There’s a difference between world-class fighters and club fighters. It’s similar to the distinction between a Grammy Award nominee and a guy who sings in Holiday Inn cocktail lounges.

Tonight, Sal Musumeci is promoting an eight-fight card in the Theater at Madison Square Garden. It’s being advertised as a night of world-class boxing. But the show features four heavyweight matchups between fighters who, at this point in their respective careers, are essentially club fighters. Three have high hopes for the future; two have been to the heights and fallen; three more are simply opponents.

The co-featured bouts are designed to showcase cousins from the former Soviet Union: Sultan Ibragimov (14-0, 12 KOs) and Timur Ibragimov (16-0-1, 9 KOs).

Sultan, a 29-year-old heavyweight, won a silver medal for Russia at the 2000 Olympics. He’ll be facing Al Cole (34-13-1, 16 KOs), who turns 41 next month. Cole was a good cruiserweight champion – at one point, his record was 27-1 – but that was 14 years ago. Over the past 10 years, campaigning as a heavyweight, he has won only 7 of 20 fights.

The 30-year-old Timur is from Uzbekistan. He takes on Ronald Bellamy (14-1-4, 9 KOs), who’s being advertised as the much younger brother of basketball great Walter Bellamy. Ronald has fought exclusively in North Carolina and Georgia, and his loss came by knockout against Leon Turner, whose record was 1-7 at the time.

The best the Ibragimovs can hope for tonight is for each to add a victory to his record. They’d also like to benefit from exposure to the New York press. But there’s no such thing as “looking good” against opposition of this nature.

Shannon Briggs (40-4-1, 34 KOs) will also see action. Briggs was once a world-class fighter with enormous potential. But too often, he has been unwilling to train hard or dig down deep during fights. At 33, he could still get things together and move back up the ladder in today’s mediocre heavyweight market. But odds are, he won’t.

The Briggs camp turned down journeyman heavyweight Zuri Lawrence (19-9-4) as an opponent for tonight because Lawrence was considered too tough. In 32 fights, Lawrence has never scored a knockout. Instead, Briggs will face Demetrice King (7-5, 5 KOs), who lost to Lawrence last August. Look for Briggs to come out hard in an effort to score an early knockout. If that doesn’t work, he’ll stick and move en route to a six-round decision.

In the fourth heavyweight matchup, former college football star and current prospect Derric Rossy (3-0, 2 KOs) fights a rematch against Rubin Bracero (2-2, 1 KO), who went the four-round distance with him last December. This time, they’re scheduled for six. Rossy has improved over the past three months, and Bracero hasn’t.

Former World Boxing Council 126-pound champion Kevin Kelley (54-6-2, 36 KOs) is also slated to do battle. Kelley was once a world-class fighter. But he’s 37 years old and has fought only once in the past 27 months; he was stopped in four rounds by Marco Antonio Barrera in April 2003. Kelly will go against Felix St. Kitts (12-4-2, 7 KOs). In the past three years, St. Kitts has won once, been knocked out twice, and fought a draw against a fighter with a 4-25-2 record.

The first fight is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tickets cost between $40 and $250; the $250 ducat includes a pre-fight cocktail party. At those prices, the drinks had better be good.

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Last Saturday night in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, World Boxing Organization 140-pound champion Miguel Cotto ran his record to 23-0 (19 KOs) with a fifth round stoppage of DeMarcus “Chop-Chop” Corley. The bout highlighted the questionable practice of boxers being allowed to weigh in the day before a fight and replenish their system afterward.

In order to make the 140-pound limit, Cotto “dried out” for the weigh-in. But on fight night, according to the HBO scale, he weighed 157 pounds to Corley’s 140.That’s not a fair fight. Also, while Cotto supposedly weighed 140 pounds at the official weigh-in, Corley was listed at only 137.That gave rise to the suspicion that the official scale was rigged by three pounds to accommodate the hometown champion.