Is There No Fight Left In Lou Di Bella?
LIKE THE BLOODSTONE” TUNE, DI BELLA & I, “WE GO A LONG WAY BACK”
San Francisco, CA– The best comparison I can make when it comes to comparing professional boxing to any other vocation is prostitution. It’s the same old song, when a broad no longer looks good and can’t turn $400 tricks, she’s reduced to walking the streets and giving blow jobs in a car for $35 bucks. When it comes to fighting, the method is the same, when a championship or world class level fighter can no longer fight at the upper echelon of the game, he finds himself himself fighting for chump change. You think I’m kidding? Well, if you doubt the “great one” and need a reference point, look at the end of the career of boxing’s greatest fighter in history, one “Sugar Ray” Robinson.
HBO HASN’T BEEN THE SAME SINCE DI BELLA LEFT
Being the brains that came up with the “original” Boxing After Dark series, when the concept debuted in 1996 with Marco Antonio Barrera-Kennedy McKinney, Di Bella was a genius of sorts. Matching “starving” guys against fighters with the same type of hunger pains, this is what made Boxing After Dark the best thing in televised boxing since Howard Cosell packed it in and essentially ended boxing presentations on ABC’S Wide World of Sports. With HBO Championship Boxing becoming a “showcasing” production that usually matched fighters signed to HBO with guys that had little or no chance of winning, Boxing After Dark, or B.A.D. as we called it, was the most exciting fight series on any network.
SHOWTIME STOLE THE “B.A.D.” CONCEPT
The Sho Box series has tried to emulate what Boxing After Dark once was, but after years of the late Jay Larkin selling Showtime Championship Boxing to either a business partner of the highest bidder, Showtime boxing and their Boxing After Dark copycat, Sho Box, never reached a level of acceptability until Larkin was given the boot! Nowadays, Showtime puts on good fights, not mismatches put forth by Don King or Frank Warren, something Larkin allowed with both a great level of impunity and more importantly audacity. And while some of you will take offense at my jabbing the dead, just look at the quality of the Showtime product today compared to what it was when the wanna-be actor Larkin was at the helm.
BACK TO LOU DI BELLA
While a lot of boxing promoters are slimy uneducated grease-balls, the Italian-American Di Bella is a lawyer with a degree from Harvard University. Before I get to the meat of the this article, HBO, Time Warner, AOL, whatever you want to call them, they slipped in Ross Greenberg to the HBO Sports CEO job, this after Di Bella, then the HBO Sports VP, was told he would never get the gig and that then CEO Seth Abraham wasn’t going anywhere, so Di Bella resigned in 2000. In a fortnight, Abraham announced he was going off to head Madison Square Garden and Greenberg, a pretty good producer whose expertise was in the truck producing live events, not being the ringmaster that could run HBO Sports and HBO Boxing. Greenberg was fired, let go, not had his contract renewed, dumped, however you want to put it, the undeserving one who undeservedly took Di BelIa’s spot, the chosen one was discarded last year.
IT TOOK ME 500+ WORDS TO GET TO MY POINT
According to Cal Berkeley alumni/boxing historian Ron Marshall, Di Bella threw such a fit, one littered with four letter words, Lou felt like me, Marshall and others, that awarding Tavoris Cloud a spilt decision over Gabriel Campillo was one of the worst decisions ever in boxing history, let alone this century. I had the fight 10-2 in rounds, historian Marshall, the world’s #1 purveyor of autographed boxing books at [email protected], we thought it was akin to snatching a women’s purse at gunpoint. Di Bella, at Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday party that night was beyond livid offering four letter words, blowing his top per se.
NOW I GET TO THE MEAT OF THE ISSUE
If Di Bella was adamant about Campillo, a Spaniard who has been robbed in significant fights more than a check cashing joint sans bullet proof glass in the ghetto, as he was that evening, Lou should have sued the International Boxing Federation for the screwing of Gabriel Campillo in a court of law before 12 jurors. Unlike the American criminal jurist prudence system where all 12 panelists have to agree unanimously on a conviction or acquittal, civil cases, in this case against the IBF and their President Daryl Peoples, winning this case would only require 51% of the evidence and a majority of jurors to secure a Campillo win.
THE CLOUD-CAMPILLO DECISION WAS MADE FOR A JURY
Having put the Tavoris Cloud win over Gabriel Campillo case in front of an unbiased panel of 12 who knew nothing about boxing, there is no way 12 people who didn’t know a *uck about boxing would or could have thought Cloud won. Cloud won one round on my card after dropping Campillo twice in the first round, historian Ron Marshall gave him the 1st, 6th, and 12th, that being said, this no way equates to Cloud winning. The two judges who had Cloud winning David Robertson’s 116-110 was, if not the worst score in my 40 years of covering boxing, one of the top five. Joel Elizondo had it 114-112 for Cloud, while Dennis Nelson had things 115-111 for Campillo.
ONCE THE VANGUARD OF BOXING HAS DI BELLA BEEN COMPROMISED?
Even though we had a very close relationship over the years, I now wonder if the boxing establishment has purchased the soul of Di Bella. I mean, here is a Harvard educated attorney, and if there was ever a fight you could put before a jury of casual or even non-sports fans, the Tavoris Cloud-Gabriel Campillo fight is the one! The trial wouldn’t take long, Harold Lederman of HBO could be called in as an expert witness, as he had Campillo so far in front that if these were horses crossing the finish line, Campillo would have been like eight lengths ahead.
COULD LITIGATION STRAIGHTEN THE GAME OUT?
Take the case of Graciano Rocchigiani, the WBC light heavyweight champ in 1998 after defeating Michael Nunn for the vacant title. Without a fight, hearing, nothing, Jose Sulaiman of the WBC, against the advice of many, including myself, stripped Graciano Rocchigiani of the title and handed it to over to Roy Jones. Graciano would not fight for two years, and in that time span launched a lawsuit against the WBC that brought him in the neighborhood of a $30 million judgement. If my memory serves me correctly, it was $6 million initially, but then the New York jury awarded Rocchigiani $24 million in “punitive” damages. While on the witness stand, Sulaiman was held in contempt of court more than half a dozen times. Although Graciano Rocchigiani never received the entire amount, he did receive some money from the WBC.
DI BELLA SHOULD SUE THE IBF & THE WBC!
Having already stated my reasons as to why Di Bella, representing Campillo should sue the IBF. that point is made. Now just in case you didn’t know, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is the WBC middleweight champion. Senor Sulaiman did this by making a new “silver” title and gave it to the real middleweight champ Sergio Martinez. The newly formed title has done little to enhance the real champion’s status. This has been allowed to go on for over a year now. Sulaiman and Chavez say they will fight Martinez in September, provided Chavez gets by Andy Lee in June.
BACK TO THE TITLE OF THE ARTICLE!
With all due respect, why hasn’t Di Bella sued both organizations? He could get his guys in with the WBO, a Puerto Rican sanctioning body with a lot more integrity that’s run by an honorable man in Francisco Valcarcel. These two situations have got me to the point of asking this question. Initially, Di Bella was supposed to be a breathe of fresh air in the sport and business of boxing, part of the solution to the corruption that had out of a poll of 100 people, 72 say they thought boxing was fixed. In closing, I ask instead of being part of the solution, has Di Bella became part of the boxing problem?
Pedro Fernandez