Golden Boy

(Arlovski tries for the Dan Severn, sweat-soaked-grey-t-shirt look.)

Following his knockout loss to Fedor Emelianenko at Affliction: Day of Reckoning, Andrei Arlovski has signed with Golden Boy Promotions and will begin his career as a boxer, reports FightHype.com.  

You may recall that Arlovski’s trainer, Freddie Roach, said he’d like to see Arlovski take on heavyweight boxing champ Nikolai Valuev if he was victorious against Fedor.  Of course, he wasn’t, so maybe Valuev won’t be Arlovski’s first opponent, which is probably just as well.  But whoever he does face in the boxing ring, at least he won’t be tempted to try another flying knee.

If you’re Arlovski this move makes perfect sense right now.  Having lost to Fedor, there’s no immediately obvious opponent for him outside the UFC ranks.  He’s already beaten Ben Rothwell and Roy Nelson, Josh Barnett has the next shot at Fedor (though it won’t happen until the summer, at the earliest), so why not put on some bigger gloves and find out whether Roach really knows a boxing diamond in the rough when he sees it?

The upside for MMA fans is we get to see someone from our world match his skills against a real boxer.  We’ve all heard about how superior their striking is for so long, wouldn’t it be nice to find out the old-fashioned way?  Not to mention, this could actually get people to care about boxing’s heavyweight division again, at least for a little while. 

('Lying is such a negative word.  I prefer to call it efficient storytelling.')

By all accounts, HBO boxing commentator Larry Merchant’s claim that Oscar De La Hoya was missing the Shane Mosley-Antonio Margarito bout on Saturday because Affliction paid him $5 million to attend their show is straight up false.  The question is, did Merchant know it was untrue when he said it?  According to what Golden Boy CEO Richard Shaefer told Sherdog, the answer is: kind of.

Schaefer says he told Merchant that De La Hoya would be helping to promote the Affliction show because “our partners at Affliction made an over $5 million commitment to the event.”  Merchant took that and twisted it to mean that Golden Boy was paid $5 million by Affliction, which is quite a leap, as even Merchant almost admits:

“The $5 million was the number thrown out,” Merchant told Sherdog.com on Tuesday. “There was not a discussion on how that precisely was allocated or how it was branded. Is it a little bit glib or short-handed to say that Golden Boy got $5 million and Oscar had to be there? Yeah. Yeah. I’m on television and I’m trying to tell a story as tightly as I can.”

That’s obviously a pretty sorry excuse.  Being on TV doesn’t give you license to distort a story just to make it shorter, as Merchant well knows.  The fact is he just doesn’t like MMA, as he freely admits without ever being asked.  Even tacked on to the end of his erroneous $5 million claim was this little zinger: “It would take that much to get me to go to one of those things.”  Now he says he’d go for a mere $100,000, despite the fact that no one in the MMA world wants or needs him there.

But the thing that’s frustrating about Merchant’s disdain for MMA is that it makes no sense coming from a guy whose life has been spent covering the fight game.  Just look at this quote from Merchant about the decline of boxing, taken from Joe Layden’s book about the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas bout, The Last Great Fight:

Dana White's UFC 94 video blog, episode 2 - Watch more Free Videos

In the second episode of Dana White’s UFC 94 video blog we get a look inside the taping of “The Ultimate Fighter,” and encounter a man identified as Dana White Sr.  Could this really be the father of the UFC prez?  The brief look we get at their relationship seems contentious yet oddly loving enough.  After that it’s off to NYC for more Pinkberry (so no more Men’s Health cover shoots any time soon, then?) and another race through the city streets.  Oh, to be rich and loaded on sugar.  Nothing at all about GSP-Penn in this episode, by the way.

Andrei Arlovski comes home to Chicago and thanks his fans for their support after his loss, which he attributes to a stupid mistake.  His cameraman, playing the role of the enabling sycophant, insists it was just necessary risk-taking, but Andrei knows better.  He also tosses another jab at “pee-pee-pee taster” Tim Sylvia, because that always makes a man feel better when he’s down in the dumps.

(Looks like Andrei's the only thing standing between Fedor and another trip to the scary rollercoasters.  That is not a safe place to stand.)

Is it sad that this installment of Ben vs. Ben is forced to dwell on questions surrounding Affliction’s possible demise?  A little, but that’s life.  We can’t just pretend that they aren’t paying Andrei Arlovski roughly 20,000 t-shirts for an event that has no clear path to a profit…or does it?  That discussion and more awaits you below.

What are the odds that this is Affliction's last show?

BF: -300.  In other words, 3-1 odds that we’ll never see another Affliction MMA event again.  I’m not happy about that, but if I’m being honest I have to look at how difficult it’s been for them to get a second show together, how much they’ll spend on it and how little of that will be recouped in ticket sales or pay-per-view revenue, and I can’t see how they justify another money pit of a show after this.

Of course, three has always been their magic number.  That’s how many shows they said they were committed to, and it would give them the chance to put on the Josh Barnett-Fedor Emelianenko fight they’ve obviously been angling for since the start.  But if Arlovski’s getting over a million bucks for this fight, imagine what it would cost to put on Barnett-Fedor alone, not to mention the rest of the card.  It would be an obvious money-loser, and even Affliction can’t bleed cash forever.  If they don’t pull out a miracle on Saturday night, they’re going to pack it in.

BG: I really hope nobody at Affliction has their fingers crossed and breath held for this miracle of which you speak. Between Margarito/Mosley and the UFC's usual counter-programming and market saturation, Affliction won't even be outperforming their first event in terms of ticket sales or pay-per-view buys. But I have to assume that they already know this. Maybe Atencio & Co. are bad at running an MMA organization, but they're not childish enough to believe that money will literally fall out of the sky. And yet they sign Gegard Mousasi to fight in their third event, and announce they'll be promoting four events a year with Golden Boy.

I'm not Affliction's CFO, so I don't know how much money the company is willing to lose on this MMA pursuit. But is it naïve to think that they wouldn't be making these concrete plans if their future really depended on the financial performance of "Day of Reckoning"? Short answer: yes. Still, I'm going to set the odds for this one at a more generous -200. Now if I could just find a gambling site that offers a parlay bet on "Affliction won't put on a third show" + "Tito Ortiz will never fight again," I could probably make a decent profit…

(Will Andrei Arlovski be the man to beat Fedor Emelianenko? Will anybody actually get to see it?)

Let's get this out of the way first: If you didn't watch Manny Pacquiao's one-sided walloping of Oscar De La Hoya last night, click here. My God this Mexecutioner.

Okay now. We've already told you that boxing promotion juggernaut Golden Boy's relationship with Affliction could be described as "non-committal" at best. What was originally announced as a grand partnership devolved into straight-up rivalry when GB scheduled a superfight between welterweight stars "Sugar" Shane Mosley and Antonio Margarito on January 24th, the same night as Affliction's "Day of Reckoning" event. And it gets worse: The match is slated to go down at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, about a half-hour drive (depending on traffic) from Affliction's venue of the Honda Center in Anaheim.

"Day of Reckoning"'s original date of October 11th was canceled due to nearly non-existant ticket sales, and they weren't even competing with a major boxing match on the same day for attendance and local media coverage. Simply put, Mosley/Margarito on 1/24 is a death-blow for Affliction. It's hard to envision them filling an arena without rescheduling the event yet again. Still, Fabricio Werdum is under the impression that Affliction has promised 16 events in 2009. Quite a lofty goal for an organization that has put on exactly one event in the last five months. But hey — everybody gotta have a dream.