|
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
The Boxer Next Door Dimpled -- and undefeated -- lightweight champ Sugar Shane Mosley, the 1998 Fighter of the Year, is putting a fresh, sweet face on his often sour sportBy Richard Hoffer Issue date: April 26, 1999
Where are the tattooed orphans, the repeat offenders, the surly nose-bone-into-your-brain stars we've grown used to? Is it truly possible that the sport has been taken over by a bunch of kids with milk mustaches, guys who a year ago were playing trumpet in the school band? In other words, does the changing face of boxing now belong to Sugar Shane Mosley? And does it have to have dimples? If Mosley, the undefeated IBF lightweight world champion-who last Saturday night in Indio, Calif., ran his record to a pristine 32-0 with an eighth-round TKO of challenger John (the Beast) Brown -- is the standard-bearer for this new generation of fighters, as many in boxing believe, then the sport really is in for a transformation. It may never be civilized to the degree of, say, contract bridge (point of reference: a faded and shamed Mike Tyson remains boxing's biggest draw), but a good citizen-fighter like Mosley, who can't bring himself to move more than a block from his parents, could go a long way toward reclaiming the sport as family fare.
"He's the complete package," says HBO matchmaker Lou DiBella. "He's got that rare combination of speed and power, and he knows how to carry himself outside the ring." DiBella can afford to gush, as Mosley's fights helped HBO to consistently higher ratings in a year that was mostly devoid of big bouts. Indeed, the normally gloomy DiBella is cheered by Mosley and a group of like-spirited and similar-sized kids who have been reliable ratings warriors for him and other promoters. "Mosley's part of a new generation of young, quality fighters who are also pretty good citizens -- guys like David Reid, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Antonio Vargas. They all have the sense that it's more important to be a fighter than a sideshow." Until now, though, Mosley has been the best fighter nobody's ever heard of. While his talent has long been trumpeted among aficionados, it's been a secret elsewhere. "You could say that he's been underpromoted," offers his promoter, Cedric Kushner, "but you would be tragically understating the case." Kushner does not indict himself for negligence. He didn't get ahold of Mosley until 1997, three lost years into the fighter's career. Before that, Mosley had been strictly a West Coast fighter, having boxed all but three of his 23 bouts in his home state of California. At that time Mosley was far more famous as a sparring partner -- warring with the likes of Julio Cesar Chavez for $100 a week -- than he was as a headliner. "It was a slow start," Mosley says. It was his own fault, you could say. He started boxing at age eight, when he tagged along to a Pomona gym with his father. By the time he was a teenager, he had become the class of American amateurs. In 1990 the U.S. team coach, Joe Byrd, said, "He's probably above and beyond any [amateur] in the world at his weight class." However, he never got to the Olympic springboard, the one that sent Oscar De La Hoya (one of Mosley's amateur victims) toward his superstar status of today. Mosley, shockingly, failed to make the 1992 team, losing a questionable decision to Vernon Forrest. Today Mosley says the upset never bothered him all that much. He was eager to get on with his pro career, and he assumed he would be ranked with his idol, Sugar Ray Leonard, in no time. That rosy outlook ignored Leonard's own use of the Olympic springboard. And it ignored boxing reality. A Southern California promoter who was new to the business of boxing-his money came from construction -- could not move Mosley at all in the heavily networked world of professional fighting. For all his brilliance, Mosley remained a local fighter, far from the notice of the East Coast crowd, which shapes national opinion and offers TV contracts. "I was worth millions, or so I thought," he says, "but I was living in my parents' garage, making $1,500 or $2,000 a fight." Not that the garage was any particular hardship. It might not seem fair that while Mosley was double-parked at his parents' house, a contemporary like De La Hoya was drawing up plans for his Big Bear chateau, but Mosley doesn't complain. "That garage was nice," he says. "I had cable, air conditioning, a lot of space." Home cooking? "That, too." But once Mosley's first promotional contract expired and he signed with Kushner, a move up and out was inevitable. Kushner, who operates in the big leagues and has a variety of champions signed at any time, lured Mosley under his ample wing with the prospect of fighting Holiday, a Kushner-promoted boxer who happened to hold the IBF lightweight title. Mosley jumped at the chance. The fight against Holiday is considered one of his poorest, although Mosley's performance had less to do with the presumably stiffer competition than it did with a huge ingestion of muscle builder. By his own admission Mosley took too much creatine the day before the bout and became dehydrated by diarrhea. "He had an upset tummy," is how Kushner puts it. By fight time Mosley