A CAREER CATCHES FIRE

Life is sweet, but Vernon Forrest is still mad as hell. And he's just not going to take it anymore.

First, 'The Viper' was stripped of his IBF welterweight title because he chose to fight Shane Mosley instead of his own mandatory challenger. Forget about the fact he did the seemingly impossible by easily defeating Mosley.

Now, an eliminator bout to produce a mandatory challenger for his newly won WBC title has failed to produce an opponent for the anxious champion.

Forrest, who demolished Mosley's aura of invincibility in a one-sided beating in January, is determined to fight in June.

'I'll be in the ring and I don't care who is in there with me, but that's when I will be fighting,' Forrest says.

The WBC eliminator ended in a stalemate in Mazatlan on 23 March when, after 12 hard rounds, Jose Luis Cruz and Carlos Baldomir battled to a split draw.

Forrest sighed at the news, turning - hopefully - to the IBF eliminator between Cory Spinks and Michele Piccirillo, which takes place as this issue goes to press.

'That's my belt. My gold - and I want it back,' says Forrest. 'Somebody just better get in the ring with me because I am ready.'

The native of Atlanta, Georgia, is beyond frustration. He wants to prove that his mastery of the ring against Mosley was no fluke.

He is also not thrilled with word trickling back to him via the sport's rumour mill that Mosley is blaming a head butt in the second round of their fight for the defeat.

'I'm hearing talk that Shane didn't train properly and that he was having problems with the ladies. It's all lies. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he fought me because I beat him up bad in the amateurs,' asserts Forrest.

'This talk is Shane just making excuses. You know what I'm capable of. That's why I'm talking to you. Most people don't understand what I've been through and for Shane to deny me my victory is to taint it. I would like to fight him again and I'll knock him down again, too.

'Only this time I'll finish him off quickly. Next time, I'll knock this guy out.'

Despite this ire, Forrest's stunning triumph has brought him out of the shadows and into the spotlight. He's hired a publicist to help him deal with the attentions, while Atlanta's other favourite son, Evander Holyfield, has counselled him extensively on how to deal with making sense of the media madness.

Packing to move from a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles to the west side, where Forrest was scheduled to do a TV interview before heading back to Atlanta for - get this - 'Vernon Forrest Day', the man of the hour was flustered by the cavalcade of gifts showered on him in the City of Angels.

Deposed heavyweight king Hasim Rahman sent him an array of clothing from his Hobo line. It's all too big, of course, but Forrest wears it with pride, nevertheless. Fans, friends, passers-by have loaded him with gift baskets.

Forrest is certainly enjoying his rare turn as the boxing celebrity du jour.

'A month ago I couldn't get arrested,' he says. 'Today, I did three radio shows, I'm talking to you and then I got a TV interview. It's crazy, baby.'

'I did the Steve Harvey [Los Angeles drive-time] radio show. Shane Mosley must have been listening because he called up talking crazy. He wants an immediate rematch, which is fine by me.

'He gave me the opportunity to prove myself. I'll give him the opportunity to redeem himself. But he wants the money to be 50-50, which just ain't gonna happen.'

Forrest doesn't believe Mosley should fight him again so soon. He feels that Mosley needs to regroup, possibly work with a new trainer.

'I hit him with my right hand until I couldn't hit him anymore, I hit him with as clean and hard a punch as I ever hit anybody,' he says. 'If he fights me again and loses, I hope he has a back-up plan because where does he go from there?'

Though a rematch with Mosley isn't off the radar, Forrest is more immediately interested in unification.

'I want to round up the rest of the belts,' he states.

But, whatever happens, the 30-year-old fighter plans to eventually move up to light-middleweight 'and then I want to retire undefeated'.

But the distracting gossip still filters through.

'They [the Mosley camp] never talked to me after the fight,' says Forrest. 'I think they went into collective shock. Daddy Jack just didn't know what to do with himself. Shane keeps blaming the head injury, saying it was concussion.

