Recent experience suggests that while the "announcement" of a boxing match might mean one thing on this side of the Atlantic, across the pond it can evidently mean quite another.
We refer in this instance to last week's breathless announcement that Belfast's Eamonn Magee was going to fight American Mickey Ward. The account of the British news agency, the Press Association, was rich in detail, providing the date (July 15th, on the Lennox Lewis-Francois Botha undercard), the venue (the London Arena), the title at stake (Ward's WBU light-welterweight championship), and even quotes from Magee ("This is what any fighter dreams of") and his manager Mike Callahan ("This fight is going to be another thriller").
It had such a ring of authenticity, in short, that newspapers all over Britain and Ireland (including this one) picked it up, and I must confess that I fell for it as well. I innocently dropped a mention of the impending WardMagee nuptials among the notes accompanying my dispatches from Indianapolis, where Roy Jones was fighting Richard Hall last Saturday night, to the Boston Herald, which is how I came to be the recipient of a phone call from Ward's manager Sal LoNano the following morning.
"What's this all about?" demanded LoNano. "Who's this Eamonn Magee, anyway?"
LoNano said that his conversations with Magee's representatives were "none - and I mean zero.
"Besides, we have a signed contract with (promoter) Cedric Kushner. We couldn't do anything like this without his permission - and I checked with him before I called you. He knows nothing about this either."
Befuddled, our next conversation was with Kery Davis, the vice president of Home Box Office, which is bankrolling the July 15th London show.
"It's news to me," said Davis. "I can tell you this much - if Ward and Magee fight, it won't be on television."
Davis went on to explain that HBO still hopes to broadcast a heavyweight triple header from London. In addition to the Lewis-Botha main event, the network is trying to arrange a second bout featuring New Zealand's David Tua, who will be a mandatory challenger for Lewis' titles this November, and possibly a third showcasing Chris Byrd, who won the WBO version of the heavyweight championship by upsetting Vitaly (Quitschko) Klitschko in Berlin last month.
Ward, who won the WBU title two months ago by knocking out previously unbeaten Shea Neary on the Naseem Hamed-Vuyani Bungu card in London, is scheduled to fight in the main event of an ESPN2 show in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire on July 14th. LoNano says he had been approached about a July 15th fight, but not in London and not against Magee.
Russian-born Australian Kostya Tszyu is scheduled to defend his WBC 140lb title against the venerable Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez in Las Vegas that night. Tszyu's promoters had quietly approached LoNano about putting Ward on the show in a supporting role, mainly in order to be available should Chavez, as has been his wont of late, suddenly become indisposed, but, said LoNano, "the money wasn't right, so we took a pass".
Where, then, did the Ward-Magee story come from?
"You got me," said LoNano. "Cedric and I are baffled."
The entire affair puts one in mind of the Steve Collins-Roy Jones fiasco a couple of years back, when Collins unilaterally "announced" a fight (and, if memory serves, a date) which had absolutely no chance of taking place then. Yet the fanciful story played out on the sports pages in Ireland for weeks, if not months, before inevitably evaporating into the same cloud of smoke from whence it had sprang.
In the world of modern-day boxing, several factors go into making a fight, and while the consent of the principals is obviously important, it is only one of them. At a bare minimum, one needs a venue, a date, a television deal, an agreement on purses, and a signed contract.
Collins had none of these when he convened his Dublin press conference, and in the case at hand, Magee and his people apparently didn't even bother consulting Ward's camp before running to the press with their "announcement".
It was at best premature, but lest we be too harsh in castigating Magee and Callahan, it should be conceded that the possibility exists that they, too, were misled.
On Saturday morning - the day of the Jones-Hall fight, two days after the story had broken, and one day after it had been roundly shot down - Kery Davis and I had a date to play golf in Indianapolis. As he pulled his clubs from the boot of his car in the parking lot of Meridian Hills Country Club, the HBO official was still laughing as he recounted the telephone call he had received from Panos Eliades, Lennox Lewis' London-based promoter, that morning.
"Panos says `Oh, by the way, mate, we've got Mickey Ward on the London card,"' reported Davis, whose reply was brief and to the point.
"No, we don't."
