Bloody Elbow staff picks: Boxing 2018 Awards

Mookie Alexander and Fraser Coffeen review the best of boxing’s memorable 2018.

It was another great year for boxing, which is very much alive and well with exciting fights, fighters, and bigger events coming from multiple promotions. Bloody Elbow’s boxing team (Mookie Alexander and Fraser Coffeen) looks back at 2018 and hands out awards for the best moments in the ring.

Fight of the Year

Mookie Alexander: I’m really torn. There were just so many great fights in 2018. Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Jorge Linares was outstanding technical stuff that featured Loma down for the first time in his career, only to stop Linares with the sneakiest of body shots. Deontay Wilder rallied from being badly hurt to KO Luis Ortiz. The Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin rematch was great, as was Oleksandr Usyk’s narrow win over Mairis Briedis. I also highly recommend going to Youtube to find Kosei Tanaka vs. Sho Kimura for sheer brutality. Wilder vs. Fury was good but not FOTY material to me. Round of the Year? yes. My Fight of the Year is actually Jarrett Hurd vs. Erislandy Lara. Yes, that Erislandy Lara, known for a lot of hard-to-watch fights. Well this one was excellent, as Hurd was willing to push an incredible pace and go toe-to-toe with him. This was such a back-and-forth battle that was literally decided in the closing seconds. Hurd would’ve, at best, gotten a draw on the scorecards and been unable to win the WBA junior middleweight title away from the Cuban. Instead, he knocked Lara down and won a split decision, unifying the WBA and IBF belts in a classic.

Fraser Coffeen: There’s just something special about Heavyweights. Even after all these years and so (SO) many bad Heavyweight fights, when you get a good one, it can stand out above the pack. And this year we got a really good one in Deontay Wilder vs. Luis Ortiz. This was everything you want in Heavyweight boxing - two of the hardest punchers in the sport today just throwing down. They created great drama in a back and forth fight, and Wilder closed the show impressively, helping to quiet his doubters (but not silence them of course). This is the 2nd year in a row I’ve given this honor to a Heavyweight fight. What a glorious time for the division that for so many years was a hollow shell of its former glory.

Fighter of the Year

Mookie Alexander: Not even a debate. Oleksandr Usyk is the runaway Fighter of the Year for 2018. He essentially cleaned out the cruiserweight division in less than two years. Won the semifinal in Latvia against Mairis Briedis in by far the toughest and closest fight of his career, dominated Murat Gassiev in Russia to win the World Boxing Super Series tournament and become the undisputed champion, then he starched former world champion Tony Bellew in England this past November to cap off a brilliant 2018 by defending all four belts. He is a masterful boxer who is sometimes trained by Vasyl Lomachenko’s father Anatoly, aka “Papachenko.” Now that he’s done pretty much all he’s needed to do at cruiserweight, heavyweight is presumably what awaits him this year.

Fraser Coffeen: Yes, Usyk. Agreed. But just for the sake of discussion, I’m not going to talk about his brilliance - I’m going to talk about my runner-up for this award: Tyson Fury. Yes it’s true that Fury’s actual record this year is 2-0-1, and those 2 were easily set-up cans. But what Fury did this year was remarkable. He came back from a layoff that would have ended many careers. And then he fought the #2 active Heavyweight in the world. Then he controlled the fight against that #2 Heavyweight. THEN he got blasted into oblivion but somehow managed to get off the mat in the single greatest boxing moment of the year. And then boxing being boxing, he got robbed by the judges. For my money though, he walked into that fight the lineal champ, and he walks out the lineal champ. He returned, he defended, and he created a moment for the ages. That’s a pretty great year.

Knockout of the Year

Mookie Alexander: Teofimo Lopez made a strong case with his one-punch melting of Mason Menard. I thought to myself that Oleksandr Usyk’s KO of Tony Bellew would be my winner -- this came hours before Yair Rodriguez’s KO of The Korean Zombie, MMA’s KO of the Year -- but I’ve actually gone with Naoya Inoue KO1 Juan Carlos Payano from October 7th. Inoue moved up to 118 lbs last year and thrashed both Payano and Jamie McDonnell, two world class boxers, in one round. He has absurd power and might be one of the hardest punchers in the entire sport. I look forward to seeing what “The Monster” has in store for 2019, as long as the World Boxing Super Series gets its shit together.

Fraser Coffeen: I like the impact of the Teofimo Lopez KO1 of Mason Menard more, so that gets my nod. It was one of those visually impressive delayed KO’s, where the victim is hit so hard he seemingly enters a different space-time continuum from the rest of us for a brief moment before crashing back down, so, so violently. We don’t know what’s next for Lopez, but this felt like the welcome of a major star. I’m excited to see where he goes.

Story of the Year

Mookie Alexander: I could’ve gone with HBO Boxing’s demise, but I think the writing was on the wall even before 2018 began. That means by default it’s Tyson Fury returning to the top of the heavyweight division. As Fraser notes, Fury fought a pair of live bodies for easy tune-up fights. He didn’t really look great in either fight. It was already a credit to him that he’d slimmed down after ballooning to 350 lbs, but to take on Deontay Wilder, survive two knockdowns, including the outrageous 12th round shot that should’ve put him to sleep? That’s insane. You may not like him for a multitude of reasons, whether in the ring or outside of it, but he has battled back from substance abuse and mental health problems to reassert himself among the world’s best heavyweights. Now we’ll see in 2019 whether or not he can go the extra step and take the title away from Wilder… and maybe even go after Anthony Joshua.

Fraser Coffeen: To me, the biggest thing in boxing right now is the still shifting landscape of how to watch this sport of ours. As Mookie said, the loss of HBO was huge, and that final 15 minutes on the air is one of the most powerful sports compilations I’ve ever seen. But on the flip side of that loss, there was also the introduction of DAZN (which I will forever pronounce “Dazzin” and never NEVER “Da Zone”), the return of high level boxing on ESPN and ESPN+, and a new era for PBC. The ways we tune in to boxing are very different now than they were a few years ago when it was all HBO vs. Showtime, and that’s a good thing, giving us more options, and seeming to break down the rigid divisions, at least a little bit.

Number one thing you want to see in 2019?

Mookie Alexander: Any one of Terence Crawford vs. Errol Spence, Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Mikey Garcia, Anthony Joshua vs. Deontay Wilder/Tyson Fury, or Leo Santa Cruz vs. Gary Russell Jr. We need more title unifications in boxing, but of course, politics often get in the way. I’m most confident we get LSC vs. Russell Jr. The rest? Not so much.

Fraser Coffeen: I love all the fights Mookie mentioned, particularly all possible permutations of Joshua vs. Wilder vs. Fury. But what I would most love is to see some increased accountability for judges. There are so many terrible decisions that they become routine and we get numb to them. On ShoBox this year (best combat sports program today), you had Thomas Mattice defeat Zhora Hamazaryan in honestly the single worst decision I have ever seen in combat sports, ever. And it’s not even a blip on the radar because these things are so common. So I would like to see ACs step up and try to actually do something about this. I’m not holding my breath though. Also, a quick mention here of Adonis Stevenson - who reports indicate is out of his coma and improving, but who I really want to see make a full recovery. This is a brutal sport folks.

Bloody Elbow’s boxing coverage for 2019 starts off with Manny Pacquiao vs. Adrien Broner on January 19th, and we’ll also have Keith Thurman vs. Josesito Lopez (January 26th), Eleider Alvarez vs. Sergey Kovalev 2 (February 2nd), Gervonta Davis vs. Abner Mares (February 9th), and much more to come over the next several months.