America at Large: Late in the fourth round last Saturday night Laila Ali cut loose with the roundhouse right that broke her opponent's nose and made her cry.

The tears welled up in Shelley Burton's eyes as she winced in pain, and as Ali rushed in to throw a left-right combination, Burton cowered and turned her back on her tormentor, taking both punches off the back of her head.

Arthur Mercante Jr rushed into the breech, stepping between the combatants to rescue Burton.

The Madison Square Garden crowd of 14,260 almost unanimously voiced its displeasure at the referee's intervention. The Burton supporters scattered among the audience felt their girl had gotten a quick hook. The rest of them, who had been chanting "A-li! A-li!" since the winner's father, Muhammad Ali, frail and visibly trembling, had struggled to his ringside seat almost an hour earlier, presumably wanted to see Laila at least knock her opponent down, if not out, if only for old times' sake.

Even Shelley Burton was unhappy. Once she stopped sobbing and realised only two seconds had remained in the round, she complained to a television interviewer that Mercante Jr's stoppage had been "premature" and possibly squeamish.

"She turned her back on her opponent," pointed out the 45 year-old referee, a stage foreman at the Metropolitan Opera who would a few nights later be pulling together sets for Il Barbiere De Siviglia.

"If a man had done exactly the same thing I'd have stopped it."

"I wanted to knock her out cold, but she turned her back," said Ali with a shrug. "In this business, that's an automatic stoppage."

HBO, the TV cable giant which was showing that night's Wladimir Klitschko-Calvin Brock main event, had taken some heat for its decision not to televise the Ali-Burton skirmish. As it turned out, the network did air a brief clip of the denouement, which was probably just about enough to demonstrate to its viewers that the fight represented at once the best and the worst about women's boxing.

That, with the obvious exception of Ms Ali, distaff pugilists have been unable to cash in on the anticipated groundswell of interest engendered by the Hollywood production of Million Dollar Baby is no doubt distressing to many of them.

But the simple truth of the matter is, a decade after the groundbreaking battle between Christy Martin-Dierdre Gogarty, you could still count the number of women boxers who can actually fight on the fingers of both hands - and Shelley Burton isn't one of them.

Laila, 23-0 as a professional, wasn't even a glimmer in her father's eye when Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier for the first time in the same ring 35 years ago. (Mercante's father, Arthur Sr, was the referee in that one.) Laila's mother, Muhammad's third wife Veronica Porche, was also in attendance on Saturday, and watched from a loge seat on the opposite side of the ring from her former husband.

Laila Ali fights under the nom de guerre "She Bee Stingin'," a handle bestowed by her semi-literate erstwhile manager (and former husband) Johnny McClain; the television people are apparently concerned that instead of stingin' she could be stinkin' and don't want to commit themselves to a series of mismatches.

HBO's concern is not Ali's ability, but the "lack of depth" in the talent pool. Once you make the decision to show Ali versus Burton, does that lead to Laila versus the hat-check girl from a Times Square saloon the next time she comes to town? At 5ft 10ins and 166 ½ pounds (which she weighed for Burton last weekend) the 28-year-old Ali dwarfs most of her current prospective opponents, with the possible exception of Texan, Ann Wolfe.

Of the trail-blazers in the women's game, Lucia Rijker is a decade older at 38 and hasn't had a real fight since fatally sucker-punching Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. Martin, also 38, has lost three of her last four, including a fourth-round knockout by Ali back in 2003. Gogarty, who never topped 130 pounds for a fight, retired eight years ago and was appointed to the Louisiana Boxing Commission just in time for Hurricane Katrina.

The TV people do have a point, then, but didn't Joe Louis have his "Bum of the Month Club", and didn't Laila's father in his heyday face a version of the same thing? Remember that Murderers' Row that included the likes of Rudi Lubbers, Richard Dunn, and Jean-Pierre (The Lion of Flanders) Coopman? And, as the New York Daily News' Tim Smith pointed out, when HBO had Roy Jones under long-term contract the network showed Jones against a succession of opponents from Roy's "Civil service years", when he faced a roster of foes which included a postman, a policeman, and a schoolteacher.

"Women's boxing is not a mature sport," HBO vice-president Kery Davis told Tim Smith in defending the decision to keep Ali off the airwaves.

"I wouldn't even be here if my name wasn't Ali," Laila admitted after her Madison Square Garden debut.

HBO says that is precisely the problem.