Ray Leonard, HBO Cut Ties After 12 Years : Boxing: The cable network, upset at not being allowed to bid for his next bout, drops the fighter as a commentator.

Sugar Ray Leonard will serve no longer as an HBO championship boxing commentator because the cable television network is miffed about not having a chance to be involved in Leonard’s next fight.

“He will fight again,” Mike Trainer, Leonard’s lawyer, said today. He also said that Leonard’s behind-the-mike contractual relationship with HBO was virtually at an end anyway and that “Ray indicated to me he didn’t want to continue it because it interfered with some things he wanted to do.”

In announcing that he was releasing Leonard from his contract after 12 years of telecasts for HBO, Ross Greenberg, vice president and executive producer for sports, said in a statement: “We are saddened to end our broadcasting relationship with Ray this way.

“Regrettably, however, after more than a decade of work together in the ring and behind the microphone, HBO was not offered an opportunity to bid on the telecast rights to Ray’s next fight by has adviser-lawyer Mike Trainer.

“We feel therefore if HBO is treated in this fashion, it is inappropriate for Ray to continue as a commentator on world championship boxing telecasts.”

“The fight he is talking about is a rumored fight between Ray and Terry Norris, the WBC junior middleweight champion,” Trainer said by telephone from Las Vegas, where he is serving as consultant to Steve Wynn for the James (Buster) Douglas-Evander Holyfield title fight, which will be held Oct. 25 at the Mirage casino-hotel.

Trainer said that Leonard, who has won world titles in five weight divisions, would probably fight “somewhere at the end of January” and that Terry Norris “is a leading candidate as his opponent.”

“There never has been a linkage between his broadcasting and his fighting,” Trainer said, adding that Leonard had only one or two make-do telecasts left with HBO. These were makeups for telecasts he had missed while training.