MAY DAY WILL SATURDAY MARK THE START OF A RENAISSANCE, OR THE LAST HURRAH FOR BOXING AND HORSE RACING?

Byline: RAMONA SHELBURNE 

Staff Writer

Saturday is easy to predict, although not in the way your handicapper or oddsmaker might find interesting.

It's going to be huge. Vegas will be packed for the finale of the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather reality show. Louisville will be grand as newspaper columnists and television shows spend the week producing odes to Barbaro leading into another wide-open Kentucky Derby.

It will be a great day for boxing and horse racing.

But what about Sunday?

There was a time, not so long ago, that boxing and horse racing were two of our favorite sports. Their champions were larger-than-life figures who graced the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated.

Their biggest days were electric. The whole nation watched.

Celebrities showed up like it was the Academy Awards.

But both have been in decline in recent years for similar issues. Boxing because of a corrupt, confusing power structure, the absence of talent in its marquee heavyweight division, and challenges from other pugilistic enterprises such as wrestling and ultimate fighting.

Horse racing because of the increase in decentralized, off-track betting, the absence of Triple Crown winners and star horses because of pressure to retire early and start breeding, and challenges from other gambling-based sports -- if you can call them that -- such as poker.

None of that will matter Saturday. Both sports will get the red-carpet treatment and get all dressed up for their big nights.

The question is, how long will that glow last?

"I'm never willing to suggest that one event, in and of itself, will be the saving grace of it all. But what it does provide is the opportunity to have a dialogue with sports fans, or at least grab their attention," said Paul Swangard, the managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Institute at the University of Oregon. "But it'll be an opportunity for both sports to show themselves, at their best, to people who wouldn't otherwise care. But if you just own one day, it doesn't make a sustainable business model."

De La Hoya, who is fighting as much to cement his legacy as one of the all-time greats as for the opportunity to reinvigorate the stumbling sport that he plans to make his future living off of as a promoter, has said mega- fights such as Saturday's -- the kind that are prefaced by a "Fight Week," with celebrities fighting over ringside seats and experts scrambling to pick a favorite -- are the kind of fights that will save boxing.

The problem is De La Hoya might just be the only fighter around with enough clout and mainstream relevance to generate such a fight. But at age 34 he's on the back end of his career.

The Golden Boy has made $492 million in pay-per-view revenue in his 14-year professional career, behind only Mike Tyson, who made $545 million in PPV, and Evander Holyfield, who made $543 million.

De La Hoya is the only non-heavyweight to surpass one million PPV buys for a fight, in 1999 against Felix Trinidad and in 2004 against Bernard Hopkins. HBO expects Saturday's fight to surpass that, but isn't saying whether it'll break the all-time mark of 1.99 million buys set by the Tyson-Holyfield fight in 1997.

It already has broken the live gate record of $19million, selling out the 18,000-seat MGM Grand in two hours.

Outside of the Klitschko brothers -- Vitali and Wladimir -- breaking their vow of fighting each other, there are few potential heavyweight matchups that would even be worthy of putting on PPV.

"The heavyweight division has been the bellweather division or flagship for boxing since John L. Sullivan ... but right now, the division is on the verge of being called off for lack of interest," boxing historian Bert Sugar said. "This fight (Saturday) is going to be massive. I'm calling this fight the 'Fight of the Century.' There hasn't been a fight this ballyhooed in 20years, since Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns. But the problem is, boxing is not developing new stars.

"Boxing needs a Michael Jordan, a Tiger Woods to invigorate it, refresh it. I think Mayweather, if he beats Oscar, might be a star.

"He's got the personality for it. This society is based on charismatic sports figures and personalities. Unfortunately, behind (Floyd), I don't see anyone else out there with that."

You can't teach personality of course, but there is a science for developing and marketing it, and the run-up to this week's fight has been a master course. At times, it has felt more like the promotional campaign for a summer blockbuster movie.

HBO has been airing a reality show on Sundays called "24/7" from the two camps. Mayweather is happy to play the brash, smack-talking villain to De La Hoya's Golden Boy image.

Mayweather shows up with rapper 50 Cent, calls De La Hoya "the Golden Girl" and feuds with his father, Floyd Mayweather Sr., who is De La Hoya's former trainer.

