By Dan Rafael, ESPN.com
Your weekly random thoughts …
As soon as Shane Mosley's welterweight unification fight with Andre Berto was canceled -- understandably, because Berto lost numerous family members in the Haiti earthquake and isn't prepared to go forward with the fight during this heartbreaking time -- the possibility of Mosley defending against Floyd Mayweather Jr. immediately came up.
It's the obvious fight. Mosley needs a dance partner, and Mayweather also needs one. Besides, it's a huge fight.
Let's just hope the sides can make it happen (probably for early May) and not get bogged down in the ego and stupidity that killed Mayweather's fight with Manny Pacquiao, which was supposed to be on March 13.
If you ask me, there are three superfights in boxing. One is Pacquiao-Mayweather, which is by far the biggest. The other two are Mosley-Mayweather and Pacquiao-Mosley.
So while Pacquiao moves on to face Joshua Clottey -- the next-best available welterweight for him to fight -- Mosley and Mayweather hopefully will come together.
Mosley-Mayweather is a fight I've wanted to see for many years, going back to the late 1990s when Mayweather was the junior lightweight champ and Mosley was the lightweight champ. But Mosley didn't stick around at 135 pounds waiting for Mayweather; he jumped all the way up to welterweight to lure a prime Oscar De La Hoya into the ring.
As much as I like Mosley-Mayweather, though, remember one thing: It's still second-best. Pacquiao-Mayweather was, and still is, the biggest fight out there.
• Not sure what to make of some phone calls I received Monday night: Informed sources said that even though Berto planned to withdraw from the fight because of his family situation, his adviser, Al Haymon, who also happens to handle Mayweather, made a deal for Berto to get paid (either by the Golden Boy/Mosley side or Mayweather or both) to step aside to allow for Mosley-Mayweather (a much bigger fight than Mosley-Berto) to be put together. One reason it sounded plausible is because, according to a source familiar with the Mosley-Berto contract, the deal had a rescheduling clause in it, in the event either guy had to delay the fight. That clause was not exercised. Perhaps a payment to Berto made that go away.
• With Mayweather off March 13, it should come as zero surprise that HBO PPV and Top Rank struck a deal for the network to produce and distribute the Pacquiao-Clottey card on March 13. There never was any way in the world that a Mayweather fight would have actually gone on the same night against another opponent, as had been insisted upon by Golden Boy, which is promoting Mayweather. HBO's Ross Greenburg and Mark Taffet had to let the craziness play out, and now it has. Pacquiao gets March 13. Mayweather will go some other time. All's well that ends well -- except for the fact that we still aren't getting Pacquiao-Mayweather. And don't think that I or millions of boxing fans are going to forget that any time soon.
• Example 5,879 on why boxing often leaves me scratching my head: Mosley slaughtered Antonio Margarito in January 2009 in a huge victory. Margarito later had his license revoked for at least a year for trying to load his gloves before the fight, yet he may wind up back in the ring before Mosley. Top Rank, which believes Margarito will be licensed in Texas, plans to put him on the Pacquiao-Clottey undercard. Mosley, meanwhile, hasn't fought since beating Margarito and probably won't fight until the spring now that his fight with Berto is off. Crazy.
• Promoter Don King always seems to wait until the last minute to secure sites for his cards. King, however, has found a home for the March 6 HBO show headlined by the Devon Alexander-Juan Urango junior welterweight unification fight. It will take place at the Mohegan Sun resort in Connecticut. He landed the site with about seven weeks before the fight. By King's standards, that's an eternity.
• You may not like watching John Ruiz fight/hold, but it made a lot of sense for Golden Boy to sign him because it also promotes David Haye, which means Golden Boy will control a piece of the heavyweight title regardless of who wins their April fight. And then Golden Boy can give the winner of Haye-Ruiz to Bernard Hopkins, assuming he beats Roy Jones Jr. (which he should). As long as HBO doesn't let Ruiz anywhere near one of Golden Boy's dates on the network, everything will be just fine.
