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Saturday, May 17, 2003

By Chuck Finder, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

Lou DiBella used to lord over HBO's boxing rings. He promotes fighters nowadays, including middleweight Jermain Taylor in the opening feature on HBO tonight from Petersen Events Center. Yet he isn't speaking from any promotional bias or financial stake when he talks about the Paul Spadafora-Leonard Dorin main event.

"HBO paid the most money for this fight. That being said, it's not enough," DiBella said. "They've got two world champions. One's fighting in hostile territory. The other is fighting in front of 10,000 people that he brought to the arena," though the crowd is expected to number 7,000 or more.

"And they're going to fight for one-seventh of what Floyd Mayweather got for fighting an ordinary guy."

His math was slightly off, which was surprising for a Tufts graduate. The word was that Mayweather grossed about $2.85 million and gave Victoriano Sosa -- a challenger whom Spadafora defeated more than three years ago -- $150,000 for Mayweather's HBO-televised triumph in California last month. Spadafora and Dorin are scheduled to earn about $500,000 apiece from the fight tonight, a sum approximately 17.5 percent (barely one-sixth) of Mayweather's payday.

Dorin and Spadafora were in negotiations for a bout with Mayweather this time around -- if you want to call it negotiations. Mayweather's camp offered Spadafora and Dorin each a 90-10 split, meaning they would make about $250,000 to his $2.5 million, and each refused. So HBO, abiding by its words in March when Xavier James spoke of a title unification tournament in the lightweight division, ponied up a $1 million purse to match the International Boxing Federation belt-holder (Spadafora) against the World Boxing Association champion (Dorin).

"This is one of the best fights you can buy in the lightweight division," said James, the HBO Sports vice president.

Hometown advantage?

"Do you think I apologize because we're fighting in Pittsburgh?" manager Al McCauley said, referring to this sixth of Spadafora's nine title fights in the lightweight's hometown. Two others were at Mountaineer Race Track & Gaming Resort in Chester, W.Va. "No, I don't apologize. Do you think the Rooneys wouldn't like to have 16 home games at Heinz Field if they could? That's good management, baby. We want it to be here. We're from Pittsburgh. I don't apologize for anything. We got the right town. We got the right place. We got the right judges. We got the right promoter."