Little Guys Putting on the Big Shows

Half as heavy but with 10 times the guts and dignity, boxing’s littler warriors can’t save the sport, they can only look on at the recent developments in the heavyweight division with disdain--and disappointment.

Who decided that Bruce Seldon should earn $5 million for a 109-second, one-punch belly flop?

Certainly not Marco Antonio Barrera and Kennedy McKinney, super-bantamweights who fought last February in a brutal, thrilling HBO-televised title fight blockbuster at the Forum. There were six knockdowns--and six get-back-ups--and 1,700 punches thrown in the nearly 12 rounds of action.

Barrera stopped McKinney in the last round of the fight that ranks as the leading candidate for fight of the year.

And tonight, he and McKinney are back at the Forum in separate HBO-televised headline bouts. Barrera defends his World Boxing Organization super-bantamweight title against No. 1 contender Jesse Magana, and McKinney faces late replacement Nestor “Chino” Lopez in a 10-rounder.

With Seldon’s silliness still reverberating on the scene, the difference between the little fighters’ frenetic fistic display and what was offered last Saturday at the MGM Grand is clear and distinct.

You want to feel robbed, watch a Mike Tyson fight. You want heart and hellacious hitting, watch the little guys rumble.

“It makes me mad as hell,” said former International Boxing Federation 122-pound champion McKinney, who has never made more than a $200,000 purse. “For Seldon to go in and get $5 million to fight for a minute and 30 seconds, and not even get hit but once or twice and walk out rich, it makes me mad.

“I gave my body and my soul and my heart, to go 12 hard rounds the way I did, got knocked down four or five times, got right back up every time up.

“We have no more Muhammad Alis, no more Joe Louises. . . . Tyson deserves the money. But these opponents, I don’t think so. . . . You can’t keep paying these guys. People are going to say, ‘Forget boxing.’ Just going to walk away from it. And if they walk away from the heavyweight division, they’re going to walk away from the whole sport.”

Which would mean they wouldn’t see Barrera continue his probable rise to superstardom, or McKinney’s willingness to, perhaps unwisely but courageously, trade power shots, or any of the countless battering rams who fight in the lower divisions.

Former junior-lightweight champion Humberto “Chiquita” Gonzalez, maybe the all-time small destroyer, will be saluted at the Forum tonight as he heads into retirement.

“The only thing that disappoints me about my boxing career is that I was not a heavyweight--because with my style and the championships that I won, I would’ve made a fortune,” Gonzalez said this week.

“I feel sad sometimes. Like Tyson now, he’s making all that kind of money with this opponent I don’t even remember his name, and he fell down without one single punch. I think it’s embarrassing.”

But what can be done? Not much, Barrera concedes.

“I believe that the lightweights always have been giving spectacular shows,” Barrera said. “But unfortunately, the people are always attracted to the heavyweights, even after what happened with Seldon-Tyson.”

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McKinney is 30 and has a distinct map for the final years of his career: Regain his lost IBF title in a rematch with Vuyani Bhungo, then wangle a much-anticipated, big-money rematch with Barrera--if Barrera doesn’t detour to a big-money match with cocky WBO featherweight champion Naseem Hamed.

“I just want the Forum to know, I want Barrera to know, I want HBO to know, that I’m looking to get paid at least $1 million for the rematch,” McKinney said. “I haven’t been paid in my career like I should’ve been paid, and as exciting as my fights are, I look at that sham in the Mike Tyson-Seldon fight, and see they got $15 million and $5 million . . . for that kind of fight?

“When I fight, it’s not hold, hold, hold, quit. There’s none of that. I brought a lot of attention to this division--we both did in that fight. I brought this division up, and kept it going for five or six years. And now I’m 30-31 years old, I’m passing the torch to this young man.”

McKinney, who had a drug problem but has apparently been clean for years, was an Olympic gold medalist in 1988 and held the IBF title for two years.

“I’m just about like Chiquita,” he said. “I’m just a little tired and I want to get that big payday before I get out of here, and I believe the rematch with Barrera will set me up pretty good.

“I don’t think my personal troubles shortened my career. I don’t see anywhere in my career where my personal troubles hurt me. I didn’t lose a fight because of it.

“That’s been six years ago and if people still think that a man can’t get his life back together after making a mistake. . . . I think six years is enough time to prove to the people that I made a mistake, I overcame the mistake.

“Now all I have to do is win this title back and beat Barrera. Then I think all the drug questions will be out the door.”

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Although he teasingly says he hopes the Forum will promote him if he decides to return, Gonzalez looked relaxed and comfortable with his retirement at a news conference this week.

Gonzalez says he had been contemplating quitting for almost a year, then made the final choice as he began to train for a scheduled fight on tonight’s card.

“After two or three days, I was feeling tired,” Gonzalez said through a translator. “I was not feeling excited about the fight. I was, in a certain way, lazy. After the fourth day of training in the gym, I was hitting the heavy bag, I thought, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t want to do this anymore.’ That was it.”

Gonzalez says he is not disappointed he didn’t get to avenge his last fight--an explosive seventh-round knockout loss in July 1995 to Saman Sorjaturong.

“I would love if people remember me like that, an all-action fighter,” Gonzalez said. “I still remember my fights with Michael Carbajal, especially the first two. We made a good match because Carbajal was a hell of a fighter.

“I can tell you that every fight for me was to kill or get killed.”

Boxing Notes

Boxing returns to the Sports Arena next month when Latino idol Luis Ramon (Yory Boy) Campas gets a shot at the World Boxing Organization welterweight title against champion Jose Luis Lopez. The Oct. 6 fight is promoted by Don Chargin, who moved it from Sacramento when the bout was delayed.

Former junior-lightweight champion Genaro Hernandez is scheduled to fight Sept. 28 in Fort Worth in a tune-up for a projected title fight with two-time World Boxing Council champion Azumah Nelson on Dec. 6, at an undetermined site. Hernandez has fought only once since he was knocked out by Oscar De La Hoya last September. . . . Featherweight prospect Robert Garcia will headline a show in his hometown, Oxnard, on Sept. 28 at the Radisson Suites, the old training camp site of the Raiders.

George Foreman, scheduled to fight Nov. 2 in Tokyo against former kick-boxer Crawford Grimsley, said his fight was “all about integrity” in the wake of the Tyson-Seldon debacle. “Everybody who saw that fight says, ‘Sham! Sham! Sham! . . . Barnum and Bailey!’ You give a guy $25 million for a fight like that, he doesn’t even apologize, just suck their money like nothing. These guys they’re paying this money to, you scrape him with a thumb and you count him out. My fight here, this is going to be a real fight. If somebody falls because of a scraped elbow, I’m jumping down and fighting him on the canvas.”

Foreman, who hasn’t fought since his disputed victory over Axel Schulz in April 1995 and has been stripped of his two title belts because of the inactivity, said he has to fight Grimsley in Japan because other deals--to fight Tyson or a rematch with Michael Moorer--have fallen through.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Calendar

Thursday--Cecilio Espino vs. Edgar Decine, super-flyweights; Rene Arredondo vs. Bruce Pearson, junior-middleweights; Grand Olympic, 7:30 p.m.