Facebook ‘friends’ become frenemies

March 25, 2012 at 12:02a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

“I’m going to hurt this boy. There’s an old saying that goes, ‘Your arms are too short to box with God.’ I’m not God, but in the ring I’m the closest thing to it.”

“Hammerin’” Hank Lundy

“Dangerous” Dannie Williams was Facebook friends with Hank Lundy long before they were scheduled to fight.

Once the fight was made, though, Lundy wasn’t quite so friendly. (Sample post: “Can’t wait to knock this bull head the [expletive] off, I’m so ready wish I was fight n today.”)

“I’d get on Facebook and look at my news feed and he was always saying something,” said Williams (21-1, 17 KOs), who will meet Lundy (21-1-1, 11 KOs) in a 10-round NABF lightweight bout in Connecticut on Friday on ESPN2. “I’d just look at it and I’d laugh to myself.

“After awhile, it gets annoying because it’s been going on for so long.”

Williams, though, kept quiet. He’s not a talker.

His trainer, Southside Boxing Club owner Jack Loew, is a talker. He didn’t keep quiet.

“Lundy’s putting all the pressure on himself,” Loew said. “He’s shooting his mouth of all over the Internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s a good boxer but he’s going off of two victories.

“He got stopped by John Molina. [Lundy] said he was winning the whole fight. Well, at the end of the day, you lost the fight. You got stopped. And John Molina is probably the most overrated lightweight out there besides Hank Lundy.”

Lundy’s biggest win was his last one, knocking out David Diaz in the sixth round in August.

“I used to be a big David Diaz fan ... five years ago,” Loew said. “The guy’s walking on his heels, he can’t say his name right and you knocked him out on TV. Well, you got dropped and hurt by David Diaz [in the fourth round], who can’t knock nobody down.”

There’s more — nobody loves a verbal feud more than Loew — but that’s plenty. Loew compares Friday’s bout to Kelly Pavlik’s fights with Jose Luis Zertuche and Edison Miranda. Pavlik entered those fights as a big underdog and left with knockout victories.

“I’ve been through it before,” Loew said. “Lundy’s never been there. His people have never been there.

“When you go into a fight like this, where you’ve got two comparable kids on the crossroads, you’ve got to go with the puncher. One clip on the chin and it could be over.”

Williams said he’s had a great training camp — “I’ve never felt this ready in my life,” he said — and knows he needs to win convincingly to take Lundy’s title.

“When you fight somebody with a title, you can’t go in there and try to out-box the champ,” he said. “You’ve got to go in there and take it.”

Lundy is ranked fourth by the WBC, while Williams is ninth. The winner of Friday’s bout could move up as high as second and would likely be a fight or two away from a title shot.

“Dannie knows what’s in front of him,” Loew said. “It wasn’t hard getting Dannie motivated or ready to fight.”

What is hard is getting Williams to talk trash.

“I don’t be doing that,” he said. “That ain’t my job.

“My job is to perform in the ring.”