Rodney Berman puts on a bill fit for royalty

You don't have to be as pretty as Charlene Wittstock to make it in Monaco.

Promoter Rodney Berman is the latest South African to roll into the principality, having clinched a multi-million-dollar deal with the SBM hotel chain, which owns the famous Monte Carlo casino.

"We want to make Monaco the boxing Mecca of Europe," says Berman, who has signed Kazakhstan middleweight sensation Gennady Golovkin to top the bill on March 30.

The show, which will be staged at the 5000-seater Chapiteau de Fontvieille arena on the waterfront, will also feature the opening round of the Monte Carlo Million Dollar Super Four catchweight competition, featuring two super-middleweights and two light-heavyweights.

The two winners of that will battle for a 60-40 split of a $1-million purse at the second show on July 13, which will also celebrate the 95th birthday of Nelson Mandela.

"In South Africa we have never had a level playing-field because we have not had the money," says Berman, who was impressed by Prince Albert and his SA wife, Princess Charlene, during negotiations. "But this has levelled the playing field. I can put on a show like the top promoters in the world put on."

Golovkin doesn't come cheap. The undefeated WBA middleweight champion fought just a few weeks ago at Madison Square Garden.

For SA fans old enough to remember, Monaco is where Gerrie Coetzee's first-round demolition of Leon Spinks in a 1979 eliminator for the world heavyweight title vacated by Muhammad Ali took place.

That Berman is spreading his Golden Gloves operation abroad should be no surprise considering the apparently worsening state of the fight game locally, with Boxing SA vowing to take TV rights from promoters.

But it does not mean an automatic showcase for SA fighters - not even for Berman's blue- eyed boy Thomas "Tommy Gun" Oosthuizen, who is anyway assured of fighting on a high-profile bill in the US, to be televised by pay-per-view channel HBO.

Berman's plan is simple: capture the European market.

Not many SA fans will have heard of super-middleweights Edwin Rodriguez (US) and Ezequiel Osvaldo Maderna (Argentina), nor light-heavyweights Zsolt Erdei (Hungary) and Denis Grachev (Russia), the Super Four contestants.