Alibis Can Border on Ridiculous

The Mexican border can be a dangerous place. Especially if you happen to be a fighter bound for the Reseda Country Club. Long a focal point for international intrigue, the border has gobbled up two such fighters in the last three weeks.

First there was Lupe Martinez, heading for a March 25 Country Club main event against Jaime Garza, a former World Boxing Council super bantamweight champion. Martinez never made it.

What happened? Who knows? Country Club promoter Dan Goossen was informed Martinez had been told to leave his immigration papers at a border checkpoint, then was not allowed to retrieve them. A cynic might have seen a few holes in that story, but Goossen was more concerned with replacing Martinez then finding him.

“I didn’t want to hear excuses,” Goossen says. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. There is no good reason for what happened. Jaime Garza should have fought that night.”

Goossen says he told his matchmaker, Jerry Niss, he would pay a replacement $5,000 to fight Garza. Martinez was to have been paid $2,000.

It’s bad enough getting into the ring with Garza (42-1 with 40 knockouts) after you’ve had a few weeks to prepare. But to do so with little more than 24 hours notice isn’t worth $5,000 to most people. Goossen had a few candidates but couldn’t put anything together.

Instead, he went on with the rest of the night’s card, after first offering a refund to any disgruntled fans among the sellout crowd of nearly 1,000. He had no more than five or six takers.

Last Monday night, Harry Kabakoff wasn’t so fortunate. Working for 7-11 Boxing Promotions, Kabakoff not only lost his Country Club main event, but his entire card went with it.

The main event dissolved when Mexico’s Benny Quintero, scheduled to fight Elias Madrid in a super lightweight match, didn’t make it past the border. Turned out, according to Kabakoff, that Quintero’s papers didn’t even exist .

But that’s not the story heard by George Johnsen, assistant chief inspector for the state athletic commission.

“I was told Elias had a bruised rib,” Johnsen says. “Then when I got to the Country Club Monday night, all of a sudden it was Quintero who couldn’t fight. That’s not what I had been told.”

Kabakoff, who says he has never before lost an entire card, insists Johnsen is thinking about an old rib injury suffered by Madrid.

“He was a little bruised,” Kabakoff says, “but hell no, he was ready to go. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have let him go.”

That wasn’t Kabakoff’s only problem. By fight time on Monday, one fight was called off when it was discovered one of the participants had gotten his license to fight earlier in the day. The commission requires a waiting period of at least 24 hours.

Another bout was scrubbed when one of the fighters called up Monday night a little after 7 p.m. and announced he wasn’t going to show. A commission rule stipulates there must be at least 26 rounds of boxing. Kabakoff was down to 17.

“It’s not good for boxing,” Johnsen says of the cancellation. “When something like this happens, people get out of the groove, out of the habit of going to fights.

“But there’s nothing we can do. There’s no way we can check on an excuse like the Quintero one. We can’t do background checks on these guys. We don’t have law enforcement status. But I’ll tell you, if I went around and accused everybody of lying who I know is lying, there’d be a lot of people in hot water.”

One measure the commission could take is to require fighters to be on hand several days before their scheduled bouts, which is mandatory for bigger fights, but not smaller ones like those at the Country Club.

“That would mean the promoters would have to pay the fighters’ expenses for those days,” Johnsen said. “The profit margins now are so small, if we did that, they wouldn’t have any money left.”

Goossen, who has built the Country Club into a popular and profitable fight spot over the last few years, said the biggest problem comes with the preliminary fights.

“There’s not enough money involved,” he said. “These guys make maybe $250 to $300. If a fighter gets a hangnail, if he gets up on the wrong side of the bed, if his mother wants him to wash the car, the money is not there for him to say, ‘Screw everything. I’m going to fight.’ The Garzas of the world are just the opposite. They will fight under almost any conditions from head colds to injuries.”

But too many more nights like we’ve seen recently and there’ll be no place for the Garzas of the world to fight. A few more disappearances by the fighters and it’ll be the fans who start disappearing.

Critics of the sport don’t need more ammunition. Promoters have to deal with people they know are reliable. Get guys who’ll fight each other, not the border patrol.

And get the fighters here early. It may be expensive to put an out-of-town fighter up for a few days, but it’s a lot cheaper than giving fans their money back.