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Whenever Golden Boy Promotions is involved in an event there is bound to be some monkeyshines, and, sure enough, Richard Schaefer and his jesters outdid themselves throughout the recent Floyd Mayweather Jr-Manny Pacquiao debacle.
No one needs to hold Bob Arum up as some sort of white knight of boxing in order to see Golden Boy Promotions as the phonies that they are. Over the years Top Rank has been investigated for fixing fights and Arum has admitted to paying bribes to sanctioning bodies, but Arum is more likely to give you the finger than to pretend to be anything other than a cutthroat operator in a cutthroat sport. Schaefer, on the other hand, is a sickeningly phony charlatan whose smile, meant to be cherubic, perhaps, actually resembles something out of Hogarth. Thirty years ago Don King and Bob Arum were routinely raked over the coals by a boxing media much less compliant than the fan boys who slobber over keyboards these days. Nary a peep is heard about some of the shady moves Golden Boy Promotions makes, possibly because Schaefer, along with his malignant sidekick, Oscar De La Hoya, never forgets to wear his plastic halo wherever he goes.
Nor has much been said about how, Schaefer, by insinuating that Pacquiao is on steroids, is actually conspiring to devalue one of his own commodities. Fallout from the infamous briefcase stuffed with $250,000 included binding arbitration between Top Rank and GBP. The result? GBP has a 10-20% stake in all Pacquiao fights. Yes, if Pacquiao-Mayweather actually came off, Golden Boy Promotions would have gotten 10-20% more from potentially the richest prize fight in history than any other promoter out there. But does that stop the “smartest man in boxing” from insinuating that Pacquiao is dirty? According to Boxingscene.com, Schaefer has made it clear that all GBP fighters will demand similar unprecedented drug tests before facing Pacquiao. If this is true, then Schaefer has outlined a company policy specifically targeting only one athlete in boxing: Manny Pacquiao.
In addition, Schaefer rejected stringent drug tests for one of his own fighters, Shane Mosley, in 2008 when Zab Judah requested them. Judah almost never makes sense, but in this case, he was absolutely in the right, since Mosley, also some kind of partner in Golden Boy Promotions, perhaps, “underboss,” who knows, actually used designer steroids in a previous bout. “Whatever tests they want them to take, Shane will submit to that. We are not going to do other tests than the Nevada commission requires,” Schaefer said. “The fact is Shane is not a cheater and he does not need to be treated like one.” No, Golden Boy Promotions is simply beyond reproach. Saint Schaefer is always there to remind of us that fact when he slinks out of his luxury reptile Terrarium with his Swiss tan aglow and one insincere platitude after another dripping from his forked tongue.
Of course, Schaefer is routinely given a run for his money in the bonehead department by one of his own marionettes. “We can paint ourselves as the cleanest sport by doing this test,” Oscar De La Hoya wrote (or is it dictated?) in his RingTV shillbox…err, blog. Once again, the man who has slandered Jews and African-Americans; who tried to get analyst Larry Merchant fired from HBO; and who once brought $250,000 in cash to meet Manny Pacquiao at an airport ala Don King circa 1982, proved that no pose suits him more than that of a hypocrite.
(Nothing was more ironic than seeing De La Hoya groveling on his hands and knees after Bernard Hopkins nailed him with a body shot in 2004. After all, years earlier, it was De La Hoya who claimed that “African-Americans” cannot take bodyshots.)
De La Hoya is so concerned about having a clean sport that he brought Shane Mosley into Golden Boy Promotions despite the fact that Mosley admitted to using performing enhancing drugs for his fight against De La Hoya in 2003. De La Hoya is so concerned about having a clean sport that he has another partner in GBP, Bernard Hopkins, who is a convicted felon. Those who moan about Don King having been an ex-con are strangely silent about the front office of a promotional firm made up of one ex-convict, one BALCO client, and a former boxer once accused of rape. Of course, De La Hoya was never convicted of a crime, but if he was innocent, as he claimed, why not go to trial and prove it? Isn’t this the kind of lame, illogical reasoning behind his “Pacquiao must have something to hide if he refuses to take these stringent blood tests” stance? He also settled a palimony suit from his ex-fiancé, Shanna Moekkler, out of court. Moekkler accused De La Hoya of
being an abusive drunk, but rather than clear his name outright, De La Hoya forked over the only thing he has in abundance other than megalomania: moolah. Before De La Hoya tries to play super reformer, perhaps he should take a look at himself in the mirror more often.
If GBP is so concerned with high morals, why represent Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the first place? Mayweather, after all, was convicted of misdemeanor battery in 2004 after an altercation with two women. Oh boy, if only boxing could have more noble figures like the ones Golden Boy Promotions is connected with, then it would be able to shuck off its image as the grimy underbelly of the sports world.
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