‘Return to the Mecca,’ the drum beaters hailed the return of big-time boxing to Madison Square Garden. The main attraction was promoted less like a contest between well-matched combatants, more like ‘An Evening with Oscar De La Hoya’, the good-looking kid from Little Mexico’s East LA, with the fast hands and the fast patter. He could be the best thing to come out of my home town since our little buzzsaw Henry Armstrong came to the Garden (the third one, on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth) and shook up first the featherweight, then the welterweight, finally the lightweight division in an incredible triple against Petey Sarron, Barney Ross and Lou Ambers.
The mood of the healthy turnout for De La Hoya’s debut at the Garden – like a hot young tenor’s appearing at the Met – was festive, happy and hopeful. There was electricity in the air when you took your seat for the prelims, a feeling that name fighters were back in the Garden where they belonged. In Vegas there’s always the feeling that the high rollers in the casinos are saying, ‘OK, let’s leave the tables f’ an hour an’ go out an’ see the fight,’ a momentary distraction but not exactly their main activity. And in Vegas, Michael Buffer intones a seemingly endless litany of film and TV celebrities, a Demi Moore, a Whoopi Goldberg, a John Travolta . . . Whoever’s hot in Hollywood or on the tube gets the roar of the crowd rather than the current fighters and old-time greats who were traditionally intro’d on the Garden nights.
It was good to hear fighters’ names on the announcer’s lips in the Garden ring – Jose Torres, Emile Griffith, Floyd Patterson . . . though the volume rose to a roar for Roy Jones, Jr, and Felix Trinidad. This is more of a now crowd than in the old days. In Griffith’s years in the 1960s and ’70s, we would not have forgotten our heroes of the ’30s to the ’50s. But now the new fight crowd, if that’s what it was, seemed to have forgotten or never knew about Griffith’s illustrious past. I had an urge to stand up and shout, ‘Hey, you’re giving this silent treatment to one of the great welter/middles, who fought 11 title bouts in the Garden, and never a dull moment!’ Cheering Trinidad and falling silent for Emile Griffith was like hailing Jay McInerney and ignoring Scott Fitzgerald.
Two recently retired champs, the ringwise Buddy McGirt and the tough Iran Barkley, also got the silent treatment, making me think again of the Four Seasons of Success and how quickly the winter chill sets in after the fall. A big hand for Joe Frazier – his trilogy with Ali now the stuff of legends – but the biggest hand at the intros was reserved for an overnight sensation called Butterbean (real handle, Eric Esch), an undefeated 300-pound curiosity who was coming to the Garden with 15 stirring victories over tomato cans, on his way to becoming a cult figure and media darling.
I was fortunate to have as my seatmate Stephanie Arcel, whose distinguished husband Ray was one of the great trainers of the century, starting with Charley Phil Rosenberg and Benny Leonard, later Ezzard Charles and what seemed like a covey of the Bomber’s opponents, then all the way up to Roberto Duran and Larry Holmes. In Ray’s sensitive and gifted hand, the Game was truly Sweet Science, and that spirit was clearly reflected in Stephanie, who watched the first clumsy moves of Butterbean, in there with a journeyman last-minute substitute, Mitchell Rose. ‘Oh my God, no skill! No skill!’ she cried out. And as the fat toughman brawler walked into punch after punch, his white face colouring red and leaking blood, my knowledgeable companion turned to me and said, ‘A travesty of an art form.’
In less than two rounds, the undefeated Butterbean was exposed for the sideshow freak he really was. And there had been talk of putting him in with the windless ‘Hurricane’ Peter McNeeley in the next show. In the bad old days, Frankie Carbo, Eddie Coco or Blinky Palermo would have had a little chat with Mr Rose. Mr Butterbean might have gone all the way to the top à la Primo Carnera. So please, dear Madison Square Garden, spare us the Butterbeans. But thank you for Oscar De La Hoya.
Whether young De La Hoya will reach Armstrong’s level of accomplishment depends on the matches ahead. There’s talk of a jumbo fight down the road with Julio Cesar Chavez. In December the smaller Jesse James Leija, a nice little junior lightweight from San Antonio, was clearly in there as a supporting player, not unlike Buster Mathis, Jr, in his honest effort the following evening in Philly to smother in flab the still wild and rusty Iron Mike Tyson. If both fights were mismatches, nobody cared. Leija put in his two rounds as an opponent, one more ornament on De La Hoya’s year-round Christmas tree. There’s genuine talent in the kid. He passed the Stephanie Arcel test: ‘You feel the style in him, a seriousness. An approach to the job. He can punch, in bunches, accurately, with an instinct for closure.’
Behind the flash of De La Hoya, I saw the ghosts of all those lovely lightweights who used to thrill the Garden – Beau Jack, Bob Montgomery, Ike Williams . . . nights when you forgot the sleaze that corrupted the game, nights when you went back to Toots Shor’s exhilarated, your hope for mankind somehow reaffirmed. And the welterweights! The night our nonpareil Sugar Ray Robinson fought oh-so-tough Tommy Bell for the vacant title. Ray was down but boxed his way to the crown. Or the night our classy Billy Graham was jobbed out of the championship because Mr Carbo had made it abundantly clear that he preferred Sr Gavilan.
Everybody in the Garden knew that Billy was the uncrowned champ, just as almost 25 years later, in Ali–Frazier I, we knew we had seen an unforgettable contest for the true Championship of the World.
I had been in Ali’s corner that fabled night, in the limo with him driving to the Garden, then crouching at the ring apron with Angelo Dundee, Dr Ferdie Pacheco and ‘Blood’ Wali Muhammad. Oh, that furious 15th round when Ali was down but refused to stay down, as he somehow managed to float and sting again as the first act of the Ali–Frazier trilogy closed with a roar that rose layer on layer of emotion from the capacity crowd.
To be fighting in the Garden was to be anointed in those days. When the heavyweight fighting out of my barn in Bucks County, Archie McBride, beat up everybody in Trenton and Sunnyside Garden, I remember the excitement when we got the semi-windup in the Garden. More than the $1,500, a semi in the Garden was one step away from fistic heaven. There was a feeling of muscles tightening around my heart when Archie was in there (for seven rounds) with Floyd Patterson. And I remember another Archie on another night, the venerable Archie Moore, finally getting his shot in the Garden at the age of nearly 40, and putting away a class light heavyweight contender, Harold Johnson, in the 14th round.
The Garden was truly a Mecca then, and if the mismatches, faked ratings and manipulations of greed can be avoided – a big If – we’ll have our Mecca back again. Certainly, following De La Hoya with Roy Jones, Jr, in there with a toughie, Merqui Sosa, and then Foreman’s farewell performance against enigmatic Michael Moorer, are hopeful signs of Friday Nights in the Garden for ’96.
Thank you, Caesars Palace, we’ll take Manhattan . . .
[1996]
Boxing – God love it and God save it! – is the only sport I know that can leave a major event like the recent De La Hoya–Whitaker fight without a manifest winner, or in the case of the puzzling Golden Boy–Sweet Pea encounter, without a satisfactory conclusion.
