Did you hear the one about the Puerto Rican who grew up in Pennsylvania and went off to Austria to spar with an Irishman for a fight in New Jersey against a guy from Argentina? When Kermit Cintron makes the first defense of his IBF welterweight title against Walter Matthysse in Atlantic City Saturday night, it won’t be the main event, but it is one fight we think we can safely predict won’t go the distance.

Cintron (27-1) and Matthysse (26-1) have had 55 bouts between them, and just three of their aggregate victims (two of Cintron’s, one of the Argie’s) have been around to hear the final bell.

“I know we’re going to have our hands full, until it’s over,” said Cintron’s trainer Emanuel Steward at a press gathering conducted Wednesday at a Times Square sporting goods emporium. “I don’t expect it will go more than seven.”

Cintron-Matthysse is scheduled to be the kickoff bout of HBO’s tripleheader telecast Saturday night. It will be followed by Arturo Gatti-Alfonso Gomez, also at Boardwalk Hall, after which the network will shift its cameras to the West Coast for the Antonio Margarito-Paul Williams WBO 147-pound title bout.

With all due deference to Gatti’s trainer Mickey Ward, who accompanied him to New York for Wednesday’s press conference, Steward predicted “three Ward-Gattis” Saturday night.

The Hall of Fame Trainer was speaking, he maintained, “as a boxing fan,” but Steward is, of course, an HBO employee, and will even participate in the telecast once his work in the corner is finished.

“I’m going to jump right into my tuxedo after Kermit’s fight and get right back out there,” said Steward. “I won’t even have time to take a shower, so I hope it’s a quick fight.”

Margarito-Williams, the piece de resistance of the evening for all but Gatti’s loyal following, is a bout of particular interest to Cintron and Matthysse. The competitors in the IBF title fight have one loss apiece: Cintron’s was to Margarito, Matthysse’s to Williams.

Cintron has spent the past two months training for the fight. He accompanied Steward to Memphis in mid-May as part of Jermain Taylor’s camp, and flew straight to Austria three days later, where his training camp shared quarters with that of another Steward charge, IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko.

“Kermit and I had some hellish sparring sessions,” reported Lee, the undefeated Irish middleweight who last Saturday ran his record to 10-0 by knocking out a German named Thomas Hengtsberger on the Klitschko-Brewster undercard in Koln.

And Lee was pretty much the smallest man Cintron boxed with in Austria. Steward had brought along Florida junior middleweight Jerome Ellis to spar with the IBF champion, “but after a week or two Cintron beat him up so had he couldn’t stay with it. Kermit just destroyed him.”

Steward had Cintron work some with German light-heavyweight Haxhi Krasniqi, but for the most part for his final month in Austria was spent working against his larger stablemates – Lee and cruiserweight Johnathon Banks. Cintron even went seven rounds with Klitschko.

“In all,” said Cintron, “I sparred at least a hundred rounds over there.”

The hotel hosting the Austrian version of the Kronk Gym was a holistic retreat outside the hamlet of Going. Not only was the food all-natural, so was the climate control. In the absence of air conditioning in the five-star hotel, Lee and Cintron found themselves engaging in frequent sparring sessions with the resident flies.

The other guests hardly knew what to make of the international array of boxers, particularly after assistant trainer Joey Gamache solemnly explained to a crowd of curious German tourists that Cintron was an Arab who had to arrange his sparring sessions around his daily prayer schedule and was only permitted minimal exposure to sunlight.

“It was a great camp, actually,” said Lee. “There was a big lake nearby on the grounds, and at the end of our morning run Kermit, Joey, and I would jump right into it and go for a swim.”

When Klitschko, Steward and Lee decamped for Koln two weeks ago, Cintron flew back to Detroit, where Steward’s nephew Javen “Sugar” Hill oversaw his final week of training. (At the Kronk, Cintron sparred with Steward’s highly-regarded amateur, Domonique Dalton, whose style the trainer describes as “exactly like Sugar Ray Leonard’s.)

Cintron, who was raised in Pennsylvania by his uncle, former middleweight Ben Serrano, after being orphaned at an early age, is surely the boxing’s only world champion to have attended college on a wrestling scholarship. In high school he also played football and baseball and ran track.

“But that’s not the half of it,” said Gamache. “The guy is just an incredible athlete, period. Not only can he box and wrestle, he’s a pretty good golfer. (This past Monday, five days before his title fight against Matthysse, Cintron and Lee were in Chicago, playing in a charity golf tournament.)
And at the hotel in Austria, we played a lot of ping-pong at night. Kermit beat the hell out of all of us – including Klitschko.”

How all of this will translate once he gets into the ring with Matthysse Saturday night remains to be seen.

“We’ve watched lots of tape of Matthysse,” said Steward. “It’s going to be a dangerous fight. This guy is another Juan Roldan. He’s going for the knockout with every punch he throws, and we expect he’ll try to knock Kermit out, too.

“Put it this way: Somebody’s going to get knocked out.”

Cintron does not disagree, “but it’s not going to be me.”

M

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