A brief one today, with the finals series in full force in our football codes, and soccer’s season really just starting… and basketball apparently due to start after a quarter of the teams have collapsed…
So today I’ll look at boxing.
Australia has a new Australian heavyweight champion in John Hopoate. To everyone’s surprise, he boxed a smart bout to defeat 42-yr-old Bob Mirovic by technical knockout (the trianer threw the towel in) in the 9th.
And if anyone has any knowledge of Australian sport, you will undoubtedly be going, “Don’t I know that name from somewhere? Not the Bob guy, but Hoppa?”
Yes, John Hopoate is a former rugby player who received a hefty ban from the sport. Quite a long ban, in fact. 12 weeks. So, what did he do? Kick a ref? Maim an opponent? Abuse a club president? No…
He stuck his finger up the arse of several opponents, and all with apparent imprimatur of his club (but they, of course, got away with it). Oh, they fired him, he went to another club, and there received a 17 week ban for trying to take Keith Galloway’s head off his shoulders. And he was fired again. But that is by the by. His first huge suspension was for poking his finger up another man’s bum!
Yes, the current Australian heavyweight boxing champ is a man who inserted his metacarpals into another man’s anus during the course of a game.
Oh, how the sport has fallen.
Australia has produced some great champions – Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tzu (yes, he’s from Russia originally, but we’ll claim him), Lionel Rose, Les Darcy, Johnny Famechon. But now look at us. We have Anthony “The Mouth” Mundine, a man who lives by the adage any publicity is good publicity, and who thinks that he can claim his Muslim / Aboriginal heritage as an excuse for doing any stupid thing he wants, as our highest profile world champion boxer. And now we have a heavyweight champ who is a blow-in from another sport, who digitally dug another dude’s date.
But all is not lost, as a new book has just been released, called ‘Fighters By Trade’, written by Robert Drane. For anyone with any interest in the history of boxing outside of the USA, it is a must-read. A well-written book with tons of great stories about names from the past of this once proud sport. And the final piece – about the rise of MMA and other ultimate fighting events – is worth the price of admission alone.
For more details, go here: http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=165525
And that’s the view from down here…
