Do you know what time it (almost) is? LADYHAMMER TIME!

Christina Hammer, the German based Kazakh middleweight world champion - who actually has been reigning, quietly, as MW champ every bit as long as her male counterpart & compatriot GGG - was set to make her US debut tonight on ShoBox on the Claressa Shields vs. Tori Nelson undercard, against light middleweight journeywoman Lisa Noel Garland. She was just signed by Dmitry Salita (who promotes Claressa Shields...and whom you may remember from his WBA super lightweight title challenge in 2009, in which Amir Khan blitzed him in a minute) to a multiple fight deal after being freed up last year from her previous contract - with yet another mediocre boxer turned semi-successful third-tier promoter Alexander Petkovic, who did okay by her building up her brand in Europe but could only take her so far.

The plan was obviously for Salita to pit Shields and Hammer against each other (with the former dropping to 160 or the latter jumping to super middle, or perhaps a catchweight) after featuring them on tonight's show together.

Unfortunately, visa issues (her special P1 visa was delayed in the post by the recent weather crises) have spoiled the plan for now. Salita plans to postpone Hammer's stateside debut to March, and still forge ahead with the superfight (assuming Shields gets through Nelson) in the summer.

 

She really is. Kazakh ladies in general are .

Look at GGG's wifey, Alina. She's a smokeshow but actually fairly average by Kazakh standards.

 

Hammer can box quite tidily - but she's disadvantaged in size in a Shields match-up, and lest we forget, her zero has a big asterisk next to it as she probably ought to have a TKO loss to Anne Sophie Mathis on her record...and the Frenchwoman, although taller and probably harder-hitting p4p than Shields, was a 154lber, and not an Olympian (let alone gold medalist)

 

I feel bd for Lisa Noel Garland; she turns 40 in a few months and this is probably the last "big fight" opportunity she was destined to get.

 

Should've been a TKO but originally ruled a DQ win for Hammer, if you can believe it. There was enough outrage they overturned it, but not to a win for Mathis, just a No Contest as compromise.

 

All kidding (and bangability/aesthetic/cooch odor speculative comparisons) aside, Shields vs. Hammer is a great match-up on paper and could give us the kind of high-profile tear-up (with both world class skills on display and styles combining to make for an entertaining fight) that everybody was hoping for in the prolonged and ultimately anticlimactic Layla Ali vs. Ann Wolfe build-up.

Of course neither of these has accrued the mainstream interest that pair did, that ship might have sailed permanently, but given the rise of WMMA in the last few years it might just be possible for women's boxing to eke out a niche for itself (maybe semi-regular televised bouts on, say, ESPN2) with this as the harbinger .