Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (30 page)

And out of the ring, blowing every round, street fights, car wrecks, beating on men and women. He wasn’t just raping an eighteen-year-old. He confused international celebrity with a license to rape the world. A walking time bomb. In that white stretch limo you could hear the ticking. Now the orphan with the golden chance to fight his way out of juvenile delinquency comes face to face with a woman from Indiana who, ironically, specialized in sex-crime prosecutions before she became a judge.

Cus used to call “Time!” at the end of a three-minute workout. But Cus is long gone, and when Judge Gifford calls “Time!” it’s back to the slammer. It’s midnight for Cinderella, and Don King is a sorry stand-in for Prince Charming.

And now back to you, Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

[February 1992]

W
HEN I WAS ASKED TO
choose “my favorite” for an anthology of “Best Sports Articles,” I reviewed in my mind the hundreds of boxing pieces I’ve written, from my
Sports Illustrated-
Marciano-Liston-Ali days to the more recent Larry Holmes and Holyfield campaign for the
New York Post
and
Boxing Illustrated.
My pick was a piece I did for
Esquire
on “The Mystique of the Heavyweight Championship,” how it rose above all sporting events, including the World Series and the Super Bowl, to become a morality play that raised it to a level above mere athleticism.

In the grip of this mystique I flew from L.A. to N.Y. for that first and still unforgettable Joe Louis-Billy Conn thirteen-round epic. When the Supreme Court gave back to Muhammad Ali his right to resume his career and he finally went head-to-head with Joe Frazier, the packed Madison Square Garden was so charged with electricity that it seemed as if we had to hold our breath not to set that historic hall on fire. When Ali was matched with then-champion George Foreman, I knew I had to fly to Zaire to watch “the People’s Champion” outthink and dramatically defuse Big George.

My piece on the heavyweight mystique tried to capture that special hush that comes over the crowd, tensing forward in the
darkness of the great arena, and the millions plugged into TV around the world as the announcer heralds those magic words, “Ladies and gentlemen … for the heavyweight championship of the world …!”

Whether he be John L. Sullivan or Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey or Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Marciano, Ali, or finally Mike Tyson, the undisputed king of the heavyweights was the undisputed champion of the world, reigning above all other athletes and invariably the most recognizable human being on Planet Earth. When you think of our great ones, Dempsey, Louis, Ali, you think of their championship belts as symbols of magical supremacy. In the court of King Arthur they would have walked with Lancelot and Galahad. The operative word in reaching out and grasping that magical world was
pride.
Yes, money was involved, for after all, these knights are professional fistfighters who make their living by the give-and-take of punishment in the prize ring. But without pride these are warriors going into battle with empty scabbards, who suddenly, as the bell rings for the opening round of their ordeal, reach for their swords and realize in panic that somehow they have left their weapons behind—in their lavish hotel suites, or their white stretch limos, or in the gold-fixtured Roman baths of their new, five-million-dollar, thirty-room palaces complete with indoor swimming pools, bowling alleys, and state-of-the-art projection rooms.

Sitting close to the Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe contention for the current heavyweight championship in Las Vegas a few months ago, while doing my job as a boxing reporter, scoring a close, hard-fought twelve-rounder by three points for the recycled Holyfield, other notes involving pride and character and deteriorating patterns of behavior occurred to me.

With the exception of Holyfield, who at least has managed to maintain a work ethic despite his multimillion-dollar, country-gentleman lifestyle, our haunted heavyweight championship has been seriously diminished by a disgraceful parade of what I would designate as a new division: the Overweights. While
Louis and Marciano and Ali liked their good times too, they had too much pride, too much fistic character not to know that their championship comes with a heavy price tag: self-punishment in preparation for their title defenses, so intense that I have often found it almost painful to watch. I think of Rocky Marciano driving himself month after month in the isolation of an old farmhouse above Grossinger’s to get ready for Ezzard Charles and Archie Moore. I remember in Angelo Dundee’s Miami gym the then Cassius Clay jackknifing fingertips to toes on a rubbing table more than one hundred times and pausing only to groan, “Oh, this is so borin’!” and then resuming with even more intensity. And I watched him up at Deer Lake running mile after mile in heavy boots to make it harder. Was there ever a true champion not willing to pay the price?

