Vitali Klitschko and Chris Arreola had their own workout / promotion that afternoon at the famed body-building spot, chatting it up with a couple hundred onlookers as they skipped rope, worked the gloves and otherwise tried to drum up support for their heavyweight title fight scheduled for Saturday night at Staples Center.

Merchant, with Jim Lampley and Emanuel Stewart, will be at his usual HBO ringside seat for it -- think of him as a set of training wheels for viewers who need help figuring out what's really going.

Never one to backpeddle, Merchant admits his 16-mile round-trip cruise to the beach this week wasn't so much to avoid horrible parking conditions.
"I'm really a (fitness) freak," said the Brooklyn native who's been a Los Angeles resident for more than 30 years. "I ride the bike to the beach a couple times a week, play tennis, still ski ..."

He rides, it must be noted, without a helmet.

"I don't come from the helmet age," said the hard-headed Merchant. "I've either been lucky or good, or both."

The same can probably be said about the arch of his sports media career.

Grounded as a newspaper sports columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and New York Post, Merchant came West in the late '70s because he sold a screenplay to Hollywood and "I wanted to see how it worked." It didn't.

He latched on with the L.A. Herald Examiner, first as a pro football writer - he did a book in 1973 called "The National Football Lottery," focused on the game's gambling aspects, and followed it up three years later with a book called "Ringside Seat at the Circus." As he tried to stay on as a general columnist, HBO came looking for a boxing expert.

"It was the cable revolution and I happened to get detoured into it," Merchant admits. "I've never been a good long-term planner."

Three decades later, the inductee in both the L.A.-based World Boxing Hall of Fame and New York's International Boxing Hall of Fame isn't ready to throw in the towel.

When plans leaked two summer ago that HBO wasn't going to re-sign him to a contract extension, Merchant somehow landed a two-year compromise deal. Last January, it was extended another two years, but it allowed the network to swap him out with Max Kellerman on certain fight broadcasts. Such as last week's Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Juan Manuel Marquez bout, which Merchant said he had no interest in seeing anyway.

"I'd like to keep doing this, but in 2011, I'll be 80 and it's really not my decision," Merchant said. "I feel I've been treated fairly and they have other choices. I'll have to see where things are going. I might write another book, I could turn up on the Internet ..."

He's not stupid. His experience in the evolution of boxing in the sports media business gives him a unique perspective. A sport that was once a staple of radio broadcasts and a vehicle for some of the finest newspaper journalism now has its voice on the Internet and cable TV.

"I don't think most newspapers have sports editors who know when there's a big fight any more," Merchant said. "The New York Times literally ignores it. The last time Sugar Shane Mosley fought Antonio Margarito at Staples Center (a controversial welterweight title bout last January), it got a tremendous crowd, good ratings on HBO ... and many papers ignored it. There was a time when you didn't need a dynamic heavyweight champion to be a mainstream sport. That's just the environment boxing's in now.

"It's still not the sport that a newspaper reporter or columnist sees as a way to advance his career. That's just the way it is."

Likewise, if you happen to see this Merchant of Venice -- or Santa Monica -- suddenly in the bike lane on his way to Staples Center on Saturday afternoon, avoiding all the trappings of today's high-speed advancements and subsequent parking issues, that's just the way that is, too.