I mean, if you look at any other sport from football to Ping-Pong, points are scored for all to see. We see the ball going into the end zone. With our own eyes we see the kicker nailing the ball cleanly between the goal posts. Three points unarguable. Just as no one can argue with the electrifying swish of Michael Jordan’s signature jump shot. When Cuba’s giant bird, Sotomayor, clears eight feet in the high jump, there are officials to measure it to the fraction of an inch. When our human running machine Michael Johnson dominates his world-class rivals in the 200 and 400, there are the wonders of state-of-the-art high-tech electronics to record his times to the 1/100th of a second.
Alas, no such precision attends the decision in a crucial contest of championship boxers. With De La Hoya–Whitaker, for instance, ringsiders who consider themselves experts in the arcane art of judging a contest of fisticuffs will be arguing the round-by-round scoring of their bout until both those performers with 180-degree contrasting styles are ready for their social security benefits well into the next century.
No one truly knows who won this anticlimactic, sometimes lacklustre, but technically interesting 12-round engagement. The three judges, those official but somewhat Vegasly suspicious arbiters, awarded only three rounds to the peerless Pernell, which was roughly half the total the ageing, still crafty champion earned from this corner. Most reporters at ringside had it by a single point, most for Whitaker, but with some competent votes for the now slightly tarnished Golden Boy. Our own score reflects the subjectivity of scoring fights. Not able to make the Vegas scene, this time, with nose pressed against the screen and notebook in hand, first I had it for Oscar by two. Yes, he was tentative, and as Larry Merchant complained, ‘robotic’, especially compared to Whitaker’s weirdly frustrating style, but he seemed to be pressing the fight (if you could call it that) and landing the harder if fewer punches.
But replaying the tape next day, and maybe at a kinder hour, I found that Whitaker had improved considerably overnight. Oscar was extending his left hand too far forward to be able to jab with it effectively. Pernell’s jab was furtively incessant, and though the young challenger would flurry in the last 30 seconds of almost every round, provoking his passionate rooting section to standing ovations, there were so many more misses than hits in these attacks that you had to admire Sweet Pea as probably the smoothest master of defence since Willie Pep. And since the Whitaker style is to feint and sucker opponents into attack and then counterpunch from unorthodox angles, Oscar’s more conventional aggression was often being smothered as he fell victim to Whitaker’s unexciting but efficient game plan.
So this time I had the old champ up by one. With the score now tied one to one on my cards I ran the rubber match, and now there was no doubt in my mind. It wasn’t the ‘blow-out’ the super-confident Whitaker insisted he had won – ‘ten out of twelve rounds – I toyed with the kid’. Nor was it – except officially – the glorious night the De La Hoya Boys were ready to celebrate. Even if the self-satisfied Whitaker waltzed the last round, his big 11th was the convincer for me. When asked why he urgently wanted a rematch after pulling out the controversial decision, Oscar replied, ‘Because next time I know I would do much, much better. I will not be satisfied until I dominate Whitaker’s style.’
Still, it was a close, technical, begloved debate, a learning experience for the preppy kid who’s more Madison Avenue than Barrio now, and who moves on to easier nights with less talented names such as David Kamou and over-the-hill fighters like Macho Camacho. In the good old days it might have been called a draw, too close to take the belt away from this unique practitioner of the Sweet Pea science; a champion since the late 1980s, who rose to the occasion the other night but who fell to the whims of the WBC ‘judges’.
To his credit as an honest man in a sport rather underwhelming in integrity, here’s how Promoter Bob Arum’s new mega-million-dollar meal ticket sums it up for us: ‘Boxing is all politics, it’s all money. What the WBC sees is that I’m a young fighter. If I win the title I obviously make more money for them than Whitaker or anybody else. It’s more sanctioning fees for the WBC. That’s the way it goes.’
As for the rematch, despite Oscar’s professed good intentions, let’s not hold our breaths. The last thing the very practical Mr Arum would like to see at this moment is a detour in the De La Hoya run on the mint. ‘Who the hell wants to see Whitaker again?’ Arum filibustered after the fight. Just us fight fans, we might answer, but who listens?
‘Show business with blood,’ we’ve always called the fight game. There wasn’t a lot of blood to De La Hoya–Whitaker, just a few flecks from an unintentional butt, for which Pernell was penalised an undeserved point. But plenty of emphasis on business, especially the business they gave our erstwhile nine-year champion of the world, Master Pernell Sweet-and-Sour Whitaker.
[1997]
In the old days, the big fights eclipsed the build-up. When you talk about ‘Opposites Attack’ – the catchy title for Oscar De La Hoya’s most recent star turn (with Macho Camacho in a supporting role) – you remember the real thing. In Louis–Conn I, opposites attacked. There was the ever-stalking Brown Bomber and the nimble-footed, nimble-fisted Pittsburgh Billy. I flew across the country for that one, and my reward was a 13-round classic, the cocky 169-pound challenger ahead after 12. Moving in and out, side-to-side, attacking. And opposites attacked again when the original Sugar Ray (Robinson) finally caught up with Raging Bull LaMotta in another 13-round unforgettable.
Opposites attacked when the raw power of Rocky Marciano finally chopped down that cutie who knew every move in the book and ad-libbed a bunch of his own, Jersey Joe Walcott. And again when the street dog from Panama, Roberto Duran, cut off the ring on Sugar Ray Leonard in Montreal. There was attacking on both sides when Leonard, a boxer–puncher, met Tommy Hearns, a puncher–boxer. And attack-counterattack defined Marvelous Marvin’s reception for Ray Leonard in the first and by far the best of Sugar II’s multi-comebacks.
Since we go to the fights for the personal drama not to be found in any other sport, we are invariably intrigued with the match-up of boxer v. slugger. All the way back to Sullivan–Corbett at the turn of the century and on to Dempsey–Tunney, Ali–Foreman. Could the boxer defuse the puncher? Could the puncher crash through the craft, as craft almost won the night for the wily Archie Moore (v. Marciano), who finally went down like a fighting ship with all flags flying?
Everyone of those rivalries played out even more dramatically than they were scripted. So for De La Hoya–Camacho, why not dust off the old slogan ‘Opposites Attack’ and blazon it all over the roller-coaster town of Las Vegas and all over the world for the benefit of PPV? You saw it on billboards, posters and marquees. You saw it on the ubiquitous TV teasers, you saw it on T-shirts, peaked hats and sweatshirts. Give yourself a few days in the razzle and the dazzle of Suckertown and the repetition of ‘Opposites Attack’ begins to stitch a tattoo in your brain.
Of course we’re not only talking boxing styles now. Macho Camacho, in his seventeenth year as a pro, with only three losses in sixty-eight fights (and none in his first eleven years), was as slippery as an eel. And some would say he had all the charm and personality of a coral snake. But give this little snake from Spanish Harlem his due. I remember him as the Boy Wonder of the Golden Gloves. Hands muy rapido (with the speed and grace of a dancer who could win salsa contests). I caught him in the Garden as a teenager in the early 1980s and he was electrifying. Brilliant. Quite simply the best junior lightweight I had ever seen. (Footnote: I missed Kid Chocolate, and a little Mexican born the same year as Camacho, Julio Cesar Chavez, was knocking down other little Mexicans like bowling pins, but only in his home town of Culiacan.)