A roll call of heavyweight “champions” since the end of the Larry Holmes era suggests that something has gone seriously wrong with our prize-ring morality. When we think (if we must) of interlopers like John Tate, Michael Dokes, Tim Witherspoon, Pinklon Thomas, Greg Page, Tony Tubbs, and Buster Douglas, all of them sadly listed in the record book as “heavyweight champions,” we realize what a sea change we’ve suffered, what a near-mortal blow to the mystique of the heavyweight championship of the world.

I’m thinking of an afternoon when Greg Page, facing Tim Witherspoon for the “heavyweight championship” in Las Vegas that evening, showed up at the bar where I happened to be sitting (I was in training to
write,
not fight) to down a couple of beers. In “fight” after “fight” the champions and challengers removed their robes to reveal a tire of fat or “love-handles” no self-respecting champion would ever dare indulge and expose. And sad to say, these Pages, Thomases, Tubbs, and others weren’t your everyday bums, they were big, quick talented men who held the promise of everything—except pride and character. I think of a big, strong fella like David Bey, another might’ve-been who came to his big nights looking as if he could rent himself out as a nursing mother.

Pride and character, the flags of this hard trade all the way back to Mendoza the Jew two centuries ago, where have you gone? How could you desert a champion on his way to greatness, like Mike Tyson, and abandon him in the sloth and self-indulgence with which he went into the ring to defend this title against Buster Douglas? And Buster, after a hero’s welcome back home in a town of winners, Columbus, Ohio, how dare you shuffle into the Holyfield fight looking as if you’re ready to go partners with David (Moo-cow) Bey and his fellow Overweights?

Which brings us to the most recent one-year one, Riddick Bowe. A year ago a well-tuned Bowe, at 235, jabbed and out-fought the doughty, smaller Holyfield. Obviously Bowe loved being champion of the world. He world-traveled, tried on an ill-fitting Ali persona, built a garage for his sixteen cars, and ate so high on the hog that he went into training for the Holyfield rematch looking like one, up to 300 pounds. In two months he sweated that off to the official weigh-in figure of 246. He then raced off to his favorite soul-food restaurant to make up for lost time.

My first note at ringside—jotted while the interminable pre-fight celebratory intros drone on—reads: “H. looks in shape 100%. B. jumped through ropes last year. This time climbs through slowly. Trunks pulled high to cover the flab. Soft around the middle.”

You could say that was the story of the fight. Bowe stormed out of his corner at the opening bell, scoring so furiously we wondered if Evander would survive the round. Evander did, of course, as he always does, with his notable “bottom,” that schoolboy-athlete determination. We also wondered if Riddick had thrown everything into those first three minutes, as if hoping another quick over-and-out would spare him the demands of having to drag those 250-plus pounds through eleven more rounds?

After four rounds the answer was becoming obvious. Holyfield was still there, in shape, composed, and scoring so heavily in the fifth that another ten or fifteen seconds might have chopped big Riddick down.

The middle rounds belonged to Holyfield, who was moving in and out this time, rather than standing foolishly and bravely toe-to-toe as he had done in the first one. To his credit, Bowe didn’t quit, as we had seen some other overweight “champions” do. He hung in, breathing hard, with “sluggish” turning up in my notes again and again, but coming on to win the ninth, and in the final three minutes trying for a knockout his corner must have told him he needed if he didn’t want to blow it, à la Tyson or Douglas.

This is a fight a conditioned Bowe could have won, but the decision went to pride and character over hedonism and selfindulgence. No one will ever call Evander Holyfield a great champion. He neither punches with the conviction of a true heavyweight nor moves with the grace of say, an Ezzard Charles. But at least he’s an honest practitioner who takes the championship seriously enough to work for it and not simply assume it’s his by right of eminent domain.

In a postfight press conference, an unusually subdued Rock Newman—Bowe’s promoter, in an unfamiliar mode of humility—acknowledged that “Riddick was still a growing boy,” though it wasn’t clear whether the reference was to waistline or emotional maturity. A sad Rock suggested that this loss could be a learning experience motivating Bowe to “reevaluate himself both as a fighter and as a human being.” My note on this one: “Good idea, if maybe a little late?”

