It’s that season, boxing fans. No, not pumpkin spice. No, not sweater weather. No, not Halloween. It’s International Boxing Hall of Fame — or IBHOF, if you will — Ballot season!
The Hall of Fame ballots just keep getting heavier and heavier, name-wise. For 2021’s induction, names like Floyd Mayweather, James Toney and Miguel Cotto stand out as not only great fighters on a page full of them, but as entertainers with enviable fan bases.
There always seems to be caveat, though, and this year COVID-19 was a huge, dumb asterisk right in the middle of everything. The Coronavirus pandemic all but ruined half of 2020’s boxing, but it also postponed the year’s beloved IBHOF induction weekend. No induction weekend meant a whole lot of boxing fans were sad.
That’s not to downplay the deadliness of COVID-19 or the lives lost either; unfortunately the boxing community has been hit particularly hard. When you’re a die-hard boxing fan whose life revolves around the fight game in one way or another, though, it’s difficult to forget the consequences of a pandemic like this on smaller aspects of fandom.
The proverbial show must go on. In this case that means we soldier forth and proffer our IBHOF ballots for the 2021 induction year. There are so many recognizable names any five picks are bound to be viewed as excluding someone, having some weird bias or being straight-up wrong.
Luckily the Knuckles and Gloves Boxing Radio podcast has not one or even two IBHOF voters, but THREE. On this episode, two of them in Patrick Connor and Aris Pina run down much of this year’s ballot and explain their choices. There was a small matter of Teofimo Lopez, Jr.’s win over Vasiliy Lomachenko to talk about first, however.
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