Omar Figueroa off Mar. 8 card with left wrist injury

Omar Figueroa off Mar. 8 card with left wrist injury
Mark E. Ortega
RingTV.com
March 1, 2014

The Mar. 8 WBC lightweight title bout pitting champion Omar Figueroa against Ricardo Alvarez has been scrapped, according to Golden Boy Promotions matchmaker Eric Gomez.

Gomez told RingTV.com on Saturday afternoon via email that Figueroa suffered a injury that will take him off the Showtime PPV card.

Figueroa's trainer Joel Diaz informed RingTV.com that the injury was to the fighter's left wrist, which occured during sparring Friday. Alvarez will stay on the card, and Golden Boy currently is looking for a new opponent, per Gomez, but there is "no replacement yet."

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Page comeback derailed

Page comeback derailed

Mark E. Ortega

Martinez News-Gazette

November 19, 2012


NATOMAS, Calif.--Last Saturday night, former WBA welterweight champion James Page did the improbable, returning to the ring for the first time following a 10-and-a-half year prison sentence, fighting rugged journeyman Rahman Yusubov in the six-round main event at the Four Points by Sheraton in Natomas, Calif. Unfortunately for Page and his team, the result wasn't what they were hoping for.

Page had been out of jail since the early part of the year, training at famed King's Gym in Oakland with a number of quality professional fighters, including middleweight prospect Omar Henry and junior middleweight contender Alfredo Angulo. He had worked himself down to 153 pounds for the fight, just one weight class heavier than where he contested most of his bouts in his prime in the late '90s.

From marinated to overcooked: Lopez-Gamboa, Kirkland-Angulo, & Ortiz-Berto

From marinated to overcooked? Lopez-Gamboa, Kirkland-Angulo, & Ortiz-Berto

Mark E. Ortega

Leave-it-in-the-ring.com

April 18, 2011

In this midweek piece, Leave-it-in-the-ring's Mark Ortega discusses the overcooked bout between Juan Manuel Lopez and Yuriorkis Gamboa that fell to shambles following Lopez' shock loss to Orlando Salido this weekend, and why promoters should put their fighters in tough more often as was the case with Andre Berto and Victor Ortiz the same night, where the loser gained just as much in defeat as he had in winning his first 27 pro fights. As was the case with Tua-Ibeabuchi in '97, no career will be derailed from the great welterweight bout between Berto-Ortiz.

The month of April has already seen its fair share of upsets in big time bouts as well as the vanquishing of quite a few future paydays for many fighters on the losing end of them.

Adamek outlast Arreola, Angulo batters Julio

Adamek outlast Arreola, Angulo batters Julio
Mark E. Ortega
FightFanNation.com
April 24, 2010

Saturday night from the Citizens Bank Arena in Ontario, California, Tomasz Adamek [41-1, 27 KOs] won an impressive twelve-round majority decision over local hero Chris Arreola [28-2, 25 KOs] in front of a large crowd in the televised headliner of HBO's Boxing After Dark. Arreola started off quickly and for the first four or five rounds it was a firefight that favored the more than thirty pounds heavier fighter. Somewhere in the fifth round, Arreola hurt his left hand and the fight changed as Adamek began to outbox Arreola and move around the ring extremely well. Arreola would land a few big shots in nearly every round but Adamek was landing much more accurately. Adamek's body work in the middle rounds helped slow Arreola down and he enjoyed a surge in the eighth and ninth round. Arreola seized momentum in the tenth and eleventh but Adamek took the twelfth to earn the tight majority decision. One judge had it 114-114 even but was overruled by the 115-113 and a much too wide 117-111 in favor of Adamek.

Kirkland-Angulo: As hot as it is going to get?

Kirkland-Angulo: As hot as it is going to get?
Mark E. Ortega
Freelance
March 12, 2009


Also eight other matchups and whether they would come off better now or later

There are fights out there that quickly grasp the attention of the boxing public, sometimes a bit too early in time for it to be a realistic possibility based on where in their careers those two fighters are. That is one of the many things that make our sport intriguing, it is all in the timing. It isn’t like football or baseball, where they play basically the same set schedule with a few differences here and there. In boxing, you never can guess where you will be eight months from now; let alone two to five years from now.

With that said, in boxing, many times a fight will start building up heat and excitement even if it doesn’t make sense at that exact moment for that fight to come off. Promoters are always trying to build a fight up so much until both guys are at similar stages in their career, near their projected primes, so that it makes the most money. A lot of times, this has worked and many fights have come together that took years of build-up to produce. It seems that fights like Hagler-Hearns and Tyson-Holyfield, despite their numerous setbacks, were always meant to come together the way they did, and it served the winners in both of those fights much better based on the timing.