Dan “No Talent” Rafael of ESPN.com
MOST BOXING WRITERS DON’T REALIZE THEY ARE PUPPETS!
San Francisco, CA– One writer in particular, a friend of mine, got upset because I referred to the majority of today’s boxing writers as being nothing more than fans with a computer. That’s how promoter Bob Arum , and other promoters to a lesser extent, plays you guys and gals. You don’t think Arum could pull the charade he is perpetrating with Manny Pacquiao avoiding Floyd Mayweather (at his insistence) like the HIV virus, he couldn’t pull this for one minute with Jack Fiske, Wallace Matthews, myself, or Mike Katz? When Mike Marley was beholden to Don King, the King’s main publicist, Marley threw daggers at Arum. But with King all but dead promotionally, and some tell me physically, Marley has switched sides and now he either writes Top Rank Press Releases or has become Bob Arum’s proctologist.
John Beyrooty
MARLEY’S FALL FROM PENTHOUSE TO ARUM’S OUTHOUSE
Mike “Once The Best” Marley
Quite a fall from being the most entertaining writer in the business in the early 90s, Marley left the NY Post and went to work for Don King, becoming King Dung’s paid publicist/flunky. But after that Marley fell on hard times, and attempted to start a website. You used to see his work at Examiner.com, but not much lately, as I think his blowing Massa” Bob Arum in print got sickening even to the Examiner.com folks. The #1 column for insiders in boxing was Jack Fiske of the SF Chronicle, then came Marley, and no need to brag here, but my column in Flash Magazine was the second most faxed column in boxing, second only to Fiske. There were others like Earl Gutskey of the LA Times and John Beyrooty of the LA Herald Examiner.
Now a publicist with a Los Angeles based PR group, Beyrooty wrote manuscript like columns. Simply put, you could finish a long dump before you were done reading the work of the talented John Beyrooty. Dean Juipe of the Las Vegas Sun knew how to get under the powerbroker’s skin, but not his “Sin City” rival Royce Feour of the LV Review Journal, a mild mannered type, starting s*it just wasn’t Royce’s thing.
Steve Kim
SOME TALENTED SCRIBES TODAY, BUT MOST SHOULD STICK TO WRITING POSTCARDS!
Steve Kim of Maxboxing.com is articulate and a good wordsmith, but most of his peers couldn’t carry his notepad. Some writers, who have no journalism training under their belt, never fought, don’t judge professional or amateur boxing, they are just fans who take every word out of the face-lift stretched mouth of Bob Arum as if they were either gospel or true. I watch Arum play these Internet guys like a hand me down violin, and because they lack acumen, experience, and their claim to fame was that one day they got a computer and decided to become boxing writers, they are dumber than George W. Bush, a hard feat to achieve in any era. If there is one major fault of the Internet, it has given a platform to men and women who in reality would have trouble writing their grocery list. For those of us that made big money writing in the 80s & 90s, relish the memories of the good old days. Truth be told, just like there are far fewer talented fighters in 2012, the lack of quality scribes with college backgrounds and newspaper experience has hurt the game with the equivalency of driving a knife in the heart of what used to be the “real” boxing media.
Pedro Fernandez