'That is Shane's team just trying to give him false confidence. I don't buy any talk that he underestimated me or didn't train hard to fight me. He trained hard and so did I.

'Just like the first time we fought, I outworked him, I outboxed him and I outsmarted him. I beat him at every aspect of the game. If it was concussion, the fight would have been finished in the second round, not the 12th.

Forrest will concede that: 'I do think he got a shock because of the cut. He's never been cut before, so he didn't know how to handle it. Me, I had experience to draw from. I got cut when I fought Ed Griffin [December 1998]. My whole eye was split wide open.

'Next round, I picked it up and stopped him. I broke my right hand - my power hand - in the second round of my fourth fight. I threw my left shoulder out in my sixth fight, so, yeah, I'm used to adversity.'

That same adversity dogged Forrest for 18 months while he waited for his on-off fight with Raul Frank to take place. When it finally did, the fighter said he was so disillusioned with boxing at the time that he had contemplated quitting.

'I had some serious talks with God,' he says. 'I didn't think I wanted to fight anymore. Boxing's difficult because you know it demands everything. I just didn't know if I wanted to keep dealing with the politics and the mind games.'

His ambivalence showed in an uninspired decision win in May last year. Unfortunately, the win over Frank was the one fight many fans saw, judging his chances against Mosley accordingly.

'I knew that going in,' he admits. 'But there wasn't much I could do about it. I know exactly what I am capable of and I finally got to prove myself.'

He was obsessed with Mosley during his preparations. He and trainer Ronnie Shields (who also looks after plucky Jesus Chavez) did little else but sleep, train, eat and watch Shane Mosley tapes.

'I read one magazine where they made predictions on the fight and, hell, they damn near had me dead, man. I had 7-1 odds against me that I would be mercifully stopped. When I read that, I stopped looking at the magazines. It was much easier to train after that.'

The conversation careers, almost inevitably, back to Mosley.

'I'll tell you what else. Shane keeps telling people he got $1.6 million to fight me, which is impossible. That means I got more than he did. And could he get $1.6m to fight me and $3 million to fight Adrian Stone?

'All this talk gets me riled up. You can probably tell,' he says with a laugh.

'There are people who still don't give me credit. They think I just got Shane figured out. They don't think that maybe I am better than they thought I was.'

At one point in his career, Forrest trained with former world champ Roger Mayweather.

'Look, I loved Roger and I learned some things, but he loves Las Vegas and I hated it there,' says Forrest. 'Roger is a superstar there and he has a good life. He has every good reason to want to stay there. His family is there. I was all alone and I had nobody, plus I don't gamble, I don't drink . . . Ugh! Give me Atlanta any day.'

Life for Forrest in Atlanta is very much a family affair. Engaged to be married, he has a wide circle of family and friends around him constantly.

'That's how I like it,' he says. 'I'm very social. I love doing new things. I want success. The pieces are starting to fit.

'I don't want to just be a star in boxing. I want to do a lot of things: TV, movies. I want to do everything.'

Did Evander Holyfield perhaps have a hand in creating a little monster here?

'Maybe,' says Forrest. 'Evander helped me in so many ways, I can't even tell you. I have done more PR in three weeks than I have in my whole career, but I like it and I have something to say.

'He [Evander] said to watch how I eat in public because, even then, people will stare at you. You know what? They do.

'I still have a bit of thug in me - not all the way, but it's there and I was ready to get into it with this one guy in a restaurant. He was just staring at me! And when I asked him: ÔWassup?' He asked me if I was Vernon Forrest and, if so, [that] he'd just seen me fight. I had to relax then. I had to remind myself that stuff like this is gonna happen.'

If Forrest feels he still gets no respect from the boxing world, his own city has opened its doors to its newest hero.

He has been given the key to the city, ridden around in an open-topped car while people threw ticker-tape at him from office windows.

'I felt like the president or something,' he says. 'Usually a whole team gets a ticker-tape parade.'

The smile on his face shows that not even Shane Mosley can mess with a memory like that.