Forrest’s Return Is Almost Here

“On Saturday night,” said Oscar De La Hoya, serving as moderator of Wednesday’s news conference at the MGM Grand Hotel, “making his comeback fight ... “

De La Hoya, promoter of Saturday’s fight card, never finished his sentence, stopped by a verbal jab from a corner seat on the dais.

“It’s not my comeback,” Vernon Forrest yelled. “It’s my return.”

Forrest just can’t let that word “comeback” go unchallenged. He’s also not too fond of “shoulder,” “elbow” and “bone spurs.” Semantics aside, Forrest (35-2, 26 knockouts) can’t dispute that his 10-round junior-middleweight match Saturday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena against Sergio Rios (17-1, 15) of Mexico, on the undercard of the Bernard Hopkins-Jermain Taylor middleweight title fight, will be Forrest’s first appearance in the ring in two years. And only his fourth fight since Forrest shocked the boxing world 3 1/2 years ago by upsetting Shane Mosley.

They’ve been 3 1/2 painful years. In fact, it’s almost a decade since Forrest was pain free.

While sparring in 1997, he dislocated his left shoulder. He quickly had it popped back into place, but the damage was done.

“It was never right after that,” Forrest said. “And every fight, it got worse and worse. But I had to work. I wasn’t making a lot of money at the time. I wasn’t a marquee fighter. I didn’t want to get left behind.”

So he suffered in silence. Only those close to him saw the ice packs he would apply after every sparring session, ice packs that soon stretched down his left side as the problem grew. Because he was favoring the shoulder, Forrest injured his left elbow as well.

“After a sparring session, the guy would be buried in ice,” said Al Haymon, his longtime advisor. “He looked like he had been in a car wreck.”

And then there were the cortisone injections, “an untold number,” Haymon said.

Why didn’t Forrest just get the medical care needed to alleviate the problem? There never seemed to be time. There was the long-awaited match against Mosley. Then, there was the rematch later in 2002.

After Forrest had won both of those, there was the chance to fight another well-known opponent, Ricardo Mayorga, early in 2003. And when Forrest lost to Mayorga, there was the rematch later that year, which Forrest also lost.

Finally, barely able to lift his left arm as he prepared for another fight, bone spurs added to a damaged rotator cuff, Forrest had had enough.

“The body is just not there,” he told Haymon.

Three surgeries and months of rehab later, while still facing probable additional surgery on his elbow, Forrest, 34, is, nevertheless, ready for his comeback.

Make that, his return.