Meanwhile, Macho sparkled like the glitzy bangles that dangled from his neck. He won world titles and beat champions who could put serious hurt on you, like Bazooka Limon, Boza-Edwards and Edwin Rosario. He actually had people saying, ‘This could be the lightweight Muhammad Ali.’ He could be magically elusive like Ali; and on occasion, when he did get caught, he had a chin like Ali’s. Before the Golden Gloves he had trained as a gang fighter in the mean streets of Harlem, and he had a very tough streak in him, hidden in an adolescent flamboyance, a theatrical extroversion that made people wonder if he didn’t spend more time working on the outlandish costumes with which he was wont to enter the ring than in serious training. A cut-up, a show-off, what we used to call a wisenheimer, a tasteless self-promoter, he didn’t know how to make his rare gifts and his TVish theatricality work for him as Ali, even in defeat (Frazier, Norton), reached out to people who made him their champion.
We defenders of boxing like to point to the ghetto kids who could have wound up lost to the slammer but who found salvation through boxing. Alas, the career of Macho Camacho is a marker for the other side. Winning and successfully defending his WBC 130-pound and 135-pound belts did nothing for Macho’s character. Not just vino y mujeres y salsa was where Camacho was spending his Macho Time. Throw in drogas too. There were years when he seemed to have more fights with the fuzz than he had in the ring. He was driving down streets the wrong way with no licence. Literally. A pocket-sized Leon Spinks.
When Julio Cesar Chavez pounded on him for twelve rounds like a bongo drum five years ago, he earned a begrudging respect for the kind of courage expected of the true professional. For all his goofiness and all the squandering of gifts lesser athletes would kill for, he hadn’t lost that Nuevo Yorkin pride. You couldn’t knock him out. Chavez couldn’t do it. And the undefeated J.C. was still in his prime five years ago. But Macho Time for the irrepressible scatterbug was now half an hour past midnight: the ‘Lightweight Ali’ of the ’80s had become the glorified welterweight ‘opponent’ of the ’90s, in there for a paynight and the chance to fatten the record of a Chavez or the new boy on the block, Felix Trinidad.
The year Macho was taking his lumps from Chavez, a new star was rising out of Little Mexico’s East LA, Oscar De La Hoya, the Golden Boy of the ’92 Barcelona Olympics. Here’s where the ‘opposites’ apply. While Macho, who might have been called the Golden Boy of the ’80s, pissed everybody off with his outrageous behaviour, young Oscar was turning everybody on with his preppy manners and his golden smile.
A truly promising lightweight who could lick name fighters like John-John Molina, Rafael Ruelas, Genaro Hernandez and an over-the-hill Chavez, Oscar was made for prime time. In a time of Celebrity Madness, Oscar could not only light up the ring (though the ‘W’ over Pernell Whitaker has quotes around it), he could light up the money tree of television and bring a new constituency of fans to the fight game, the teeny-boppers whose grandmother had squealed for Frankie, whose mothers had fainted for Elvis and the Beatles, and whose older sister screamed for Mick Jagger.
While true fight fans welcome a legitimate new talent like De La Hoya, it’s these cute little screamers, by the thousands and counting, who follow Oscar around like wild-eyed handmaidens and throw themselves under the wheels of his golden chariot. At the tumultuous weigh-in at Caesars Palace the day before the fight, Macho not only had to strip down to his teeny-weeny black bikini but then drop even that to get a rise out of what looked like a high school cheering section. All Oscar had to do was flash that $9-million smile at them, and they were his.
Each decade seems to have a way of developing the perfect role model for reflecting the spirit of its time. In this era of high-tech, high-celebrity cultism, Oscar De La Hoya has what my old man’s movie discovery, Clara Bow, had in the 1920s . . . ‘It!’
After the squealy weigh-in came the usual pre-fight seminars in which self-appointed experts spend the waiting hours in profound ringwise analysis of the respective chances of the combatants. There was general agreement that Macho was in the best shape he had been in since his lightweight years – ‘Maybe ever,’ his trainer, Pat Burns, was earnestly assuring us at lunch that day. ‘Believe it or not, Hector had never done a sit-up in training before. The other day, on a dare, he did 13 hundred! Unbelievable. I know he has a reputation for not working hard, but this time he knows he’ll never get a shot like this again. He may be in the twilight of his career, but he’s ticked off about those odds [8 to 1] and I tell you, it’s turned him into a monster.’
And Macho had his serious face on when he said, ‘After tomorrow night, we’ll see who’s the Golden Boy. I’m going to surprise him the way Ali surprised Foreman. Let’s see if he can really fight a real fight. Hit, get hit back. Get hit, hit back. A real fight, like the way I beat on Sugar.’ Of course the Ray Leonard he took out in five was forty years old and came in with a gimpy foot. If he had been a horse, he never would have been allowed in the starting gate. Still, Macho’s weight – one hundred and forty-seven, compared to his one hundred and fifty-eight for Leonard six months earlier – seemed to confirm Pat Burns’s claim that Macho was in the prime shape of his life and ready to make the fight of his life.
Meanwhile, Oscar’s trainer, the eminent Emanuel Steward, was telling us that he had trained Oscar to be far more aggressive than he had been in his less than spectacular performance with tricky Pernell Whitaker. Golden Boy was going to put relentless pressure on Camacho. Call it six rounds or less. Oscar was slightly more generous. He saw the possibility of Macho’s hanging in until the seventh. I listened quietly to all the predictions, including one distinguished boxing writer’s picking Camacho by KO in seven, and then quietly placed a modest wager: De La Hoya by decision. If Limon couldn’t do it, I figured, if Rosario couldn’t do it, if Chavez and Trinidad couldn’t do it, an in-shape Camacho could draw on the experience of those 17 years (plus all those amateur rounds) and 68 fights to devise escape routes and survive.
Twenty seconds into round one, I was getting ready to tear up my ‘W-Dec.’ chit. Oscar came roaring out of his corner as if his own bet was ‘KO-1’ and smashed a left hook to Macho’s body that sent a powerful message: ‘I own you, man!’ Any serious intention Macho may have had of actually winning this fight was instantly a thing of the past. By the end of round one the fight was all but over. Poor Macho wasn’t going to be the Ali of the 1990s any more than he had been in the ’80s. The only suspense left was how long Macho could take those hooks to the body, fierce uppercuts and straight rights to the head without obliging Oscar with the knockout victory the TV star from East LA had predicted. To frustrate his oppressor, the 16,000 in the Thomas & Mack Center and all the PPViewers around the world, Macho changed the title of the ‘fight’ from ‘Opposites Attack’ to ‘One Opposite Attacks, the Other Opposite Backtracks’.
Like a wily general who knows he’s outmanned and outgunned, Macho knew it was time to run so he could run another day. He backed this way and that way, anyway he could find to escape. If there had been a closet in the ring, Macho would have slipped into it and locked it from inside. And where there was no room to run, Macho moved forward, not to hit Oscar – that would be foolhardy – but to wrap his arms around him and hold on for dear life.
The crowd booed, as they booed Macho’s entrance into the ring in his silly Darth Vader mask and his glitzy silver-festooned Romanesque loincloth, split seductively at the sides. Boring rounds of running and clutching, until the frustrated attacker finally put Macho down in the ninth for only the second time in Hector’s singular career. But somehow Macho survived. That’s what he does for a living now. In the 11th he was on his way down again. But the instinct to survive sent him lurching forward, grabbing his tormentor around the waist and pulling Oscar to the canvas with him, like a pass rusher sacking the quarterback. Often the sacker is back on his feet before the sackee, as happened here as well. Oscar took his time getting up. All that punching and chasing was taking its toll. Meanwhile, Macho the survivor was ready for more. More run and grab and grab and run found him still on his feet at the final bell, knocked about but still never knocked out.
