A guy in the super heavyweight category got a walkover last night. He grinned as the green and gold belt was placed around his waist. The female announcer made an unflattering crack about his opponent not showing up. The guy's opponent was supposed to have been Keith.
Steve thought that Keith's match was tomorrow. He swore that's what the Golden Gloves organizers told him. A schedule of matches that they had given him a couple of weeks before revealed that Keith's match scheduled for last night. A big mistake. Dave, the coach at Evanston Boxing Club, claimed that Keith's name had been called several times to come and weigh in. I beat Steve, Mort, JJ and Mike there. I didn't hear any announcements, and the guys came in about 15 minutes behind me. The matches didn't begin until near 8:00 PM, so we all would have heard if Keith's name had been called. Steve wondered later why Dave, or any of the other coaches near who know he's with Loyola Park, didn't mention anything to him about Keith being called. "I could have sent someone to look for him. . .I could have done something," Steve said.
The guy who won by default is out of Windy City Gym. Steve spoke with the guy's coach to see if he would be willing to fight Keith anyway, and earn the belt as opposed to taking a walkover win. Chances of that happening look extremely dim. Keith's phone was down, so Steve couldn't contact him to tell him the bad news. I'm hoping he can catch Keith before our gym opens up tonight. Two years ago at the Gloves, Keith was denied competing because he missed the weigh-in time. He didn't compete in the 2006 tournament, and had said he really didn't want to miss out this time around. I already know Keith is not going to take this well.
In better news, Mort won over Simon in his match. Mort was a slip and duck artist, confounding Simon, who would come back with punches only to find Mort already gone. I put in some money to help pay for a DVD of his match. Mort will pay the other part on Saturday. Les told me I could use the company camrecorder to tape the finals matches. The disks in that camera are smaller than the standard DVD. I'll call the store where the camera was purchased from to find out if they'll be able to transfer images to a standard DVD. That'll save Mort some money if he wins on Saturday and wants a copy of his performance.
I met another celebrity at the Gloves last night. Shonie Carter is a five time champion in mixed martial arts. He was one of the fighters featured on the last edition of Spike TV's "The Ultimate Fighter" where several MMA fighters room together and compete against each other for a contract with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Carter is originally from Chicago. We talked for several minutes like we had known each other for a long time. He told me he likes to hang out at amateur fighting events. "Some of the fighters at the top wouldn't bother. But I tell them to remember when they were starting out and wanting people to come out and support them," he told me. I asked Carter if he had another match coming up soon, and he told me he was waiting for his broken hand to heal. Shonie Carter is a real person, just a regular cool guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment