Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (29 page)

One thing Big George has won for sure is the identity debate. In the press conferences it’s George, with his born-again preacher skills and his down-home wit, who takes the play from beautifully conditioned and well-behaved Evander Holyfield. And while Evander’s manager, Lou Duva, is quick-minded, the ’91-model George Foreman can beat him to the one-liners. It’s almost as if the once-sullen Sonny Liston the Second has become the graceful, articulate, people-loving, and press-caressing Muhammad Ali.

Whether or not this movie ends with another miracle—the comeback victory of George Foreman—is anybody’s guess. The ring
cognoscenti
fall back on that tried and occasionally true cliché—“When he hits you, you go. You gotta give him the puncher’s chance.”

And as Big George was saying, back at the ranch, “One thing about Evander, he doesn’t mind getting hit.” Big grin. “That’s the kind of fighter I like.”

Evander’s cagey brain-trust, Lou Duva and George Benton, may have something to say about that. But win or lose, this 260 pounds of fighting preacher has proved what gifted novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald denied when he wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Not only is The Second Coming of George Foreman a helluva second act, it’s giving us a happy ending that you only see in Hollywood fairy tales like
Pretty Woman.

[April 1991]

A
FTER THE VIETNAM AND
Watergate ’60s and ’70s, and Boesky, Milken, and the takeover boys of the ’80s, America’s been hungry for heroes. The Japanese and the West Germans were outproducing and outselling us. “Say No to Drugs” was a vapid slogan mocked every day from Harlem to Hollywood. It seemed as if, since that terrible day when JFK went down in Dallas, and the proud Lyndon Johnson quit, and Nixon retreated from the White House as “an unindicted co-conspirator,” something had gone awry with our American Dream. Drugs and the deficit. AIDS and recession were our front-page news. The Greedy ’80s seemed to be giving way to the Noxious ’90s. Ten more years of gloom and doom?

And then all of a sudden, up from the abyss fight-fan-novelist Jack London wrote about, came a brace of heroes, the articulate General Schwarzkopf, the first black chief-of-staff, Colin Powell, and—after his astonishing twelve-round set-to with Evander Holyfield—the Reverend George Edward Foreman, who came within one heavy right-hand punch or two of removing all those resplendent (and redundant) heavyweight belts from young Holyfield.

When the bell ended Round 12 a few minutes after midnight on the morning of April 20, with Big George very much on his feet and the younger, more agile champion doing the clinching and begging for the bell. Holyfield may have had the WBA, the WBC, and the IBF titles still in his column, but somehow the three biggest capitals in our alphabet got away from him—USA.

Before the fight, after every round, and when he stood face-swollen but unbowed waiting for the demanding final three minutes of a fierce-paced and constantly competitive fight, Foreman heard the chant of eighteen thousand doubting fans he had turned into believers, “George! George! George! …” And in a record number of pay-per-view living rooms and bars, George’s new constituency was chanting along with them. No question that an able and finely trained Holyfield won on points (our arithmetic on the silly ten-point-must system wound up 115-112). He had done the most hitting, even though the determined senior citizen had done the most hurting. Big George, with his newfound gift for pinpoint articulation, had summed it up as neatly as a Dave Anderson or Pete Hamill: “He won the points, but I proved the point.”

That morning when he showed up at the press conference in Atlantic City’s Convention Hall at 1:20 a.m., dressed to play Othello in his red tent of a robe, there was no doubt in any reporter’s mind that the real “winner” was not the “Real Deal” but George Foreman, the first heavyweight to take Evander all the way since the champion grew out of the Cruiserweight (or “Jr. Heavyweight”) class he had dominated three years ago. Every one of the heavyweights Holyfield had faced were gone by the tenth round or less, including three former champions.

“When I hit them the way I hit George, they went,” Evander marveled at his gentlemanly press conference. “But I hit George with everything I had”—in the ninth round we counted twenty in a row—“and he still kept coming. I have to admit that surprised me. I had to fight a technical fight because he was always dangerous, right to the end.”

What he didn’t say was that the crowd was booing him at the end for clinching and trying to coast in while Foreman, a Born-Again-Fighter as well as Preacher, was cheered for his persistence in trying to land that one big right that would take it all.