At the press conference a barechested, still cocky Camacho was almost exultant. There had been talk of a side bet: if Oscar knocks him out, he gets to snip off the irritating spit curl, a Macho trademark he affects on his forehead. But if Macho’s still there at the final bell, Oscar deals him $200,000. So for Macho, it’s a moral victory – plus a few hundred grand for those gold chains and diamonds. I watched him strut off the stage, oblivious to the boos, and my notes scribbled on the spot read: ‘There goes crazy Macho, maybe for the last time(?). No contusions and no illusions.’ Sic transit. Golden Boy, Class of ’80, makes way for Golden Boy ’97.
The winner and still champion of the WBC welterweights takes his time coming out for his press conference, as befits the poster boy of pugilistica. He holds a cold cylinder to a left eye swollen from Macho’s defensive jabs, but he’s all smiles and youthful enthusiasm and becoming modesty and that articulate way of talking as if he’s just returned not from a fight but from his elocution teacher.
His promoter, Bob Arum, who is wreathed in his own smile and money, introduces Oscar as ‘The greatest fighter in the world today’. That may be a slight exaggeration, but hey, asking a promoter with a hot ticket not to hyperbolise is like asking a rooster not to crow. Golden Boy ’97 puts it in perspective. His goal is to be one of the greatest fighters who ever lived, up there with Louis, Robinson and Ali. But he realises he’s not there yet. ‘I still have a lot to learn in the sport of boxing.’
Meanwhile there’s the business of boxing, which is a very different animal. The welterweight/junior middleweight field is full of talent – Felix Trinidad, Ike Quartey, Terry Norris, Pernell Whitaker – but Trinidad is with Arum’s rival, Don King, and HBO’s rival, Showtime. Quartey is the WBA champion. ‘Why should we pay those exorbitant sanction fees of the WBA? We don’t need the WBA. The WBC is treating us fine,’ said Arum, walking out of the fight with us. Trinidad is with King and Showtime. Whitaker is a logical rematch, but Pernell is a far craftier and better southpaw than Camacho. A good reason to avoid him. The other potential money fight is with WBC super welterweight champion Terry Norris, who’s suing Don King and signing with Arum. Emanuel Steward acknowledges that ‘Terry is still too big, too strong’ (and too good, he might have added). ‘This is Oscar’s first year as a welterweight,’ he points out. ‘He’s going to be one of the great ones, but give him time.’
‘The greatest fighter in the world today’ needs time to develop his skills and ‘learn more about the sport of boxing’.
The sport of boxing and the business of boxing are on their usual collision course. The undefeated champion is willing to take on all comers. Arum smiles. ‘I’m not afraid of Trinidad, or anybody,’ De La Hoya says. The kid is willing to learn on the job. Arum smiles some more. He’ll go where the money is.
Oscar gave himself a nine, and deserves an eight, for pitching a shutout against Camacho. In the old days of McLarnin and Robinson, later Leonard, Hearns and Duran, he would not have been a four-time champion with only twenty-six fights. He’d have been a very good prospect with good hand speed, power and intensity.
But while we’re being critical and technical, the young champion with the rock star charisma is leaving the stage, and all those girls are screaming and swooning and squealing ‘Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!’
It warms the cockles of Bob Arum’s heart and bank account. Trust him to find a way to wind the business around the sport. The De La Hoya Express rolls on.
[1997]
With three of our erstwhile heavyweight champions – Tyson, Bowe and McCall – in the hoosegow, and the anticlimactic Holyfield–Lewis ‘unification’ leaving us with bifurcation, investigation and frustration, boxing diehards are finding relief is spelled D-E L-A H-O-Y-A and T-R-I-N-I-D-A-D.
In a sticky season when once again the hounds forever snapping at the heels of our Sweet and Sour Science are thrown too many bones by wrongheaded decisions and cynical power plays, the old game gets a shot in the arm – and not a moment too soon: here come the welterweights!
On back-to-back mid-winter Saturday nights, we had the four top welters of ’99 – two champions v. No. 1 contenders – Oscar De La Hoya v. Ike Quartey, Felix Trinidad v. Pernell Whitaker – in lively if not epic twelve-round contests that gave us a taste of the glory days of Barney Ross, Jimmy McLarnin, Henry Armstrong, the original Sugar Ray, Emile Griffith, Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns.
But for now, here comes Oscar the Golden Boy, so called for his four belts in four different divisions, his $75 million in earnings, his movie-star looks and enough miniskirt groupies to arouse the envy of Leonardo Di Caprio. They know nothing about the art of boxing, but they know what they like: the sweet, seductive smile of their young, undefeated hero with the bod of a 26-year-old Adonis, a begloved, near-naked Woody Harrelson.
And the kid can fight a little bit, too. Though he showed his inexperience, and for much of the match his excessive caution, before coming on big to knock the talented, hard-punching Ike Quartey down and almost out in the final round. Inexperienced? After twenty-nine fights in five years, four titles and wins over marquee names – Julio Cesar Chavez, Pernell Whitaker, Genaro Hernandez, Jesse James Leija, Macho Camacho? Hard truth is, the chic Chicano may have been more carefully groomed for his role than the Prince of Wales. He was getting rich and famous knocking over smaller champs like Hernandez and Leija, and shot fighters whose future was behind them, like Chavez and Camacho. Now, for a $9-million paynight, he was in with his first real test, the undefeated Quartey from Ghana, the West African nation where Dr Azumah Nelson presides. For more than half the fight, the beautifully conditioned challenger with the stinging jab was giving Golden Boy a boxing lesson, punishing him for his mistakes with stiff right hands short and accurate that were beginning to make a bloody mess of that pretty face. Quartey was moving nicely, fluidly, in total control, and Oscar was flat-footed and tense, the gold turning to tin. Like the latter-day Tyson, he seemed suddenly bereft of skills, the jab listless and of lateral movement, none. After eight rounds, maven scorer Harold Letterman had Nelson’s compatriot ahead by three. Oscar’s Machiavellian promoter Bob Arum must have been plotzing. His cash cow was blowing the big one. The nasty tomato under the left eye looked ready to pop. The multimillionaire from East Lost Angeles was accepting his punishment gamely while his boxing professor would give him a double D, Dumb and Dumber.
And then, as if written by the hand of the playwright who knows how to drive the work to a climax, the show took a dramatic turn. As he had in his last encounter, with Jose Luis Lopez 16 months ago, Quartey ran out of gas. Seizing the opportunity, De La Hoya set the pace for the first time, his confidence growing as Quartey’s seemed to fade. He stormed out for the last round as if he had to knock Ike out to win, as indeed, on the card of one judge, was the case. A score of unanswered blows drove the almost defenceless Quartey into a corner where referee Mitch Halpern seemed ready to step in and call it a night. But, suddenly, like a flash storm, Oscar was spent and Ike survived, losing a split decision he bitterly protested.
At the press conference De La Hoya iced his wounded eye as a badge of honour. Scorned as ‘Chicken de lay Hoya’, accused of lacking the fighting heart Mexican battlers are famous for, his last-round fury was a rite of passage. He wasn’t just a pretty face. At last the Mexicans who doubted him would give him his due: Mucho Cora?on!
Our verdict: more will than skill.
