Jim Rock, the reigning All-Ireland light-middleweight champion, arrived in Boston yesterday in the company of manager Brian Peters, amid what might be considered extraordinary fanfare for his appearance tomorrow night in the main event of a modest club-fight show in Worcester.

The Castleknock boxer, who fights under the nom de guerre The Pink Panther, was whisked away to a reception at a Worcester pub imaginatively called The Irish Times. This afternoon he and Peters will retrace their steps, making the 50-plus mile return journey back down the Massachusetts Turnpike for the weigh-in at another saloon in Boston called The Irish Embassy. Peters, a publican from Dunshaughlin, Co Meath, should feel right at home.

Rock's opponent, South Boston's Tommy Attardo, would, at 32, appear to be on the downhill side of an undistinguished career. His professional record of eight wins, four losses and one draw is somewhat misleading, in that he was once 8-0. The draw came next, and has been followed by four consecutive losses.

The original plan had called for Rock to defend his Irish title on tomorrow night's Worcester card. There existed a precedent for this, when the Boxing Union of Ireland (BUI) recognised a 1988 bout between Steve Collins and Sam Storey at the old Boston Garden for the Irish middleweight championship.

The union was initially prepared to grant its blessing to this fight as well, but in the end BUI president Mel Andre Christle withdrew his organisation's sanction, not because Attardo wasn't good enough, but because he wasn't Irish enough.

When Peters and Worcester promoter Ken Kosla (with the full complicity of Massachusetts Boxing Commission chairman Nick Manzello) first hatched the plan for a Rock title defence on American soil, they sifted through a very short list of qualified prospective opponents.

The name of Collins' younger brother first came up, but it rapidly became clear that Paschal Collins, a super-middleweight, hadn't a hope of making the 11 st limit. Another Dublin newspaper proposed exhuming Mike Culbert, a welltravelled Massachusetts fighter born in Carrickfergus. Culbert, alas, had fought just once in the past three years, and had come in three pounds over the 12 st super-middleweight limit for that bout.

Enter Attardo, and the mysterious case of "The Dog Ate the Birth Certificate". The fight's promoters maintained that "Attardo is of Irish heritage; his mother's maiden name is Brophy", and had even taken to referring to him in press releases as "Tommy (Brophy) Attardo".

That might have been good enough (and, apparently, it was) for the Massachusetts commission, but Christle was more vigilant. When he asked for documentation, the best Attardo could come up with was his birth certificate (which showed that his mother's name was not Brophy, but Richards, and that she was born in Boston in 1934), accompanied by a copy of a hand-lettered 1995 document purporting to show that her mother had been born in "Westport, Mayo, Ireland". It would appear that, at the very least, the author of the second document had difficulty spelling "Brophy", and it provided no date of birth for Mrs Richards, nee Brophy.

A more suspicious mind might suggest that the omission of this information discouraged a search of the parish records in Westport.

Now, it remains possible that Maureen Richards, Attardo's mother, was indeed Irish-born, but you certainly wouldn't take that as gospel on the basis of the certificate provided to the BUI, and Mel Christle didn't.

A man with less respect for the well-established integrity of the worldwide boxing community might have supposed either that the furnished documentation constituted proof positive that the City of Boston's Department of Vital Statistics maintains the sloppiest records in Christendom, or that it represented a clumsy forgery; but, exercising what we thought to be admirable restraint, Christle suggested that "there may be a question mark over at least one of the facsimile documents furnished", and asked for the original documents.

"Without the originals," he politely noted, "there may be a difficulty as far as some members of the board are concerned with regard to recognising Mr Attardo's Irish ancestry."

When the request for further documentation was met by a stony silence, Christle put the promoters on notice two weeks ago that "the Boxing Union of Ireland is refusing to authorise any All-Ireland professional championship bout for the Irish light-middleweight title, and we would be most grateful if you could confirm that the proposed bout between James Rock and Thomas Attardo is not being billed as for the All-Ireland light-middleweight title."

Jim Rock, who brings a 17-1 record to the bout, is an entertaining fellow who once served as the boxing instructor for Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls. Attardo, although brave to a fault, absorbed an astonishing amount of punishment last September in losing his fourth consecutive fight, and it would be surprising if Rock so much as breaks sweat in winning.