Even if the fight hadn’t celebrated the mystique of age against youth—“The Battle of the Ages”—the middle-aged comeback gourmand against the scientifically trained, undefeated, and undisputed champion, this would have simply been remembered as one hell of a fight, with a ferocious seventh round that brought to mind the almost unbearable intensity of Hagler-Hearns.

Indeed, unlike baseball, football, or basketball, a fight between two determined athletes is such an emotional experience that it seems to affect the senses the moment the men meet in the center of the ring. It is will against will, plan against plan, character against character, creating a chemistry so strong that sometimes I swear it gives off an aroma—you breathe in the fight and its awesome possibilities. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, only in a way you do, or rather you smell: hard fight or easy, long or short, nerve-racking or boring. Only in a bullfight do you get that feeling as the bull charges into the arena—oh God, this is going to be a mess, make it short! Or, this one brings two really good ones together, maybe great ones, this could be an awesome work of art.

One minute into Holyfield-Foreman your senses told you: this is no joke, no fraud, this is not going to be another one of those heavyweight fiascos of the Douglases and the Thomases, the Pages and the Tates, that all but destroyed the luster of the heavyweight championship that had glorified Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali … And by the second round, when George lands a mean left hook and follows with a right hand that actually stuns the champion, and the crowd is on its feet screaming “Knock ’em out, George, knock ’em out!,” now we know that, whatever happens, Big George is for real, he
hasn’t come to collect his twelve to fifteen million bucks, he’s come to prove that the man who folded in Africa with Ali and ran out of gas in his mess of a fight with Jimmy Young is George Foreman Past and this is George Foreman Present, with a new smile, a new attitude, a new stamina.

Never sitting down through their twelve hard-fought rounds, staggered a few times but always fighting back and moving forward, George begins to take on mythical powers. Holyfield may hit him two to one, but he calmly walks through the hard rain of punches to land his own.

What makes his stand all the more dramatic, of course, and sets him up for folk heroism, is the fact that so many mockers and naysayers wrote him off before the battle as a pugilistic traveling salesman touring the country mugging for TV cameras and selling tickets with a combination of back-country wisdom and back-country jokes featuring his oversized eating habits and waistline.

In the press room before the fight one of the best-informed boxing writers in the business, with whom I’ve compared pre-fight notes for years, confessed to me that he was really ashamed to be covering this fight. “It’s a farce,” he said. “It’s getting to be more like wrestling all the time. George hasn’t fought his way into this fight, he’s talked his way into it. I don’t see him getting through the second round.” And the loquacious Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who came to fistic fame as Ali’s ring doctor and cornerman, worried out loud that a man Foreman’s age could suffer a fatal heart attack in there, predicting another black eye for boxing.

There were a few Foreman supporters in the press room, including this one, who remembered how Alex Stewart had shaken Evander in the fifth round before the champion took him out in the eighth. Anyone watching Big George split heavy bags on his ranch in Texas knew the 260-pounder was as strong as the bulls he raised. Sooner or later, we reasoned, even without the speed of the Holyfield footwork and jab, even without the heady tactics of George Benton (which George had
given me a demonstration of in the men’s room of the Trump Plaza), Big George would get to him with the big punch come Round 7 or 8.

George did land those punches in the second round, the seventh, and even occasionally, as the going slowed, after Round 10. The Holyfield jaw nullified George’s power, just as Holyfield’s three hundred or more punches beat on Foreman like a drum—giving off a lot of sound and fury, signifying that this time George Foreman had come to prove that he was a better fighter at forty-two than he had been at twenty-two.

I can’t remember anything quite like this since Daniel Mendoza, known as “Mendoza the Jew,” retired after losing his title to “Gentleman” John Jackson in 1795, and then came back over ten years later to whip young Harry Lee in fifty-three rounds. I missed that one, but I hear that was a hell of a fight, too. Mendoza was forty-two. He retired as a folk hero, lecturing in theaters and giving boxing lessons, his pupils including members of the royal family.

If Big George never fights again, he’s given us exactly what we need in these days of cynicism when the underclass, the lower class, and even troubled members of the middle class are groping to find a way.

