No Holds Barred: Charles Farrell on Cotto-Foreman and the Decline of New York

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman once again speaks with our correspondent Charles Farrell about a bad boxing matchup with bad attendance in a big ballpark, and which was brutally blemished by bad officiating, bad announcing, and bad reporting, held in a big "hick town" known as New York.

That, of course, refers to the June 5 fight between Miguel Cotto and Yuri Foreman held in the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York. Cotto won by a TKO after referee Arthur Mercante finally stopped the fight in the ninth round, after Mercante refused to stop the fight one round earlier when the corner of Foreman, who was by then hobbling around on one leg, tried to end it by several methods.

We spoke Monday night and present our lengthy and cutting critique here in its entirety. We not only analyzed the many bad points of this fight and its promotion, but also tied it to the overall decline of New York, the home of many of the guilty parties in this debacle. We didn’t spare anybody, the promoters, HBO, the officials, and the media included. And as our guest philosopher, Jerome Lester Horwitz, explained, "Truth is stranger than fiction."

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