LOS ANGELES — Well, that will sell some tickets.

In any other sport you might care to name, if you put two athletes together to talk about an upcoming event and an altercation broke out, it would be an embarrassment.

In boxing, it's just a good, solid business decision.

And so, when Fernando Vargas and Carlos Mayorga staged their fight before the fight — at Wednesday's news conference to announce their Sept. 8 bout at Staples Center — it's safe to say no one was appalled.

OK, Mayorga might not have been too thrilled to come away with marks (Welts? Bruises?) on both sides of his face. And Lee Zeidman, the highest-ranking Staples Center executive on hand, may have had visions of lawsuits dancing in his head as one member of the Mayorga entourage toppled off the dais and onto the floor.

Other than that, it was pretty clear no one was too worked up at the sight of two fighters, well, fighting.

Once all the shoving and shouting was done, promoters Kathy Duva and Don King were quickly at the microphone, smiling and making jokes. And why not? The only upsetting thing for them about the whole altercation had to be that tickets don't go on sale until Monday. If they'd known what was coming Wednesday, sales would have started today. Or perhaps King would have pulled out a suitcase full of ducats and started selling them on the spot. Only In America, indeed.

"Any time this happens, it's good for business," said Joe Pecora, Vargas' business manager, and vice president of the new Vargas Entertainment Promotions, in his down-to-earth way. "But you don't want to see a guy get hurt, especially this close to the fight. You know, Fernando landed a pretty good uppercut on him, and messed up his eye pretty good."

That, incidentally, is probably the second best argument against the temptation to say this whole thing was a setup. (That the tickets weren't immediately available would be the first.) It's hard to imagine any fighter would agree to come out second best in the kind of macho posturing represented by these sorts of altercations, and the marks on Mayorga's face made it hard to claim he'd won what is now, unofficially, Vargas' next-to-last career fight.

On the other hand, it's worth noting that if you Google the words "Don King boxing press conference altercation," you get 36,400 hits, including stories about similar set-tos involving Mayorga and Oscar De La Hoya, Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, Lewis and Hasim Rahman you get the idea. The altercation — at a news conference held on what is arguably the slowest sports-news day of the summer, the day after baseball's All-Star Game — catapulted the event to a level of media coverage it was not going to get from two fighters talking trash, or even some classic language-mangling soliloquies by King. Hearing King call Mayorga trainer Stacey McKinley "a strategerial genius" may be good for a laugh, but it wasn't going to get the news conference on the TV news.

This may not have been premeditated, but it sure was convenient.

Pecora, it should be noted, said he'd made an effort to try to prevent an altercation. "We could see it coming," he said. So he talked to Mayorga's manager.

"I said, Look, let's try to keep the women out of this,' " Pecora said. " He can put down Fernando as much as he wants. But let's keep the ladies out this, the wives and the mothers, and we'll be fine.' Either he didn't talk to Ricardo or he chose not to do that."

Either way, Mayorga baited Vargas from the moment he stepped to the microphone, calling him a coward and a fatty before invoking the boxer's mother and wife, according to the Mayorga representative translating his remark. (Mayorga would later claim otherwise.) Vargas — according to a bilingual reporter — responded in a manner that questioned Mayorga's manhood. And so, almost inevitably, they rumbled.

And so, almost certainly, the news conference accomplished what it set out to do: Vargas-Mayorga is now on the public radar, and tickets will move as a result. Let's face it: Bad blood sells.

In the chaotic aftermath of the altercation, after the Mayorga camp had moved to the Kings locker room to conduct its interviews — insert your own punch line here — I asked Vargas if he was sorry the altercation had happened.

"I don't want to put it on anybody," he said. "I don't want to fight outside the ring. But I'm a born fighter. You come shake my hand, I'll shake your hand. You come push me, I'll push back. I'll punch back."

In other words, no, he wasn't.

And really, why should he be?

He was at Staples Center to generate publicity.

When musicians want to promote a concert, they go on radio stations and play music. Should we really be surprised when fighters — looking to promote a bout — end up fighting?

It may not be gentile or polite. Neither is boxing.

Whatever you may think of Wednesday's little altercation, you can be sure it will help move tickets.

— Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.