CARLOS BALDOMIR'S NEW LIFE

by Ron Borges

The pressure is beginning to weigh on the wide shoulders of welterweight champion Carlos Baldomir. It is a pressure like he has never felt before. It is the pressure of being a winner.

For most of his career the 35-year-old Argentinian was a struggling journeyman living the hard-scrabble life of a boxer without connections. He fought on short notice. Twice he fought the same opponent on three different occasions just to pay the bills. Always the fight was the same.

Not so much to become a champion, although that was the dream, but to find some way to keep alive a career that, even at its lowest point, was a step up from selling feather dusters on the street corners of Santa Fe, Argentina.

That is how Baldomir supplemented an often meager existence as a short-notice fighter with a packed duffle bag and an always valid passport.

While others trained he sold feather dusters and hoped for the best.

"Back then I had to train haphazardly because I had to be on the streets selling my dusters,'' recalls a far different fighter today. "But after I won the WBC International championship in 1999 I started to train like a professional. I realized with proper training I could get to where I am now.''

Where Carlos Baldomir is now is a most unlikely place. On Nov. 4 he will share a ring in Las Vegas with the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world, Floyd Mayweather. Win or lose Baldomir will make more money that night than he's made in his entire 15 years as a prize fighter. Win or lose he will, in a sense, be the champion of all the down-and-out fighters with a little talent, a big dream, a taste of desperation and a blind faith in the future and in themselves. He will have won whether he defeats Mayweather or not...although it should be noted he intends to do the latter as well as collect the kind of paycheck he never before included in his distant dream.

"Mayweather is the pound-for-pound champion but I'm the top of our weight class and that won't change on Nov. 4,'' Baldomir said recently of a fight in which, like the previous two matches that have changed his fortunes forever, few people expected him to win. "Don't be surprised if I knock him out. Nobody has hit him as hard as I'm going to. He better be ready. I'm going to hit him harder than he's used to.''

Few people in boxing put much stock in such statements but Baldomir says them with a flat-voiced fervor that can only come from the kind of man who has walked a long road to glory. For much of his career he fought in small venues in Argentina or in other people's hometowns around the world.

He fought in Denmark and Germany and anywhere he could make a buck, appearing in eight countries and on four continents even when a buck was about all he was going to take home after the fighting ended.

He fought until, at age 35, he suddenly found himself facing then WBC welterweight champion Zab Judah on a night in which Judah was supposed to be fine tuning himself up for the guy Baldomir will square off against next, boxing's pound-for-pound champion. What Baldomir did that January night was not only upset Judah and become a most unlikely world champion but dominate him far more clearly than the judges' cards reflected. It was a victory that made him a hero back in Santa Fe, which is a town with a long boxing tradition and the spawning ground of the greatest Argentine boxer in history, Carlos Monzon.

It was the kind of unexpected moment that can lift a man but it did not change his life. He made $100,000 that night, which was by far the biggest payday of his career and he was given a bonus from the Sycuan Indian casino that recently began to back him - first class passage home to Argentina from New York. Riding in the front of a plane for the first time in his life, Carlos Baldomir was a contented soul. He was not rich. He was not some bejeweled boxer with an entourage and an exotic car but he was a world champion at an age when few men get the opportunity to win such a title and he seemed destined to finally get one big payday before his short reign ended.

If ever there was a hometown favorite it was Arturo Gatti in Atlantic City. He has sold out Boardwalk Hall more often than the Miss America Pageant that called the old building beside the Atlantic Ocean home for four decades. He was a fan favorite, an HBO favorite and a betting favorite when he signed to challenge Baldomir on July 22. What he was not, as things turned out, was able to defeat a tough guy from Argentina with a firm chin and a firmer resolve who learned years ago that just hanging in there is often a much underappreciated virtue in boxing, especially if you can catch the guy with a big reputation on the back side of his career.

That's what happened that night with Gatti but Baldomir did more than simply beat a shadow. He beat up Arturo Gatti, dropping him twice in the ninth round before the fight was stopped. If common sense prevails Carlos Baldomir retired one of the bravest warriors boxing has ever known that night and with that victory he was no longer just an accidental champion.

Now he was a fighter on the edge of stardom, a place whose brightness can blind you if you're not used to it.

"He told me Monday, 'I'm not used to all this attention,''' said Scott Woodworth, Sycuan's vice-president of boxing and a close friend of Baldomir (43-9-6, 13 KO). "He fought for 15 years in the shadows. He told me he goes home to Argentina now and feels he has more friends than he ever knew he had. He said he has more respect for Oscar (De La Hoya) and (Floyd) Mayweather today because now he understands how demanding it is to be on top.''

Boxing is no longer simply a matter of training and fighting for Carlos Baldomir. For the first time there are ads to shoot, teleconference calls to make, press conferences and open workouts to attend in New York and L.A. and Vegas. There is not only preparing to fight, there is preparing to promote the fight, a responsibility that comes with the biggest payday of his career.

