Oscar De La Hoya was clearly distracted, silently scanning the crowd while Floyd Mayweather hurled a flurry of insults his way.

"I'm the top dog in boxing!" Mayweather shouted, pointing at De La Hoya. "It'll be a toe-to-toe battle. You can fall on your face. You can fall on your ass. You can fall on your back.

"I'm going to take my time and give you a brutal beating. A brutal beating!"

The raucous crowd at Union Station roared its approval, looking for a response from De La Hoya, hoping he would leap from his seat and charge the fighter known as "Pretty Boy".

De La Hoya refused to take the bait, sitting impassively. With 42 professional fights under his belt, the constant hype for their lucrative May 5 bout in Las Vegas is familiar territory.

"I hate the fact that he's a like an out-of-control brat," the 34-year-old De La Hoya said after the event. "I don't like creating circus acts. This is not good for me, it's not good for boxing.

"Let's talk and say what we're going to do, thank the people and hype the fight. But you don't have to act like a brat. I'm hating it inside."

Boxing fans know the hype is as much a part of the game as a left jab. Often the pre-fight hoopla ends up with the two boxers trading punches on the podium.

Even the sport's core of dedicated fans admit that when two boxers tussle during a news conference it is usually as scripted as a Broadway show.

Renowned boxing writer Bert Sugar says the once-dominant sport needs all the attention it can get.

"The face of boxing's coverage has changed," said Sugar, a cigar-chomping member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. "There used to be boxing writers. Reporters would go to the Catskills (in upstate New York) and watch fighters train for weeks.

"There used to be three sports: baseball, horse racing and boxing. It's no longer like that. Everything is a sport now - darts, bullriding.

"There's Texas hold'em on TV. We're watching some 50-year-old fart with his hat on backwards wearing sunglasses playing poker. That's why boxing has to now go to the people."

Money-making bout

The De La Hoya-Mayweather showdown for the junior middleweight championship will be one of the biggest money-making fights in history. Tickets at the 17,000-seat MGM Grand arena sold out in three hours for a Nevada-record gate of $19 million.

Some 1,200 closed-circuit showings are expected for the fight which will be broadcast to 176 countries. The fight is more than two months away but the two fighters' 11-city U.S. tour is in full swing.

Mayweather, unbeaten at 37-0, is the mouth of the tour, a blue-collar hero dressed in jeans, T-shirt and construction boots. De La Hoya, meanwhile, is nattily attired in a dress shirt and tie, looking every bit the Wall Street mogul he is.

The two stood nose-to-nose on the stage, while photographers scrambled for the shot. De La Hoya and Mayweather jawed at each other, slightly bumping chests, while the crowd craned to see if a fight would break out.

In fact, the two Americans had had a similar encounter several hours earlier at a news conference in Philadelphia.

"We damn near get into a fight in every city," Mayweather told reporters just minutes after taking his shirt off and flexing his muscles while De La Hoya addressed the crowd.

Media tour

Sugar said the event might be bogus but it made good theatre.

"Cities are so upset about not being on the media tour that newspapers are writing editorials complaining about it," he said. "It's a circus but they're upset the circus isn't coming to town."

Perhaps the biggest non-heavyweight attraction, De La Hoya (38-4) is now a wealthy entrepreneur and owns Golden Boy Promotions which is running this fight. The upcoming bout will bring him a reported guaranteed purse of $12 million while the 30-year-old undefeated Mayweather will pocket $8 million.

Their wallets can grow even fatter with the number of pay-per-view cable buys. Sugar thinks the fight could be "the most ballyhooed since the 1981 fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns".

While Mayweather's quips are loud, brash, and staccato quick, De La Hoya's taunts are subdued.

"You can feel the envy, all the frustration he has," De La Hoya said softly. "He wanted to be like me. He knows he could never accomplish that. He's a talented fighter. But he's never faced an Oscar De La Hoya before, someone at this level. It's a whole different animal."

Sugar said over the next two months De La Hoya and Mayweather would be "less mad than tired of each other".

"In this society we're in, people love this crap," he said with a chuckle.

(China Daily via Agencies February 28, 2007)