By Doug Fischer
It’s a good time to be a lightweight contender.
With two high-profile ‘Fight of the Year’ candidates having took place this month – Nate Campbell’s thrilling decision victory over Juan Diaz and Joel Casamayor’s dramatic 10th-round stoppage of Michael Katsidis – along with Manny Pacquiao’s lightweight debut scheduled to take place this summer, Juan Manuel Marquez’s imminent jump to 135 pounds, and with rapidly rising young talents like Amir Khan and Anthony Peterson, the lightweight division is quickly emerging as one of the sport’s glamour weight classes.
So why isn’t Rudy Hernandez – trainer and manager of top-10 lightweight contender Jose Armando Santa Cruz – happy?
Santa Cruz, who beat-up Casamayor for 12 rounds last November in a bout that everyone but two official judges thought he won easily, is 27 years old, at the peak of his physical powers, and is part of the Golden Boy Promotions stable of fighters, which includes recognized lightweight champ Casamayor, Marquez and Diaz. The L.A.-based company also has a working relationship with Katsidis.
However, since Hernandez took his lanky lightweight contender from Top Rank to Golden Boy Promotions last year, he has butted heads with the company’s executives starting with the weeks leading into the fight with Casamayor, who GBP signed shortly after signing Santa Cruz.
Before the Nov. 10th bout, which was on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley showdown in NYC, Hernandez felt that Golden Boy Promotions slighted his fighter by not including the shy swarmer in pre-fight media functions like open workouts and conference calls.
After the bout, which Casamayor won by a ridiculous split decision, Hernandez went from being merely disgruntled to totally disgusted.
“They’ve done nothing for my fighter,” Hernandez says. “He got screwed in New York and they don’t say a word about it.
“How can they cry robbery after the Marquez-Pacquiao rematch, a legitimately close fight, but not make a peep after the way Santa Cruz lost to Casamayor?
“I’ll tell you why, because Golden Boy Promotions are the biggest hypocrites in boxing. They claim to be on the side of the fighters, they say that they look out for the boxers unlike the older promoters, but then they play hardball with all their fighters not named De La Hoya or Hopkins or Mosley or Marquez.
“What really pisses me off is how they boast about all their sponsors and the record-breaking fights they promote but when they deal with the ‘little guys’ they act like they don’t have any money.”
Hernandez’s most recent beef is with Eric Gomez. He says Golden Boy Promotions’ matchmaker promised Santa Cruz a WBC lightweight title elimination bout (vs. Antonio Pitalua) on the undercard of Bernard Hopkins-Joe Calzaghe but then replaced it with a middleweight bout (David Lopez vs. Marco Antonio Rubio).
“Eric offered me the April 19th date for the Pitalua fight,” Hernandez recalled. “Rafael Mendoza, Pitalua’s co-manager, and I agreed to the terms last Tuesday, and I told Eric that we could do it, but last Thursday Eric called me up and told me that Mendoza no longer wanted the [April 19th] fight and he wanted to go to a purse bid. The reason he gave me was that I waited too long [to agree the terms] and pissed Pitalua’s people off.
“But I called Mendoza and he told me that he accepted the terms and that Gomez told him that we took too much time to agree and he had to replace it with Lopez-Rubio.
“That means we have to go to a purse bid now, which means Santa Cruz probably won’t fight until May at the earliest.”
True, and that’s unfortunate for Santa Cruz, who is in his prime and should be as active as possible. However, who’s at fault for the contender’s inactivity since last November is open to debate, according to Gomez.
“I really don’t know why Rudy is so angry with us,” Gomez said Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve given him every opportunity to keep his fighter active and to make good money and he’s made his own decisions.
“I know he was upset with the outcome of the Casamayor fight, and I can understand his anger, but for some reason he blamed us for it. After the fight he said ‘How can you guys allow this to happen!?’ But it had nothing to do with us. [Bad decisions] happen in boxing. It’s happened to the president of the company, Oscar De La Hoya. It’s not our fault.”
Gomez said Hernandez wanted a rematch with Casamayor, and he tried to deliver that request.
“The problem is, HBO and Showtime were not knocking down our door for that fight, and we needed them in order to pay the fighters their minimums,” he said. “The bottom line is that we didn’t have spots for the rematch, but we still wanted to work with Santa Cruz and get him a money fight that was also televised.
“HBO was high on Michael Katsidis and they were willing to do a Santa Cruz-Katsidis bout. Had Rudy agreed to this bout, it would have been the March 22nd ‘Boxing After Dark’ main event instead of Casamayor-Katsidis, but he didn’t take the fight.
“I still don’t understand his decision. It would have paid Santa Cruz THREE times his minimum purse for a title bout, it would have been on HBO and it would have been for an interim world title [the WBO]. I thought it was a winnable fight for Jose Armando, and I know it would have been a good TV fight with the way he and Katdisis fight. I told Rudy ‘If Jose wins the fight or is even in a good fight, you’ll get future dates on HBO’, but he said no, and his exact words to me were: ‘I’m not taking the fight because I’m loyal to the WBC. Mr. [Akihiko] Honda [of Teiken Promotions, which has foreign promotional ties to Santa Cruz] will work it out and Jose will get the mandatory position with the WBC if Casamayor doesn’t give him a rematch.
“I told him ‘Rudy, you’re dreaming; the WBC is not just going to make Jose the mandatory contender, I guarantee you that they’ll have him fight in at least one title-elimination bout to get that position. If you want to be loyal to the WBC, be sure that they’ll be loyal to you, because if you turn down the Katsidis fight we’ll offer it to Casamayor and HBO will accept that fight.
“Ultimately, that’s what happened. Rudy turned it down, Casamayor’s people took it, Casamayor won the fight and now he’s hot again.
“But I want to make it clear that Santa Cruz was HBO and Golden Boy’s first choice. Rudy missed out on a good payday and good exposure for his fighter.”
Hernandez admits that he turned down the Katsidis bout.
“They offered me Michael Katsidis, I’ll give them that,” he said. “But the way I saw it, Santa Cruz should have been the world lightweight champ after the Casamayor fight. I didn’t want him to fight for an interim belt, especially if it wasn’t the WBC belt. Why? Because it was the WBC that did the right thing and ordered an immediate rematch between Jose and Casamayor, not The Ring. [WBC president] Jose Sulaiman and Mr. Honda did the right thing with Santa Cruz.
“Jose, Mauricio [Sulaiman] and Honda tried to do what Golden Boy should have forced. Golden Boy should have capitalized on the sympathy the media had for Santa Cruz after the Casamayor fight. They could have capitalized on the outrage that the fans had after that fight, but they didn’t. Bob Arum would have capitalized on it. What happened when Miguel Huerta got robbed against Kid Diamond on Versus?”
Two months after Huerta got the dookie-end of the stick in an awful split-decision loss to Almazbek Raiymkulov (AKA Kid Diamond) last June, Top Rank had the grizzled Mexican vet back in the ring in another Versus-televised bout against Efren Hinojosa, fighting for the vacant NABF title that Raiymkulov had no business winning in June.
However, Gomez says he worked hard to make the WBC title eliminator between Santa Cruz and Pitalua.
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