Mayweather appearance spices up Bundrage-Smith presser

• Cornelius Bundrage%2C 39%2C fights Ishe Smith Saturday for Bundrage%27s IBF junior middleweight title
• The fight is in Detroit%2C Bundrage%27s hometown
• Smith fights for Floyd Mayweather%27s %22Money Team%22

DETROIT -- German shepherds lurked the halls. Tommy (The Hitman) Hearns was in the house. So was The Money Team's frontman, Floyd Mayweather.

The smack talk? Yeah, there was plenty of that, too.

Detroit's Cornelius (K9) Bundrage and Ishe Smith engaged in boxing's traditional prefight I'm-going-to-kill-you, no-I'm-going-to-kill-you bravado Thursday at the MGM Grand in Detroit.

Fingers stabbed the air. Pumped-up posses howled and harrumphed. Bundrage (32-4, 19 KOs) vowed to keep his IBF junior middleweight title in Saturday's Showtime card at Masonic Temple. And Smith (24-5, 11) promised to become the first native Las Vegas fighter to win a world championship.

In fact, Smith said he preferred to walk out of the ring with the belt — or not walk out at all.

"I'd rather go out on my back," he said, "than go home without that title."

Smith, who is promoted by Mayweather, told a soulful story about losing his will to box for 18 months and read from an inspirational letter Mayweather wrote to him from prison.

Bundrage, still a fierce puncher at 39, just laughed at the words and began his own with a trademark bark.

"Man, this cat, he's the Money Team water boy," Bundrage said as he shot a stare at Smith and Mayweather's team. "The last time he came to Detroit, he was scared to death. I could see a fear in him. He went home, he started tweeting. He's a Twitter twangster, a Facebook gangster.

"To come back home, to come back to my city again on the Money Team, he all of the sudden got heart. I bark outside the ring, but I bite in the ring."

The crowd will be decidedly on the side of Bundrage, who is making his third title defense and fighting in his hometown for the first time since 2005.

Smith knows this. But he also knows boxing isn't football or basketball.

"You can't yell at the quarterback so he can't have his cadence," Smith said. "You can't wave stuff in the crowd so you can't shoot free throws. You've got to get in there and you've got to fight, and I've got to fight. It's two warriors going at it. And one thing about it: He's going to get touched."

Monar rez writes for the Detroit Free Press