Real Politics:  The Inside and Outside the Rope Battles Surrounding the WBC 154-Pound Title and De La Hoya, Vargas, Mayorga, Castillejo, Karmazin, Mosley, and Wright  Part I

By Brent Matteo Alderson

After losing to Shane Mosley in June of 2000, Oscar De La Hoya severed his promotional ties with Bob Arum and signed with Jerry Perenchio, the owner of Univision and the man who promoted the only true fight of the century, the first Ali-Frazier fight. 

You see it was rumored that De La Hoya was upset with Arum for a couple of reasons.  First, De La Hoya was disturbed by the amount of money that Top Rank earned from the Trinidad-De La Hoya fight.  Arum had asked Oscar if he wanted a flat guarantee or if he preferred to share in the risk and agree to a profit sharing type of agreement. 

De La Hoya leaned more towards the guarantee for which he was paid approximately 23 million dollars.  The fight was the highest grossing non-heavyweight fight of all time with an estimated 1.4 million Pay-Per-View buys, creating enough revenue that easily exceeded the purses of both fighters as well as the production and promotional costs. 

Because De La Hoya’s contract was based more on a guaranteed sum, Arum’s Top Rank made a killing on the fight and made so much profit that Oscar felt that their take was unreasonable considering that he had been the one who took the loss as well as the punches. 

Less than a year after De La Hoya lost a controversial decision to Trinidad, Arum matched him with Shane Mosley who had recently moved up from Lightweight, and a lot of insiders speculated that Oscar’s brain trust, especially his father, was upset that Arum chose Mosley as an opponent.  At the time Mosley didn’t have that big of a name outside of the sport and was just a very talented fighter with average marketability. 

Oscar lost to Mosley and legally broke his contract with Arum.  Don King was so delighted upon learning that Arum, a Harvard trained lawyer had lost to Oscar in Court that he commented, “He must have been eating cookies when he should have been paying attention to his law professor.”

Perenchio and his associates quickly set up a March of 2001 fight against Arturo Gatti and then a June match against WBC 154-pound champ Javier Castillejo.  De La Hoya won the fight and another title and just when it seemed like everything was going great, everything went bad. 

After Oscar won the title from Castillejo, Perenchio and his associates tried to make a Vargas match for the fall of 2001 and were unsuccessful.  You see, Perenchio hadn’t been involved in the boxing game for a long time and wasn’t able to work out a deal that was satisfactory to Oscar.  So instead he set up a December of 2001 bout against WBC number one contender Roman Karmazin scheduled to take place at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles.  

Not surprisingly, De La Hoya claimed that he injured his wrist and the fight was cancelled, but insiders suspected that De La Hoya wasn’t happy with Perenchio.  Look, next to Mike Tyson, Oscar was the sports premier attraction and he was going to fight at the Olympic Auditorium, a great arena, but a venue that only holds 6200 people. 

So De La Hoya went back to Arum and a match with Fernando Vargas was set up for May of 2002.  De La Hoya realized that if he didn’t go back to Arum, he would have to sign with another big time promoter who also had the infrastructure and experience to exasperate the different avenues of possible revenue. 

Because with big-time-extravaganza-type fights, factors such as foreign television rights and foreign sponsors can considerably increase revenue, and although he was an astute business man, Perenchio didn’t have the connections or recent experience in the fight game to generate enough profit to satisfy De La Hoya’s monetary expectations.  

During the course of this political maneuvering and back stabbing, a problem arose.  Roman Karmazin had been the number one contender for quite a while and had not been afforded a title shot, but because the WBC wanted to be involved with the De La Hoya-Vargas Super Fight, they granted Oscar an extension. 

You see the organizations are well aware that their valor and worth is dependent upon the champions that represent them and as a result they sometimes make special exceptions for special fighters, as was the case with Prince Naseem Hamed and the WBO when Juan Manuel Marquez was the mandatory challenger for what seemed like an eternity. 

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW