by David P. Greisman
Between superstars and Golden Boy Promotions business partners Oscar De La Hoya, Bernard Hopkins, Shane Mosley and Marco Antonio Barrera, there are 61 years as professionals in the sweet science. They have accumulated 190 wins and millions of dollars. They are experienced, successful and rich.
As of Saturday night, their fraternity includes Winky Wright, who brings to Golden Boy his 50 wins over a 16-year career, along with his venture Winky Promotions.
Unlike Zab Judah, whose proposed Super Promotions was a thought without solidity prior to his signing with Prize Fight Promotions, Winky Promotions will maintain some semblance of autonomy.
“This is a big step for Winky Promotions,” Wright told the Associated Press over the weekend. “A lot of people thought it was going to be a joke, one of those fly-by-night promotions. We’re trying to do the right thing, and take over the boxing game, and do it the right way.”
Yet after announcing Winky Promotions last year prior to his December fight with Sam Soliman, joining an established promotional outfit may have been Wright’s only way to conduct business while preventing a repeat of some of his recent missteps.
Wright first ran into the distracting drama of the boxing business last fall when Gary Shaw pulled out as Wright’s promoter. Shaw’s reasoning, as he told John C. Cotey of the St. Petersburg Times, was that Wright’s new manager and partner Chris Lighty had “been going negotiating around behind my back.”
Shaw and Wright mended fences in time for Wright-Soliman, which carried the banners of both the veteran and the budding promoters. Wright, though, still had his sights set on freedom.
“They think we don’t know what it takes to be promoters, but just because we haven’t done it yet doesn’t mean we can’t do it,” Wright told Anwar S. Richardson of the Tampa Tribune in January.
“All it takes is for us to see what they do, add something to it and go from there,” he said.
But it’s not that easy.
As Marc Ratner, then the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, told Richardson, self-promoting fighters may not promote their own fights, but must instead partner with another company that will prevent conflicts of interest by paying the judges, officials and other fighters.
Nevertheless, Winky preferred to go it alone, distancing himself once again from Shaw in February, thus putting in danger a June bout with Jermain Taylor that had been negotiated by Shaw and Taylor’s promoter, Lou DiBella.
In the meantime, Wright and Lighty met with Golden Boy Promotions executive Richard Schaefer and HBO, according to a Times article by Cotey. Wright, though, told an interviewer that the purpose of the meeting was to either try get a fight with De La Hoya or to otherwise talk about co-promoting with the Golden Boy’s company.
Although Wright insisted to the interviewer, “HBO had nothing do with setting up the meeting,” many were upset, including Shaw and DiBella.
“[A]ll I’m trying to do is show my business mind, establish my business and create a life for me outside of boxing. What’s wrong with that?” Wright told the Tribune’s Richardson. “I’m trying to get Winky Promotions running and want it to be seen as a viable promotional company. I couldn’t do that because people kept thinking everything was a Gary Shaw Productions.”
Days later, Wright agreed to the Taylor fight, likely because without the deal agreed to by Shaw and DiBella, the bout would have gone to a purse bid, creating a less favorable split for Wright of the lucrative proceeds.
“If not for [Shaw’s] involvement I would not have let the deal happen,” DiBella told ESPN.com scribe Dan Rafael. “It was amateur hour on Winky’s side except for Gary Shaw. I give Gary credit for putting up with the embarrassment and for negotiating like a gentleman and a professional.”
Wright got his fight with Taylor, which ended as a draw, but he lost the prominent exposure for his company.
Until this past weekend.
Winky Promotions will now likely reap the benefits of Golden Boy Promotions, a growing company with a decent-sized stable and a number of shows that have not necessarily needed their superstar honchos in order to thrive.
As of February, Winky Promotions didn’t even have a license to promote in any state, according to Richardson in the Tribune. Their first show sans assistance from Shaw occurred in May, when Winky Promotions, Peter Kahn Entertainment and DRL Promotions put together an episode of ESPN2’s Friday Night Fights that had Alejandro Berrio-Yusaf Mack headlining.
That show was in Florida, one of only three states (along with Connecticut and New York) that Wright’s company had licenses to promote in as of May, according to an article by Teri Berg on MaxBoxing.
The promotional doors will likely be open much wider now for Wright through his “joint agreement” with Golden Boy, as Wright’s adviser Jim Wilkes described it to Cotey in the Times this weekend.
“Winky’s next promotion will be Winky Productions in association with Golden Boy,” he said.
