Business before Haiti aid Golden Boy policy

AMERICA AT LARGE:Promoters fail to utilise Mosley promotion as opportunity to raise funds for quake relief, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THERE WILL be no attempt to claim credit for scooping my brethren scribes by breaking the Andre Berto story the other day, because as sometimes happens in this business, occasionally one will land right in your lap.

By the purest of coincidences, while I was out walking the dog Monday afternoon, I was on the phone with Lou DiBella, discussing an unrelated matter, when he excused himself to take another call. When DiBella got back on he line he told me it had been Berto on the other line, and that the WBC welterweight champion was withdrawing from his title unification bout against his WBA counterpart, Shane Mosley, which had until that moment been on the books for Las Vegas Saturday week. I couldn’t say I was surprised. In fact, going through with the fight would, in my view, have been unthinkable.

“No, it’s the right thing to do,” agreed DiBella.

DiBella is a boxing anomaly, a promoter with a conscience, and what went unsaid when we hung up that afternoon was this was the second time in barely a month that coming down on the moral high side of an issue would cost him a bunch of money.

He had promoted former middleweight champion Jermain Taylor throughout his career, and last October had spent a terrifying night in a Berlin hospital as Taylor lapsed in and out of consciousness following his knock-out loss to Arthur Abraham. It was the third time in four fights Taylor had been thus concussed, and the next morning DiBella advised him that the time had come to hang up his gloves. Jermain said he would think about it.

So when Taylor announced his return to the ring in December, DiBella put as much distance as he could from the ill-advised decision by releasing the boxer from his promotional contract. Lou was widely applauded for his stance, but from a practical standpoint he could have accomplished pretty much the same thing by withdrawing two million dollars from his bank account and feeding it into a paper-shredder.

His purse, over a million dollars, for the Mosley fight would have represented a career high for the undefeated (25-0) Berto, and DiBella would have shared in that booty, but money had been the furthest thing from the mind of either man since the devastating earthquake that levelled Berto’s ancestral home more than a week ago.

Although Berto was born in the United States, both his parents are from Haiti. After a disqualification in the US Olympic Trials cost him a place on the American squad, he wound up participating in the 2004 Athens Games as Haiti’s one-man boxing team, and he had since forged his own bonds with the land of his parents’ birth.

Pre-earthquake, Haiti was already securely established as the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere, and Berto seemed deeply touched by conditions when he visited Port-au-Prince last year. There, he met numerous relations, and total strangers as well. He wound up handing out 10,000 pairs of shoes, and established a charitable foundation.

The Berto-Mosley fight had been keenly anticipated all along, and with the collapse of negotiations for a Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr fight a few weeks ago it had taken on additional significance since it loomed as boxing’s biggest attraction of the winter.

Preparing to face Mosley would be a formidable task in the absence of outside distractions, and in the six days that elapsed between the quake and his withdrawal Berto surely had enough of those on his mind. When he wasn’t training at his Florida gym he was in front of a television set for up to 20 hours a day, watching the horrifying images of human tragedy play before his eyes.

More frustrating were his attempts to establish contact. The Haitian telephone system, rudimentary in the best of times, was nonexistent, and mobile phone contact was virtually impossible as well, since most of the towers had come down with the 7.0 earthquake and millions of people were vying for a place in the queue for the few systems that were still operating.

Eventually he was able to learn his uncle’s house had collapsed, trapping and killing eight family members. Berto’s sister Naomi and his small niece were also missing in action. It took him days to learn that they had survived the catastrophe but were now homeless.

For a time Berto thought he could go through with the fight anyway. For one thing, it might somehow serve as an inspiration to the Haitian people. For another, he reckoned he could put the money he would earn for Mosley to good use in the relief effort. But he was clearly fighting a losing battle, and on Monday he finally threw in the towel and phoned DiBella to inform him of the decision.

“I have seen the pain in my parents’ eyes as they attempt to understand what has happened to our homeland and recognize a place they once called home,” he said. “As a result of this disaster, I am mentally and physically exhausted, and have no choice but to withdraw from my bout on January 30.”

Berto’s withdrawal gave the promoter – Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions – nearly two weeks’ notice. My immediate suggestion had been that since they still had a star attraction in Mosley, they might secure another opponent and proceed on the initial date, earmarking some of the profits for disaster relief in Haiti.

Yeah, right. Within hours Golden Boy had cancelled the date and were already offering refunds. They have bigger fish to fry, and seem to have interpreted the disaster in Haiti as a licence to print money.

When Pacquiao-Mayweather fell apart, Pacquiao wasted little time in signing to fight a quality opponent – Joshua Clottey – and in fact those two, accompanied by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (who don’t have much else to do these days) were in New York yesterday pumping the gate for their March 13th date at Cowboys Stadium. This development had had in turn left Mayweather high and dry, bereft of an opponent against whom he could earn his customary €14 million in his annual visit to the ring.

Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer chose to view Berto’s withdrawal as an opportunity to match Mayweather against Mosley, and within a matter of hours had commenced negotiations for a May 1st bout.

That’s pretty much what you’d expect from a boxing promoter not named Lou DiBella, but an alarming number of fans – and a shockingly high percentage of boxing writers, who you’d think would know better – have expressed pretty much the same reaction: too bad about that stuff in Haiti, you know, but spit happens, and maybe it was a good thing after all.

They should hang their heads in shame. Every last one of them.