FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

The British boxer David Haye is the undisputed cruiserweight champion of the world, but people just don't pay any attention to cruiserweights. So Haye is giving up his cruiserweight title and will fight at heavyweight, where he thinks he can unify the belts, even though he'll be fighting guys significantly bigger than him.

But Haye's ambitions don't end with being heavyweight champion of the world in boxing. Haye says he also wants to try his hand at mixed martial arts. From The Sun:

"It's just another challenge. I like to set myself goals and tasks and fighting for the UFC heavyweight championship would be a real big thing for me.

"I'd do whatever was required to get that win.

"I'm a fighter, through and through - any kind of competition.

"I'd be a big underdog and I'd actually like that. I like people writing me off."

Olympic athletes often don't get paid to do anything other than look good. In that vein, Attractive Olympians handicaps which athletes may rake in endorsement deals after the Olympics.

Demetrius Andrade isn't old enough to buy beer, but he's the reigning world AIBA champion at 152 pounds. Along with flyweight roommate Rau'shee Warren, the 20-year-old from Connecticut became the USA's first world champion since 1999 when he dominated Thailand's Non Boonjumnong in a fight that was stopped before the second round ended.

Andrade is young but well established in the amateur ranks of the sport. The son of a boxer, he's been training in the ring since age six. He repeated as gold medalist at the U.S. Amateur Boxing Championship in '05-'06 and was a Golden Glove winner in '06 and '07. Before his gold in Chicago, he lost a narrowly contested and controversial championship bout at the Pan Am Games in 2007, where he settled for silver.

He may be a favorite for gold in Beijing, but does Andrade have the right features for underwear ads and adoring fluff pieces in People? After the jump, examine the visual evidence and vote in our tastefully superficial poll.

Chances are, unless you're a close follower of Thai Olympians, the name Manus Boonjumnong is a new one to you. He was the 2004 gold medalist in light welterweight boxing and, as a result, won some $600,000 in bonuses. He promptly blew all of it in a frenzy of gambling and partying which cost him both his national respect and his pregnant wife.

Thailand wants to be sure that history doesn't repeat itself this summer so they're going to act like parents of small children. They're still offering fistfuls of Baht to winning athletes, $314,000 for a gold, but they won't fork it all over at once. 2008 medalists will get half their money paid out over 20 years.

"We don't want them to spend it all at once, they might need this money when they get old," Thai Olympic committee member Charoen Wattanasin said. "We will give it to them every month. Most of them manage their finances but there have been a few bad examples in the past."

Strangely enough, Boonjumnong himself may end up being a test case for the success of the new payout system. He's expected to contend for a medal again this summer, though you'd have to wonder why a man with his taste for the high life didn't turn pro in the intervening years.

Video games are so much better now than they were 20 years ago that this sounds ridiculous to say, but I can't believe there's ever been a better boxing video game than Mike Tyson Punch-Out:

There was just something perfect about that game, the ease of beating Glass Joe to get started, the tricks of learning how to beat King Hippo and Great Tiger and Bald Bull, and the excitement of facing Mike Tyson, who at the time was almost a mythical character.

So it's nice to learn that Tyson will be part of EA Sports Fight Night 4. We have a very, very different view of Tyson now than we had in 1987, when Punch-Out came out, but he's one of the legendary figures in video game history, and it's good to see that he's back.

I'm beginning to wonder what is more likely to happen during my lifetime - the discovery of life on Mars or a unified heavyweight title. I'd love to say the latter because I think it would be good for a sport I enjoy but year after year goes by without any movement toward that end. A big part of the problem has been Ruslan Chagaev's immune system.

The current WBA titleist was scheduled to fight Nikolai Valuev on May 31. He beat Valuev by majority decision in April 2007 to win the belt but the rematch has been put on hold because Chagaev is suffering from a viral infection. It was hoped, in these quarters at least, that the winner would then meet Wladimir Klitschko or Samuel Peter to make the title picture clearer.

It's the second time Chagaev's health has forestalled such clarity. He was supposed to fight Sultan Ibragimov last year to unite two links in the alphabet soup but Chagaev contracted hepatitis B. Ibragimov fought Evander Holyfield instead before losing his belt to Klitschko. Ideally Klitschko would face Peter but he's scheduled a match with also-ran Tony Thompson instead so that his brother Vitali can pursue a fight with Peter.