Meanwhile, the other undefeated champion, Felix Trinidad, may be the ultimate welterweight as we cross that bridge to the twenty-first century. In the once unhitable Pernell Whitaker, a six-time champion, he faced an old master who had given De La Hoya fits years ago, with his now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t style – the most elusive boxer since Will-o’-the-Wisp Willie Pep. But 14 years in this cruel sport, and the booze, the nose candy, the enforced layoffs, had taken their toll. ‘Sweet Pea’ (‘Snow Pea’, meanies called him now) came out flat-footed but full of fight, taking the first round and silencing the Puerto Ricans rooting for their ‘Tito! Tito!’
But not for long. The ring magician who had managed to avoid three of every four punches thrown at him by experts in an illustrious career was getting nailed by more than half the punches the classy Puerto Rican boxer-puncher threw at him. Whitaker was knocked down. He was bloodied. His jaw was broken. There was a glorious last hurrah in the seventh, when the tricky old pitty-patterer actually shook the front-running IBF champion. But from there on it was all downhill. ‘I thought I won – he never hurt me,’ the proud ex-champion spoke those familiar words of gladatorial denial through his fractured jaw on his way to the hospital.
‘I’d love to see him retire,’ said his tough-looking, softhearted manager, Lou Duva, who’s been with him since his Olympic gold medal days. ‘I don’t want to see this kid get hurt. If he was my son, I’d tell him to pack it in.’
Sweet Pea, hold on to your money. Stay out of the switches. Maybe you can teach a new kid the art you perfected. Now you see me, now you don’t.
So, we’re ready for the welterweight showdown of the decade. De La Hoya v. Felix Trinidad for all the marbles. McLarnin–Ross time. Robinson–Tommy Bell. Gavilan–Graham. Leonard–Hearns. We should get so lucky. All it needs is Don King and Bob Arum to get together. That very odd couple. And HBO and Showtime. And Trinidad wants parity dollars with De La Hoya. And Oscar says, ‘No way.’ It’s Holyfield–Lewis wheels-within-wheels all over again. Let the one-upmanship begin! But there’s an old saying in boxing, ‘If there’s enough money in it, they’ll find a way.’ Money-honey makes arch enemies instant best friends.
[1999]
Once upon a time, in the golden age of boxing, every division was competitive. The top ten were a formidable band and the next ten not too shabby, either. Now the No. 1 contenders come in the form of Henry Akinwande, Ricky Frazier and John Ruiz. Contenders-cum-Pretenders. Once the proud domain of Joe Louis, Marciano and Ali, the heavyweight picture has degenerated to the point where even the heralded, undisputed title fight – Holyfield v. Lewis – ends in controverted fiasco. Convoluted negotiations for the rematch no true fight fan is panting to see.
Light heavies set off sparks in the days of Jack Delaney and Paul Berlenbach, again in the time of Billy Conn and Gus Lesnevich, as later with Michael Spinks, Dwight Qawi and Saad Muhammad. Today Roy Jones, Jr, is so far ahead, he can look over his shoulder and laugh all the way to the bank. As for middleweights, well, there are Bernard Hopkins and William Joppy, but if Otis Grant, the Canadian scholar, is No. 4, and the top two can’t get on each other’s dance card, that once feisty division is drifting on a windless sea.
But, as noted recently, not only are the welters coming, they’re here, beckoning us to a level of creative intensity that comes along once in a decade. Not only have we enjoyed a unique, back-to-back semi-final, involving Oscar De La Hoya/Ike Quartey and Felix Trinidad/Pernell Whitaker, the top four one-hundred-and-forty-seven-pounders in the world, now we’re going to the final. We thought lions and lambs would lie down together sooner than Don King and Bob Arum, Showtime and HBO, WBC and IBF. In the fractured world of Fight Game ’99, these contending entities are usually more difficult to get together than Milosevic and the Kosovo Liberation Army. But this time money didn’t merely talk, it shouted, it screamed, it begged on its cynical knees, ‘Please, fellas, this is too big to miss! This is so fat we’ll all get rich!’ So Felix Trinidad and Co. settle for a mere $9 million to the Golden Boy’s $15 million, Showtime bows to arch rival HBO, and those two unloved Machiavellis of PPV waltz together around the money tree.
There’s good reason to call the Chicano kid from East LA the Golden Boy, even if he’s more accurately Golden Boy II, for those of us who cherish the original, my dear old chum and best man at my long-ago wedding, Art Aragon. Art was my home town’s all-time box office winner until Oscar came along. But he never led the charmed life of his successor. From the moment he took the gold at the ’92 Olympics, young Oscar has been a crossover star unequalled by any boxer in the history of what my estimable colleague Hugh McIlvanney rightly calls ‘the hardest game’. With his movie-star looks, his elocutionist diction and his flashy style, he was attracting as many groupies as Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst. They came squealing to his fights and his press conferences in such numbers as to make him the richest sub-heavyweight in the history of this show business sport. In a handful of professional years he had scored $50 million without taking any genuine risks, as his crafty pooh-bah Bob Arum had him in there with smaller champions with marquee names – Rafael Ruelas, Jesse James Leija, Genaro Hernandez – or famed veterans over the hill, like Julio Cesar Chavez and Macho Camacho.
In his first real test, with Pernell Whitaker two years ago, I’m still not sure he won it. It was too close to lose a title on, as did Pernell that night. But all my life I’ve seen the judges go with the money. Oh, I’m not talking anything as brash and uncouth as bribery. Oscar is golden because he sells the tickets, he brings the crowds, he generates the buzz, and the most any opponent can hope for, even a long-time world champion like Pernell Whitaker, is Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Nobody has to grease the judges. The tilt is toward Oscar. Is there any other major sport open to such subjective deliberation? The judges may not even be trying to curry favour with the promoters who pay them. The roar of the crowd provokes a subconscious reaction. Pernell would have had to knock Oscar out to win, or win decisively. Oscar was lucky to eke it out. His inexperience showed, for the trouble with an undefeated record like Oscar’s is how easy it’s been. You make a lot of money bowling over the Jesse James Leijas and the Patric Carpentiers, but you’re still in fistic grammar school. You don’t learn much from beating up old Julio Cesar, either. You can listen to Emmanuel Steward or Gil Clancy all you want (if Oscar’s really listening), but you go to college in the ring. That’s where all the great ones matriculated – Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep and Archie Moore.
Oscar is a gifted kid, with a nice jab, punching power and the appetite for taking punches essential in this relentless sport. But watching him against Ike Quartey last spring, I was reminded again how much this begloved multimillionaire still has to learn about this activity he’s mastered financially but not fistically. (If his groupie shrikes are reading this, I’m in trouble, but chances are they’re not – able to read, period.) Against the toughest opponent he’s ever faced, Ike Quartey, he seemed puzzled and tentative through many rounds, planted in front of the dangerous African who was outjabbing him and scoring right hands. In the sixth round of an often lacklustre fight, Quartey was down for a short count but stormed back to deck Oscar and have him in trouble. After eight rounds, Gil Clancy, who managed a great welterweight champion in Emile Griffith, was telling Oscar, ‘You’re stuck in the mud.’ Oscar was giving the sharp and dangerous Quartey no side-to-side, no in-and-out. After five years and twenty-nine fights, with only Whitaker to test him, inexperience was telling.