De La Hoya comes off as the focused fighter making one last run at glory. He's handsome, charming and professional. The perfect foil to Mayweather's street punk.

This is the stuff mega-fights are made of. Talent and skill get you in the door, but to really bring 'em out and make the lights bright, you've got to have the drama.

De La Hoya, who is also one of the sport's biggest promoters, says one of boxing's biggest problems is that too few fighters and promoters are willing to make competitive fights that have the potential for great drama.

It's not easy to do that though, when there are four sanctioning bodies and 17weight classes, creating a confusing, diluted group of 68champions. Back in boxing's golden era, there was one sanctioning body and eight weight classes.

That dysfunction has opened the door for sports such as wrestling and UFC to encroach on boxing's territory. Last year, UFC's PPV revenue was more than boxing's.

"Boxing is too cluttered and confusing," Swangard said. "So UFC was able to come out of nowhere to give people an alternative that's a little more barbaric, but at least they have a governing body where people can understand what's going on."

Horse racing can relate to the lack of star power. The sport hasn't had a Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978, who was the third of three Triple Crown winners in the 1970s.

When the sport does produce a star, the results are dramatic.

Last year, Lava Man helped Santa Anita to its largest season-to-season gain in on-track attendance since the end of World War II in 1945.

Lava Man was the first horse since Affirmed in 1979 to win the Santa Anita Handicap and the Hollywood Park Gold Cup in the same year. He helped draw 49,443 people to the track for the Santa Anita Handicap.

"Every once in a while, you get lucky and you get a star horse that everyone wants to come out and see," said Allen Gutterman, the vice president of marketing for Santa Anita. "But that's getting harder and harder to do because most star horses retire so early for breeding."

What Gutterman and his colleagues at Santa Anita seem to have done so successfully the past few years, and what race tracks across the country are trying to emulate, is how to draw people out when there's not a marquee horse in the field.

This year, 56,810 attended the Santa Anita Derby, the largest Derby crowd since 1984, despite an unheralded field.

They were able to do that, Gutterman said, by making big races, such as the Derby, into events. There's usually a giveaway, a big run-up of television ads, and promotional parters such as the radio station KROQ and a microbrew festival, which drew almost 12,000 fans.

"During the week, you get an older crowd with a lot of retirees. Eighty percent of the handle during the week comes from off-track sites," Gutterman said. "What we've tried to focus on is getting people to come out to the big races and on weekends. You have to create events because you don't know, from year-to-year who the participants are going to be.

"What we really believe that you can only attract new fans to the sport if they have the live experience."

That, and you can only keep race tracks open if fans keep coming out.

Before simulcast wagering in 1985, virtually all the wagering on California's races was at the track, but recently "on-track" bets made up only 17.2 percent of wagers placed ($732 million), according to the California Horse Racing Association's 2005-06 report.

That has crippled the finances of tracks across the country. In California alone, the industry has eliminated 4,000 jobs in the past fiveyears.

Race tracks in other states have resorted to putting in slot machines to lure new customers back to the tracks and away from satellite sites and offshore, illegal Websites.

California tracks probably would do the same thing, were it not for the exclusive hold Indian casinos have on slot-machine use in the state.

Another factor, Swangard said, is the emotional connection fans feel with the sport.

"In its heyday, when a lot of people came from agricultural backgrounds, horses were a part of what America was and people felt more connected to horse racing," he said. "I think it's struggled to find its connection point to fans.

"And when there are other participatory sports, like poker, that people can gamble on, that's an issue."

So how do these two sports move forward? What do they do after Saturday?

Swangard suggests horse racing look outside its boundaries for new, creative ideas, in much the same way Gutterman and the marketing crew at Santa Anita have done by partnering with KROQ and the microbrew festival.

Mark Taffet, HBO's senior vice president of sports operation and PPV has a simple answer.

"I really believe that if you continue to have the best fighting the best, the best always rises to the top and out of that comes the superstar," he said. "What I hope comes out of De La Hoya- Mayweather is that everyone in the sport recognizes the benefits of the best fighting the best."

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2 photos

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(1 -- color) no caption (Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather jr)

(2 -- color) no caption (Barbaro in horse race)