YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD BUT

When the average American sports fan thinks of boxing, certain names probably pop into his head. Mike Tyson, Roy Jones, Oscar De La Hoya. You can throw a Don King in there, maybe a Cedric Kushner if they’re paying attention. But Carl Moretti? Johnny Bos? Well, maybe they know Bos, he’s hard to miss, but Ron Scott Stevens? Probably not. That’s because the aforementioned names are all matchmakers and matchmakers get about as much attention as the guy who lifts the ropes up to let the ring card girls into the ring — not that much at all. 

“Matchmaking is the hardest job in boxing,” says Charles Jay, a former matchmaker himself who now runs Totalaction.com, a gambling website. “If I really wanted an opinion on a fighter and I had one call to make, I’d call a matchmaker.” 

Matchmakers are the unsung players of boxing. They’re the glue that holds a fight card together. While promoters and fighters get the glory, matchmakers are comforted with the knowledge that without them you’d be left with a bunch of fights that don’t make any sense. 

Most matchmakers were boxing nuts growing up who became certifiable once they began getting paid for their knowledge. They appear to know every has-been and never-was fighting today, along with who manages and trains them. They know which fighters are punchers and which ones are boxers, who has a good chin and who quits when things aren’t going his way.

They sit in their makeshift offices, which are usually airports because they travel so much, talking on their cell phones in search of the right pair of boxers. To the casual observer, it’s a simple job. To the serious boxing fan, it’s an art form, not unlike a chef who knows the perfect ingredients with which to prepare a meal.

To be a matchmaker you have to have a perceptive eye. Carl Moretti, the matchmaker for Main Events, goes a little further. “It’s patience,” he says. “Patience and organisation. Almost every fight on the card is made by the matchmaker; you have to deal with the medicals and the travel, and fighters are always pulling out. You’re always dealing with headaches. I don’t make matches anymore. I just keep them in.”

Every matchmaker has a horror story to tell, that single moment during his career that exemplifies just how topsy-turvy the job can be. For Moretti, who works with known fighters like Francisco Bojado and Fernando Vargas, the moment seems to be a recurring nightmare.

“One time we had Jeff Lacy fighting on the undercard of Fernando Vargas-Shibata Flores,” says Moretti. “I got him an opponent and he fell out. I got another guy and he fell out. This is three days before the [Saturday night] fight in Nevada, where you have until Thursday to get the blood work and the medicals done by. After finding a guy from Miami, we had a problem with his [airline] ticket, so I got him a prepaid ticket. Then I get a page from the guy’s manager who tells me that because of 9/11 the fighter didn’t want to fly. He was fine three hours before, but after having a conversation with his wife, now he doesn’t want to fly. 

“Ten minutes after the other guy pulls out, I get a call from a guy in Nebraska, Tyler Hughes, saying he had just gotten home from work, saw the message that I had left him earlier and wanted the fight. He didn’t know he was the second or third guy we were looking for and I was going to have to tell him we had already found a guy, but now he was our guy.”

Incidentally, Moretti conducted this interview while he was waiting in North Carolina for Don Normand, an opponent for Calvin Brock to show up. Normand mistakenly went to the wrong airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana — “how many airports can there be in Lake Charles, Louisiana?”— and was now missing in action. When Moretti called Normand’s wife to see if he had arrived in Atlanta, she told him he hadn’t and that he was now in Dallas. “I have no idea what he’s doing in Dallas.” Moretti sighed. “It’s a six-round undercard fight.”

When matchmakers aren’t filing missing persons reports, they’re doing what they were hired to do, which is to make fights. 

“Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward? That’s easy,” says Johnny Bos, who prefers the title fight agent (“I manage the managers”) to matchmaker. “It’s hard when you have to entertain people but you don’t want the promoter’s guy to get knocked off, that’s when it gets tougher.”

What he means is that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognise a potentially explosive match-up, even if it takes one to broker the negotiations. But it takes a special mind to design the show’s undercard because of the different demands involved with the fighters.

“It’s a balancing act,” says Ron Scott Stevens, matchmaker for Cedric Kushner Promotions. “When you’re making fights, you’re trying to serve your company; you’re trying to serve the TV network; you’re trying to serve the venue. You have to satisfy all of these elements. You don’t want to get a great prospect beat, you still have to nurture him. 

“Then the casinos and the networks want great fights. They’re not concerned with your company and what you’re trying to do and with your agenda. I have an obligation to CKP to advance fighters; sometimes that comes in conflict with what the networks and venues want. If they don’t like your show, they won’t supply the venue.

“HBO pays us a licence fee for the fights they want. That money along with advertising and what we get from the site represents our revenue. If your best prospects lose and your inventory, meaning your fighters, dwindles, then who from your company will the television stations want to put on for their shows? That’s how you go out of business.”

According to Stevens, gone are the days when the networks would televise a guy simply because he was undefeated, “the Cooney Syndrome”, as he refers to it. Now, fighters have to prove themselves before they get the TV date. Fortunately for him and for CKP’s other matchmaker, Eric Bottjer, they’ve been able to move fighters through shrewd matchmaking that have led to some exciting fights on their Heavyweight Explosion series. 

A number of fighters, including Hasim Rahman and Jameel McCline, were able to graduate from the Explosion shows to appear on HBO, where the stakes and the purses balloon.

