America at Large: In December, 1994, Steve Collins was supposed to make his first defence of the WBO middleweight title against the immortal Lonnie Beasley in the old Boston Garden, writes George Kimball
Two nights before the scheduled bout, the Celtic Warrior was overtaken by a mysterious illness. After providing a sick note from a co-operative local physician, Collins hopped on a plane and was safely back in Dublin before the first bell.
Only the next day did it emerge that Collins' former manager, Pasquale Petronelli, had quietly gone before a Boston judge and obtained an injunction to seize his purse. Had Collins fought as scheduled that night, the gate receipts from the entire card would have been impounded.
The Boston Garden was razed two years later and replaced by the FleetCenter, more recently rechristened as the TD BankNorth Garden. In the wake of the Collins near-disaster, a dozen years would go by before anyone dared try to put on another world title fight in Boston's biggest arena.
The plan had been that Ricky Hatton was going to take America by storm last Saturday night. Hatton had demonstrated that he could sell out the house in Manchester against almost anyone, and the hope was that he could do the same thing in the United States.
Coming off last year's victory over Kostya Tszyu, Hatton was suddenly a hot property, ready to be packaged and sold to American audiences.
Dollar signs dancing in their heads, HBO executives contemplated megafights against Floyd Mayweather Jr, Arturo Gatti, and maybe even Oscar De La Hoya. But the most immediate problem was that Hatton was obligated, by a decree of the courts, to make his next defence against an unmarketable Frenchman named Souleymane M'Baye.
This nettlesome little matter was resolved when Hatton was persuaded to abdicate his light-welterweight titles and fight instead for Luis Collazo's WBA welterweight belt. A light-punching American, Collazo was widely regarded as a caretaker champion and hence seemed ideally suited to play the foil in this exercise.
Although nearly 4,000 Brits would be crossing the Atlantic to support Hatton, the English wunderkind's American promoter, Art Pellulo, needed to sell the rest of the seats, and what better way to do it in Boston than to pitch it to the Irish crowd? Toward that end, Pellulo initially leaked to the Boston Globe that popular Derry middleweight John Duddy would be featured on the card.
But Duddy, who is scheduled to fight Freddy Cuevas at Madison Square Garden next month, wasn't about to jeopardise that six-figure payday.
When his Irish Ropes matchmaker Jim Borzell learned of Pellulo's claim, he accused him of violating truth-in-advertising laws and publicly labelled him "a weasel promoter".
The promoters then turned to Kevin McBride. The fact the Clones Colossus had injured a shoulder in his April 1st win over Byron Polley and won't be able to box for months didn't deter Pellulo from claiming he would appear on the Hatton show.
Twenty-four hours before fight time, a recording at the Garden box office continued to advertise McBride's presence on the card.
In the end, Ennis heavyweight James Clancy was the sole Irish boxer left on the card. According to his (and McBride's) attorney, Mike Moynihan, Clancy and his supporters sold over $17,000 worth of tickets in the weeks preceding the bout.
When Ricky Hatton arrived in Boston to announce the card back in April, he had been immediately whisked away to the Tara Pub in Dorchester by Paschal Collins, Steve's brother, and in the run-up to the bout he managed to get himself more or less adopted by the Irish Diaspora.
When the Hatton party made its grand entrance for the title fight, the posse was led by publican Martin Ward, who used to perform the same function for Steve Collins on both sides of the Atlantic, and, in addition to the Union Jack, the Hatton entourage even brought a smaller Tricolour into the ring.
Hatton was supposed to walk through Collazo, and at the outset it looked as if he were going to do just that. Barely 10 seconds into the contest, the champion was on his backside after Hatton nailed him with a left hook as he was backing up.
But Collazo rallied to make the fight much closer than anticipated. By the final bell, Hatton's cheekbones were swollen and purple, his left eye was closing and he looked much more like the loser than the man of whom Collazo promoter Don King had warned "The British are coming!"
The judges awarded Hatton with a close but unanimous decision, leading King to mutter "John Quincy Adams must be spinning in his grave". We had the Englishman winning by a single point - with the early flash knockdown providing the margin of victory. The win, however contentious, was Hatton's 41st in as many professional fights.
Collazo, of course, wants a rematch, but off last Saturday night's performance it seems more likely Hatton will want to re-think his move to welterweight and drop back to 140lb.
While all this was going on, Clancy was sitting in his dressingroom, wearing the same green trunks he had donned several hours earlier in anticipation of his fight against Tyrone Smith.
Nine bouts had been scheduled for the evening, but only five had taken place, and four of those had gone the distance. Once the main event was over, Pellulo abruptly realised that midnight was fast approaching and that it was going to cost him more in overtime costs to keep the lights on than it would to pay off the remaining undercard fighters and send them home. By then few were left in the building save Clancy's disappointed Irish supporters anyway. Once they learned the plug had been pulled, they quietly filed out into the rainy night, taking solace in the fact the abbreviated evening meant that the pubs were still open.
