Okay, so check it, I gotta tell you about this one time I was messing around with boxing match data. I was digging into some old fights, and stumbled on this Ricardo Mayorga dude. Man, what a character! So, I decided to build a little something to track his fights, you know, just for kicks.
First thing I did was scrape all the fight data I could find online. I’m talking Wikipedia, BoxRec, all that jazz. It was a bit of a mess, different formats and all, so I had to do a bunch of cleaning. Used Python with Beautiful Soup, a classic combo. I remember spending a whole afternoon just wrangling dates into a consistent format. What a headache!
Next, I needed to store this data somewhere. Figured a simple SQLite database would do the trick. Created a table with columns like opponent, date, result, method of victory, all that stuff. Then I loaded all the cleaned data into the database. It was surprisingly satisfying watching the script chug away, filling up the table.
Now for the fun part! I wanted to see some trends, you know? Like, who did Mayorga beat the most? What was his favorite way to win? I started writing some SQL queries. Nothing fancy, just some `SELECT` statements with `GROUP BY` and `ORDER BY`. I remember being stoked when I finally got a query to show me his knockout percentage. It was higher than I expected!
- First, I extracted opponent names and win/loss records.
- Then I calculated his win percentage against different opponents.
- Finally, I displayed the data in a simple table.
I even tried to visualize the data with some charts using Matplotlib, but honestly, it looked like garbage. I’m no data visualization expert, that’s for sure. But hey, at least I tried! Plus I did manage to output the data in a simple readable table.
The whole thing was just a silly little project, but it was a good way to practice my web scraping, data cleaning, and SQL skills. And I learned a bit about Ricardo Mayorga in the process. That guy was wild! I found out he fought Shane Mosley back in 2008 for some WBA title. Crazy stuff.
In the end, it wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was a fun little dive into the world of boxing data. And who knows, maybe I’ll revisit it someday and make it look a little less like a dumpster fire. But for now, it’s good enough!