Mayweather Defends Crown With TKO of Manfredy in 2

Floyd Mayweather Jr. left no doubt Saturday night about who is the best 130-pound fighter in the world as he hammered Angel Manfredy, retaining his World Boxing Council super-featherweight title with a second-round technical knockout at Miami.

Mayweather began scoring almost instantly with superior hand speed. He dominated the first round and maintained control until the fight was stopped with 13 seconds left in the round.

Mayweather, 21, improved to 19-0 with 15 knockouts in his first defense after taking the title from Genaro Hernandez. Manfredy dropped to 25-3.

The undercard featured a controversial heavyweight battle as David Tua--helped by a damaging blow delivered clearly after the bell--scored a 10th-round technical knockout of previously unbeaten Hasim Rahman.

Basketball

Michael Jordan will retire as soon as the NBA lockout ends, according to Charles Barkley.

“Michael is done,” Barkley said before Saturday’s charity exhibition basketball game featuring NBA players at Atlantic City, N.J. “Let me tell you something, you can hope and hope and hope, but Michael is gone.

“He’s not going to play anymore. He’s just waiting for the lockout to end. Everybody keeps trying to make him play, or ask if he will play if they shorten the season. But he has said from Day 1 he’s not going to play. He wants this thing to end so he can make it public.”

In the game, played before about 10,000, Tim Hardaway make five of seven three-point shots and scored 33 points to lead the Red team back from a 17-point deficit as they beat the younger White team, 125-119.

Despite NBA Commissioner David Stern’s recent threat of canceling the season, several players who participated in the charity game said they believe the lockout will end soon.

“Everyone wants to make it seem like a false sense of security on the players’ behalf,” Karl Malone said. “I think it will end in the next week. Sometimes when it’s Christmas, you’re in a giving mood. We’ve been doing it all summer; maybe it’s their turn.”

The players believe that it would be too risky for the owners to imperil the value of their franchises by scrapping an entire season. There has been talk that a rival league would be formed and the NBA would never recover.

Agent David Falk said the threat of a new league should not be dismissed.

“There are a lot of wealthy people who like challenges and would like to own an NBA team but can’t,” he said. “But if virtually the entire league were free agents, it’s not a question of whether I’d want to start a new league. Someone like a [Rupert] Murdoch or a Disney or CBS or ABC, a lot of entities might look at this as, ‘If they give it to me, I might as well take a look.’ ”

In American Basketball League games:

Shannon Johnson scored with 3.3 seconds left to give the Columbus Quest a 56-54 victory over the Seattle Reign before 2,051 at Columbus, Ohio. Johnson scored 17 for the Quest, who improved to 7-0 at home this year.

At Hartford, Conn., reserves Dale Hodges and Barbara Bolden combined to make 12 of 13 shots and score 33 points to rally the New England Blizzard to an 80-76 victory over the Nashville Noise before 6,715.

Olympics

As revelations of corruption surrounding the bidding for the Olympics continue to arise, some major corporate sponsors have urged officials to hurry and fix any problems that threaten to tarnish the image of the event.

“We’ve expressed our concerns to the International Olympic Committee and they assured us they will take swift and decisive action and we will monitor them to ensure that,” said Ben Deutch, spokesman for Coca-Cola.

The IOC has responded with an investigation into allegations of its members selling their votes, with particular focus on Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

The Salt Lake Olympic Committee spent nearly $10,000 on six Browning shotguns and rifles for people associated with the Olympics, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The firearms and other items--including a shotgun that would retail for nearly $3,000--were bought from July 1993 to May 1995 at approximately wholesale prices.

Winter Sports

World Cup overall ski leader Alexandra Meissnitzer of Austria gained her first downhill victory with a time of 1 minute 42.68 seconds at Veysonnaz, Switzerland. Regine Cavagnoud of France finished second at 1:43.00.

Italian Kristian Ghedina won the second of consecutive World Cup downhills at Val Gardena, Italy, ending the two-race winning streak of Norwegian Lasse Kjus.

Ghedina’s winning time was 2 minutes 4.17 seconds. Kjus, winner of the two previous World Cup downhills, finished second, .14 of a second behind.

The race, however, was marred by a season-ending accident to Olympic downhill champion Jean-Luc Cretier of France, who tore the cruciate ligament of his left knee and fractured his left hand.

U.S. Olympic bronze medal winners Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin set a heat record of 45.978 seconds en route to winning the doubles at the luge World Cup at Winterberg, Germany. Martin and Grimmette won in a combined time of 1 minute 32.641 seconds, followed by Austrian cousins Tobias and Markus Schiegl and Germany’s Patrick Leitner and Alexander Resch.

World champion ski jumper Janne Ahonen of Finland scored his second World Cup victory of the season with a record jump of 132 meters at Harrachov, Czech Republic.

Miscellany

Jim Colbert and actor Kevin Costner shot a closing-round, 10-under-par 62 to win the Lexus Challenge pro-celebrity golf tournament by a shot over Hubert Green and Matt Lauer at La Quinta. Colbert and Costner combined to shoot a 36-hole score of 24-under 120.

The late Ray Scott, best known as a play-by-play football broadcaster during a 50-year career, was selected as this year’s inductee to the American Sportscasters Assn. Hall of Fame. Scott died in March at age 78.

The recently released collection of Jim Murray’s columns, “Jim Murray, the Last of the Best,” has risen to No. 1 among best-selling nonfiction paperback books in Southern California, according to the weekly Los Angeles Times survey of bookstores.

The book includes reprints of 90 columns from the 1990s written by The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist. Murray, who had written sports columns for The Times since 1961, died Aug. 16 at 78.