AMERICA AT LARGE:IF HE had given it much thought at the time, which he probably didn't, Lou DiBella's experience with last January's NFL play-offs might have provided a hint of what 2010 held in store for him.
There were four games over the Wild Card weekend of January 9th-10th and four more in the Divisional round a week later. Lou wagered on all of them, and managed to bet the wrong team in all eight games. This is pretty remarkable: had he just pulled the names out of a hat, or let his rat terrier, Chaplin, choose, the casual statistical probability is he’d have got half of them right.
His full handle is Louis J DiBella Jnr, and while it sometimes seems that way, there is no truth to the rumour the J stands for Job. Suffice it to say, had the Old Testament figure endured a run like the boxing promoter (and former HBO vice-president) did over the first 10 months of this year he might have thrown in with Team Lucifer by Halloween.
Just weeks before the New Year dawned, in an act of conscience rarely seen among promoters, DiBella, fearing permanent neurological damage should Jermain Taylor continue his career, had given the former world middleweight champion his outright release. Since Taylor was guaranteed at least two more fights in Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament, DiBella left what would have been his share of several million dollars worth of purses on the table.
Two days after he had gone 0-for-4 on the wild card games came the earthquake in Haiti. This event touched almost everyone, but it also touched DiBella in the pocketbook. Haiti is the ancestral home of welterweight champion Andre Berto, who was scheduled to fight Shane Mosley in late January. But Berto was so distraught by the events he withdrew from the fight, a decision DiBella wholeheartedly endorsed, even though it probably cost him half a million dollars.
Around the same time it had become apparent a fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather, was not going to happen, and when Pacquiao opted to fight Joshua Clottey, Mayweather courted another DiBella fighter, Paulie Malignaggi. But when Berto-Mosley blew up, Mayweather fought Moseley.
As a consolation prize, Malignaggi got a fight against Amir Khan, one in which he barely won a round before being stopped in 11. Shortly thereafter, by mutual consent, Malignaggi was released from his contract with DiBella Entertainment.
DiBella’s non-boxing affairs weren’t going so well either. His minor league baseball team, the Connecticut Defenders, had finished dead last in attendance in the league, and Lou was battling the board of governors to let him move his franchise, an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, to Richmond, Virginia. Both his parents were in and out of the hospital. And his interest in a Joe Pesci-Helen Mirren vehicle called Love Ranch, seemed to have evaporated when the production company formed to make the film declared bankruptcy even before the movie was released.
DiBella’s experience with Love Ranch would confirm his suspicion that Hollywood can be even dirtier than the boxing business. The director, Taylor Hackford, who happened to be Mirren’s husband, bought the film out of bankruptcy, then informed DiBella that while his name would stay on the credits as co-producer, his only hope of recouping his investment (including what Lou had advanced to screenwriter Mark Jacobson for the script) was that if the film turned a profit, he could stand in line with the other unsecured creditors. When Love Ranch went straight to DVD it was clear there would be no profits.
While DiBella’s “Broadway Boxing” series of New York City club fights continued to do a lively business, his boxing enterprises on the larger scale seemed headed to hell in a handbasket. He announced that the proceeds of Berto’s April defence against Carlos Quintana would be donated to Haitian relief. After the charity show drew 800 paying customers to a 19,000-seat arena, the contribution to Haitian relief came out of DiBella’s pocket. In June, his fighter Allen Green, having been ushered into the Super Six tournament to replace Taylor, lost every round to Andre Ward in their fight, but owing to the vagaries of the tournament ground rules, DiBella still stood to collect a tidy sum from his end of Green’s subsequent fight against Mikkel Kessler in Denmark. That fight went belly-up when Kessler, citing an eye injury, withdrew and announced his retirement.
The Fates seemed to be conspiring to take the shine off even what should have been the bright spots in his enterprise. Last December another DiBella fighter, Sergio Martinez, had lost a controversial majority decision to Paul Williams in Atlantic City.
Martinez had shown enough grit to earn him the challenger’s role in an April fight against middleweight champ Kelly Pavlik, which, remarkably, he won.
This should have put DiBella in a strong bargaining position with his former employers. In practice, he had almost none. When HBO, bemoaning Martinez’s lack of name recognition among all but hard-core boxing fans, refused to put the middleweight champion on a televised card against anyone save Williams, the promoter was forced into a rematch neither he nor Martinez wanted. Which is pretty much where thing stood as of the first of this month.
“I was so depressed even my tweets were reflecting it,” says DiBella. “With everything that was going on I was wondering how long I’d be able to even make my office payroll.”
The first indication his luck might be about to turn came on November 1st when the Giants beat the Texas Rangers to win their first World Series since 1954. No fewer than 10 players on the roster of the new world champions were former Connecticut Defenders, and the San Francisco management elected to award Lou an honorary World Series ring. (Now known as the Richmond Flying Squirrels, they led all of the minor leagues in home attendance last season.)
Six nights later, 41-year-old Glen Johnson, who DiBella promotes, knocked out Green to claim a place in the Super Six semi-finals.
Exactly four minutes into last Saturday night’s fight in Atlantic City, Williams and Martinez threw simultaneous lefts. The former’s punch never got there, but Martinez’s did. He caught Williams flush on the jaw with a punch so devastating he was out well before he hit the floor. In the 10 seconds between the blow and the count it became clear Martinez had not only authored the Knockout of the Year, but almost certainly vaulted past Pacquiao to become the leader in the clubhouse for Fighter of the Year honours.
It was a result potentially worth millions for DiBella Entertainment, and Lou’s not done with the year yet: Berto is favoured to win his welterweight title defence against Freddy Hernandez on Saturday night.
“Boxing is a strange business for a fighter, but it’s even stranger for promoters,” said DiBella, who will have more reason than most to count his blessings over Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon. “When I look at how dramatically things have changed over a few short weeks all I can do is look up at the sky and say ‘Thank you’.”
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