One City Down and 10 to Go
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
February 21, 2007
It was the start of the 11-city tour to sell the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather Jr. bout on May 5, and the staples of major boxing promotion were in evidence: well-fed reporters, thumping music, interminable video clips, Bert Sugar (boxing’s living logo) in his fedora and unlit cigar, late-arriving fighters, intercamp insults and each boxer’s fierce vow to hurt the other.
There were flashy entrances, the usual claims that history will be made, overuse of the fight’s slogan (“The World Awaits”) and the golden oldie of boxing news conferences: the posed staredown between the boxers for photographers and TV cameras. Here, they adopted menacing looks that may have reflected mutual loathing or subconscious admiration.
And then there were the fans, invited to the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf-Astoria by the promoter Golden Boy Promotions (De La Hoya’s company) to cheer for one boxer and hoot the other, and provide some of the loud chaos that sells boxing — the rough equivalent of fans being bused into Super Bowl media day to snap photographs and ask for autographs.
“You’re going down!” one woman, who hoped that De La Hoya would sign a poster she had created for him, shouted at Mayweather.
Over the next week, the boxers are to repeat the ritual 10 more times.
“I have to go with it, but I get fed up with it,” said De La Hoya, who knows as well as anyone the primary requirement of the tour: to push sales of HBO’s $54.95 pay-per-view production beyond the 1.4 million he and Felix Trinidad generated in 1999, the most for a nonheavyweight fight.
“It’s important to go out to the fans and to let them get a glimpse of you, to get an autograph,” he said.
At least Don King is not part of the junket, he said.
King is a promotional savant, but those who have watched him in action know that he is the star of his tours and news conferences, discoursing with breathtaking loquaciousness before introducing the main event’s boxers.
King’s place as ringmaster was taken by Richard Schaefer, the far-less obtrusive chief executive of Golden Boy Promotions. He was polite and relatively brief, yet still needed 40 minutes to tick off business details of the bout (financial history in the making!) and usher in a gaggle of speakers with stakes in the fight. Then the boxers spoke.
Mayweather is the self-appointed motormouth and trash-talker, who said he respects his opponent as a man, but not as a fighter. He ripped off his Technicolor warm-up jacket and T-shirt to demonstrate his stellar shape, forcing De La Hoya to unbutton his suit jacket and shirt to flaunt his pecs and abs. Mayweather called De La Hoya dull and a fake; his adviser, Leonard Ellerbe, said De La Hoya had “laid down” in a fight. All standard stuff to elicit attention to a major fight designed to perk up a marginalized, sickly sport.
When De La Hoya rose, ending a requisite period of staring straight ahead to ignore Mayweather’s shtick, Mayweather bowed eight times while chuckling in mocked obeisance. “Stop the fight now!” he shouted.
“When I touch you, you’ll hurt for a week,” De La Hoya promised. Then he said he converts the insults into his motivation to hurt Mayweather. De La Hoya later insisted that none of what he said was promotional folderol.
“There’s no room for fake talk,” he said.
Their routine will continue through next Wednesday as the two camps fly on separate private planes (visiting two cities in each of four days, including Philadelphia and Washington today), spending a few hundred thousand dollars of Golden Boy’s money to promote the bout.
“You need a megafight to justify that,” said Mark Taffet, a senior vice president of HBO.
Bill Caplan, a veteran public-relations operative, usually for the promoter Bob Arum, dates the multicity tour to the 1980s, and recalled a 26-city, 12-day slog before De La Hoya’s 1996 fight with Julio César Chávez.
In day after day of self-promotion for bouts that are months in the future, answering the same questions and rising again and again for staredowns, Caplan said that as a rule, “The fighters don’t stay interested.”
But he could not recall a tour truncated by ennui.
Kelly Swanson, a publicist for the fight, said different cities, with different audiences, will maintain the fighters’ enthusiasm.
But prefight promotion can be dangerous. After Mike Tyson brawled with (and bit) Lennox Lewis on a theater stage in Manhattan in 2002, there was no tour. That same month, Fernando Vargas pushed De La Hoya at the Los Angeles stop of their prefight tour, starting a melee in which one of Arum’s publicists broke a leg.
In advance of their 2002 bout, Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales were on tour in Houston when they got into a verbal row that ended when Barrera slugged Morales on the chin.
“Real bare-knuckle stuff,” he said.
The initial stop on the De La Hoya-Mayweather tour offered no hint of violence, but Mayweather, who is seeking his opponent’s light middleweight belt, said: “He’s kind of scared of me. He won’t last four more cities.”
