Shadow Boxing

While Barry McGuigan was fighting Eusebio Pedroza at Wembly, the real fight was going on in room 205 of the Curson House Hotel. Gerry Callan reports.

Right from the start the world .title waters were turbulent.

Within three days of Barry McGuigan's definite arrival on the championship scene with his brilliant points win over Juan Laporte at the King's Hall, boxing's brown stuff had well and truly hit the fan.

McGuigan beat the former World Boxing Council champion on the last Saturday in February, and the followwing Tuesday London promoter Frank Warren fired the first salvo by announncing that he'd reached an agreement with the World Boxing Association titleholder Eusebio Pedroza for a London defence against McGuigan. Warren cabled Barry's manager Barney Eastwood to that effect that same day but in his own words "didn't even receive the courtesy of a reply, either by phone or in writing."

Eastwood instead chose to go pubblic with his response, saying that "Frank Warren has no mandate to act for us." What he really meant was that in boxing's politics, he and Frank Warren belonged to different parties.

From the beginning the Eastwoods had aligned themselves with the part London and part American based Mickey DUff, who with his promootional partner Mike Barrett had ruled the roost in British boxing circles since the late sixties. But four years ago Warren arrived on the scene, and the greater his success in making inroads into the Duff/Barrett empire, the more bitter the struggle between the two factions grew.

But Warren, who has staged both world title fights held in Britain so far this year, feels that there's a second point of dispute between himmself and Barney Eastwood. a bout of verbal fisticuffs in the Ulster Hall in 1983 over the agreed fee for an appearrance there by Keith Wallace, who Warren manages and who at the time was the Commonwealth flyweight champion.

Whether for one reason or two, Barney Eastwood flatly rejected a title challenge by McGuigan under the Warren banner (he also turned down an offer to make the fight a joint promotion), and accompanied by DUff, flew off to Panama hoping to sign the champion up himself.

If nothing else, the sojourn to Panama and Miami served to highlight the power structures of today 's big time boxing world. In essence, all championship bouts are controlled, not by the four different associations claiming to govern world boxing, but by three promoters; Bob Arum, Don King and Dan Duva.

The reality of the situation is that this trio dictates the who, where and when of virtually every championship fight at every single weight. In short, a boxer won't even get a chance to become a world champion unless he has at least the tacit backing of one of the "Big Three". And the rivalry between Warren and the Duff/Barrett team extends into the world arena.

Arum, King and Duva each serve as controlling promoters to one of the three world champions on whom the McGuigan camp had set their sights. Pedroza is firmly in the Arum camp, King pulls the strings with Ghana's WBC featherweight champion Azumah Nelson, and Duva is the guiding hand behind Rocky Lockridge. Such connsiderations presented, and will conntinue to present, severe problems for McGuigan's handlers.

Arum adamantly refuses to deal with DUff, saying bluntly, "I don't like him and I don't trust him"; King and Duff are on such terms that the former wasn't even approached about a possible clash between Nelson and McGuigan; and Duva, although evidenttly prepared to go along with an end of the year defence by Lockridge, may prove to be irrelevant as the American has two extremely tough title fights lined up and could well become an ex-champion before September. And anyway, Duva doesn't yet have the total independence and power of the other two.

So how did the McGuigan camp overcome the Arum obstacle to evenntually get Pedroza's signature? By the simple expedient of paying over the odds, but the man who was once Muhammad Ali's attorney still has another card to play. He manages the WBA's number one contender, Ameriican Bernard Taylor, against whom McGuigan, if he becomes champion, must make his first defence or be stripped of his newly won title.

But Bob Arum insists that there's no way on this earth he'll let Bernard Taylor willingly go to Belfast or anyywhere else for a promotion involving Mickey Duff. Under WBA rules the two parties would be given a specified length of time to reach an agreement, after which the fight would go to the highest bidder. And the man who proomoted the Hagler-Hearns extravaganza would surely be favoured to top any bid emanating from this side of the. Atlantic, which would mean that McGuigan would almost certainly have to go to America for his first defence if he becomes champion. Indeed, in an open market, Frank Warren would stand at least an equal chance of winning the bid, in which event the McGuigan camp would be compelled to accept the fight under his promootion.

The deal, which was finally signed during Pedroza's highly publicised visit to London for McGuigan's facile European title victory over Frenchman F arid Gallouze at Wem bley , ensures that the Panamanian will receive an all time record purse for a featherrweight; his basic fee beint 600,000 dollars tax free, and by the time exxpenses and the necessary supplements for tax are taken into account, his total cost will run to twice that. The buying out of the two fight option alone cost 300,000 dollars, and if Barry does become champion and Bob Arum wins the bidding for the Taylor fight, that money will have been more or less wasted.

And already the June 8 promotion has encountered a financial snag; it simply hasn't attracted as much Ameriican television money as the Eastwoods and Duff had hoped. And for that they have really only themselves to blame.

The initial favourites to get the fight were CBS, who'd been involved in two of McGuigan's previous fights (including that versus Laporte), and who, in the words of their consultant matchmaker Mort Sharnik, "only became involved because Mickey Duff had been loud in his assurances that we'd get a run with McGuigan." A run, of course, would have to include the most important fight in McGuigan's career, his shot at the world title.

