Photo credit: Eddy Poinelli

Jimmy Lange has got the boxing game whupped. The Great Falls junior middleweight parlayed the renown he got from the first-wave reality TV show, The Contender, into a smart career headlining cards near his hometown, in which he gets paid well to beat up mostly club fighters. On paper, he looks like an, um, contender, with a 33-4-2 record. But Lange, who turns 35 this week, appears to have given up dreams of holding a legitimate world title, and his run in the ring has gotten silly lately.

He's now reduced to facing a bunch of, well, McFails.

On Saturday, Lange decisioned a guy in Greensboro with a record of 12 wins and 40 losses and a name to match: Mike McFail.

Really, he beat a guy literally named McFail. This comes after a debacle last year in which state boxing regulators in North Carolina refused to sanction a Lange bout because the desired opponent was a figurative McFail: Jimmy LeBlanc had gone on a 3-15-1 skein before Lange signed to fight him. That bout was canceled before it took place for LeBlanc's safety.

Saturday's fight, Lange's first away from Fairfax since a 2005 Vegas encounter related to his work on "The Contender" series, was billed as a tuneup for Lange's next appearance around here, in November at the Patriot Center.

All we know so far about that fight so far is that Lange'll be at the top of the bill, again, and tickets will cost from $35 to $500. ($500!) His opponent is listed by his handlers as "TBD." Floyd Mayweather's probably busy. But now that McFail's been taken care of, Lange's camp has gotta be on the lookout for a fighter named Lou Zerr. Or maybe Tom Matoekan.

Tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com.

Finley, 81, tells me he's setting up shop in the basement of his Temple Hills home.

"I got the heavy bags up," he says. "I'm getting the ring up. I'm not in a hurry, or on a timetable. But I'm going to do it."

Finley ran the best fight club this town has ever known. For 41 years before its 2001 closing, Finley's Gym sat upstairs from a body shop on Capitol Hill, and could count Bobby Foster, Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, and Sugar Ray Leonard among the world champs who laced 'em up there.

"Everybody who's someone in the fight game walked through Finley's doors," says Chris Ray, a cut man who knows the DC fight scene as well as anybody and is now helping Finley get going. "The man's an institution."

The boxing scenes in Burt Lancaster's 1973 thriller "Scorpio" were shot at Finley's Gym, also.

It wasn't only a place for champs and big names, however.

As the club was closing, DC-based superagent Jeff Fried, who has represented Sharmba Mitchell, Sugar Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather, explained why the loss of Finley's Gym was huge.

"The image of boxing is now Las Vegas marquees and pay-per-view stars," said Fried. "But what people forget is, places like Finley's gym are where they all started. I always loved walking in there and seeing champions and also seeing 16-year-old kids with the big eyes, thinking about what could be, the old guys helping the younger guys, the whole cycle of life, right there in front of you."

Finley walked away from his Capitol Hill gym when his club's landlord tried doubling his rent. And when he left, he left the fight game completely.

Whenever I'd go to big fight nights around here in the years since, I'd ask about Finley's whereabouts, and always get some version of: "Mr. Finley doesn't come out to these things anymore."

Finley now insists he didn't miss boxing during his years away — "I could have stayed away, no problem," Finley tells me. But the excitement in his voice when talking about setting up the basement gym says otherwise.

"It's just my basement, but I got more room than I had at the old place," he says.

Finley never was in boxing for the money. Most fighters who worked out at his old gym paid what they wanted, when they wanted. And Finley says he's going to keep that same loose arrangement in the new venture.

"This isn't commercial or for my [financial ] benefit," he says. "I love working and I have some time on my hands. And, yes, I love the game! So as long as I can contribute to somebody's welfare or happiness, then my bill has been fulfilled. Shakespeare couldn't have said it better, right?"

Welcome back, Mr. Finley.

That means Mitchell's now ex-employer was Dan Snyder.

The same guy has fired the same guy before.

In 2000, Snyder's first offseason of running the Redskins, Mitchell, the team's all-time punt return and kickoff return leader, was let go.

In Thom Loverro's 2007 book, Hail Victory: An Oral History of the Washington Redskins, Mitchell insinuated he got run out of town because he was disliked by Snyder's favorite Redskin, Darrell Green.

That's sorta interesting again, because the owner's pet these days, Clinton Portis, got in a big to-do over the airwaves with Mitchell last year over things the host said about his attitude and play.

Portis and Snyder were recently spotted dining together at N9NE Steakhouse in Vegas.

Vegas!

And now Snyder banishes Mitchell again!

Hmmm.

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Speaking of the underworld: Pittsburgh Penguins winger Miroslav Satan assisted on Games 4's winning goal versus the Capitals on Friday, and helped out on Pitt's first score a day later.

