Andrade on fast track to boxing stardom

Had he won the gold medal he expected at the Beijing Olympics, Demetrius Andrade knows life would be different.

“I’d probably be on Oprah,” he laughed. “Or Letterman.”

Instead, he’s in Airway Heights. But at least he’s on TV, where stars are inevitably born.

And this seems to be the consensus about Demetrius Andrade – that he will be a star. Not just a champion, not just his sport’s brightest light, but something that will transcend the fractured and flailing community of professional boxing and maybe lift it up as only celebrity is able to do in our modern world.

All this before he’s been paid for a punch.

That changes tonight on the undercard of the Cristobal Cruz-Orlando Salido IBF world featherweight title fight at Northern Quest Casino. The 2007 world amateur champion at 152 pounds, Andrade makes his pro debut in a four-round junior middleweight bout against Patrick Cape (4-2) that’s also part of the live national telecast on the Versus channel.

Every legend has to be launched somewhere and it’s the bet of promoters Artie Pelullo and Joe DeGuardia that the casino is Canaveral and Andrade is the rocket.

“He’s more than a diamond in the rough – he’s already been cultivated,” said DeGuardia. “He has the boxing qualities, the character, the presentation – the whole package.

“He has the ‘it’ factor.”

And maybe the best thing for them is, their fighter embraces the concept.

“I have my ego and pride,” he said. “I have things I want to accomplish – the belts, going undefeated. I have big dreams.”

Of course, he’s hardly the first one to dream them.

It is the rare boxer who ducks through the ropes into the ring without envisioning some level of greatness – even if it’s a Rockyesque fantasy of getting just that one shot and connecting with one fateful punch. Andrade’s ambitions are more of a conspiracy, though only in the last few years has it come together. He is no fistic Todd Marinovich, his destiny programmed at a young age only to go predictably haywire.

He started tagging along with his father to a gym in his hometown of Providence, R.I., at age 6 – just one of the many activities to which Paul Andrade steered his sons “to keep them off the streets. They did everything – football, basketball, boxing, karate, tennis.”

Tennis?

“It couldn’t be all contact sports,” he shrugged.

Boxing stuck – mostly because Paul had a remarkably even hand as a trainer, pushing hard one minute, dreaming up a contest the next. Pushups and situps were meted out in games of musical chairs – but the boys were also dropped off a mile from the gym with their full equipment bags to run the rest of the way.

“We used to do laterals around the ring – not in it but around it,” Andrade said, dredging up an early memory from the gym. “If we were going too slow my dad used to have his belt out. The slow people got whacked, but I used to get by him – that’s where the foot speed came from.

“There were a lot of games. You didn’t see the hard work you were putting in. You were just a little kid running around.”

But soon enough came the medals and trophies, and then the turning point – winning the U.S. national amateur title at age 17 with upsets over two more experienced fighters, Austin Trout and Danny Jacobs. Andrade repeated the feat in 2006, then won the 152-pound crown at the world championships the next year in Chicago.

That made him a favorite in Beijing, but he lost a narrow – and controversial – quarterfinal decision to Korea’s Kim Jung-Joo, a page out of the Roy Jones scrapbook.

“He said something to me when he was 15,” Paul recalled. “He said, ‘I figured it out – you might love boxing, but it doesn’t always love you back.’ ”

Nonetheless, he seems to be getting all the love he needs now. Boxing promoters are hardly known for their reticence, but these two are unrestrained in their assessments despite the stakes.

“It’s tremendous pressure, both on Demetrius and us,” admitted LaGuardia. “A guy like Demetrius is already perceived as being better than everybody else and now he has to maintain that. We have to make the right choices in developing his career, but ultimately he has to keep winning and look impressive doing it.”

Because if he doesn’t, all the rest – the boyish handsomeness, the easy manner with fans and children, the level head, the fun he brings to every interview – don’t add up to “it.”

“It’s a win business,” Pelullo acknowledged.

Starting tonight. Even if there had been gold for Andrade in Beijing, there would be a four-rounder in some casino and an unknown opponent with his own, private dreams.

So today Airway Heights. Tomorrow the world. And the day after, Oprah.