Meaning that although Wright is neither a Golden Boy fighter nor a Golden Boy executive, he may hold and star in shows with his name on them. In return, according to Cotey’s brief, Golden Boy will use Wright and his Winky Promotions to scout and sign fighters.
In essence, Wright is less a Golden Boy partner and more a Golden Boy employee. But by working for and working with the group of fighters that, like him, are experienced and successful between the ropes, Wright is hoping that he, too, becomes successful and rich outside of the ring.
The 10 Count
1. The announcement that Winky Promotions is teaming up with Golden Boy followed Saturday’s pay-per-view rematch between Shane Mosley and Fernando Vargas. Whereas Mosley-Vargas I was competitive, Mosley dominated the second go-around, stopping Vargas in the sixth round. With the win, Mosley will likely take the rest of the year off, preparing his body for an eventual return to welterweight. Vargas, meanwhile, looked slow from his making weight and subsequent pre-fight adding of pounds. Vargas will likely join the middleweight ranks, where we will see just how much he has left following his losses to Mosley, Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya.
2. I’ll be interested in seeing the pay-per-view buyrates for Mosley-Vargas II. The first fight was on PPV due to the price of its two headlining superstars, yet the show did well with 410,000 buys. That success was probably more instrumental in the signing of the rematch than was the revenge factor for Vargas, and thus this card’s number of consumers will dictate just how often promoters and networks ask us to dig deeper into our wallets.
3. On the undercard of Mosley-Vargas II, junior featherweight titlist Daniel Ponce De Leon needed less than a minute to put away his opponent. A left cross did most of the damage, knocking down and knocking out Sod Looknongyantoy, whom Ponce De Leon had defeated via twelve-round decision last October. The fight didn’t come anywhere close to going the distance this time, not with Ponce De Leon forcing Sod to eat dirt.
4. Also on the undercard of Mosley-Vargas II, Juan Diaz pummeled Randy Suico over nine rounds, causing referee Joe Cortez to step in and prevent Suico from taking further punishment. Someone needs to get Diaz non-PPV exposure as soon as possible. After stopping Billy Irwin on ESPN2 early last year, he has fought off-air once and then been on the televised undercards of Judah-Mayweather and Mosley-Vargas II. The kid is guaranteed effort, and there are many other lightweights who he could mesh well with, including Jose Armando Santa Cruz, Edner Cherry, Jesus Chavez, Acelino Freitas and Diego Corrales.
5. Following Suico’s stoppage loss at the hands of Diaz, reporter Ronnie Nathanielsz quoted Suico’s manager Joe Koizumi as complaining that the fight’s end was “premature,” as Diaz was “a light puncher but very busy” and Suico “suffered no damage. He is okay.” That Suico is okay now is precisely the point as to why the stoppage was right, and Koizumi should step into his other role as a boxing journalist to see the fight’s result from its proper, unbiased perspective.
6. Javier Castillejo knocked out Felix Sturm to take a middleweight trinket this weekend, a shocking upset considering that Castillejo is 38 and had recently lost to Fernando Vargas while Sturm, 27, had only previously been defeated via a controversial decision loss to Oscar De La Hoya. It is a major blow to Sturm, who had turned down a fight with middleweight champion Jermain Taylor, probably in order to rake in more paydays in Germany.
7. Did anyone else hear that collective sigh of relief after it was revealed this weekend that Manny Pacquiao’s recent hospitalization was due to relatively minor stomach problems? After Pacquiao gets better, fans can focus on his rubber match with Erik Morales, and whether Morales, with his recent difficulties making weight, will have stomach problems of his own.
8. Here’s hoping that the proposed rematch between light heavyweights Tomasz Adamek and Paul Briggs, which scribe Dan Rafael noted is going to purse bid in July, makes it onto the airwaves. And let’s hope that, should an outlet choose to broadcast Adamek-Briggs II, they figure out a way to show the duo’s first throwdown, which was not televised in America but was also, as Rafael wrote, “spectacular and bloody.”
9. Now that Mike Arnaoutis is out of his July 29 bout with Vivian Harris on HBO’s Boxing After Dark due to a cut suffered in training camp, how about a rematch between Harris and the man who knocked him out over a year ago, Carlos Maussa?
10. Is it any longer news when James Toney goes off on a rant, like he did last week at a press conference for his September bout with Samuel Peter? It’s beginning to become a “Dog Bites Man” kind of non-story. I’m waiting for the reverse, when journalists flock to James Toney standing at a busy intersection helping elderly women cross the street. Nevertheless, Toney is entertaining, and the wheels need to be put in motion for a televised roundtable of trash-talk between Toney, Bernard Hopkins and Antonio Tarver.
