Mosley Finds the Strength to Win His First World Title

The purest Mosley moment occurred between Rounds 4 and 5 on Aug. 2, with Shane Mosley staring straight ahead and his voluble father standing above him in the corner, shouting.

“If you don’t get this one,” yelled Jack Mosley, who doubles as his son’s trainer, “it’s going to be maybe three more years to wait! Do you want that?”

No, answered the fighter whose overwhelming talent has been matched only by a knack for business-related career lulls. No way.

Dehydrated and weakened by a morning attack of diarrhea, Mosley, of Pomona, controlled the

bout in the early going, but looked slightly tired when Phillip Holiday stepped up his offense to counteract Mosley’s obvious advantages of speed and power.

It was not time to be tired.

“I just wanted to make sure he remembered we waited so long to get the shot,” Jack Mosley recalled last week. “Shane looked at me, kind of nodded, then he jumped on the guy. He was doing OK before that, but he took heed.”

Through the hard middle rounds, Mosley held his own against Holiday, the respected International Boxing Federation lightweight champion from South Africa.

Then, as he put some blazing combinations together, Mosley picked up the pace again, starting in the 10th, and cruised to a unanimous decision at the Foxwoods Resort in Ledyard, Conn.

About a year and a half longer than it should have taken, he finally walked out of a ring with a world title belt.

“I was thinking, ‘We’re here, we’ve got to win--we just have to,’ ” Jack Mosley said. “Because we waited too long and worked too hard not to.

“If he didn’t win, I think it probably would’ve crushed Shane. All these years he’s waited without complaining. He never got bitter. But you could tell he wanted to win this one.”

Even while he was scuffling for decent purses--the $75,000 he earned against Holiday was probably more than he had earned in his previous 23 fights--and fighting to break from his original, local promoter, Mosley has been the boxing experts’ best-kept secret since his star amateur days.

Despite his lack of big-time experience and exposure, the 25-year-old Mosley, promoted by international figure Cedric Kushner since leaving Patrick Ortiz’s company last year, was a solid Las Vegas favorite against Holiday.

“The timing is right,” Jack Mosley said. “We could’ve had it a year, a year and a half ago if Patrick would’ve been doing his job. But there you go, you have to be with a major promoter. . . .

“We’re just a little late, but not that late. Out of the other guys from the 1992 [national championships], Steve Johnson just got his title [the World Boxing Council lightweight belt], Shane got his. Oscar [De La Hoya] was first. . . . And that’s about it [not including Montell Griffin, who just lost his WBC light-heavyweight belt back to Roy Jones Jr. on Thursday].

“I look at that, and we didn’t do too bad.”

The only disappointment was that, for someone who went into the bout having knocked out all but one of his previous 23 opponents, Mosley didn’t blast Holiday.

“Holiday was so weak, if I had my strength, I would’ve walked right through him,” Mosley said afterward. “But I had to be very economical with my punches because I didn’t know how far I could take it. I couldn’t go for the knockout. I had to just make sure I beat him.”

MOSLEY’S FUTURE

Now that he has his major title at 135 pounds, Mosley’s management is hoping that HBO, which televised the bout against Holiday as one of its “After Dark” series, will back his efforts to land name-brand opponents and pump up his own recognition rate.

“I think, instead of unifying titles, we’ll go after the big names in the lightweight division,” said Tom Loeffler, part of the management team.

Some of the names being tossed out are familiar: Arturo Gatti or Gabriel Ruelas, whoever wins their Oct. 4 junior-lightweight bout; Azumah Nelson, possibly Johnson.

Loeffler said there has been some talk of Kushner taking Mosley overseas for his next bout, and at some point in the next six months he will have to fight the IBF’s No. 1 contender, Demetrius Ceballos.

“HBO is very happy with Shane,” Loeffler said. “I think they’ll put some money behind him to get the big fights, like they did with Oscar.”

Either way, Mosley is certain to be immortalized at least digitally. In a deal with a video game company, Mosley’s fighting style will be the model for the company’s new boxing release.

TAKING THE LOW ROAD

This is reality, heavyweight style: It took Andrew Golota’s infamy to get WBC champion Lennox Lewis on pay-per-view television.

Even Lewis, a two-time heavyweight champion, implied that he might have needed Golota, a two-time below-the-belt bomber--and riding a two-fight losing streak--more than Golota needed him.

Their bout Oct. 4 in Atlantic City, N.J., will mark Lewis’ pay-per-view headline debut. Golota’s second disqualification loss to Riddick Bowe last year was a pay-per-view bout, and his scheduled fight next Saturday against Ray Mercer, canceled when Mercer had to undergo shoulder surgery, was to have been Golota’s second pay-per-view date.

Lewis, who will be guaranteed about $7 million against Golota’s $2 million, is coming off two bizarre fights of his own--a technical knockout over Oliver McCall, who broke into tears and refused to defend himself; and a disqualification victory last month after Henry Akinwande ignored instructions to stop holding.

“You can never prepare yourself for low blows,” Lewis said. “If they do happen, I’ll react in a deadly way. I’m hoping to knock him out before that, because I find in the later rounds he gets tired and that’s when he starts going low.”

SHORT JABS

What will it take to keep Jones as focused as he was Thursday night in his crushing first-round knockout of Griffin? Amid rumors of an impending managerial shake-up and retirement threats, Jones came out blasting.

Whether he actually separates himself from the Levin brothers, two Pensacola (Fla.) lawyers who have not exactly maximized his earning potential, Jones clearly is at a crossroads:

Does he make one last try to vault onto the $10-million-a-fight plateau of De La Hoya or Evander Holyfield by fighting more often and perhaps abandoning his second career as a guard with the Jacksonville Barracudas of the United States Basketball League?

Or does he continue complaining and stay at home in Florida, watching his big-money days evaporate? Jones has a mandatory title defense coming against Michael Nunn, but is talking about making the quantum leap up from the 175-pound division to fight Holyfield, a thought ridiculed by Lewis.

“He needs to be pinched,” Lewis said. “What is he going to do? You can only move and stay away from the big shots. It doesn’t make for a good fight.”

A deal is on the table to put WBC junior-middleweight champion Terry Norris in against Ike Quartey, who would move up from welterweight for the bout, on Oct. 17 at an undetermined site. Both would earn about $2 million. One possible problem is that Bob Arum, Norris’ new promoter, apparently is weighing the option of holding Norris out for a bigger-money 1998 match against De La Hoya if a De La Hoya-Pernell Whitaker rematch falls apart.

Oxnard welterweight Fernando Vargas, impressive so far against non-contenders, could be a title threat by the middle of next year, says his co-trainer, Lou Duva. Vargas will fight his sixth pro bout Aug. 19 on USA, then will make his pay-per-view debut on the undercard of Lewis-Golota.

Roy Englebrecht, promoter of the Irvine Marriott’s “Battle in the Ballroom” series, is staging a fight card at the Los Alamitos Race Course on Saturday. Six four-round fights are scheduled between the night’s horse races.

He usually sat by himself high in the stands, far from the ringside traffic and hobnobbing at the Forum. “This is a much better view of the fighters,” Alex Sherer said one time. “This way, you can really see what they’re doing. I can’t concentrate down there.” Sherer, who died last Friday at 42 after training stints with Jorge Paez, Michael Moorer and Thomas Hearns, among others, was an analyst and historian, always opinionated and almost always right, a wise man staring down at a chaotic scene down below.

CALENDAR

Monday--Jesse Magana vs. Marius Frias, super-bantamweights; Ed Mahone vs. Val Smith, heavyweights; the Pond of Anaheim, 7:15 p.m.