Boxing: Barrera makes money making us wait

By Patrick Kehoe: Championship boxers, no less professors and executives, seem to require and expect paid vacations, with as many fringe benefits as possible. Featherweight-plus wonder man Marco Antonio Barrera has been granted such a paid vacation, a working holiday with bonus, if you will, taking the form of a pay per view HBO "championship" boxing outing against South African homebody Mzonke Fana. After a half decade of savaging victories and warring defeats, one could make the case Barrera deserves a little down time, a time to take his fame to the bank of sports entertainment pay-offs. Too bad for Team Barrera and Oscar De La Hoya and the entire promotional staff over at Golden Boy Promotions that Barrera's nemesis, Top Rank mainstay Erik Morales - conqueror of Barrera's conqueror Manny Pacquiao - has effectively illustrated for even the pathologically rationalizing that the Barrera-Fana contest is little more than batting practice boxing, off-off Broadway, C picture stuff.