patrick kehoe

Ali-Frazier I: Meanings Beyond The Messages

Boxers live out the marshal creeds of their truths and lies, under the blinding limelight, at the knife edge of death’s tragic enfolding, without recourse martyrdom or public restitutions for the exacting sum-totals of their entropic endeavoring.  Ch...

Bernard Hopkins: Still Tempting Fate

By Patrick Kehoe - With most champions of the boxing ring, experience tends to tame some of the more rabid impulses. More and more takes place below the surface of a calmed persona smiling into cameras, much left to merely drift off as inconsequentia...

Bernard Hopkins and The Law of Survival

By Patrick Kehoe - Don’t let Bernard Hopkins’ penchant for contradiction or philosophical peripeteia force you to lose your way. His time on this earth and a million situations overcome and endured and “The Executioner” remains the same old rugged su...

"Sugar" Shane Mosley: Finding Defining Moments

By Patrick Kehoe - No, you cannot completely run from your past – even as time’s distancing from events and circumstances, from actions made from intentions – with perceptual memory coloured over. We are, in the final analysis, the sum total of that...

Boxing in the 21st Century: The First Decade

By Patrick Kehoe - On January 2, 2000, the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act was passed into US law as an updated reversion of the 1996 Professional Boxing Safety Act. Call it political incrementalism, postured symbolism or a necessary step toward respo...

Jermain Taylor’s Dreams Deferred

By Patrick Kehoe - Former world middleweight champion Jermain Taylor awaits his next opponent, knowing a loss lays him bare onto the icy slab marked: STEPPING STONE. Who will believe “Bad Intentions” has anything meaningful left to offer, in the cham...

The Mayweather Maelstrom

By Patrick Kehoe - Iconic portraits of Roger Federer, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and Arnold Palmer stare out from major sports and men’s magazines this last month, with autumnal athletic engagements tugging at our sense of anticipation and nostalgia j...

How “Bad” is Chad Dawson?

By Patrick Kehoe - Cable broadcasters HBO certainly want the answer to the question of just what kind of upside light-heavyweight title holder Chad Dawson can generate. No one expects his career to spontaneously combust, for him to become an overnigh...

Taylor vs. Froch - Made For Each Other

By Patrick Kehoe - When Team Taylor sent out their PR circulars, making public notification of Jermain Taylor’s decision to fight Britain’s WBC super-middleweight champion Carl Froch, they couldn’t resist injecting a rhetorical disclaimer intended to...

Marco Antonio Barrera - In the Eye of the Beholder

By Patrick Kehoe - Marco Antonio Barrera has been taking Manchester England by stealth. The Mexican legend has been looking interviewer after interviewer in the eye over the last week patiently, and in his measured English, stating what he feels is t...

Kelly Pavlik, The Return of The Youngstown Hero

By Patrick Kehoe - No crown was lost, a title neither forfeited nor voided in having suffered defeat. Kelly Pavlik was nevertheless in shock at how comprehensively he’d been out boxed by veteran tormentor Bernard Hopkins during their 12 round, 170lbs...

Darchinyan vs. Arce – Not Just a War of Words

By Patrick Kehoe - Bernard Hopkins and James Toney, famous for their pre-fight invectives and all out bad mouthing confessionals have NOTHING on super-flyweight rivals Vic “The Raging Bull” Darchinyan and Jorge “The Entertainer” Arce. Both guys are p...

Klitschko Dilemma Hovers over The Heavyweight Division

By Patrick Kehoe - Never before in the long history of professional boxing have two brothers stood arm and arm at the summit of heavyweight boxing, title holders both, separate but equal coefficient agents knee deep in the muddled fistic trade. With...

"Dream Fight" - De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao: White Knights

By Patrick Kehoe - Oscar De La Hoya fighting Manny Pacquiao has brought out almost every kind of analysis, warning, celebratory cliché, bombastic flourish, shading of cultural commentary and insider tripe, just as all truly mega boxing fights inevita...

A Meditation on "Superman" - Roy Jones Jr

By Patrick Kehoe - Where once we stood in awe of the punching velocity turned over as power, during those spurting staccatos that seemed instantaneously invented, freezing an opponent’s determined aggressions, before decapitating them, we now look fo...