Rematch Finally Becomes a Reality : Promoters’ Squabble Had Delayed Mancini-Bramble

NEW YORK — The day after Livingstone Bramble stopped Ray Mancini in the 14th round to win the World Boxing Assn. lightweight championship last June 1, efforts began to arrange a rematch.

It was a task not easily accomplished.

“This was the only fight we wanted,” Dave Wolf, Mancini’s manager, said at the press conference announcing Mancini-Bramble II at Reno, Nev. Feb. 16. “But it was something we despaired at times of ever seeing happen. Influential people in the boxing business went out of their way to see that it would not take place.”

Specifically, Wolf charged that Bob Arum, president of Top Rank, Inc., and co-promoter of the first Mancini-Bramble bout, had attempted to block the rematch. “He had a plan whereby he hoped, by a variety of measures to create a situation where a second fight (between Mancini and Bramble) would not take place. This fight was made in October, but Arum tore it apart.”

According to Wolf, Arum was attempting to force Mancini into a bout with Harry Arroyo, the International Boxing Federation champion, who fights for Top Rank. Arroyo and Mancini both live in Youngstown, Ohio and are friends.

“Mancini is the only money fight for Arroyo and to get it, Arum needed to destroy the Bramble fight,” Wolf said. “He badly misjudged Ray Mancini. Ray’s only interest was in the real title, Livingstone Bramble’s title.”

Arum was out of town and unavailable to comment on Wolf’s charges.

In order to arrange the rematch with WBA sanction, promoter Dan Duva had to get a waiver from the No. 1 contender, Tyrone Crawley, releasing Bramble from his mandatory defense obligation. Crawley was paid an undisclosed sum to step aside and was guaranteed a match with the winner within 90 days of Mancini-Bramble II.

Wolf is sure that winner will be Mancini and that it will allow him to arrange lucrative future fights with attractive opponents like Hector “Macho” Camacho and Aaron Pryor. Mancini’s loss to Bramble in June upset those plans.

“I feel we’ll win and subsequently make fights with more attractive opponents for four or five times as much as they otherwise would have been worth,” the manager said.

That, of course, is not Bramble’s view of the rematch.

“I don’t think Ray will be able to beat a top notch fighter after this fight,” he said. “I guarantee it won’t go 15.”

Although he won, Bramble wasn’t totally satisfied with his performance in the first Mancini fight. “I made mistakes,” he said. “I never used my jab. I never used combinations.”

To erase those errors, the champion has imported his original trainer, Ruppert Nell Brown, who introduced him to boxing in their native Virgin Islands when Bramble was just 14. “None of my past trainers knows me as well as Nell,” he said. “I never performed better than I did with Nell.”

Mancini said he felt he was not “physically right,” for the the first Bramble fight. “No excuses, though. He won it. It was his night.”

Since then Mancini has had two other bouts canceled, one in September because of a cut over his eye and the other in December because of a blood disorder. But he says he will ready for the rematch.

“The first fight was a good one,” he said. “This one will be better.”