Pantera

Over the past few years I have become interested in boxing again. Everyone says it is a dead sport and there are some arguments which support this. I, however, am not one who believes that boxing needs a dominant heavyweight champion to be relevant. (Just to be clear I am sort of a Wladmir Klitchko fan anyway.) I tend to gravitate toward the middleweight and adjacent divisions for the nice combination of speed, technique and power. Heavyweight fights have always disappointed IMO. With middleweights you get real boxing but the potential still exists for a knockout.

Anyway, the fighter I am always excited to watch is Edison "Pantera" Miranda. He's fairly tall for a middleweight at 5'11". He throws tons of looping haymakers usually going for the knockout(record 27-1 with 24 KO's). But what really is amazing is his story. Born in Colombia, his mother abandoned him when he was a year old. He was raised in an abusive household and ended up living homeless on the street at age 9. He decided to track down his biological mother who turned him away and sent him back to the street.

From his bio:

He was now all alone on the tough streets of Colombia at the young age of nine. He spent the rest of his childhood working hard in the plantain and yucca fields of Tumaco and sweeping up for street vendors in the neighboring town of Buenaventura. He ate whatever he could find on the streets in order to survive. By the time Edison was 12, he was already working a grown-man's job in construction. Just two years later, he worked as a cattle butcher in Barranquilla, where he would soon begin pursuing his dream of becoming a champion boxer.

He was an amateur boxer at age 16 and eventual amateur champion. He lost an earlier professional title bout to Artuhur Abraham in a controversial decision where he broke Abraham's jaw with a legal punch. On May 19th he fights Kelly Pavlik (30-0, 27 KO) for the right to fight for the title. Two men who clearly fight to knock the other guy out. Not a PPV, it's on HBO as an undercard fight on the middleweight title bout between Spinks and Taylor. My money says the undercard fight will be the one worth watching that night. I better have HBO in my hotel room in Anaheim.

I do promise at some point to return to things "not sports" in my posts but for now it will continue.