Seldin to Fight Vazquez on September 4

Cletus Seldin is scheduled to face Victor Vazquez on September 4 at the Paramount Theatre in Huntington, New York, USA. This bout will take place in the junior welterweight division.

Seldin (25-1, 21 KOs) is a 34 year old with a wrecking ball for a right hand. After turning pro in 2011, the Hebrew Hammer won his first 21 fights. He appeared on ESPN and HBO. After Yves Ulysse Jr. out-boxed him in his second fight for HBO in 2017, Cletus took eleven months off. Da Hamma has scored four consecutive knockouts, including one over Zab Judah, since the loss.

February 28, 2020 marks the date of Seldin's last professional fight, eighteen months ago. While he might be rusty come fight night, he will be in shape. Cletus has spent the pandemic training, including lost distance running.

Victor Vazquez (11-5, 5 KOs) is a 25 year old pressure fighter. The Puerto Rican from Yonkers, New York is fresher (with ten fewer fights), has been more active (last fighting in April) and is three inches taller than Seldin at 5'10". He primarily fights from the orthodox stance, but he will switch to southpaw.

Boxers are tougher than the average human, and Vazquez is tougher than the average boxer. Human beings tend to be about 60% water, but El Flaco (The Skinny) is about 60% heart. When a fighter has a ton of heart, it usually means they exhibit poor defense and possess a weak chin. Victor is no exception.

Vazquez is the B side, but he's no pushover. Seven of his eleven wins have come against opponents with winning records. He has been stopped on three occasions, but the combined record of those fighters is currently an extremely impressive 44-3-3. He also beat 14-0 Ricardo Garcia in 2017, but that win looked more impressive at the time. Garcia is now 14-8-1.

The best moment of Vazquez's career came against 2016 Olympic gold medalist Fazliddin Gaibnazarov. Fayzi, a southpaw from Uzbekistan, went down 15 seconds into his pro debut for an official knockdown. But it appeared as if the Olympic champion had stepped on Vazquez's foot and gone down as Victor missed a right. Vazquez chomped on a Fayzi left in the next round and fell. He got up and wanted to continue, but the fight was stopped.

Vazquez is often too square right in front of his foes. When he pressures, he doesn't come in behind the jab. Instead, he throws reckless power punches from the outside and launches four shots in the hopes of landing one. He keeps his left hand low which leaves him open for the overhand right, which happens to be Seldin's signature punch. Vazquez is often wobbled in fights, but he always keeps fighting back... if they let him.

Against Seldin, Vazquez would be wise to box, but he won't. His team announced before his 2018 fight with southpaw prospect Josue Vargas that Vazquez would box. That lasted about thirty seconds when Vazquez's true nature surfaced and he attacked Vargas. It made for a very exciting fight. Victor was eventually stopped in the seventh round when his corner waved it off. The Yonkers man had taken a ton of punishment but would not go down or stop throwing. His fight against Anthony Mercado five months later was an even more thrilling fight. Young Vic survived a knockdown early and a near stoppage in a close decision loss. In fact, ref Gary Rosato nearly stepped in and stopped it on two different occasions: one when Vazquez was on his way out and later when Mercado was all but done.

Though the bout is scheduled for ten rounds, it might be a short night, not because of an overly wide difference in class, but because Vazquez's style seems perfect for Seldin. He'll be there to hit and when he gets hit by Da Hamma, the fight might not last long.  If Vazquez can make it out of the first round, he'll show a ton of guts, and win some fans along the way. But Cletus will win the fight.

An Unimportant Encounter with the Champ

This is the second boxing-related memory of my grandma who passed away a year ago. The first is here.

My grandmother's other connection to boxing is something to roll out at cocktail parties. It was 1940 and my grandmother was 12 years old. Her brother Kenny, alternately nicknamed Dinky and Lefty, ran with the same crew as Jake LaMotta, the oldest living world champion boxer at the time of his death on September 17, 2017 at the age of 95 and the subject of the Oscar-winning flick Raging Bull.

LaMotta, 19 at the time, was an amateur boxer and married to his first wife, a Jewish woman. ("My first wife divorced me because I clashed with the drapes," LaMotta would say.) The crew attended parties, enjoyed dancing and drinking. My grandmother even remembers him coming over to her house once.

"Wow, that's amazing, Grandma!"
"No it isn't. It doesn't matter. It means nothing to me. It isn't important. You mentioned boxing, so this is what I thought about, but it isn't important."

At the time of this conversation, my grandmother didn't like to think about the past; she'd rather focus on the present and finding ways to make the aging process as comfortable for her as possible. But one woman's discarded memories are sometimes another man's treasured family history.

A Night in the Bronx

I began writing this article after a 2013 visit with my grandmother. During that visit, I attempted to unearth some of her formative memories, which was no small feat. Pain defined her past. She passed away last year at the age of 92 and I felt the urge to memorialize her by completing this article in time for her yahrzeit.

A Jewish family sits around their radio at 1422 Washington Avenue, across the street from PS 55, in the Bronx. My grandmother, five years old at the time, remembers the hoots and hollers spewing from her relatives and being thoroughly confused by it. She knows enough to understand the family's cheers are directed towards Max Baer, a heavyweight with a Jewish star on his trunks. In subsequent years, Baer's link to Judaism has been questioned, but in those moments of his fight a mile and a half away at Yankee Stadium against a member of the new-found Nazi nation, Max Schmeling, it doesn't matter whether or not Baer has been circumcised; Max is considered as kosher as a box of matzo on Pesach. But my grandmother could not have understood the implications of the contest.

This idyllic scene in the Bronx living room masks a troubled childhood and a difficult life. At the age of eleven, my grandmother was thrown into a Jewish orphanage like an unwanted couch. Her father was absent and her mother was ill-equipped to deal with her fifth and youngest child. None of my grandmother's adult siblings summoned the desire to take in their kin. When my grandmother married at the age of 19, her mother sat shiva for her because my grandfather was a gentile. Her new in-laws weren't any more compassionate, both being anti-Semitic immigrants. Adulthood was equally as cruel; she outlived her son, my father, by 30 years and remained a widow for her last 20. Those tragedies fueled her lifelong struggle with depression.

But on June 8, 1933, my grandmother was an adorable child with her innocence in hand and her life ahead. She remembers the people congregating around the radio for a single purpose. It was a rare occasion when they truly were some semblance of a family.

My grandmother doesn't remember the specifics of the fight. She doesn't remember the clubbing lefts Baer fired into Schmeling's face in the first round. She doesn't remember when Baer faked another left and came back with a hard overhand right and then another. She doesn't remember the Livermore Larupper out-muscling Schmeling throughout the bout and grabbing the German behind the neck with his left while smacking him around with the right. Or the explosive right Baer landed while Schmeling was on the ropes. She doesn't remember the slick way the smaller Schmeling parried Baer's punches when he wasn't being nailed. Or when Baer began an unanswered flurry with a devastating right and punctuated it with another monstrous right that floored a dazed Schmeling. And she doesn't remember Schmeling getting up, stumbling around, and being punched in the back of the head before referee Arthur Donovan could wave off the punishment.

Baer would later go on to win the world heavyweight championship after destroying Primo Carnera and then lose the crown to Jim Braddock. Max retired from the ring in 1941. Some consider him the only Jewish heavyweight champion of the modern era while others question his link to the Jewish people. For my grandmother's family, and countless others like them, Baer's victory over Schmeling symbolized Jewish strength in the face of impending vulnerability. And for my grandma, Baer's bludgeoning of the Nazis' favored son starred in one of her painfully few pleasant memories of a mostly nonexistent family.

2021 Israeli Amateur Championships

The lines between the amateur ranks and the pro game have become increasingly blurred in boxing. Some Jewish boxers who have turned pro were able to fight in last week's Israeli amateur championships. After going pro, Miroslav Kapuler, Yotham Shalom, Mikhael Ostroumov, and Arthur Abramov all took part in the tournament held in Oranit.

Kapuler, who has also fought under the surname Ishchenko, dominated the 71 kg division. He stopped his first opponent in the second round and then swept his next two foes five to nothing on points. Miroslav is 2-0 as a pro with one KO. He last fought professionally in April.

After a bye in the quarterfinals, Shalom edged a victory in the semis by the score of 3-2. He swept the finals of the 57 kg division 5-0 on points. Yotham is 2-0-1 as a pro with one KO. His last fight for pay was a decision victory in 2019. He has been scheduled to fight professionally since then, but his fights have fallen through due to covid-19 restrictions.

Ostroumov stopped his opponent in the semis of the 86 kg division in the first round of the contest after earning a bye in the quarters. The tough body-assaulting southpaw dropped a decision in the final to 21-year old Yan Zak. Mikhael, sometimes spelled Mikhail, is 3-0-1 as a pro with one KO.

Abramov was stopped by Zak in the third round of their semifinal encounter. Arthur won his lone pro fight by way of first round knockout. That bout took place in January of 2020.

The entire tournament results can be viewed here.