In this era of overpriced paynights for closed-circuit warriors, when a prizefighter like Bowe can earn $15 million without bothering to show up for the major event of the year even
looking
like a prizefighter, much less the champion of the world, that weird sound you hear emitting from Arlington Cemetery may be Joe Louis rattling around in his grave.

[March 1994]

A
S WE GO TO PRESS,
a most unlikely champion rules the heavyweight division: Big, Lovable George Foreman (once Big, Nasty George Foreman), at age forty-five the oldest man ever to hold the title. He had won it in the fall of ’94 from moody Michael Moorer, who had a nifty right jab and won all the early rounds but paid no heed to trainer Teddy Atlas’s drumbeat of advice: Keep moving counterclockwise, away from that right hand. That’s all old George had left. His jabs were sloppy and his movements slow. If Moorer had listened to his frenetic trainer, he would have won an easy decision, and George would be back shilling for Meineke. But there was Moorer stubbornly in front of Foreman, forgetting all about Atlas and the counterclockwise jazz, and than
boom
Big George saw the opening for the short right-hand chop on the kisser, and down went Moorer, suddenly a glassy-eyed ex-champion (in his first defense after a close win from Holyfield), and there was our born-again preacher, whom all us seasoned boxing experts (or know-it-alls) had written off as over-and-out after Ali destroyed him in Zaire twenty years earlier.

Our theory that heavyweight champions—the real ones, not the Witherspoons, Pages, and Moorers—catch and reflect the spirit of our times, symbols like Dempsey and Louis, Marciano and Ali, seems borne out once again by the second coming of George Foreman. I saw the icon emerging in his stand-up fight
with Holyfield. Here is the reformed mugger recycled for the ’90s, between fights the humble preacher in Houston, the millionaire huckster for Meineke mufflers on television, one minute the clown prince of jumbo-hamburger consumption, the next moment preaching the prowess of middle age once you bring yourself to believe that all things are possible. He’s a blown-up Jimmy Carter with a chopping right hand, a ’90s-style faith, and enough Madison Avenue savvy to keep those millions rolling in even if he doesn’t hang in there long enough to wait for the springing of Mike Tyson.

If every great fight is a morality play, we have a beauty coming up if forty-six-year-old, gold-plated George can manage to climb through the ropes against Iron Mike, with all the feminists crying, “Rapist!” and “Sexual harasser!” and all the young bloods claiming Tyson was framed or at least unfairly overpunished.

From born-agains to “date-rape” victims to inner-city violence, all the provocative issues of the final decade of the twentieth century will be reflected and hotly debated if we get Old George the Good and Young Mike the Bad into that zillion-dollar ring.

If every major heavyweight title fight holds up a mirror to our society, this mirror would cover the side of the World Trade Center, framed in twenty-two-carat gold. Praise the Lord and hike the prices on those commercials. This is the ’90s, when our old new heavyweight champion laughs at us: “In God and Meineke I trust, helping the poor, selling Mr. Nice Guy, getting banged up around the eyes, but never too blind to find my way to the bank.”

If it happens, get ready for religious fervor and big-profit redemption versus inner-city anger, pent up after doing five years hard time in presidential-hopeful Dan Quayle’s home state, where Family Values seem to have superseded the Bill of Rights.

I
AM INDEBTED
to Nick Beck, a man of letters who knows his boxing—a dear friend of the late Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs, Mike Tyson’s original mentors—who volunteered to read through some 150 fight pieces and suggested the Contents that gave form to this work.

While Nick provided this service as a labor of love, it was invaluable, unselfish, and thoroughly professional. How can I thank him: a long nostalgic lunch at Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard for starters, to discuss everything from the Scott Fitzgerald comeback of the century to the impending release of Mike Tyson and his impact on the sorry state of the heavyweight division.

And my thanks to Elizabeth Marlowe, who fused high-tech efficiency to dedication in her paper chase through elusive files and lost folders to bring these pieces to their present form, along with invaluable editorial suggestions that supplemented Nick Beck’s expert selections from an overload of material.