weighed 136 pounds, about 10 less than he normally would have, and he didn't have the strength to take out Holiday, one of only two opponents to have gone the distance against him. Kushner kept Mosley busy thereafter, accepting small paydays in less than glamorous venues just for the activity. Ordinarily this would provoke a champion to bolt, but both Mosley and his father were persuaded of Kushner's wisdom. And what might have seemed like downward mobility -- Mosley once fought for $75,000 less as a champion than he had as challenger, and he bounced from HBO to the USA network to Fox -- turned out to be the path to fame and fortune. By virtue of his relentless schedule, which was played out almost entirely on the East Coast, Mosley became recognized as the sport's rising star. In 1998 HBO signed him to a three-year contract, validating his string of conquests. This is a splendid payoff for Mosley, who at 27 does not have time to spare. But he doesn't intend to relax much. "I like to fight," he says. "I don't have time or focus for anything else." In an age when athletes reach the top very quickly and then begin planning alternate careers, Mosley is a throwback. "Ten more years," he says. "What else am I going to do?" He will almost certainly move up in weight, possibly as high as De La Hoya's class (147 pounds), and earn commensurate purses. He could turn out to be one of those rare fighters who is so extravagantly skilled that it matters less whom he fights than whether he fights at all. If Mosley turns into a kind of performance artist -- in the fashion of a young Roy Jones Jr., for example -- he will certainly be a busy one. He doesn't enjoy downtime. Just weeks after a recent victory over Golden Johnson, which was a sort of solo act (highlight: a round in which Johnson failed to land a punch), Mosley was back in the gym, working out and playing pickup basketball twice a day. "If I'm not working out," he says, "I get grouchy." This might not be so much a matter of self-discipline as it is hyperactivity. "He was always very, very hyper," says his mother, Clemmie. "In nursery school they let me bring his Big Wheel so he could ride around during nap time. All the other kids were asleep, but Shane...." The trick throughout his young life was to keep him busy, in soccer, basketball, it didn't matter. But even if he couldn't be contained by ordinary means, he was not likely to get into much trouble. The sisters at St. Joseph's had a soft spot for those dimples. Mosley, who has two older sisters, had the luxury of one of those "normal" childhoods that real kids -- much less boxers -- never seem to have. His parents relocated from downtown Los Angeles to comparatively bucolic Pomona, 35 miles to the east, when Shane was a baby. Jack commuted 100 miles a day to USC Medical Center, where he worked as a material manager, and for a while Clemmie, who worked in the accounting department of General Dynamics, commuted too. The sacrifice allowed Shane one of those Leave It to Beaver upbringings, a sense of middle-class prosperity as well as of family. It was one big world of opportunity. If it occurred to Mosley to take up the trumpet, then he did. If it occurred to him to learn Spanish, from tapes and daytime soaps, then he did. And if it occurred to him to follow his father, who boxed in local recreational club matches and once served as a sparring partner for WBA heavyweight champion Mike Weaver, to the gym to hit a speed bag, well, he did that, too. No wonder it's the idea of family that has stayed with Mosley. Though he has a fiancee, Myoloe Gilmore, and his own son, Shane Mosley Jr., age eight, he has not strayed far from home. Just that one block, actually. Clemmie sometimes wonders what would happen if she and her husband picked up and moved. "I kind of think Shane would follow us," she says. Of course, it's the father-son relationship that, in boxing anyway, seems strangest. Shane and Jack get along like two best friends, neither challenging the other, each accepting his role in the partnership. It's comical when you see it, young Mosley being alternatively assertive and submissive, but it seems to work. Example: At one point in a recent conversation Jack tried to say something on Shane's behalf, beginning, "Let me interject...," and Shane just cut him off, saying, "Don't interject nothin'." Champion talking. Yet seconds later when Jack was spinning some yarn about how he showed up a bully during his days as a child pugilist in Watts by giving the kid "the bad eye," Shane had relaxed into a six-year-old, sitting at his father's knee, just eating it up. Laughing, young Mosley turned to his guest. "The bad eye!" Any father should be so lucky that his kid still laughs at, or even listens to, his stories. In time, and in not too much of it, Shane will have all the stories to tell. If his young career proceeds as expected, those stories could very well describe how he changed the fight game, turned it from spectacle back to sport, how he made it safe to enjoy boxing once more. Dimpled instead of dour, he could be the guy to do just that. Be sweet, wouldn't it? A good citizen-fighter like Mosley, who can't bring himself to move more than a block from his folks, can go a long way toward redeeming boxing.
|