Stevens readily admits that fighters like McCline and Rahman weren’t necessarily developed into stars, but were rather products of natural selection — fighters who had separated themselves from the pack by beating whoever was placed in front of them. 

Because Cedric Kushner has so many durable heavyweights in his stable, Stevens can match them against each other in a round robin-like tournament to figure out who the cream of the crop is. When the winners emerge they’ve picked up so much experience that when they finally do get a big fight, they’re ready. 

“With Jameel McCline, we didn’t know how good he could be,” Stevens explains. “Against Michael Grant, he stepped up. Grant thought he’d be safe against McCline, but McCline had been staying busy and had been working hard and he took advantage of the opportunity. McCline had to prove himself by beating heavyweight workhorses like Sherman Williams, Ron Guerrero, Sedrick Fields, King Ipitan and Al Cole before getting his shot on HBO against Grant. He didn’t get it just because he was a nice guy.”

When the highly touted Olympians, Francisco Bojado and Jeff Lacy turned pro under Main Events, Carl Moretti, serving as their matchmaker, had a tough situation in front of him. With large amounts of money invested in Lacy and Bojado and both of them fighting on television from the get go, there was pressure on Carl Moretti to not only develop them as pros, but to make entertaining fights for the public who watched them on the Showtime network. 

We all know what happened. Bojado effortlessly knocked out his first nine opponents in a total of 14 rounds, and the public, sensing that he could be something special demanded to see him in a competitive fight. 

For Moretti, it was a no win situation: Continue developing Bojado at his own pace and the fans might throw tomatoes into the ring because his fights are so short; match him with a tough opponent and he might be in over his head. The public ultimately won out when the 18-year-old Bojado fought and lost a tough 10-round decision to Juan Carlos Rubio, a fighter with a record of 26-6-2 (10 KOs). 

“When a prospect isn’t signed with a promoter, you can obviously be a little more reckless [matching him with opponents] than if he was a signed fighter,” says Moretti. “In Lacy’s and Bojado’s case, every fight is televised, so it gives you different parameters to develop fighters. If an opponent has a 6-14 record, sometimes you can’t put him on TV even though he could be a good match for your fighter. 

“In the Rubio case, he was the same opponent we had for the undercard of De La Hoya-Roman Karmazin in L.A. that was later cancelled. I kept the same opponent and what happened was that Rubio stayed in the gym, Bojado didn’t. We wanted extended rounds and we got it. It was still a close fight.” 

In hindsight Moretti probably wishes he could have put Bojado in with the 6-14 guy, but television often forces your hand as a matchmaker. 

To Pete Brodsky, a newcomer to the matchmaking game who works for Bob Duffy’s Ring Promotions in New York City, a loss is only bad if the fighter doesn’t learn from his mistakes. 

Brodsky matches his fighters tough — maybe too tough. He’s been a boxing trainer for over 25 years and was a fighter himself before that. His experiences have hardened him into the kind of matchmaker he is today. Brodsky probably would have matched Bojado with Rubio after only his fifth fight if it was up to him. 

“If a guy calls me up and says, ‘Listen, I have so and so fighter and he sells a certain amount of tickets and I want you to get me a win,’ I say, ‘You’re calling the wrong guy,’” says Brodsky. “‘What I’ll do is, I’ll get you a fight that your fighter has a 50-50 percent chance to win. If he wins he wins, if he loses he loses.’ If you lose and you lose competitively and you learn, the next fight you’re going to be better, as opposed to guys that are built on fights where there’s no question about the outcome of the fights. Some people don’t want to call me because they don’t want a competitive fight.” 

As a matchmaker for a fledgling promotional company, Brodsky doesn’t have any Olympians to develop. Many of the fighters he works with are making their pro debuts in front of audiences that have never heard of them. There are no networks televising the fights and little advertising at the shows. Unlike Carl Moretti and Ron Scott Stevens, Brodsky doesn’t have to play favourites. But if he and Duffy are going to be successful in this promotional endeavour, they need an angle to attract customers. They think they have one.

“We have an obligation to the paying public,” says Brodsky. “Let’s face it, a guy spends $35 to $40 on a ticket to come to an event and if there are seven fights and four of them end in first round knockouts, he walks out saying: 'Gee, this was not competitive.' But if there are seven fights and there are three spilt decisions, one or two draws, and two fights where there was a winner, he'll be satisfied. And I think if we stay with this concept and weed out all the negative parts like the red corner, when you know who the winner is [before the fight begins], then I think we have a chance to do a monthly show, maybe a bi weekly basis."

Maybe. On 23 April, Ring Promotions did a show and out of six matches, just as Brodsy envisioned, three ended in decisions, one in a draw, with two knockouts. Whether that's "good" or not, who knows? But at least the matches were fair - with one exception.

The only mismatch was in the main event between the Teddy Atlas-trained light-heavyweight, Elvir Muriqi and Mike Coker from Ozark, Alabama. Muriqi knocked Coker cold before his fans could get comfortable in their seats.

Bob Duffy, the show's promoter, confesses that without the drawing power of Muriqi, a fighter with a large following in New York, the show could never have taken place. "I need that person who the people identify with," he says. "Without him there's no show."

As Charles Jay puts it: "If the matchmaker gets the house fighter beat, they're basically out of a job." And the way the fans reacted to Muriqi's first-round knockout left no doubt that they'd be back again next time he fights, and for a small time promoter like Bob Duffy, his business depends on that. Matchmaker Brodsky had done his job.