AMERICA AT LARGE/George Kimball: It was a new if unhappy experience for Wayne McCullough. Inactive for two years after being banned by the British Board of Boxing Control, the Pocket Rocket from Belfast returned to the ring at Las Vegas's Cox Pavilion in January, and made short work of his opponent Alvin Brown, who lasted less than two rounds.

McCullough was duly presented with his $20,000 purse, which, according to procedure, had been lodged in the form of a cheque with the Nevada State Athletic Commission by the promoter, America Presents. A few days later McCullough's wife and manager, Cheryl, was notified by her bank that the cheque had been returned for insufficient funds.

Two months passed before America Presents impresario Mat Tinley made restitution, just last week completing a wire transfer that lodged the $20,000 directly into the McCulloughs' bank account. Still in dispute is an additional $10,000 McCullough claims he was promised in a side deal.

McCullough's contention is that Tinley wanted the money, for a December fight in Sacramento that was eventually cancelled, to be paid under the table. McCullough claims that the Denver-based promotional company also owes him for the medical tests he was required to perform before being re-licensed in Nevada. The total bill comes to $12,087.90, a trifling sum by contemporary boxing standards, but if McCullough plans on collecting it any time soon he is apparently going to have to take his place at the back of a very long queue.

The latest blow to Tinley's embattled company came last week when America Presents vice-president Fred Sternburg, claiming he had gone without pay cheques for the past six weeks, resigned and promptly filed a formal demand for payment of wages with Colorado's Division of Labour. The revelation of Sternburg's departure has led to a flood of information detailing other questionable practices. Tinley, bunkered in his Denver offices, insists the company will survive, but a more realistic boxing observer said yesterday, "I don't see how."

Nearly a decade has passed since Tinley, then a 33-year-old television executive, travelled to Dublin and scored a major upset by winning the sweepstakes to sign McCullough, beating a dozen better-known promoters and managers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just after his silver medal heroics at the Barcelona Olympics, McCullough's exciting style marked him as one of the more attractive prospects to come out of the 1992 Games. Tinley, who was widely described as "an American millionaire" (although in retrospect it would probably have been more accurate to describe him as the nephew of an American millionaire), explained that it had come down to a choice of buying a professional sports team or buying himself a boxer. McCullough's career, he said, would become his full-time hobby.

And for a few years it was nothing but the best. Tinley was the man who persuaded the late Eddie Futch to train McCullough, who relocated to Las Vegas to be near the venerable legend. By 1995 McCullough had become the World Boxing Council's bantamweight champion, and Mat Tinley, having succeeded after re-inventing the rules by which the game is played, apparently began to believe that he knew something about boxing.

In 1996 Tinley, announcing his intention to take on Don King, Top Rank and Main Events, formed America Presents. The company was largely funded by his late uncle, the cable TV tycoon Bill Daniels. In short order, Tinley hired Californian Dan Goossen to run the day-to-day operation, and set out to sign a number of prominent boxers.

Whether it was Tinley's money or Daniels', Goossen proceeded to spend it as if it were his own. The tales of the $1,000-a-night hotel suites and the first-class airfare wouldn't surface for years, but it is a fact that five years after America Presents' first major card (the January 1997 show at Boston's Hynes Auditorium headlined by McCullough's unsuccessful challenge to WBC's 122lb champion Daniel Zaragoza), local promoter Al Valenti, a New England public relations firm, and the Boston limousine company Goossen engaged for the week all claim they still haven't been paid.

"I don't understand this," said Wayne's wife, Cheryl, yesterday. "I mean, you have to pay your bills."

Four boxers under contract to America Presents (heavyweight Lawrence Clay-Bey, McCullough's old Barcelona opponent Casamayor and 140lb contenders Ben Tackie and Alex Trujillo) are presently in litigation with the company, and following Sternburg's messy departure, it has also come to light that the company has owed its former publicist, one-time boxing writer Pat Putnam, $9,000 since last October and an Internet boxing site $7,000 in unpaid advertising costs.

Two days ago the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that one of Tinley's erstwhile competitors, Top Rank, had been forced to assume a $13,000 debt America Presents owed DiBella Entertainment in order for a televised March 9th card in Pittsburgh to proceed. Kevin Barry, who manages New Zealand heavyweight David Tua, told the same newspaper of America Presents: "I don't even know where to start, but we have ongoing major financial issues with them."

Apart from the profligate lifestyle of Goossen, who departed under somewhat acrimonious circumstances last year, America Presents' troubles appear to stem from two additional events. The first, of course, was the untimely death of Bill Daniels two years ago. Tinley has apparently found that dealing with executors, lawyers, and foundations isn't quite the same as walking into Uncle Billy's office with one's hand outstretched.

The other was America Presents' unfortunate decision to throw in with Mike Tyson's comeback. For the price of a few million dollars in the form of loan which bailed Tyson out of some immediate financial difficulties a few years ago, America Presents' became his promoter of record, but when Tinley showed up in Copenhagen for Tyson's fight against Brian Nielsen last October, he was told by adviser Shelly Finkel at the weigh-in: "We can't pay you."

According to some reports, Tyson & Co owe America Presents $2.5 million, which, if true, would be enough to get the company out of the hole for at least the short term, but Sternburg says that figure is misleading. In fact, Tyson owes America Presents $900,000, and the other $1.6 million is due on a note directly payable to the estate of Bill Daniels.

In the wake of the bounced cheque to McCullough, the Nevada Commission says it will henceforth require cashier's cheques for America Presents shows, if there are any. Two days ago, the company's general counsel, Washington attorney Jeff Fried, had to personally guarantee and round up certified cheques to underwrite an America Presents card taking place in Phoenix tomorrow night.

"I just find it all very sad," said Cheryl McCullough yesterday. "I don't have any ill feeling toward Mat at all. I love Mat, and so does Wayne. I knew Mat was having some financial difficulties, but this has all caught us by surprise. I really hope he survives all of this."