In the city of the skyscraping ego, Naseem Hamed's is being sold to the American public this week in a fight that has cost his promoters $10 million to put together. Manhattan thought it had a pretty decent opinion of itself until it encountered the self-appointed prince of Sheffield, a town that will be associated in most New Yorkers' minds with an entirely different kind of disrobing.
The Full Monty connection has not been used to market Hamed's fight with Kevin Kelley at Madison Square Garden on Friday night but just about every other promotional device has. New York's sporting public are notoriously parochial. Alerting them in Christmas shopping week to the charms of a Yorkshire featherweight who has never fought outside England was bound to necessitate a fairly hefty unloading of dollars.
Hamed's new 10-fight deal with Frank Warren is expected to add a minimum of £40 million to his already burgeoning account. To keep the American public interested he must fulfil his promise to lay on a "good clean collision" in which the seasoned southpaw Kelley, "will hit the canvas in the third round". Hamed is not the sort to genuflect at the idea of New York. He said in Warren's hotel suite: "I don't like the cold and I hate the traffic."
Kelley is not entirely delighted to see himself depicted as a soon-to-be supine obstacle in Hamed's mission to conquer America. Warren has had to buy 250 hotel rooms to accommodate his allies and staff and forked out £250,000 to hire the Garden for a single night. A Friday night at Wembley would have cost him £22,000. The selling of Hamed to the States is British boxing's biggest marketing operation since the early peddling of Frank Bruno. This time, though, there is a shade more substance to back up the extravagant claims.
Hamed is unbeaten in 28 fights and is one of the world's best pound-for-pound fighters. His American assignment is supported by the giant cable firm Home Box Office (HBO) which has so far spent $1.5 million promoting the first of Hamed's projected six fights here and could end up paying him $10 million in purses.
Posters have been slapped on New York bus stops and a huge billboard greets motorists as they enter the Lincoln tunnel. A 22-storey building in Los Angeles carries a gigantic hoarding which proclaims the prince's prowess. In New York there have been expensive newspaper adverts and radio campaigns. Hamed, of Yemeni origins, has even been taken round the Arab districts in the hope that he will be embraced as a Middle Eastern hero.
"New York is the most expensive city in which to put on a show," says Warren. "We won't make money here. It's about breaking new ground." He claims that with his own £200,000 and half that again from Madison Square Garden the promotional bill is approaching two million bucks. So far 7,000 of the 17,000 tickets have been sold and the television suits are waiting anxiously by their phones to see how many Americans take the fight on pay-per-view.
One of the better stories swirling around this fight is the suggestion that Michael Jackson will be in the crowd as one of Hamed's supporters. Jackson has grown fond of the boyish Hamed, who says of his, er, eccentric admirer: "The guy's all right. We're friends. But I don't want to say too much about him. I don't want to get publicity on the back of someone else."
His final rallying cry to us was: "I want to bring some drama to New York." This, in the home of Broadway, was pretty ambitious stuff. If he reads New York's Time Out, he might see an interview with Arthur Miller in which the great playwright says of the city's drama industry: "You can't confide in anyone, and you'd better protect your wallet and your neck."
