by David P. Greisman

NOTE: For video, please go to http://bit.ly/jefflacydc

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It had already been a bizarre evening at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Then the night got even stranger, with an announcement that former super-middleweight titleholder Jeff Lacy’s fight with Rayco Saunders had been canceled. Later, Lacy and Saunders each came out to the ring ready to fight. Finally, their bout was called off nonetheless.

But even before that, there was the cancelation of a fight between Hector Camacho Jr. and Ryan Davis, not that you would’ve known this by checking the event’s website or the bout sheet handed out to media.

No official reason was given, though rumblings among press row and other D.C. boxing insiders said that Camacho had gotten injured in training camp, was overweight, had shown up in the city anyway and had even gotten paid some money ahead of time. Another undercard bout, this one between Jarrett Hurd and Eddie Soto, had also been called off.

There were extended gaps between fights, never mind the significant swaths of empty seats. Daniel Attah at one point came to the ring, waited for DeMarcus “Chop Chop” Corley to come out, then returned to his locker room. It would be quite a while before Attah made his second ring walk of the evening and the match with Corley actually occurred.

There had been six pro fights listed on the bout sheet, which followed a handful of amateur bouts. Only three actually happened.

In the first pro fight, local middleweight/super middleweight Demond Nicholson scored a fourth-round technical knockout over journeyman Dennis Sharpe. Then Corley won an extremely wide unanimous decision over Attah, putting Attah down five times over the course of the bout.

And right before Henry “Sugar Poo” Buchanan stepped into the ring with Alexander Johnson, it was announced that Buchanan-Johnson would be the last bout of the evening, even though Lacy-Saunders had not yet occurred. No official reason had been given.

Johnson landed a left cross in the first round that put Buchanan down for the count. Fans began to file out of the venue. Jeff Lacy soon began to walk to the ring. He went up the steps and onto the canvas.

“They ain’t told me nothing,” Lacy said to someone at ringside. He paced around the ring. Saunders soon came out toward the ring.

“There’s no fight!” a person at ringside, apparently acting in an official capacity, yelled out.

“Everybody’s out. There’s no fight!” that person yelled. “Let’s go! No fight!” He yelled to another staffer: “Do not let nobody else through there! That’s it! There ain’t no fight!”

Lacy picked up a microphone, holding it with his still-gloved hands.

“I never said I didn’t want to fight. I’m in the ring to fight,” he said. “I want to let my fans know because I got a reputation.”

He didn’t want people to think that he was to blame for the bout not happening, he said.

“Me and my opponent are right here ready to fight. They didn’t tell us nothing. For some reason, these seats are starting to be empty. For whatever reason, I don’t know. But we ready to fight.”

He soon spoke with BoxingScene.com while taking off his gloves and then walking back to his dressing room:

“They had us in the back warming up,” Lacy said. “They kept moving me back from main event to swing bout to I don’t know what else. But I come to find out everybody leaving, so I came out her to pay my respects to my fans. They didn’t say why. They still haven’t told me anything.”

Derek Gionta, who was Saunders’ chief second, corroborated this afterward.

“They switched the order of the fights a number of times and moved our locker room once,” Gionta told BoxingScene.com.

There was confusion the entire time. One rumor was that the card had gone over its time limit and the venue needed to shut down. Gionta was told by a member of the convention center’s security team that Lacy didn’t want to fight.

“I find it hard to believe that Jeff didn't want to fight,” Gionta said. “Everyone believes it was a money issue.”

That appears to be what it was. The head of the city’s athletic commission told a local matchmaker/publicist that the fight had been called off because the promoter hadn’t provided the money for the bout to be paid to the fighters afterward. While the money was there up front for the other matches that had already taken place, that was not the case for Lacy-Saunders, and so that fight couldn’t be allowed to go on.

“I didn’t do everything that I’ve done to fight for free,” Lacy said. “That’s the reason why I came, because they threw money in my face. I lived up to my end of the agreement on the contract. At the end of the day, I was ready to fight, my opponent was ready to fight, and we come out here to fight, and the arena was empty.”

This was a card put on GFS Boxing as part of its “Celebrity Weekend of Champions,” which also included a golf tournament, an awards ceremony, and appearances by Roger and Jeff Mayweather at a gym in suburban Maryland, where they worked one-on-one with a number of amateur boxers (Floyd Mayweather Sr. had also been advertised but was not there).

Lacy later said he’d been promised $10,000 for the fight with Saunders.

Gionta said Saunders was paid his travel money, which is part of the fighter’s compensation and covers car rental, gas, food, etc. It’s not much, however.

“The purse, which is a substantial amount more, was not paid to Rayco,” Gionta said. “Looks like they will go after the promoter's bond to pay his purse. Not sure what the other fighters will do.”

It was another bizarre situation for Lacy, who got stopped in two rounds against Humberto Savigne this past July, then proceeded to use social media to claim that the man he’d faced was much bigger than the man who had been at the weigh-in and must’ve been a brother of Savigne’s who had been substituted in. The 37-year-old from St. Petersburg, Florida, remains 26-5 with 18 KOs and 1 no contest. Saunders, 40, of Pittsburgh, remains 23-24-2 with 10 KOs.

“I’ve been in training camp, I just came off a fight, I stayed in training camp. It’s been over two to three months,” Lacy said. “It goes to show you the business of boxing, how bad it is. It showcased what us fighters have to deal with behind the curtains. This is the sport I love. I grew up loving the sport. It’s a pure love that I have for this sport, at the age of seven. And I feel the devil is trying to strip that away from me.”

Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide . Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com