But CBS were never approached in what they'd regard as a spirit of coooperation. Mickey Duff, who has long established connections with NBC, told CBS that the fight was going on on May 25, a totally unsuitable date for the network. And when CBS couldn't accommodate that date in their schedule, Duff sold the fight to NBC for a reputed 440,000 dollars.

Just where Duff got his information on a May date remains something of a mystery; he certainly didn't get it from Panama, because both before and after May was mooted the Pedroza camp insisted that the second half of June was the earliest possible date for which the grossly overweight chammpion could be ready.

CBS, to put it in American terms, felt shafted. They'd been forced to turn down the fight because the prooposed date was impossible for them to fit into their schedule, then they discover that the fight was never really on for that date in the first place. Duff then went selling again, only to find out that second time around it was very much a buyers market, and he ended up giving it to ABC for an estimated 260,000 dollars.

The irony is that had he gone back to CBS after the NBC deal fell through he could well have picked up another 100,000 dollars, as Mort Sharnik had by that stage been told by the network that the fight had been allocated a revised budget of "half a million dolllars, with about 140,000 dollars of that going towards the cost of transsmission from Europe."

There were other foul ups too.

Three days before McGuigan's hammerring of the unfortunate Gallouze, Barney Eastwood elevated the Frank Warren controversy onto a new level when, in the course of a live interview with Desmond Lynam on the BBC programme Grandstand, he asserted that the London promoter's claim to have secured an agreement with Peddroza was "a lie".

It was a strange allegation in view of the known facts, and what's equally puzzling is why, if that's what he really believed, he should wait a full month before making his feelings known. His comment about Frank Warren not having a mandate from him constitutes not a denial of the existence of an agreement, but rather a rejection of it and therefore an immplied acceptance of its existence.

And Barney Eastwood told Dessmond Lynam that in the course of three visits to Panama he'd built up such a rapport with the Pedroza camp that if there had been any such agreeement he'd "certainly have known about it." Not only does Mr Eastwood ignore his mail, but seemingly he was left in the dark about something that both Panamanian and American sources could confirm the existence of to this writer, not once but several times.

The ultimate PR fiasco, however, happened at about the very time that Barry McGuigan was preparing to step into the Wembley ring. In a nutshell, the fans who handed over up to £50 each were cheated; not only did they pay to see the wrong fight, they weren't even in the right arena.

They should have been at the Currzon House Hotel, because whatever about the lack of competitive action inside the ring at Wernbley, there was certainly no scarcity .of it in Room 205, the room occupied by Santiago Del Rio, Eusebio Pedroza's manager.

The two Panamanians, along with the champion's wife Rosa, had flown into London the previous Sunday morning and incredibly, after an afterrnoon press conference that day, they had had absolutely no contact whattsoever with either of the Eastwoods or Duff or Barrett in the next fortyyeight hours.

Just after seven o'clock on the Tuesday evening, Santiago Del Rio received a telephone call from an interpreter named Gerry, asking them to get a taxi to the fight. The manager's Latin temperament seethed at what he regarded as the ultimate innsult; the world champion had travelled halfway across the world, and now he was being asked to make his own way to the Wembley arena.

Replying that not only would they not get a taxi, but that they wouldn't even go to the fight, Del Rio terminated the conversation by giving Gerry a message for his lords and masters:

"By the way ... get fucked."

At eight o'clock, at just about the precise time that the boxing at Wernbbley was getting under way, an "obbviously distraught" Stephen Eastwood arrived at Del Rio's room, accompaanied by Gerry. The latter attempted to smooth the troubled waters by saying "Perhaps my Spanish isn't good enough. Maybe I didn't explain the message properly; what I meant to say was that we would be collecting you in a taxi."

The already agitated Del Rio rapidly grew even more so, and he resented what he saw as an attempt to con him. "Your Spanish is perfect. I understood you' perfectly on the phone, and I understand you perfectly now. What it means is that there's a liar in this room and it isn't me. "

The unfortunate Gerry then said that he d phoned the hotel "three or four times" with messages for Del Rio ; but when Del Rio checked with the reception desk and was told there'd been no messages, Gerry replied that he hadn't left his name, to which the world champion's manager repeated his comment about the contents of the room.

All attempts to get the Panamanians to go to the fight proved futile, Stephen and Gerry departed for Wernbley and the story was put out that Pedroza was suffering from a "stomach bug". About one o'clock in the morning Duff and Barrett arrived at Room 205 and both the dialogue and the atmossphere ran pretty much as before.

The deal was finally signed by the world champion at seven in the mornning, but so' piqued were the Panaamanians by the treatment they had received during their visit that they refused to remain in London for the lunchtime press conference and instead flew out just after ten 0 'clock. And when they had received their air tickets from Mickey Duff they got three oneeway tickets, so in their anxiety to get out of London they thefuselves paid almost 5,000 dollars to fly home

The entire saga reads like a catalogue of blunders, and what it all means is that there could well be plenty more to come because, as one member of the Panamanian entourage remarked, the lines have been drawn even before Pedroza comes back for the fight. The one inside the ring, that is. '.