Two fights before facing Gatti, Baldomir was paid $15,00 to fight Miguel Angel "Mickey'' Rodriquez in a title eliminator designed to produce a foil for Judah. It was, to that point, the biggest payday of his career and he had to do nothing to get the money but fight. When he received slightly more than $1 million to put his title at risk against Gatti he earned more in one easy night than he had in 14 hard years of boxing. Such is the nature of his sport, one where an overnight sensation can percolate for a decade and a half before he finally boils over.

But with this new found fistic and financial success come responsibilities and demands and Baldomir has struggled with some of them.

He failed to appear for an international teleconference with media from the United States and South America, causing the fight's promoter, Dan Goossen, to go ballistic. His excuse was he got lost while searching for a place to buy cellphone cards before going to a hospital where he was supposed to be examined in Los Angeles while making that call. This might have been the case but Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather don't put themselves in that kind of situation. They understand such demands on their time translates into publicity which translates into money in their pocket. For Baldomir that is a new concept that takes some adjusting to.

The next day he was a half hour late for an open media day workout in L.A. and promotional insiders claim he has had other promotional slipups while preparing for what he admits is "the most important fight of my life.'' Even his weight has become a cause of speculation, with some boxing insiders believing his new lifestyle has effected his ability to make 147 pounds. Goossen recently made clear that both fighters had come in under the required weight 30 days before the World Boxing Council sanctioned event but it's still a long way from 158 to 147. Long, but not as long as the route from Santa Fe to salvation.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd be in Los Angeles staying in such a nice hotel, feeding my children steaks,'' Baldomir said at a recent news conference in L.A., where he has prepared for Mayweather in the company of his wife and children for the first time outside of the country.

"When he brought his family to the Gatti fight it was the first time they'd seen him fight outside of Argentina,'' Woodworth explained. "After that fight he bought a home for himself and one for his father. That's the way he is. A family guy. A quiet guy.''

Recently named 2006 Fighter of the Year by the World Boxing Hall of Fame in Los Angeles, Baldomir knows where he stands at this moment. He is on the edge again but it is the edge of a far different place. He is on the edge of approaching his idol, Monzon, in the eyes of his country's fight fans. If he can beat Floyd Mayweather, Jr., if for the third straight time he can do what the oddsmakers believe he can't and the skeptics scoff at, his life will have changed profoundly, changed in a way he never could have imagined back when he was trekking through airports with confusing signs and a cacophony of unintelligible languages in places like Johannesburg and Copenhagen and Karlsruhe, Germany and London and Chicago and so many other cities he can't really remember any more.

"The Gatti fight propelled him to national stardom in Argentina but this win, if he can beat Floyd, they'll talk about him in the same breath as Monzon,'' Woodworth claimed. "When you know how far he's come from selling feather dusters on the streets to fighting on HBO pay-per-view against the pound-for-pound champion, it's a remarkable story. He's the modern day Cinderella Man.

"He knows Floyd is an icon on HBO. He doesn't resent the money he's getting. He knows Mayweather is the star. But he's also the vehicle to propel him to the next level.''

Only time will tell about that but as the days dwindle down to a remaining few and a new kind of pressure continues to build one wonders how Carlos Baldomir, the accidental champion, will handle it all. When the walls begin to squeeze in on him in the final days in his Las Vegas hotel suite how will he react? No longer is he simply a visitor to a foreign land. Now he is a champion, considered by many to be the best welterweight title holder in a cluttered field of such men. As Baldomir has learned the past 10 months, with titles comes pressure, pressures he never knew existed. Pressures not from trying to survive as a feather duster salesman and part-time fighter any more but from trying to maintain a place he seemed only a year ago unlikely to ever attain.

Can he once more be the relentlessly focused aggressor he was against Judah and Gatti when faced with arguably the fastest and most talented opponent he has ever shared the ring with? Can he remain fixated only on his purpose for being in Las Vegas - to win a fight - when around him arms will pull him here and there even as the final days approach and he wants only to think of what he will have in front of him?

Floyd Mayweather has been through the Big Fight circus enough times to be comfortable in its harsh lights but Baldomir has lived nearly all his career in the cool shadows. Will he be undone by his new surroundings in a way he never was as a journeyman constantly traveling to small venues for equally small paydays, a feather duster in his bag to remind him why he was there?

Not even Carlos Baldomir knows yet the answer to those questions but he believes he knows something more important. He believes he knows the answer to beating the best fighter in the world.

"Mayweather is skilled and very fast but he won't stand and trade with me,'' Baldomir said of his undefeated (36-0) challenger. "He'll run.

"I have no fear of Mayweather. I'll show again my last fights weren't the best I can be. I respect Mayweather a lot for all he's done in boxing but with no disrespect to him, I intend to defend my title. I'm the true welterweight champion. I've brought the green and gold (WBC) belt back to my wife and children in Argentina and I'll keep it there.

"I'm going to surprise the world again and keep on winning. Nobody thought I'd win those other (two) fights. He's the most skilled fighter I've faced but I can't wait to get my fists on him.''

Win or lose, it's better than having a fist-full of feather dusters to sell.