At 6-foot-1 and 232 or so tightly coiled muscles, heavyweight Amir “Hardcore” Mansour certainly has the appearance of someone who would be quite comfortable on a football field. Early in Mansour’s Nov. 8, 2014, bout against veteran Fred Kassi in Bethlehem, Pa., cruiserweight contender B.J. Flores, the color analyst for the NBC SportsNet telecast’s main event, suggested as much.
“He looks like one of those fighters that could have played a lot of different sports,” Flores said of Mansour. “He’s really strong, explosive, and athletic. He could have been a nice running back or a nice outside linebacker, a strong safety, something like that.
“A couple of fights ago you saw him do that standing backflip in the middle of the ring. It’s very rare that a 235-pound man can do standing backflips. He’s got that type of athleticism.”
As it turns out, the now-43-year-old Mansour ( 22-1-1, 16 KOs), who takes on 6-7, 260-pound Dominic Breazeale (16-0, 14 KOs) in a scheduled 10-rounder this Saturday night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the televised lead-in to the main event on Premier Boxing Champions on Fox, in which Danny “Swift” Garcia (31-0, 18 KOs) and Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (33-3-1, 18 KOs) square off for the vacant WBC welterweight championship, was a former football star.
“I was a defensive end, and real good, too,” Mansour said. “Of course, that was just in the Midget League. I wanted to play in high school, but I couldn’t go out for the freshman team because I had gotten hit by a car in the summer and cracked three of my ribs. My mom went to the coach and said she didn’t want me to play, so I didn’t. But I did play freshman basketball and did pretty good.”
Based strictly on football accomplishments, Breazeale, 30, would seem to have a significant edge on Mansour. Blessed with a cannon for a right arm, the Alhambra, Calif., native spent a chunk of his college career throwing passes for the University of Northern Colorado Bears. But when his dreams of playing pro football didn’t pan out, Breazeale was signed by the now-deceased Michael King to be part of All-American Heavyweights, which King launched in 2007 with the idea of transforming good athletes in other sports, such as football and basketball, into world-class boxers. The experiment produced mostly negligible results, but Breazeale did represent the United States at the 2012 London Olympics (he lost in the first round) and he has been honing his still-rudimentary ring skills ever since.
Now, with the NFL playoffs about to pare down to the two teams that will appear in Super Bowl 50, Mansour, the Midget League star, gets another chance to do what all pass-rushers especially love: sock the quarterback. And make no mistake, he intends to do just that.
“I see a guy that comes to fight,” Mansour said of Breazeale. “He goes after his man. I don’t underestimate nobody, especially anybody with his height and size. Anybody that big can pack a punch.”
But …
“I pack a punch, too,” Mansour said. “You saw what happened with Seth Mitchell (the former Michigan State linebacker who was viewed by some as a heavyweight on the rise a couple of years ago). As soon as Mitchell stepped up in competition (a second-round stoppage by Johnathan Banks and a first-round knockout to Chris Arreola) we discovered he couldn’t take a punch.
“Look, football players wear helmets. There’s always a question with any fighter coming from football whether he can take a real hit. Being a big, athletic guy doesn’t mean he can. Some men might be able to make that transition, but I’m not convinced this kid can. Boxing is a whole different world from football.”
With the heavyweight division in a state of flux in the aftermath of Tyson Fury’s dethronement of the long-reigning Wladimir Klitschko, every fighter with a spiffy record and a discernible pulse has a reason to believe his time to shine is closer than it’s been in years. Although neither Mansour nor Breazeale is rated in the top 10 by any of the main world sanctioning bodies (Mansour is No. 19 in the WBC ratings to Breazeale’s No. 28), whomever registers a victory on Saturday night, and particularly if it’s an impressive one, has cause to believe something really good is apt to come sooner rather than later. Mansour, a very interested party, was among the 12,668 in attendance at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., this past weekend in which WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (36-0, 35 KOs) starched challenger Artur Szpilka (20-2, 15 KOs) in nine rounds and Charles Martin (23-0-1, 23 KOs) won the vacant IBF heavyweight title on a third-round TKO of Vyacheslav Glazkov (21-1-1, 13 KOs), who injured his right knee and was unable to continue.
Forget ratings. Anyone who saw Szpilka, Martin and Glazkov do their best non-imitations of Tyson, Holyfield and Lewis understood that what’s happening now is not a return to the golden age of heavyweights. Even Wilder, who knocked Szpilka cold with a crushing overhand right, should still be considered something of a work in progress. With the possible exception of Wilder, a Tuscaloosa, Ala., resident who dreamed of playing football for the Alabama Crimson Tide, a case can be made that Mansour, at his best, is as good as or better than any of the heavyweights on display last Saturday at the Barclays Center.
Mansour, in fact, was in the running to get the shot at Wilder that ultimately went to Szpilka. With a bit of imaginative thinking, it is easy for the powerfully constructed southpaw—who was born in Salem, N.J., raised in Penns Grove, N.J., now lives in Wilmington, Del., and trains in Philadelphia—to think that he could have succeeded where the willing but doomed Pole did not.
“I was very, very close to fighting Wilder,” Mansour said, wistfully. “I believe I’m going to be that much closer after this fight with Breazeale.”
Comparative results are never trustworthy, but Mansour’s exclamation-point conquest of Kassi stands in stark contrast to the difficulty Breazeale had in scoring a unanimous decision over the New Orleans journeyman. Although Breazeale won by margins of four, six and 10 points on the official scorecards, Sugar Ray Leonard, the color analyst for the PBC on NBC telecast, had it as a 95-95 draw. Contrast that with Mansour’s total domination of Kassi, which was capped when he landed an explosive right hook to the jaw that sent Kassi crashing face-first to the canvas, unconscious, in the seventh round.
“A thunderous right by Amir Mansour, and Kassi is out cold!” yelped blow-by-blow announcer Kenny Rice. “That was a devastating, one-punch knockout by Amir Mansour!”
It will be interesting to see if Mansour, with a 74-inch reach to Breazeale’s 81-inch reach, will be able to work his way in close enough to do unto Brezeale the sort of damage he inflicted upon the unfortunate Kassi, which, it should be noted, was voted “Knockout of the Year” for 2014 by The Ring magazine.
“I’m not going to trade with the guy from the outside,” Mansour conceded. “That would be foolish against someone with that much of a height and reach advantage. My plan is to get inside, to make things uncomfortable for Breazeale, and it’s going to happen.
“Look, everybody knew Joe Louis had that left hook. When you fought Joe Louis, you knew that left hook was coming. Most times, nobody could stop it. I got that kind of right hook. Let’s see if he can stop it. I know I’m faster on my feet than he is. I know my hand speed is better. I hit harder and I’ve shown I can take a pretty good punch. Let’s take it from there.”
Mansour understands that, at his age, he doesn’t have much time to waste. A nine-year stretch in prison for drug trafficking—“Growing up the way I did, in the environment that I was in, selling drugs was a way of surviving,” he said of a past he has worked hard to put behind him—has helped, in a roundabout way, to keep his boxing age younger than the age on his birth certificate.
“There’s no reason for me to be worn-out,” he said. “I haven’t been in any real wars. I take good care of my body. I try to eat right, live right. I don’t worry about the age thing at all. In any case, I’m still learning, still getting better.”
Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.