Juan Manuel Marquez v. Manny Pacquiao up next...

We're in the 11th round of the final prelim match before the main event. The undercard has been decent though not particularly compelling. The most entertaining component of the PPV has been Larry Merchant's recollections of a recent trip to Thailand. They've pretty much dropped the subject since earlier in this fight Jim Lampley started to elude to Merchant's other activities while in Bangkok: "What else did you do in Thailand, Larry?" Lamps asked with knowing glee. Merchant hemmed and hawed that he'd talk about that some other time. If it ever gets to the point where I'm having to listen to Larry Merchant Oriental whorehouse stories during a boxing broadcast I might look for another line of work. I'm a big Merchant fan and I'm pleased to know that he's still getting it done at the age of 125 or however old he is, but I sure as hell don't want to hear about it.

Best crowd reaction of the night was to a shot of a very docile looking Mike Tyson on the video screen at the Mandalay Bay. Tyson seemed to be enjoying the adulation and his presence allowed Lamps to elude to the shot of Tyson fumbling for his mouthpiece in Tokyo against Buster Douglas when one of the prelim fighters had a mouth protection "wardrobe malfunction". I hope you people read my rant against Bob Costas over at the Epic Carnival earlier today --Costas was getting all sanctimonious about the sizable chasm of professionalism between "real" sports journalists such as himself and "unreal" sports journalists on the Internet like myself. I cracked back on Costas and with good reason--there is very little excellence in "mainstream" sports journalism and a lot of catch phrase yammering hacks. Lampley is a marked exception and is basically as good as it gets--I began to worship at the altar of Lamps when I was listening to the radio show he used to have (on Fox Sports Radio if I remember correctly). It was mid to late July, and the talk was about boxing (of course), baseball, a little NASCAR and the forthcoming college and pro football season. Somehow a dweeb got through to Lamps who wanted to talk about Anaheim Mighty Ducks goaltender Jean-Sebastian Gigure. A lesser man would have simply brushed the caller off with a smart assed comment that no one cares about hockey, or at very least that no one cares about it in the middle of August. Not Lamps--he quickly dismissed the caller, of course, but in the process succinctly and accurately broke down the strengths and weaknesses of Gigure's game. Given the fact that it was mid summer there was no way in hell that he was prepped for that--the man pulled it off without a hitch right off the top of his head. In any case, Lampley's professionalism at sports in general is so head and shoulders above most of his peers that its not even funny and with all due respect to the other solid fight announcers when it comes to boxing he has no peer...

Anyway, we're sitting through the three national anthems right now (Mexico, Philippines and US) and then after a little prefight pageantry we'll be ready to rock...