wake up, it cannot be forced upon them. And until that happens, they’re going to keep asking for more security and more control because it’s the way their values have been programmed.
When you think about it, what we call a ‘country’ is nothing more than a large concentration of people who share common values. Over time, those values adjust and evolve. Today, cultures in many countries value things like fake security, subordination, and ignorance over freedom, independence, and awareness.
When it appears more and more each day that those common values diverge from your own, all that’s left of a country are irrelevant, invisible lines on a map. I don’t find these worth fighting for.
Nobody is born with a mandatory obligation to invisible lines on a map. Our fundamental obligation is to ourselves, our families, and the people that we choose to let into our circles… not to a piece of dirt that’s controlled by mob-installed bureaucrats.
Moving away, i.e. making a calculated decision to seek greener pastures elsewhere, is not the same as ‘running away’… and I would argue that if you really want to affect change in your home country, moving away is the most effective course of action.
The government beast in your home country feeds on debt and taxes, and the best way to win is for bright, productive people to move away with their ideas, labor, and assets. This effectively starves the beast and accelerates its collapse. Then, when the smoke clears, you can move back and help rebuild a free society.
I’d really like to know what you think — which is the right thing to do, stay or leave? What are you planning to do?
I’m convinced that what we’re seeing right now from the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the tip of the spear in the government’s battle for increased control of the public.
The groundwork has been laid for years– legislation empowering the TSA has gradually eroded civil liberties to the point that airports in the United States have now become ‘no rights’ zones. “Please remove your shoes” has now become “Take out your prosthetic breast so I can check it for explosives.”
Passengers who show up to an airport in the United States are now given two options: (a) go through the radiation bath [don’t worry, the government says it’s safe…] and let the TSA see you naked, or (b) let the TSA thugs grope you and fondle your children’s genitals.
This is not enhanced security protocol, this is a systematic desensitization to government intrusion. The idea is to get people used to new procedures, then continue to add more layers of government control.
Certainly, people will complain. They will be outraged… YouTube videos will abound of TSA agents stroking women’s breasts and disrobing 5-year old boys. The government will hold firm, though, responding that the tactics are necessary and that they will ‘look into’ egregious violations.
To be clear, some of the tactics are designed to be scaled back as concessions. It’s like turning up the volume from 0 to 10… everyone starts screaming that it’s too loud, so the government turns it down to 8. People think, “ah, that’s not as bad…” and eventually become accustomed to the noise.
In time, the government turns it up from 8 to 20. People pour into the streets again, protesting until the government turns it down from 20 to 15. People once again become accustomed to the noise as the new normal. This cycle escalates until no one can remember the sound of silence any longer.
It’s fairly easy to do– there will always be politicians and bureaucrats who can invent stories about innocuous white powders and men in caves that scare the daylights out of people.
Similarly, there will always be long lists of sociopaths, perverts, and pedophiles who are attracted to a job description that authorizes them to grope, fondle, humiliate, and intimidate others.
No place is perfect, every country has its challenges. But there are many nations with positive growth trends and governments that don’t treat their people like milk cows.
One of those countries is Chile, and if you’re looking for ideas, I strongly recommend that you consider it. I’ve been writing about Chile off and on for a while now, and for the life of me, I still can’t figure out why it’s not on the radar…
Margarito did better than I thought. Even though they won’t admit it, plenty of Manny Pacquiao fans were nervous as hell during the first two rounds when Margarito was jabbing and using his size. For a moment or two, I really thought Manny was going to get seriously hurt. It is a true testament to how incredible Manny is that he was able to punish Margarito in such convincing fashion.
Margarito definitely hurt Pacquiao a few times. It was probably the closest one-sided fight I have ever seen.
That being said, Margarito’s corner should have stopped the fight in the 8th or 9th round.
One of the most amazing things Pacquiao does that no one talks about is his ability to never seem hurt. Trust me, this is a great skill to have. And Manny has it. He showed it in the fight with Cotto when Cotto hit him to the body.
And he showed it in this fight the few times Margarito had Pacquiao on the ropes and ripped him with body shots and uppercuts.
Pacquiao should definetly not step up and fight Sergio Martinez. Martinez would kill him. Too big, too athletic and too fast.
Here is why Boxing is Dope:
I still have a soul (HBO Boxing)
That could be the best movie I have seen all year. Short, sweet and inspirational. Only in Boxing can a street kid go from selling cigarettes on the curb to becoming Congressman and a country’s most beloved citizen. For The People.
On another note, The Wall Street Journal had a good article about how Tiger Woods is a dork and Manny Pacquiao is dope:
As a reentry, it was better than Mr. Woods’s stiff round of confessionals last spring, but it still felt choreographed and soaked in self-helpy aphorisms (“I’m not the same man I was a year ago.”) It’s nice to hear Mr. Woods claim he is happier, but was anyone still needing an update? We’re fatigued by the unsolicited amends. We just want to see him play better golf.
Amid Mr. Woods’s strange anniversary celebration, we couldn’t help but think of another superstar athlete, one who appears to be everything Tiger’s fans and enablers hoped he would be, but wasn’t: Manny Pacquiao.
Like Mr. Woods, Mr. Pacquiao is bigger than his sport. Like Tiger, he is a global icon, whose influence and talents are described in hushed tones. Mr. Pacquaio is considered by many to be the dominant fighter of his generation—he’s won eight different titles in eight different weight classes, the latest coming last Saturday, when he dissected Antonio Margarito, who was five inches taller and 17 pounds heavier. Mr. Pacquiao’s only unrealized goal is a date with the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr., a worthy rival who seems content to delay and self-destruct.
Mr. Pacquiao, like Mr. Woods, is a Nike paragon. But in the Pac-Man’s case, the largeness of the image feels earned. As he redefines his sport, Mr. Pacquiao is also serving as a Congressman in the Philippines. This job has been characterized by some as a dilettantish distraction, but those close to the fighter describe him as genuinely torn between the ring and politics. “He takes [Congress] really, really seriously,” Mr. Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, said recently. “He’s a different person there.”
Look for Celestino “Pelenchin” Caballero too be too much for “The American Boy” Jason Litzau. Andre Berto should stop Freddy Hernandez and Juan Manuel Marquez should finish the brave Michael Katsidis in an all-action brawl.
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi’s ‘Griftopia’
In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.
Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.
My buddy was a young guy who’d come up working on the derivatives desk of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.
Aside from the hot weather, it wasn’t such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.
“I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” he said. “They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . .”
I dropped my fork. “The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We didn’t do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn’t you know about this?”
It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Taibbi’s Takedown of ‘Vampire Squid’ Goldman Sachs
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