Yes, he made up for a less than golden performance in the final round by abjuring his abundant but errant boxing skills and becoming no longer the cutie who had moved out of his Chicano ghetto to the white burbs. He wasn’t following his corner now, or his head. Under the pretty-boy face was a fighting heart, and as he traded punches for a wild 60 seconds with the dangerous Quartey and almost took him out, we remembered Toluco Lopez and Chucho Castillo and all those indomitable Mexican warriors, inspired by punishment, refusing to lose.
Whether aided by judges or his macho demons, Oscar reminds us that Somebody Up There Likes Him, and that, for all his aberrant ways, he finds ways to win. The boxing mavens with whom I’ve discussed this favour Trinidad to put the first ‘L’ on Golden’s undefeated record. Maybe even ‘by KO’. If Oscar thought Ike Quartey was tough, he’s going to find the Puerto Rican champion even tougher. This could be the Leonard–Hearns of the ’90s. Trinidad may have the niftier jab, the crisper right hand, the more self-contained style. But if Oscar remembers to move, throw combinations instead of solo hooks, and if he fights through pain as he’s shown the will to do, he could find a way to win the defining fight of his magical career.
When I was in Zaire for the Ali–Foreman fight, I was phoning home to bet the house on the underdog, Muhammad. This time I’m still waiting for a signal from my little fistic bird. I wouldn’t bet the doormat, much less the house. The logic says Trinidad. The magic says De La Hoya.
And remember, if they both get up from knock-downs, and it’s still close at the end, they’re fighting in Las Vegas.
[1999]
From the moment they made the match, Mosley v. De La Hoya was on my mind. For the first time since Ali–Norton, almost 30 years ago, a mega fight was coming to my old home town, our freeway-spangled, glitzed-up and smogged-up City of the Angels. When I was still in grade school, I was at the Hollywood Legion and Downtown Olympic Auditorium with my father, cheering on our local heroes, Jimmy McLarnin and Fidel La Barba, Mushy Callahan, Ace Hudkins, Jackie Fields, Henry Armstrong, Baby Arizmendi, Archie Moore. If Madison Square Garden was the Mecca of the Manly Art, our Los Angeles rings, with their parade of world champions, were Mecca West.
Hollywood was a fight town almost as much as it was a movie town. Ringside at the Legion on a Friday night looked like a Who’s Who of Tinseltown. My old man, as head of Paramount studio, enjoyed the royal prerogative of sitting front row in the press section. He would arrive in style, bowed to his seat by obsequious ushers, greeted by famous faces and waving his formidable Upmanns like a sceptre to fellow moguls. And to the marquee names, Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Jack Oakie, Adolph Menjou, George Raft, Jimmy Cagney, and the racier pair of Marx brothers, Chico and Zeppo . . .
I remember the Mexican sexpot Lupe Velez, in a tight red dress in case no one would notice her, in the first row, so close to the corner she could stand up and touch the fighter on his stool. He happened to be a good-looking Mexican kid called Rojas. Between rounds the irrepressible Lupe would shout instructions to which he seemed to pay considerably more attention than to his manager and trainer. Since his vantage point, as she leaned forward to advise him, afforded him an inviting view down the plunging neckline, this was understandable. Rojas was doing pretty well until round four when Lupe called to him with urgent advice. As he turned his head to look at her, he took a crushing left to the jaw. Lupe sobbed as her nino took the count.
Fast forward to Mosley–De La Hoya: I have my ticket for a non-stop to LAX, I have my press credentials and my folder of pre-fight clippings. I am almost as ready as the two gifted boys who will make LA shine as a fight town again.
And then, as if Oscar had landed that hard left hook to the heart (mine), I’m under the knife for a four-way bypass. On the night of The Fight I’m not back in LA ready with pen and paper to cover the fight. I’m in the hospital, remembering the long-ago night when our local heavyweight, Turkey Thompson, knocked Bob Pastor down seven times in round one. Pastor kept getting up. And finally, six rounds later, he chopped Turkey down. So there was hope. All I had to do was Pastor myself back into the fray. How would I cover Mosley–De La Hoya? My 20-year-old Benn, who had been coming to Garden and Vegas fights with me in the Schulberg tradition since age 12, would be out there in my place covering the weigh-in, the fight and the press conference, faxing his notes and phoning in his take on everything that came down at Staples Center. Meanwhile another family expert on the Game, my 17-year-old Jessica, would tape the fight and I’d score it from my hospital bed. All I had to do was close my eyes, rev up my imagination and I was on the scene.
As I waited for the bell I found myself listing my most dramatic memories of home-town rings. I was 12 years old the night my father took me to Vernon, where that hoary arena adjoined the slaughterhouse, its sickly sweet aroma, as from an invasion of skunks, following us to our ringside seats. There we rooted for our local boy, Mushy Callahan, sporting the six-pointed star of our Hollywood tribe, as he doubled up his jabs and danced forward to take the belt from the junior welterweight champion, Pinkey Mitchell. Mushy gave me the gloves he won the title with, and for years they hung reverentially above my bed.
There was our classy little flyweight, Fidel La Barba, who moved on from Olympic gold to fight Jimmy McLarnin three times in his first six fights, a vest-pocket prodigy. A handful of fights later he was outfoxing the clever champ, Frankie Genaro, conqueror of Pancho Villa, with only one loss in sixty fights. Can we really pull these milestones back into memory 75 years later? Maybe it’s because after Fidel retired, following a hairbreadth loss to Kid Chocolate in the Garden and a disastrous fight two weeks later in Chicago that cost him half his right eye, he had ambitions to become a writer and came to me to look over his stuff. Over the years we talked writing and fighting, and refought the Genaro victory that launched his notable if finally ill-fated career. Forty years after I’d first seen him in there with McLarnin, he was a co-best man at my marriage to Geraldine Brooks, along with the original Golden Boy, Art Aragon, who could lick all the local boys, if not Carmen Basilio.
I have only to shut my eyes and put my mind into rewind to watch again the nonpareil Henry Armstrong in with one of my all-time favourites, the inscrutable Baby Arizmendi. They had similar styles, in close without clinching, non-stop attack from two resolute little bulls. Baby had won the first two in Mexico City, but in the three I saw, each time a little more so, the Armstrong fury mounted until even Arizmendi’s diehard Aztec resistance had to give. Armstrong came to Arizmendi V after thirty-six KOs in forty fights, and the only four who managed to go the distance were Barney Ross, from whom, as an overgrown featherweight, he had won the welterweight title; Lou Ambers, from whom he won the lightweight title; Ceferino Garcia, against whom he had defended his welterweight belt; and, of course, Baby Arizmendi, off whom punches seemed to bounce as if he were made of rubber. I see them still, in perpetual motion, and I knew back then I was in the presence of the greatest fighter I had ever seen.
A year later at LA’s Wrigley Field the incredible Armstrong, little more than a junior welterweight that night, was in there again with Ceferino Garcia, who had just won the middleweight title with an explosive knockout of tough champion Fred Apostoli. Ceferino had size, height and reach on Henry that night, but there was Armstrong on the attack backing up Garcia in a furious fight called a draw, enabling Garcia to keep the title that I thought the little guy won.
