Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. have a chance to take boxing off the critical list. They have a rare opportunity to breath life into a sport that is frequently self immolating.

The rivals spent the last week on a barnstorming tour, trying to drum up attention for their May 5 super welterweight title fight at the MGM Grand Garden.

They started in New York on Tuesday, hit Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Chicago and Detroit on Thursday and were in Miami on Friday.

They'll move on to Houston and Dallas on Monday, San Francisco and Las Vegas on Tuesday and wind up the tour Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the tour is not how big a hit Mayweather has been among the fans -- he had more support than De La Hoya, the sport's most popular fighter, in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Detroit -- but the amount of carping done by sportswriters in towns where the tour hasn't stopped.

You know a fight is big when there are complaints that a publicity tour bypassed a city, as was the case recently in newspaper columns in Grand Rapids, Mich., San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.

The bout figures to top the non-heavyweight pay-per-view record of 1.4 million sales, set in the 1999 bout between De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad. It has an outside shot to top the all-time pay-per-view record of 2 million, set in 2002 by Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis.

Despite that, there are those who say -- not without some justification -- that boxing is a dying sport. But if it's dying, it's by self-inflicted wounds.

This fight, which already has a Nevada record live gate of $19 million, has an opportunity to draw new fans to the sport. To a large degree, whether that occurs is up to De La Hoya the promoter, not De La Hoya the fighter.

His company, Golden Boy Promotions, has become one of the premier promoters not because of any special skills but because of the volume of HBO dates it has received. Ask any promoter and he'll tell you the biggest problem he faces is a lack of TV dates.

But HBO so wants to please De La Hoya, who has helped it make millions upon millions of dollars during his career, that it gives Golden Boy Promotions more dates than any other promoter.

The De La Hoya-Mayweather undercard, though, is critical. There will be a lot of people who are buying a fight for the first time and they'll do so only because of the relentless drumbeat of six months of marketing.

If there isn't a reason for them to come back -- like a stirring undercard filled with evenly matched, competitive fights -- they won't. They'll go back to thinking of boxing as they do now, which is to say rarely and badly.

There will be about 40,000 in Clark County who see the fight live at the MGM Grand Garden or on closed circuit in casinos. Bank on two-thirds or more of them having no clue who Israel Vazquez or Rafael Marquez are.

And that's trouble for boxing, because March 3 in Carson, Calif., Vazquez and Marquez will take part in a bout that promises to be the equal of the series of bouts between Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales, two of which were named Fight of the Year.

No fight in history will be exposed as widely as De La Hoya-Mayweather. The result will be an extraordinary windfall for the fighters, Golden Boy and HBO.

But for it to be truly meaningful and not just a one-night stand, Golden Boy must eschew the undercard mismatches it might be tempted to make to save money.

With perhaps the biggest pay-per-view audience ever watching, De La Hoya should make certain he gives his employees the tools to make the most compelling undercard they can.

The attention focused on the main event is a chance to make one-nighters into permanent fans, but you don't do that by putting your prospects in showcase fights in which they're not challenged and which they win by one-sided decisions.

Try as some of its own might to harm it, boxing isn't dead. But De La Hoya can go a long way toward ensuring its long-term viability by not only making a compelling fight with Mayweather, but by spending enough to guarantee a can't-miss undercard.

De La Hoya should be reminded to spend money if he wants to make money.

Kevin Iole's boxing column is published Saturday. He can be reached at 396-4428 or kiole@reviewjournal.com.