By Ron Borges

Even when things are good in boxing the business side conspires against it. Saturday is such a night.

Normally fight fans are forced to shell out big money to watch the sport’s big events but on HBO Championship Boxing long-time super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe, who is undefeated (43-0) and has made 20 consecutive successful defenses of some form of the 168-pound title, will risk the WBO version, as well as his status as the dominate force in the division, against undefeated WBC champion Mikkel Kessler (39-0) before a roaring crowd of over 35,000 in Wales tonight in a fight the long-ignored division has long needed.

Not far down the dial WBC super featherweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez, who is considered to be among the top five pound-for-pound fighters in the world (as Calzaghe is) will defend his title against a power punching former Olympian named Rocky Juarez on SHOWTIME. Same time, different channel. Why do they do this?
They do it because the last people boxing promoters, boxing managers and boxing TV executives think about are the people who pay all of them. You, the long-suffering fight fan. These guys who rather try to hurt each other’s rating and audience then help themselves and the sport. That being the case, thanks goodness for TiVo.

Kessler is no Danish pastry despite having fought all but twice in Copenhagen or not much more than a bicycle trip away from it. Many such Europeans tend to melt once they get out of their native arena but Kessler is not cut from that type of flimsy cloth. He is hard punching, aggressive and young; all the things some people say Calzaghe is not.

What Calzaghe is, and long has been, is a consummate boxer, a left-handed artist who will paint your face with leather from a stinging jab and his deft use of angles and then finish you with left hands that do a lot more damage than people on the outside of the ropes seem to think possible.

Calzaghe has long been called a “slapper’’ and at times he does because he has fragile hands (especially his oft-injured left) and on many occasions errs on the side of caution. Then again, when you’re 43-0 and have been world champion for a decade you haven’t erred all that often. Kessler knows this and his people understand Calzaghe seems to be one of those guys who rises to the moment, as he did when he destroyed the myth and the magic of then IBF champion Jeff Lacy.

Lacy had been dispatched to England to put an end to Calzaghe’s long supremacy while solidifying his own position as the most dangerous puncher in the division. Not so fast. For 12 rounds a baffled Lacy took a one-sided beating before finally being driven to the floor late in the fight. He would have been wise to have stayed there.
By the end of the night, Lacy looked like he’d been assaulted by soccer hooligans… and a lot of them. If Calzaghe’s a slapper that night he must have been slapping Lacy with an axe handle.

Kessler, 28, now faces the same chore Lacy could not handle. He must try to match wits with one of the smartest fighters in boxing and avoid a stinging right jab that sets up all the damage Calzaghe eventually does to you.

But Kessler is more about pressure and power, two things Calzaghe has little fear of, than thinking and ring generalship. That is why Calzaghe has insisted that while he respects the young Dane he believes he’s a one-dimensional fighter who will not be able to adjust to the many ways the champion will attack him.

Conversely, Kessler believes power and youth are on his side and that they will triumph. Regardless of who dominates, the winner will be the undisputed champion despite the fact Anthony Mundine holds the WBA title and somebody named Alejandro Berrio of Columbia has the IBF version Calzaghe won from Lacy and lost to outside-the-ring in-fighting between men in expensive suits rather than to Berrio or anyone else inside the ring.

This is a fight well worth watching but if you do, you’ll have to miss the great Marquez, whose show begins 9 pm Eastern time on SHOWTIME. Marquez is a clear favorite and rightfully so but Juarez has power in both hands and a willingness to use it, which considering that Manny Pacquiao once dropped Marquez three times in one round is a problem worth noting.

Much is on the line in this fight because Marquez (47-3-1) needs a win here to set up a long-awaited rematch with Pacquiao, who he ultimately fought to a draw that night he went down so quickly in the opening round the crowd was more stunned than he was.

To survive three knockdowns in the first round and then fight well enough to leave the arena with a draw makes clear just how skilled and dangerous Marquez is at his best. But the fact that he was down three times makes clear that Juarez (27-3) will be a danger to him all night long.

Juarez’s three losses all came in title fights, two with Barrera and one with Humberto Soto, who upset him to win the vacant featherweight title several years back. That Juarez has not found a way to win against top opponents has made Marquez the favorite tonight in Tucson but if ever the old sobriquet – “has a puncher’s chance’’- would apply this fight is it.

That is all good news for boxing, a sport which is back on the rise if its record pay-per-view numbers, growing crowds around the world (especially in Europe) and recent spate of fights like these in which champions face the best contenders are any measuring stick. The bad news is that promoters and the cable giants who run things have once again decided to put on cards of great interest at the same time. Why?

It’s because boxing has no Roger Goodell or David Stern looking out for it. It remains a sport that has no one looking out for it, as these two shows prove.

They could have easily been staged a few weeks apart and fight fans would have ended up with a string of shows like those two plus Miguel Cotto vs. Shane Mosley (next weekend) and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Ricky Hatton (in three weeks) on consecutive weekends with half of them on free premium cable rather than pay-per-view.

That would have been a big boost to a sport that is in a deadly competition with MMA and, most of all, itself. You can still get the benefit though. Just get TiVo or your tape machine going around 9 pm because no matter which fight you choose there’ll be a second one just as good waiting for you when it’s over.