I found myself personally involved in the next Garcia ball-park fight. Through the screenwriting Epstein brothers of Casablanca fame I had met Paul Moss, who had managed the boxing team at Penn State, where the Epsteins’ teammate was Billy Soose. Billy turned pro with Paul still in his corner. I was with them the night Soose took the middleweight crown from clever Ken Overlin in the Garden. Paul and Billy liked having me around because my first novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, was an unexpected success critically and in the stores, and as someone having been banished from Hollywood for writing it, I was enjoying Eastern celebrity. I was with Paul in Toots Shor’s when a phone call came in from LA with an offer for Billy to defend his title against Ceferino Garcia.
‘It’s a good money fight for us,’ Paul said. ‘Garcia’s over the hill. Overlin licked him and so did Steve Belloise. And he’s still a big draw in LA. He’s got the right style to make Billy look good.’
Billy, Paul and I stayed with my father at his big house in Windsor Square. For the hell of it, I went down to the Main Street Gym to watch Garcia train. Hard to tell with ageing fighters, but he didn’t look over the hill to me. After the workout, Garcia’s manager, George Parnassus, whom I had known in my years on the LA scene, invited me to a drink at Abe Attell’s bar next door. ‘Whatya think, my guy’s lookin’ good, huh?’ I wondered where he was going. George was an operator. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. ‘He’s in shape, but you know, he’s had a 115 fights, we figure he’s getting ready to pack it in. I figure you’ll be talking to Paul . . .’
Uptown I delivered the unspoken message: Parnassus is looking to make a deal. Paul thinks a moment. ‘Who needs it? Garcia didn’t look that good a year ago. Billy will box rings around him.’
At Wrigley Field for seven rounds it goes exactly as Paul predicts. Billy’s a nifty boxer, never a great puncher but playing skilled matador to Garcia’s brave bull. But with seconds to go at the end of the round, a desperate Ceferino leapt in with a charge that opened an ugly cut in Billy’s eyelid. Was it a crushing right hand or Garcia’s head running interference?
Between rounds, with blood streaming from Billy’s sliced eyelid, nothing could be done to close the wound. ‘I’m not going out,’ I heard Billy say. ‘Nothing’s worth losing my eye.’ The bell for round eight found our dejected fighter still on his stool. Garcia’s Hispanic cheering section in the cheap seats erupted in celebration. Ceferino by TKO! But referee Abe Roth saw it differently. The cut was the result of an illegal butt, he decided. Under California rules, a technical draw. Billy keeps his title. Enraged Latinos charged the ring, broke up the seats, set fires and started beating up the flour-faces they assumed were Soose’s people. On my way to the dressing-room for the post-mortem, I was so shaken I actually didn’t recognise my father for a moment when he stopped me to commiserate.
Given the short-fuse or no-fused emotions of our Chicano fans, riots triggered by controversial decisions were an occupational hazard. The mega-millionaire and megalomaniac Jack Kent Cooke worshipped his Inglewood Forum like a cathedral. Some 30 years ago I was invited to be his guest for Lionel Rose’s defence of his bantamweight title against the Mexican idol Chucho Castillo. The going was intense, all 15 rounds, the sold-out Forum deafened with the chanting of ‘CHU-CHO! CHU-CHO!’ At the final bell Castillo danced to his corner waving to his confident rooting section. But the decision went to Lionel Rose.
Another explosion. Worse, if possible, than at Wrigley Field. Raging Chicanos tore down the elegant Roman orange curtains my host was so proud of and set them on fire. Seats were torn apart and piled up for bonfires. Cooke was screaming for more police! More firemen! Retreating to the club, we heard the mob was turning cars over in the parking lot and setting them on fire. I tried to call home to explain the delay, but the wires had been cut. We were under siege. A memorable postscript to the mayhem was the picture of the two little warriors – the polite Australian aborigine Lionel and the charismatic Mexican Indian Chucho talking quietly together at a small table while the battle involving them raged on outside.
‘What possible language could they be talking?’ someone asked me.
‘Fistish,’ I said.
Back home, put back together again, I was ready to rerun the Shane and Oscar Show, recalling the glory days of LA’s classic welterweight title fights from McLarnin and Armstrong to Mantequilla Napoles and Pipino Cuevas.
The prologue was all Oscar, who made his old friend Shane wait 15 minutes until he finally made his grand entrance, heralded by rousing mariachi music, a fireworks display that anticipated 4 July, and a deafening majority of the 20,000 fanatics chanting his name. But Sugar Shane, the 13 to 5 underdog who had never faced a real welterweight test before, seemed serenely unperturbed. Through the long stage-wait he had kept smiling, looking confident and self-contained. And there was none of the customary ‘feeling out’ in round one as he went at his famous rival with energy and style, with nifty jabs and straight right hands, one of which bounced hard off Oscar’s sturdy chin.
Oscar was being outsped and outmanoeuvred but not discouraged. He fought back with jabs of his own and, scoring with the main weapon, the big left hook to the body, he was regaining control. Between rounds four and five, an anxious Jack Mosley reminded his son, ‘You waited your whole life for this! Don’t slow down!’
Still, in the next two rounds it was Oscar who kept the pressure on, backing Shane up, snapping his head back with the jabs, and scoring one-twos, one-two-threes that frustrated Shane’s rhythm.
But in the seventh, it was as if Mosley had suddenly shifted from third gear to overdrive. Heeding his father’s earlier advice, he was the aggressor now. Dramatically picking up the pace, moving in and out like the great ones of old, he was making Oscar’s head a target for straight, rapid and punishing right hands. A turning-point round in what was developing into a fight living up to all the hype.
All but four of the twenty-five ‘experts’ quoted in the programme crystal-balled Oscar as the winner. Two dissenters were this writer and our prescient Benn, who filed this for me at the weigh-in: ‘I like Shane’s confidence, his calmness on the eve, and I also like his speed against the slower De La Hoya.’ Shane was rewarding our faith, trailing by a few points but coming on. The exchanges were furious now, but Oscar was tiring and Shane was stronger and faster. Suddenly turning southpaw to defuse those left hooks to the body that Oscar had been scoring with earlier, he was confusing the champion. Then deftly turning back, he imposed his will with crisp jabs and arrow-straight right hands.
Winning round after round now, Mosley had wiped out Oscar’s early lead. Going into the 12th, there was good reason for Oscar’s trainer, Roberto Alcazar, to warn his client, ‘You need this final round, but be careful.’
But the last three minutes of this rouser of a fight were pure Sugar. At least ten right hands thrown with great accuracy and power rocked the very game but very tired De La Hoya. At the bell the almost 3 to 1 underdog had outpunched his bigger rival three to one. If this had been the old 15-round days, Oscar might have been down and out for the first time in his magical career.
In the ring, having blown his title, Oscar was civilised and gracious, acknowledging Shane’s gifts, pleased that they had given the public a great fight and agreeing that it called for a rematch.
Answering post-fight questions, Oscar was a banged up, weary and schizo interviewee. Now he thought he had won by one point but wasn’t given the decision because, in the cynical ways of the fight game, this would generate more money for the rematch. ‘To take it away from me was an injustice.’
But retirement rather than revenge seemed to be Oscar’s focus now. ‘I’m going to rethink my whole game plan in life. I’m thinking about my health and my life. I’m a businessman. I want to take care of my money and my health . . .’
He had ‘enjoyed the slugfest’, he said, but ‘not getting a knockout was not having my dream come true’. In truth, take-out power had been absent from all his fights against top welterweights. Forty-eight rounds with Whitaker, Quartey, Trinidad and Mosley.
