De La Hoya-Trinidad Is On--Maybe

The real drama central to the Oscar De La Hoya-Oba Carr boxing card here Saturday night may have been thousands of miles away, in Puerto Rico. That’s where relatives and handlers of Felix Trinidad, next on De La Hoya’s horizon, were deciding whether to allow the sun to rise on that fight.

Promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank said he finalized the deal Friday that would pay De La Hoya a minimum of $15 million and Trinidad and his promoter, Don King, $10.5 million for a Sept. 18 World Boxing Council welterweight title fight. It is scheduled to be held at the new Mandalay Bay Resort Special Events Center, the same site for Saturday night’s 11th-round TKO by De La Hoya over Carr.

“I have a signed contract,” Arum said. “It has my signature on it and Don King’s. I’m not the least bit concerned about this. The fight is on.”

King being Trinidad’s promoter, therein lies the rub. With King, boxing’s leading eccentric in a sport that is certainly not short on them, deals sometimes aren’t deals.

To complete the deal, Arum said, he had to get the payment boosted to the $10.5. According to the deal, $8 million goes to Trinidad and the rest to King. That is, in essence, a buyout of King to allow Arum to do the promotion.

But once Trinidad’s people saw that King’s take would be $500,000 more than expected, they announced Saturday that the Sept. 18 fight was off because they weren’t getting a part of the $500,000. Arum said he has nothing to do with the $500,000, that Time Warner, which owns TVKO, which will produce the pay-per-view telecast, put up that money to complete the deal.

“It’s an intramural thing, between King and Trinidad’s people,” Arum said. “Let them settle it. And I’m sure they will. I got a contract. The fight is on.”

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Floyd Mayweather won the semi-main event, a match against somebody named Justin Juuko that was strangely sanctioned as a WBC super featherweight title fight. Mayweather was to have fought Goyo Vargas, but Vargas called in with flu three days before the fight and the WBC, magically, found Juuko, a Ugandan who was preparing in Las Vegas for another fight this week.

Mayweather finished it with a TKO at 1 minute 20 seconds of the ninth round, and shortly after that, some of the best drama of the night occurred. Mayweather’s grandmother, Bernice, climbed into the ring to congratulate her grandson and promptly fainted. She was given oxygen and left in a wheelchair.

“She was so happy, she just fainted,” Mayweather said. “She’s my grandma. She loves me.”

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The rest of the undercard included wins by Carlos Gerena of Puerto Rico over Angel Aldama of Mexico in the junior lightweights; Tonton Cemakala of Sweden over Marcial Jose Canas of Los Angeles in the welterweights; Lamon Brewster of Los Angeles over Mario Cawley of Chicago in the heavyweights, and Maurice Harris of Newark, N.J., over Louis Monaco of Denver in another heavyweight match. In a women’s super flyweight match, Pamela Barker of Henderson, Nev., beat Patricia Stickler of Tulsa, Okla.

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This was the first boxing event at the new Mandalay Bay facility, and it drew 11,528, or 472 shy of a sellout.

Reviews of the facility were good, especially from those who pay attention to sight lines and spectator comfort. Another feature is the ring of luxury boxes around the top, placing boxing in the race with other sports for corporate dollars.

No review was better than that of Jose Sulaiman of Mexico, president of the WBC and a grand partner of both King and Arum in the world of hype.

“This is the cathedral for boxing of the future,” Sulaiman crowed.