I only bring this up so I can also relate some Awesome Trivia about Satan: His player number in Yahoo sports is... 666!

You can look it up!

Sure, the guy's been around the NHL for 13 years and every beelzebubby joke's been made. (Even the copy editors of the Washington Times, a sectarian paper if there ever was, couldn't resist while headlining this morning's wire story about the Caps/Pens series.)

But hell if the name's not still funny!

And check out his official photo! Tell me Satan's not central casting for Satan!

So when I was reading the wire stories about Friday's game and saw that "Satan feathered the puck through Erskine's legs," of course I giggled. (Hilarious as "Satan" surely is in print, he's "Shuh-tan" on radio and TV. Not so funny.)

"Satan"'s one of those names you can't not giggle at if you went to seventh grade. Like J.J. Putz of the Mets, or D'Cody Fagg of the Florida State Seminoles, or Jimmy Douchebag of the Oklahoma City Thunder. (OK, there is no Jimmy Douchebag on OK City. But if there were, I could at least name one player on that team.)

Now back to Fagg: It seemed to me that when he was at FSU no announcer ever called him just "Fagg." Instead of, say, using Cosell's famousest verbiage, "Watch that little Fagg run!" the play-by-play was always something like "Catch by D'Cody Fagg!" or "Dropped by D'Cody Fagg!" or "Touchdown, Florida State!"

The guy had a fine college career, providing me and every other former seventh-grader with all sorts of giggles. But he went undrafted last month, probably a combination of injuries and his surname.

The Buffalo Bills, clearly the most open-minded NFL squad, have signed Fagg as a free-agent.

Now back to Satan's work: Caps fans are mad at defenseman Tom Poti knocking a pass from the Penguins' Evgeni Malkin past his own goalie in overtime to give the Pittsburgh Game 5.

But look at the replay: If Poti doesn't go horizontal, Malkin's pass gets banged in by Sidney Crosby, standing solo in front of a half-open net.

Imagine the depression here if Crosby got the winner.

***

Barack Obama never announced who's going to win the Stanley Cup.

But the President's March Madness pool pick came in, and today the NCAA champions fromthe University of North Carolina will get a meet-and-greet with the Tout-in-Chief at the White House.

***

Speaking of post-racial: I don't know if I thought I'd live long enough to see a black president. But I'm sure I never thought I'd live long enough to see the top eight heavyweights be white guys.

You can look it up!

'Course, seven of the eight whiteys atop the world rankings are Eastern Europeans.

And next month, the highest rated black heavyweight, current No. 9 David Haye, fights Wladimir Klitschko in Germany for the IBF and WBO titles. Haye is also a Euro, a Brit who trains in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus.

Where have you gone, Joe Louis?

I mulled the racial state of boxing while watching Manny Pacquiao destroy Ricky Hatton last week from Vegas on pay-per-view.

I didn't think I'd ever seen a PPV with no black fighter in the main event.

And here were Jay-Z and Denzel and a ton of mostly black celebs at ringside, having paid silly money to watch grown men pound each other.

We've come a long way, baby!

(And, my god, what a fight! Boxing's been written off like horse racing and newspapers, but PacMan/Mayweather will be among the biggest prize fights of all time.)

***

Ryan Zimmerman's streak is now 28 games.

As with any such skein, Zimmerman's mostly makes us remember how incredible Joe DiMaggio's 1941 streak was.

We're rightly enthralled with Zimmerman's franchise-record run...and he's only halfway there!

***

Another local boy made good turns out to be not so local and not so good: Tomorrow night ESPN will air a report on troubles with Binghamton University's basketball program.

The piece will focus on Miladin Kovacevic, who allegedly beat a fellow student into a coma, then fled to his native Serbia. U.S. officials are now trying to get the Serbs to extradite the suspect.

Kovacevic played his high school ball in Fairfax at Paul VI of the WCAC, which is probably both the best and the most international prep basketball conference in the country.

***

Update on the U.S. Government's War on Pickup Soccer: The red snow fences that prevented folks from playing at the park across Tilden Street from Peirce Mill have been taken down.

But the fences are still mucking things up at Piney Branch Parkway beneath 16th Street.

All the dirt spots at the Piney Branch site have been covered for a while by new grass, so the fences serve no purpose now other than to hamper the Hispanic players that have been using the site for years and years from playing the international game.

I'd love to hear another excuse for the fences.

ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!

***

D.C. United had their March on Lincoln Park on Saturday to little effect. At this point, the team might have better luck marching to Linkin Park and asking for money.

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Anybody know who won the DC Rollergirls championship on Saturday?

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