Into their midst strides Big George Foreman, the Survivor. “If I c’n do it, comin’ up from nowhere, you c’n make it,” he preaches with that sweet smile that’s mysteriously replaced the Sonny Liston scowl we saw in Zaire seventeen long years ago. Just as mysteriously he’s taken over Ali’s role as Boxing’s Philosopher. “What I did means we all got the power to do it,” he says, and the pitchman tells us something about what we can do on this Planet Earth. “We don’t need no more Chernobyls. We c’n clean up this world. I went into that fight positive. Just the opposite of what I was feeling going in there with Ali in Zaire. I went into this one thinking that nothing he can throw at me will stop me. That’s what I feel about life. That’s what I tell my people when I talk to ’em in church Sunday mornin’.”

I look at him and wonder: Is he our Paul Bunyan of the ’90s? Our John Henry? On the scorecard it may have been 115-112. But in the game of life, move over Norman and Colin, Big George wins it going away.

[August 1991]

Y
EARS AGO, WRITING
about quite a different kind of achiever—the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald—I wrote an epitaph: “In America nothing fails like success.” Fitzgerald had said it a little differently: “In America [thinking of success] there are no second acts.” Certainly not for Mike Tyson.

It is difficult to think of another young man in America who came from so far down to so far up in so short a time. All the expensive toys of success, some of the things people work all their lives for, can never attain, and only dream about, Bentleys and Rolls, hotel suites à la Donald, thousand-dollar suits, and women, women, women, beautiful women … it was all there for Mike, the Four Seasons of Success all the famous must endure, squeezed into a few, frenetically short years of Rise and Fall.

Nor did it take a clairvoyant or a know-it-all to predict this fall. Allow me the self-indulgence of quoting myself on the eve of Tyson’s defense of his newly won title against artful dodger Michael Spinks. Flash back—four years ago:

“No matter how many different directions Spinks tries to move away from Tyson or toward him, no matter how many distractions, how many public airings of private dirty laundry have interrupted his training, how much he misses the guiding hand of surrogate father [Cus] D’Amato and assistant surrogate, the late Jim Jacobs, no matter if he’s only 50 percent of
the 100 percent he could have been if he had totally dedicated himself to preparation like the great champions he reveres, no matter.

“So on goes Tyson, on to more astronomical gates and astronomical troubles. One can’t help feeling that for this man-child in this gilded world, with his $4.5-million dollhouse, his Bentley, his Rolls, his women, and his business controllers, the worst is yet to come. … God help the winner. The biggest fight of all may still be Tyson vs. Tyson.”

For make no mistake about it, the fight in the Indianapolis courtroom that ended with the tragic knockout of once-mighty Mike wasn’t a mismatch between a comely 108-pound Sunday school teacher and an awesome 250-pound fox in a henhouse of Miss Black America beauty contestants. It was Tyson taking on Tyson, a contest he had been fighting and losing ever since D’Amato got off at his final stop on life’s subway seven years ago.

That winter Mike was one of the mourners and speakers in the ring at Cus’s 14th Street Gym, where the memorial service was held. Mike spoke slowly and simply and in tears. A very big, little kid, wanting his daddy. Ready to fill in for Cus was Jim Jacobs, the legendary handball champion and a knowledgeable fight fan who had cornered the market on fight films. Jacobs worshiped Cus and thought of the heavyweight prodigy not as an incredible money machine but as a vulnerable human being who needed his devoted support.

I remember suggesting to Jim that I meet him for lunch the day of the Spinks fight. “Budd, I’ve got to stay close to my fighter!” Jim said like an anxious father. But the tragedy unfolded. Sophocles couldn’t have written it better. Jim Jacobs dies, prematurely, of leukemia. His businesslike, very white partner, Bill Cayton, loses the young, rich, wild-blooded, uneducated champion to Don King, he of the electric hair, of wiles and smiles, with all the s’s written in $’s.

After the Douglas debacle, Tyson is back winning fights, every one except the Tyson fight. Anyone following boxing
knows a great fighter needs a great corner. People not only saying, “Anything you say, Mike—you got it!” but the teachers too, in and out of the ring. D’Amato, and then his assistant, Kevin Rooney, were teaching Mike to jab, move his head, throw combinations. After firing Rooney, his last tie with a meteoric career, Mike was left with only the yes-men. He was slower now, dumb, throwing one ponderous punch at a time. Over the hill at twenty-five!