Dave Reardon: Return of Wie West, Moore a bonus for Hawaii fans
It’s hard for me to think of three sports that differ more from each other than boxing, golf, and soccer. They intersected in my mind recently because of the concept of unretirement. People get out of the proverbial rocking chair all the time for all kinds of reasons, and not just in sports.
The star athlete most famous for it — and why it is most associated with boxing — is Sugar Ray Leonard. He retired and came back so many times in the 1980s and ’90s it’s hard to remember exactly how many. Three, I think.
Anyway, so many times that it became a punchline (sorry, couldn’t resist). More recently, Mike Tyson unretired at age 58 to lose to Jake Paul, 27, in 2024. More than 100 million people watched live on Netflix, which started its online streaming services two years after Iron Mike’s last previous pro fight in 2005 (not counting his 2020 exhibition match against Roy Jones Jr.
). Plus, didn’t Rocky unretire, too? Like real- or reel-life boxers, it seems golfers and surfers never really retire, at least in their hearts.
That’s partly why nobody’s really very surprised that Michelle Wie West and Carissa Moore are back, right? “Never say never, but probably not,” Wie West told TMZ in late 2023. The timing last week was a slight red flag, since there was news about both superstar former child prodigies’ returns around April 1.