«I thought it was crap,» George told BoxingScene.com. «I thought Zhilei won the fight 7-5. It could’ve been 8-4, in my opinion. There’s a narrative with that fight that Zhilei gave away the last few rounds. He didn’t give away the last few rounds. The last four rounds of the fight were split evenly. Nine to Zhilei, 10 to Hrgovic, 11 to Zhilei, 12 to Hrgovic. To me, the scoring was very easy.»

In the quarterfinals of the 2012 London Olympics, Zhang lost to Anthony Joshua. A year later, after winning a championship at the National Games of China, Zhang retired from the national team at age 30, laying his jersey in the center of the ring after his final fight. Then it was off to New Jersey, but not before he decided to leave his wife and son in China.

Round 4: Solid jabs from Dubois and a nice right hand backs Hrgovic up. Hrgovic slams home another right hand and a jab. Left to the body from Hrgovic. One-two from Hrgovic, who’s finding better timing. It was a good start from Dubois, but the British fighter has lost a step.

«Mike Tyson has been an open book now for 30 years, but in those mid-80s days, he was never jokey or ironic. Some days he would be in a pissy mood and ignore you, and there could be an air of menace to it,» says Layden. «I wasted more than one trip to Las Vegas, but when he wanted to really sit down and talk, usually about the boxing history he reveres so much, we would have engaging intellectual discussions. … When I was covering him, my wife and I started our family, and Mike would ask after my kids. I’ve been doing this a long time, and that never happens.»

It was enough, however, to restore Parker’s confidence as he cleanly outboxed Zhang through most of the middle rounds. Parker maintained control to the point where Shaun George, Zhang’s head trainer and a former light heavyweight contender, urged his charge to apply more pressure. The insistence in the corner was that Parker could not handle the come-forward aggression, though it required a higher output.

Kurbanov (25-1, site here 13 KOs) entered the bout on the heels of a career-best win, a split-decision over Michel Soro. The 27-year-old Kurbanov also owns wins over former titleholders Liam Smith and Patrick Teixeira. Kurbanov is ESPN’s No. 7 junior middleweight.

«It’s concerning to me because just two weeks ago he refereed a fight and he stopped it prematurely,» George said. «And it’s concerning to me that they don’t have the best referee to do the job. His history shows that he messes up in big fights.»

Tyson’s imprisonment had a profound impact on his boxing career and his legacy. He was stripped of his boxing titles and banned from the sport for several years. When he returned to the ring, he was never the same fighter he once was. Tyson’s legal troubles and controversial behavior outside the ring had tarnished his reputation and made him a polarizing figure.

«It was just good, old-fashioned boxing politics,» George said regarding the Hrgovic-Zhilei scoring. «So, Zhilei is going to do what he always does, look for the knockout. We have to knock him out to win. We don’t trust the politics.»

As an amateur, he was highly regarded by American promoters by 2009 after winning a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics and bronze medals at the 2007 and 2009 World Championships. His career stalled from 2009 to 2019, however, by a combination of his belated release from the Chinese boxing authorities to turn professional, the managerial and legal fiasco of two successive fringe promotional companies, and his visa problems. He could not line up high-profile matches until he signed Matchroom Sport in 2020 at 37 years of age. Zhang considered his fight with Jerry Forrest in 2021 to be the landmark moment of his career until that point.

Warner Bros. asserted about 16 defenses. They acknowledged that the tattoos were similar but denied that theirs was a copy. They further argued that «tattoos on the skin are not copyrightable». They reasoned that a human body is a useful article under 17 U.S.C. § 101 and thus not copyrightable. The question of a tattoo’s copyrightability had never been determined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Arguments in the alternative included that Tyson, by allowing them to use his likeness and not objecting to the plot device in The Hangover Part II, had given them an implied license, and that their use of the tattoo constituted fair use as parody because it juxtaposed Tyson as «the epitome of male aggression» with the «milquetoast» Price. Scholar David Nimmer, participating an expert witness for Warner Bros., argued that treating tattoos as copyrightable would violate the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as a badge of slavery; Nimmer’s declaration was then excluded because it was a legal opinion.

«Going back to the history of boxing in China, it’s still a young sport. It only has a history of about 30 years; China started boxing in the eighties. So, in this short time, we have Olympic gold medallists, World Amateur gold medallists, professional world champions. I think boxing is on a fast track in China and our people are definitely following it now. It’s a young sport in China; it’s like a baby in the camp.»