Event Had Capacity for Falling Short

It was ironic that the announced estimated attendance at the Thomas & Mack Center for Saturday night’s Oscar De La Hoya-Pernell Whitaker fight was 12,200. Clearly, those putting on the fight had hoped for more or the event wouldn’t even have been held miles from the host Caesars Palace.

The original plan for this fight was to build an outdoor arena, seating 15,000, in the front of the hotel, only a few feet off the Strip. Its design, surrounded by the Roman architecture of the world-renowned hotel and just down the street from exploding volcanoes and battling pirate ships, would have drawn even more attention to a city that can never get enough exposure. That plan was made necessary when Caesars tore up its property behind the hotel, where the old boxing stadium was, for an expansion project scheduled to finish in December.

But according to Rich Rose, president of sports for Caesars World, the stadium on the Strip was abandoned when various city inspectors and construction experts ruled the space available would not accommodate a 15,000-seat stadium, but would perhaps for 10,000.

“Once we heard that, we decided to stage it at the Thomas and Mack,” Rose said. “There is an 18,000-seat base here, and we couldn’t pass that up.”

Rose said the plan for the stadium in front of Caesars could be resurrected for a fight here in the fall, one that likely would involve De La Hoya, Saturday night’s winner.

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The undercard turned out to be more interesting than expected.

Olympian Floyd Mayweather of Grand Rapids, Mich., who won a bronze in Atlanta, made quick work of Bobby Geipert of Gretna, La., in a first-round knockout. North American Boxing Federation bantamweight champion Paulie Ayala of Fort Worth took a tough, unanimous 15-round decision over Nestor Lopez of Mexico in a fight that was prevented from being a title defense because Lopez weighed in three pounds overweight.

And there was the inevitable Butterbean fiasco, when the 320-pound Eric Esch launched his rolls of flesh at somebody named Ed White and knocked him through the ropes in the second round.

But the most interesting undercard bout turned out to be Mickey Ward’s stunning knockout of Alfonso Sanchez in a junior welterweight match. Ward, the veteran from Lowell, Mass., who was scheduled to fight Julio Cesar Chavez last December in Reno before Chavez pulled out because of a hand injury, was taking a sound beating from Mexico’s Sanchez when he connected with a hook to the body that put Sanchez down for good. Sanchez had thrown 276 punches to Ward’s 86, had landed 110 to Ward’s 23 and had not allowed Ward to connect with a single jab.