• Regardless of whether he got a buyout, I'm glad Jermain Taylor withdrew from the Super Six tournament. Nobody wants to see the guy get hurt. But I found it pretty weak that while thanking everyone in his statement announcing his withdrawal that he left out promoter Lou DiBella, who had been an integral part of Taylor's career from day one. Although DiBella had resigned a couple of weeks earlier over concerns about Taylor's health, he deserved more from Taylor than to be ignored as though he never existed. Taylor won the undisputed middleweight championship and made many millions of dollars, and he has DiBella to thank for being a major reason it happened.
• Times may be tough for some promoters, but Top Rank keeps rolling along. Bob Arum's company will promote 11 cards in the next 10 weeks. The marathon begins with an excellent HBO card in New York on Saturday night when featherweight titlist Steven Luevano defends against junior featherweight titlist Juan Manuel Lopez in the main event, and runs nonstop through a Fox Sports Net card on March 27. In all, there is one HBO card, one combo "Latin Fury"/"Pinoy Power" pay-per-view card, eight FSN cards and the centerpiece of it all: the Pacquiao-Clotty HBO PPV card. Top Rank matchmaker Brad "Abdul" Goodman is going to be awfully busy for the next couple of months.
• I don't know about you, but between the return of ESPN2's "Friday Night Fights" a couple of weeks ago and the regularity of the new "Top Rank Live" series on FSN, I'm a pretty happy camper when it comes to the basic cable offerings. Unfortunately, it's a miserably slow start for HBO and Showtime. With regard to the new Top Rank series, I thought the debut card headlined by Vanes Martirosyan's extremely competitive fight with Kassim Ouma was excellent. Hopefully, shows like it will be the norm and not the exception.
Let's also hope that Top Rank won't be destroying another network's taste for boxing as it did when it got the keys to the castle from Versus and then burned it down. I think Arum understands, although you never know. At least he's saying the right things.
Here's what he had to say recently when I asked him about the FSN series and reminded him of the disaster he was responsible for at Versus: "We f---ed up Versus. If we don't learn from the mistakes we made at Versus, then this series will go down the drain. Versus was not something we are proud of. It just went off the tracks. We didn't pay attention to it. I admit that. This is different. Now we brought a guy on, Carl Moretti, whose first responsibility is that series."
• After the 2009 awards stories came out a few weeks ago, I was asked by several Fight Freaks to name my biggest robbery of the year. I'd have to go with two of them. Ali Funeka got absolutely hosed when he got a draw against Joan Guzman. Same goes for Sergio Martinez, who got an inconceivable draw against Kermit Cintron, who really had been knocked out earlier in the fight until referee Frank Santore made one of the worst calls I have ever seen and allowed the fight to continue.
• So Evander Holyfield's fight with Frans Botha in Uganda had been postponed from Jan. 16 to Feb. 20. Anyone shocked? Hopefully, the farce will wind up being canceled.
• Ron Scott Stevens, who was unceremoniously dumped as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission in July 2008 (even though he apparently had done a fine job) has always had interests outside boxing. One of them is theater. Stevens has written and produced an off-Broadway play called "The Cutting Den." Its three-week run opens Feb. 4 at the Soho Playhouse. Publicist Donald Tremblay described the play as being about a Brooklyn barbershop fronting for a gambling parlor. One of the interesting notes about the play is that former middleweight titlist Doug DeWitt, who has been acting since the end of his boxing career in 1992, has one of the lead roles.
• DVD pick of the week: I received some DVDs from a buddy of mine the other day. One fight he sent was one that I have on VHS but in crappy condition. The DVD of this original ABC broadcast, however, was in stunning condition, which made it all the more enjoyable watching one of the greatest heavyweight slugfests ever. It was George Foreman's epic five-round brawl with Ron Lyle from Jan. 24, 1976, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. It was Foreman's first sanctioned fight in more than a year (he had done some exhibitions) following his knockout loss to Muhammad Ali, and Foreman barely survived. Lyle hurt Foreman in the first round and dropped him twice in the fourth round. But Foreman also dropped Lyle in the incredible fourth before knocking him out in the fifth. It's a truly awesome fight.
Source: sports.espn.go.com
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