Sugar Ray Leonard's Toughest Fight

Tweet

Even in its latest incarnation, SRLB has continued to endure more than its share of litigation -- often with its own fighters. One, IBF cruiserweight champion Vassiliy Jirov, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Phoenix last summer seeking the removal of SRLB and a co-promoter as his representatives (the matter has since been settled). Still pending is a lawsuit that alleges SRLB took an advance of $75,000 and then failed to deliver a fight for the Myrtle Beach Area Sports Council. One of SRLB's co-defendants is Bobby Mitchell, who brokered the deal between the sports council and SRLB and who has been indicted on federal charges of fight fixing.

Most vexing of all, perhaps, have been Leonard's legal battles with "Baby" Joe Mesi, the undefeated heavyweight who Leonard once thought had the potential to take both of them to the top of the boxing world. The relationship had started euphorically. On a crisp morning in late February of last year, Buffalo Mayor Anthony M. Masiello stood behind a podium at a local performing arts center and proclaimed Joe Mesi "the next heavyweight champion of the world." It seemed that day as if the whole city was caught up in the announcement that Mesi, the hometown boy, had signed a career-changing promotional agreement with Sugar Ray Leonard Boxing for four nationally televised fights. Leonard had cinched the deal on a promise: Leonard's fame, Rebney's marketing acumen, and SRLB's sweetheart deal with ESPN2 -- which guarantees Leonard a monthly television date -- would help lift Mesi into national prominence, the kind of prominence, Leonard assured, that leads to big pay-per-view events.

The deal seemed to be an example of the new kind of relationship Leonard has promised to forge with his fighters. Instead of simply signing the boxer to a bonus up front, the traditional way of doing business, SRLB promised Mesi a share of the gate receipts for his fights -- 60% of the net receipts, in fact. For Mesi, this meant more risk, but more potential upside. SRLB also cut an unorthodox marketing deal for an April 2002 Mesi fight against Keith McKnight in Buffalo. Rather than pay the three main print, radio, and television media sources serving the Buffalo community for airtime or print space, SRLB gave the media companies the rights to use Sugar Ray and all the prefight publicity events to sell advertising and sponsorships. In exchange, Mesi got an unprecedented amount of free exposure. As a result, Sugar Ray blanketed the Buffalo area, signing autographs and giving interviews from morning until night. And the efforts paid off. Leonard needed to sell 9,000 tickets to cover SRLB's costs, nearly double the attendance in two prior Mesi bouts -- and so he did. A small profit was made. Mesi was on the map. But SRLB didn't leave Buffalo unscathed.

Radio advertisements and a press release leading up to the event had declared the fight would be blacked out unless all seats were sold. Tim Graham, a sportswriter for the Buffalo News, got a tip that no such blackout deal was in the works. And when Graham called ESPN, he spoke with executives who denied that a blackout was ever a possibility. Digging further, Graham also looked into one of the prefight publicity events SRLB staged -- a mock weigh-in held at a local car dealership. The problem was that, in a number of radio ads, the event had been billed as the "official" weigh-in. But official weigh-ins only take place a day before the fight. In addition, Graham found that while Mesi's opponent was billed in SRLB's promotional materials as the WBF Intercontinental heavyweight champ, he actually hadn't held that title in several years.

The day before the fight, Graham confronted Rebney as he and Leonard were leaving for a publicity event. Graham recalls that Rebney ignored him until, finally, he turned to the reporter and said, "We have something good going on here, and you could have been on our team. But all you want to do is f -- us." While Rebney acknowledges the confrontation, he says he never uttered those words. He says Graham had a personal ax to grind with the Mesi family and took it out on SRLB. After the fight, the New York State Attorney General's office looked into the matter and found no cause for action. ESPN executives labeled the blackout incident a "misunderstanding." For his part, Leonard says, "I don't know why this guy has such a hard-on for me and my company. This guy claimed we lied to the public, that Baby Joe wasn't fighting anyone, that we deceived the fans so we could have a sellout. That's not true. We requested a blackout, there was some miscommunication with ESPN, and then we fixed it."

Despite the controversies, Mesi's career seemed to be progressing smoothly under Leonard's guidance. In his third bout with SRLB, Mesi scored a technical knockout in front of some 16,000 fans in HSBC Arena, a Buffalo boxing record. And he did even better financially. Mesi's 60% cut of the gate earned him more than $300,000 -- an unusually high amount for an ESPN2 bout. And then suddenly, with one fight left on their four-fight deal, SRLB and its Great White Hope were enmeshed in litigation. Mesi claimed that Leonard and Rebney had failed to provide a fourth fight in the promised time. Leonard and Rebney claimed that Mesi backed off the fights they offered. When Mesi attempted to set up a fight without SRLB, Leonard and Rebney blocked it. "It's the oldest trick in the boxing world," Julie Bargnesi, Mesi's lawyer, told the Buffalo News. "If you can't own the boxer, you try to sideline him. Joe is at the pinnacle of his career right now. He's ranked No. 10 in the world and ready to move forward. But SRLB is stopping him from getting more fights."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: