Daytime Boxing

Morning na sir. Boxing na ta. Sound familiar? I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

As many of you were either at Mass, sipping your cup of coffee, having a quiet breakfast with the family or still sleeping on a lazy Sunday morning, boxing was abuzz at the Cebu Coliseum for Cebu’s first-ever Sunday morning boxing. Yes, the presence of scalpers and vendors in front of the Cebu Coliseum meant that there was something taking place, and it wasn’t a Mass or a religious gathering.

When will he stop coming up with gimmicks such as these? “He” of course is SGG or Sammy Gello-ani whose boxing endeavors have suddenly given the boxing family a welcome and added spice with more avenues for young prospects to shine and prove their stuff. And doing things a little differently has been the angle that SGG has taken thus far. Aside from going to Mindanao to tap fresh talents and also doing daytime boxing in Zamboanga, he’s also back in Cebu for another round of innovations: daytime boxing and as we’ll find out later, a boxing roadshow of sorts to hit the probinsya. On top of this, he’s also tying up with foreign partners.

The rationale or backgrounder behind the tie-up is SGG’s thrust to discover the next world champion out of Asia. Note that he’s talking about an Asian world champ, and not just a Pinoy champ. For Sunday’s daytime boxing, he’s tied up with the Kokiet Group of Thailand. The Thais brought two former world champions and a lady boxer to face off against Pinoy boxers. The Kokiet group is no stranger to boxing, and many of their boxers have invaded the U.S. fighting scene through Golden Boy and Top Rank promotions.

Each time a Thai comes to the Philippines, he is almost always declared a patsy even before he could go up the ring. Boxing pundits say that a Thai visit is a trip to the Philippines only to lose and make someone else look good. We’ll take our words back when talking about Sunday’s fights. The Thailand delegation of three included two former world champions in Ratanachai and Somsak. Ratanachai lost to ALA Boxing Gym’s Michael Domingo for the latter’s WBO Oriental bantamweight championship while Somsak’s fight with the up and coming Joel de la Cruz was a split draw. The third member of the visitors is a female boxer named Usanakorn who ran over Geremie Tabastabas, knocking her out.

The tie-up with the Kokiet group of Thailand is also one of the reasons why the fights were held in the morning. While it didn’t sound logical to have the events staged on a Sunday morning (at least here in the Philippines), it happens to be the norm in Thailand. The fights were beamed live to Thailand where Kokiet boxers have a following of their own, and yes, the telecast happened to be on the same time slot as the Marquez–Casamayor fight which I assume was also beamed to Thailand. On the local front, Viva Prime also aired the fights live over cable TV. Replays will be shown on Viva Sports’ “The Main Event” weekly boxing program.

So how did the Cebuano boxing fan accept daytime boxing? Nobody can deny that the Cebu Coliseum wasn’t filled to the rafters. The same was true for the Golden Boy Promotions card featuring AJ Banal and Boom Boom Bautista last April at the Araneta Coliseum. It may take awhile before boxing fans will troop to Sunday morning boxing cards unless it features a Manny Pacquiao. And that’s something that promoters will have to consider when holding boxing events in the future. It’s tough to break the Saturday night schedule that has become an automatic or even a habit for boxing through all these years. But both situations also dealt with a prevailing and probably more important factor to consider: the audience at the other side of the partnership. Both events took into consideration the norm of airing televised fights in those areas at a particular time slot, and decided that it was the more compelling thing to do.

That was daytime boxing for you. You ready for it? You willing to get off your beds to watch boxing on a Sunday morning?

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Time-out: I would like to apologize for the missed/non-Sunday sked for this column. Due to technical matters, I’ve asked our editors to feel free when to have our columns printed (or not at all). Due to the limited space, you deserve more news stories of sports events and can afford to skip columns like ours.

You can reach me at [email protected].