LOU DiBella holds a New York State boxing matchmaker’s license, but he’s not a matchmaker.
He does not have a promoter’s license, but a lot of his rivals consider him a promoter.
And he’s certainly not a manager, although his first concern, he claims, is to look out for the best interests of the fighters he does business with.
“Well, he’s got a lot of money,” said Cedric Kushner, DiBella’s friend and now, business rival. “So that gives you some kind of title automatically.”
“I am trying to rattle the cage a little bit,” DiBella said. “I’m trying to stir things up. We’re looking to change the way this business is conducted.”
In his grand vision of himself, what Lou DiBella is, is the man who will change boxing as we know it.
Not in the ring, of course – as Kushner points out, “Once the fighters get in the ring, they’re still going to have to fight.”
Where DiBella hopes to make his impact is where fighters take their worst beatings of all – in the back rooms, the ones that used to be filled with smoke in the days when fight promoters chomped on stogies and talked out the side of their mouths.
Now, they wear baseball caps and suspenders with their designer suits and talk out both sides of their mouths.
But one thing hasn’t changed. At the end of the day, win or lose, it is still usually the fighter who gets screwed.
This is where DiBella comes in.
The former vice-president of Time Warner Sports – the one who used its big checkbook to sign Roy Jones Jr., Lennox Lewis and Prince Naseem Hamed, among others, to long-term HBO deals – held a news conference yesterday to unveil his new stable of fighters, five members of the 2000 U.S. Olympic Boxing team, all of whom will make their pro debuts on a Jan. 27 card at The Theater, Madison Square Garden’s baby arena.
For the record, their names are Ricardo Williams Jr., Jermain Taylor, Michael Bennett, Clarence Vinson and Jose Navarro.
If their names don’t ring much of a bell, it is probably because among the five of them, they won 13 Olympic fights in Sydney, and only one, Williams, came home with so much as a silver medal.
This is not as dire as it sounds, because out of today’s top fighters – Jones, Lewis, Felix Trinidad, Shane Mosley, Fernando Vargas, Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya – only De La Hoya won an Olympic gold medal (Barcelona 1992), and he is decidedly on his way out.
But the real star of the show was DiBella, or, more accurately, the New Deal he says he is about to offer boxers and boxing.
DiBella got himself into trouble at Time Warner for speaking in ways corporate guys are not supposed to speak.
Now, he is trying to cause trouble for the people who would like to conduct boxing business as usual, the “one for you, one-two-three for me” school of accounting that most promoters graduated from.
“Nobody’s ever done this the way we’re going to do it,” DiBella said. “The most basic difference between me and a promoter is I have a duty to the fighters to maximize their money.”
Plus, he is allowing – make that requiring – his fighters to retain their own lawyers, accountants and managers. For some strange reason, fight promoters traditionally have frowned on boxers having that kind of independent counsel.
According to DiBella, he is not a promoter or a manager, but a “packager,” who puts together a show and sells it to the highest-bidding promoter, who will work for a set fee, not a percentage of the fighters’ purses.
Under this arrangement, DiBella says the fighters will see more of their money without having it cut by the promoter, the way a drug dealer cuts the product with milk powder.
For instance, for the Jan. 27 show, DiBella and his partners, HBO and Madison Square Garden, have pooled enough money to ensure that at least two of the fighters, Williams and Taylor, will be paid purses to rival the highest pro debut payday in boxing history, the $150,000 CBS paid Howard David Jr. in 1972.
Although by law, the fighters must be paid by a licensed promoter – in this case, Cedric Kushner – Kushner will work for a flat fee of $25,000.
“The days of a promoter getting a million dollars for a show and only paying the fighters a half-million are over,” DiBella said. “We have an open-book policy around here. My fighters are going to know exactly how much money the promotion is taking in, and how much is going out. They can sit in on my negotiating sessions if they want.”
“The full disclosure policy is one of the reasons we signed with Lou,” said Dave Washington, Williams’ attorney. “We trust him to do the right thing. And if anything turns out not to be true, he’s at risk to lose these boxers.”
He’s also at risk to lose some friends.
Kushner, for instance, was a dear friend of DiBella’s when DiBella was at Time Warner. Now, Kushner says they’re still friends, but the roles have changed, and he is not so thrilled about the idea of being DiBella’s errand boy.
“I think the whole thing is absolute horse[bleep], because he’s no different from a promoter, but he’s not subject to any of the rules promoters have to adhere to,” Kushner said. “But I’m delighted for him, because he’s still my pal.”
Kushner is justifiably bitter because over the past few months, trying to do the right thing has cost him something like $500,000 in fines from various athletic commissions.
He testified about paying bribes to the IBF to get his fighters ranked, and watched IBF president Bob Lee get acquitted at trial while he, Kushner, paid hefty fines in Nevada and New York.
He admitted to being forced to kickback money to Bronx promoter Joe DeGuardia in connection with a Jones-Lou Del Valle title fight – and paid another fine for his honesty, while DeGuardia went unpunished.
Now, he sees DiBella, who used to write him hefty checks as a Time Warner suit, paying him less than the lowest-paid Olympian on the card for doing, basically, all the work, while still having to wear the dirty name tag.
The one that says: Promoter.
“Contrary to what Lou believes, the words ‘promoter’ and ‘Stalin’ are not synonymous,” Kushner said. “For those of us who have been treating the fighters fairly all along, this isn’t any change at all.”
The change could be purely semantic, or it could be significant. If so, that’s bad news for the boxing business-as-usual, but great news for the fighters.