She’s Looking Forward to the Day the Fighting Stops

When Jin Mosley’s husband goes to work Saturday night, he will be bashing somebody in the head and getting bashed back. It is what he does and what she dislikes.

“I have hated boxing from the first day,” she says.

She is relatively new to this world. She met Shane Mosley seven years ago and married him three years later. On the biggest night of his career, June 17, 2000, the night he beat Oscar De La Hoya at Staples Center, she showed up late because she had been shopping at the mall, then left early to meet some friends, thinking he had lost.

“I don’t see the attraction of the sport,” she says. “When I first met Shane, I had no idea people actually made money boxing. I like it now because I have to, but when I watch it, I mostly watch people watching it.”

When she met Mosley, through some friends on Long Island in New York, where she is from, she says she had an immediate reaction when told he was a professional boxer.

“I asked him what his Plan B was,” she says.

For the former Jin Sheehan -- “I’m Korean Irish. My father is a CPA and MBA and my mother is right off the boat from Korea,” she says -- Plan B becomes more crucial as the fights keep coming.

Mosley’s junior-middleweight (154 pounds) rematch Saturday night with Fernando Vargas at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas will be his 47th pro fight. He has been beaten four times, twice by Vernon Forrest and twice by Winky Wright, and beaten up a little in a couple of those. He also, as his wife is quick to point out, fought more than 250 amateur fights. Mosley will turn 35 on Sept. 7.

Jin Mosley, 29, is not a fade-into-the-background type. She does not join the entourage, she leads it. She has taken over many of the business decisions involving her husband’s career and has ruffled some feathers. She is happy with their current connection to De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions and Chief Executive Richard Schaefer’s business savvy. And she is willing to juggle this while maintaining a fairly normal home life in La Verne with four children.

Even so, she is pressing for a quick arrival of Plan B. She reads the newspapers, sees the stories about boxers going into their old age punch drunk, eventually dying of pugilistic dementia.

“Who do you think gets hit more, the heavyweights or the lighter guys?” she asks.

She talks about Levander Johnson, the boxer who went into a coma and died of brain damage after a fight in September.

“Shane went and visited him,” she says. “He felt he should do that, since he was on his card.

“After that, I sat Shane down and said, ‘OK, what’s the plan?’ ”

She talks about a weekend trip she and Shane took last year, to the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. There were exhibitions, awards ceremonies and a fancy dinner. Many of the boxers also visited a hospital and convalescent home.

“I looked around,” she says, “and it was hard to tell who were the boxers and who were the patients.”

Shane Mosley is bright-eyed, quick-witted and fun to be around. A conversation with him raises no concerns. Now.

“I’m paranoid and a hypochondriac, anyway,” Jin Mosley says. “I think he’s safe. Now I read stuff and I guess I’ve got to wait and worry 10 to 20 years. With Shane, I didn’t really see him sustaining much damage, but that first Vernon Forrest fight, after that, I said, ‘I’ve got to sit him down and talk.’ ”

Her wish is that her husband gets another match around November, then fights perhaps twice more next year, then steps out of the ring for good. Plan B is that he stays in the boxing business, just not the part where he gets hit in the head.

“I don’t want my kids growing up, knowing that Daddy was an ex-boxing champion and now he is working at McDonald’s,” she says.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.