Sikahema ready to rumble with Canseco

When I first heard Vai Sikahema had accepted a challenge to box former Major League slugger Jose Canseco for $5,000, I thought the former Cougar and Philadelphia Eagle pro bowler had gone nutty.

Then I called Sikahema.

It will be the quickest pocket change Sikahema has ever earned. Canseco is going down.

Canseco, who has made recent headlines in his post-Major League Baseball career with a book on steroid abuse in the majors and reality TV, is losing his house. Plus, two divorces have cost him a reported $8 million. So he went looking for a gimmick, like a challenge to fight somebody for money.

Sikahema, currently a popular Philadelphia TV sports anchor, will fight Canseco on July 12 at the Atlantic City Bernie Robbins Stadium. They'll use headgear and fluffy 14-ounce gloves. The rounds will be two minutes each.

Still, folks think he's crazy. "Especially some people in my own house, namely my wife," Sikahema said Friday.

Canseco is 43; Sikahema is 45. Canseco is 6-foot-4, 240 pounds. Sikahema, who was 5-9 and 185 as an NFL kick return specialist, now is almost 210. Canseco is considered a bad boy; Sikahema is a positive icon in the City of Brotherly Love.

Canseco claims he's

earned black belts in kung fu, tae kwon do and muay Thai. Sikahema once fought in a National Golden Gloves Championship that would eventually be won by Sugar Ray Leonard.

But Sikahema says he is currently in the best shape of his life. He runs six to eight miles a day and regularly spars with friends in a Philadelphia gym. And he has a plan.

I'm tuned in to Sikahema's boxing roots. I was 10 years old when my father, Rondo Harmon, worked as superintendent of Liahona High School outside the capital city of Nukalofa, Tonga. Vai's father, Loni, came to Liahona, a young man headed for what Vai calls "juvenile delinquency" before Loni hooked up with a palangi (white) faculty member named Charles Woodworth, who introduced him to boxing.

Impressed, my father — once a boxing instructor in the Army — made Loni a leader over an on-campus dormitory.

When Woodworth left Tonga, Loni followed him to Arizona with his little family to become a prize fighter. Loni trained his son Vai to be a boxer, and Vai was well on the way to doing so before he got to high school and turned to football.

When promoters called Sikahema last month about fighting Canseco, it was, well, like a calling. But Sikahema didn't bite right away. He did some research. He told the promoter to give him two weeks.