A Vitali win would make unification nigh on impossible since the Klitschkos refuse to fight one another. Between that, Chagaev's health and the general inanity of boxing's governing bodies I'm brushing up on my Martian.

Oscar De La Hoya defeated Steve Forbes tonight by unanimous decision, beginning his farewell tour with a solid showing in front of an overwhelmingly pro-De La Hoya Cinco de Mayo weekend crowd in Carson, California.

De La Hoya said before the fight that he would use his jab effectively, and that's exactly what he did. He was cautious early before turning more to power punches in the middle of the fight, and he opened a gash near Forbes' eye in the sixth round and controlled throughout.

Still, some will find it a bit disappointing that De La Hoya wasn't even more dominant. Forbes entered the ring having never been knocked down, but most people thought De La Hoya would drop him before the ninth round. That didn't happen; that the fight went 12 was a minor victory for Forbes.

De La Hoya improved his record to 39-5; Forbes dropped to 33-6. Up next for De La Hoya is a likely September rematch with Floyd Mayweather.

David A Avila of MSNBC has a report on drug testing in mixed martial arts that provides some good news and some bad for the sport.

First, the good: The two headliners for the main event in the upcoming UFC 84 show, Sean Sherk and B.J. Penn, were both administered unannounced drug tests last month, and both passed. Sherk was suspended and stripped of his lightweight title after he tested positive for steroids last year, and it would have been a huge black eye for UFC if he had failed another drug test.

But here's the bad news: California State Athletic Commission executive officer Armando Garcia says the drug problems in mixed martial arts are real, and more significant than in boxing:

"We have 120 shows in boxing and 60 in MMA and the numbers coming out are super high," said Garcia. "It's a no-brainer. There's more drug usage in MMA than boxing."

As MMA gets more mainstream, drug use within the sport will get more scrutiny. The sport needs to be prepared for that scrutiny.

When heavyweight champion Randy Couture left UFC, he did it because he said his pay wasn't commensurate with his contributions to UFC. And since then, he has frequently talked to the media about the way UFC pays far less than boxing.

But Kevin Iole has a great piece at MMA Junkie that delves into the actual pay earned by boxers and UFC fighters. And the bottom line is that when you consider that UFC awards bonuses and allows fighters to sell ad space on their trunks, the pay is actually better than most people realize.

When Frank Mir beat Brock Lesnar, for instance, his base pay was only $40,000. But he got a win bonus of $40,000, a submission of the night bonus of $60,000 and $85,000 from the companies whose logos appeared on his shorts. All in all, $225,000 for that fight was an impressive haul, and more than any other promoter would have paid him to fight Lesnar.

Couture is a smart guy, and if he thinks he can make more money outside UFC than he can in it, he's probably right. But Couture is one of very, very few MMA fighters who can make more outside UFC -- and he wouldn't have gotten to that position without the promotion he got in UFC.

Oscar De La Hoya will box Steve Forbes Saturday night in a fight that no one really gives Forbes any chance of winning. Based on the odds at Bodog, you have to bet $2,000 to win $100 on De La Hoya, or you can bet $100 to win $1,000 on Forbes.

But Tim Dahlberg raises an interesting point: If De La Hoya were to lose, would this be not just the beginning of his farewell tour but also the end?

The most lucrative fight in boxing would be a De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather rematch, which everyone expects will happen in the fall. But such a rematch would lose any credibility it has now if De La Hoya were fighting the best boxer in the world while coming off a loss to a mediocre boxer whom people only know because he was on The Contender.

So would De La Hoya, knowing his Mayweather rematch had lost credibility, just decide to hang up the gloves? I think there's a chance he would, and that would be a sad way for De La Hoya to go out. Fortunately, it's not going to happen.

Here in Washington, we all had a few laughs when in between whistles on the jumbotron the home team decided to play a couple of scenes from Rocky IV where Ivan Drago was beating the spit out of the (fictional) pride of Philadelphia. As it turns out, Rocky is a more popular target than one would imagine, as the following video evidence suggests:



The culprits here are a pair of shock jocks from 96.9 CKOI-FM, a French-language station in Montreal.

HT: The 700 Level.