Battle of the 90's Journeymen, Cooper vs Thunder

I know Smith Trained at the Joe Frazier gym early in his career. Joe worked with a handful of HWS his son Obviously Marvis Frazier and Cooper being the ones I remember most. Marvis really had that Frazier fighting spirit, just not quite the chin or tools of pops, but he fought hard. I think he's remembered mainly for being crushed in 30 seconds by Tyson and the KO1 Loss to Holmes, but he had some good wins as well.

 

DANG, Funso Banjo that is a name I haven't thought of in some time, well played sir.. Almost as good a name (but not quite) as Courage Tshabalala!!!! I will never forget how much HBO hyped up that guy.

I remember I believe after the card they billed as "Night of the Young Heavyweights" which featured:
Tua vs Ruiz
Briggs vs Wilson
Golota vs Nicholsen

Merchant in his closing take of the night said something like

"All Night long I have been thinking about Courage Tshabalala"
he then described him as this killing machine who supposedly had recorded 72 wins and only 1 loss as an Amateur with all 72 wins by KO!!!!

I remember he had been buried on the under card that night along with Jameel Mccline, Michael Grant, David Izon and others.

Anyway I was so intrigued by this phenom!!

Then FF a little bit and he was once again on another triple header HW under card Ironically, again fight not shown but I think they showed a HL or talked about his fight briefly. Anyway they said he was lucky to get a split dec vs TIM NOBEL!! Now being the boxing fanatic I was and am I knew who Nobel was. My first thought was, the journeyman that Briggs destroyed on Top Rank Boxing??? Needless to say I was puzzled how this "wrecking machine" could have struggled with Nobel???

Go ahead and FF about another 5/6 months if memory serves and Courage was on the Under card of the Bowe vs Golota 2 PPV, which also featured Lewis vs Mercer. And he was going to be televised vs Brian Scott who is no world beater but I got to see the mighty Courage under the BIG LIGHTS..

I knew "the opponent" Brian Scott I remembered him losing to Morrison on Top Rank Boxing KO2 I believe. I also had remembered a HL of Jorge Luis Gonzalez Busting his face open (Scott's) on the under card of Bowe vs Hide when they were hyping Bowe vs Gonzalez. I remember a funny story attached that Scott took the fight while on his honeymoon and when Gonzalez splattered his bloody face all about the ring his new wife was snapping pics of his destruction for memories......... ok lol...

anyway my 2 year old needs a bath so Ill put a pin in this story for now lol...

To be continued

 

LOL, yeah totally man HBO definitely was feeding that hype train for sure!! And I was right there gobbling every morsel up. Like you I scoured for anything I could find on Courage long before the days of the Internet. I had contacts all over the world that I actively traded fights with at that point.. So if a fight was televised in some markets overseas somebody would record it and send it to me. This was accomplished through writing letters back-and-forth all guys who had at some point listed ads in boxing illustrated magazine as I myself did as well... I've still got a huge box full of all those letters and peoples fight lists.. I haven't looked at them in probably 15 years or more I should take them out sometime and look them over, they would probably be comical now.. And I'm sure a representation of that time period. We would write back-and-forth just like how people now use email but those were the days of handwritten letters. We would obviously make phone calls from time to time as well, but there was always a letter sent with whatever fights you were exchanging.. And a lot of times it would be on a more personal note, like how you doing, this is what we've been up to, and vice versa.

I originally got into that very early in my boxing watching because I would hear about a fight and I would want to see it so I shelled out some cash and ordered some old stuff that predated my boxing recording so anything late 70s because I pretty much had (have) the entire 80s and then EVERYTHING going forward, dad was recording stuff before me when I was very young. I then took the reins and started recording stuff myself in the mid-80s.

Once the Internet age came about I had my own website and it was always more designed to build my own collection and continue to enhance it so I always wanted to trade first if you had something that I wanted. But being as my collection was so large many people just wanted to buy things as they had nothing to offer in trade. So I started selling fights online. I think I used to charge like $25 bucks per SP tape (2hrs) but if you ordered multiple types obviously you got a discount with each additional tape you ordered.. I did that for years and it was all I could do to keep up I had that many orders.

UNTIL...............

I got a FedEx overnight letter from showtime network requesting that I take down all my showtime fights from my website that were offered for sale or trade or that they would take legal action.

Needless to say I canned the website immediately.....

I still see if sites floating around out there on the Internet and I have no idea how they are getting away with it.

I'm not even sure what the loophole is on YouTube with uploading boxing because I see people uploading fights and then it seems like the fights eventually get taken down and a lot of times the YouTube accounts get suspended, but then I have several channels that I follow that have been putting fights up for years with no penalty..??? So again I don't know what the loophole is.. I've Thought about sharing a bunch of my fights on YouTube because I have so much stuff that is not out there but I wouldn't want to get my YouTube account suspended or get in to any kind of trouble "again" lol..

Man, this conversation took a hard left turn as I'm way off my original topic.

Like you said you are well aware of journeyman Scott came into the Tshabalala fight weighing in at 280 pounds!!! He weighed in the 220s when he fought Morrison and didn't look superfit at that point so you can imagine what he looked like with 60 more pounds. A Disgusting blob of goo!!

I haven't watched the fight in years, and I know it's not on YouTube many of those undercard pay-per-view fights are not on YouTube... I however have all of them on tape because I literally ordered every PPV from the time we could get PPV in our homes which in my area the First one available in home was Evander Holyfield versus Rid**** Bowe fight #1.

I remember renting a hotel room at the Local Holiday Inn and we packed something like 25 guys in there and watched Foreman versus Holyfield.. It's funny to me looking back now that pay-per-view was available at that point in a hotel room but not in your home.

Anyway to actually finish my story, Brian Scott being grossly out of shape went on to "of course" knock. Courage out in 2 rounds.........

And that pretty much put an end to the Courage Tshabalala story..

Though he did have a good war on Tuesday night fights, (we will go ahead and circle the wagons since that was my original topic here) with Darroll Wilson I believe it was at the blue horizon and both men at the canvas, very good s****.

 

I hear ya man, me and a buddy pulled out some of my old tapes a few weekends back, we watched Toney vs Jirov (a classic) Moorer vs Cooper, and Holyfield vs Cooper what usually happens is a few guys will come over for a live fight and then want more boxing!

I remember for years when the guys would be over they'd always want me to get old Tyson fights and though many of the kos are nice, Mike while champion is the 80's was so dominant that the fights were not competitive. So though I like Mike I grew tired of watching him as frequently as they wanted and so I just started winging stuff at them.

They had no idea what something like Saad-Muhammad vs Lopez was for example but after the fact they never forgot!!