If Oscar moves on to his singing career, his acting, architecture, managing his unprecedented millions and all the other options he likes to ruminate about, I’ll remember him not as the best LA Chicano fighter I ever saw, just the first to take on the aura of a rock star. And by light years the richest.
Meanwhile Shane Mosley, who credited ‘soul searching’ for his overwhelming performance in the final rounds, is up there with the golden boys at last. Without Oscar’s distractions, he’s eager to prove he’s more than a good fighter like De La Hoya. Maybe one of the great ones up there with legendary welterweights like the two Sugar Rays, Robinson and Leonard? Dream on. Stay tuned.
[2000]
P.S. Alas, I was searching for heroes in the mode of the great ones of old, from Barney Ross and Henry Armstrong to the lightweight version of Roberto Duran, unbeatable at 135. And believing I had found a twenty-first century model in Sugar Shane. And then he comes apart against a latter-day entry, Vernon Forrest, who in turn is taken out by the primitive Ricardo Mayorga, who is soon exposed as a mindless punching bag by Felix Trinidad, who then loses every round to the defensive marvel with the wicked right jab, Winky Wright. Our trouble today is that the top performers don’t have enough fights to establish a creditable average. In the days when boxing was more of a mainline sport, the best fighters fought several times a month. They were gaining experience our best boys today will never know. Good God, while winning the featherweight title in 1937, Henry Armstrong fought 26 times. And after winning the world lightweight and welterweight titles in 1938, he fought fourteen times; in the following three years, after winning the welterweight title from Barney Ross (the greatest Jewish fighter since my old man’s hero, the Great Benny Leonard) our little buzzsaw from LA defended his crown twenty times, finally losing it to Fritzie Zivic when he was beginning to slow down at last after one hundred fights, in there with a score of immortals and so many other toughies whose names still ring a bell with long-memoried old-timers.
A grand master in chess doesn’t win a world title his first or second time out. He learns by playing other masters. Our chess game with blood is no different. If Sugar Shane had been fighting 60 or 70 years ago, he might have learned from a Vernon Forrest defeat how to cope with that type of fighter. Learning on the job, even when losing, was par for the course in those busy old days. But in today’s 50-to-a-million-dollar HBO or Showtime extravaganzas, to lose a mega-match, often that once-a-year PPV night for all the marbles, is to find yourself in virtual eclipse, if not retirement. Great fighters, indeed Hall of Famers, often lost their share. Kid Gavilan. Billy Graham. Jake LaMotta. Emile Griffith . . . a distinguished list. Because the quality of the opposition was so high and they fought so often. But today, with a lovely boxer like Shane Mosley (and three or four others come to mind), instead of three, it’s one strike and you’re out. Either you’re a multimillion-dollar baby or a bum. I look before and after, and pine for the days when boxing was as frequently competitive as big-time tennis.
[2000]
A far more complicated sport than most people realise, boxing is fencing, only with pain involved. It’s a chess game in which the board is the body and face of the opponent. Jose Torres, the literate and notable ex–light heavyweight champion, calls it ‘the art of lying’. What separates able boxers from merely tough fighters is their ability to out-think an opponent, feint him out of position in order to score. It can be done with gloves, shoulders, head moves. Now you see it, now you don’t. The old wizard Willie Pep comes to mind, and the ancient heavyweight cutie Jersey Joe Walcott, who knew so many feints he was said even to be able to feint with his eyebrows.
The best two junior middleweights in the world, and two of the very top fighters in the game, Sugar Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya, aren’t quite in that Houdini class. But they put on a remarkable exhibition of boxing at its almost best in the turbulent Las Vegas MGM Grand Casino Arena last Saturday evening. A million PPV buys made it the second richest non-heavyweight event in history (just behind De La Hoya–Trinidad) and the home viewers, noisy and partisan live audience and sold-out closed-circuit theatres all over Las Vegas got their money’s worth. They saw a close, smartly boxed contest that lacked the fireworks of their first meeting as they boxed through all the opening rounds with so much respect for each other that the great beast (the crowd) that lurks in the dark around the ring and up to the rafters began to boo for more action. But the boys boxed on. They knew each other almost too well from their first encounter when De La Hoya, the 3 to 1 favourite, was unable to match Mosley’s blazing speed, or his stamina in the late rounds, and lost for what he thought of as the first time in his life, having questioned with some reason his controversial loss to Trinidad.
This time – as fans flooded in from all over the country and Mexico for the rematch hyped as Revenge for De La Hoya, and Redemption for Oscar (but also for Shane after his two unexpected defeats at the hands of Vernon Forrest), Oscar was boasting that his new trainer Floyd Mayweather, Sr, had taught him how to neutralise Shane’s speed. The loudmouthed ex-fighter, ex-drug addict Floyd had almost come to blows with Shane’s quiet-spoken father and trainer at the pre-fight press conference after Oscar’s man had read some dreadful, sub-Ali doggerel to the effect that ‘after Oscar meets Shane, your boy’ll never be the same’.
For all the braggadocio, Oscar seemed to be following the new game plan as he doubled and tripled up on his jab to keep Shane off balance in the first half of the bout and scored with straight right hands. But Shane maintained his poise, bobbing and weaving and patiently waiting for an opening, losing close rounds that seemed more one-sided than they really were because the rabidly pro-Mexican crowd roared every time the favourite’s punch landed – and sometimes when it didn’t – and fell silent when the classy underdog scored his own jabs or dug punishing left hooks to the body. Meanwhile those watching on television had their vision of the fight coloured by the HBO ringside team, Larry Merchant, Jim Lampley and Big George Foreman, who sounded more like a De La Hoya rooting section than objective commentators as they described a fight so different from what the official judges (and these eyes) seemed to be watching.
After four careful and technically interesting rounds, the action began to heat up in the fifth, which built to a furious exchange at the bell. The De La Hoya rooters were so loud that it was hard to hear oneself think, but I gave the round to Mosley. Oscar might have been winning the Compustat totals, but I felt the power in Mosley, and Oscar must have been feeling it too. Body punching is something of a lost art in modern boxing. It’s not as flashy as punches to the head, but it can prove more deadly. Body punches wear a fighter down and slow him up in the later rounds.
It was still intangible, and Oscar seemed to be winning the fight, but that’s exactly what was happening to him. After six rounds I had him leading four rounds to two, but Oscar’s questionable stamina was about to be tested again. Slowly the tide was turning. Two of the three judges gave Mosley the last five rounds, and I had him winning five of the last six, hurting Oscar with so many fiercely thrown left hooks that the partisan crowd grew eerily quiet and the underdog rooters began chanting MOS-LEY! MOS-LEY! Oscar was able and willing but soooo tired. The unanimous decision, 115 to 113 in favour of the new and now redeemed champion, put the Sugar back in Shane and struck this corner as exactly right. The pained silence of the disappointed throng seemed a reluctant agreement with the judges. But the HBO trio were outraged. They denounced the verdict as highway robbery. George Foreman even went so far as to charge that it was a fix or conspiracy against promoter Bob Arum. By odd coincidence, I happened to come out from the arena with George, who is an old friend all the way back to Ali/Zaire days. He was surprised that I had seen the fight so differently from him, and when boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar chimed in on my behalf, he made a face and said, ‘Wow, if you two think Mosley won, maybe I went too far!’
Bob Arum and his $20-million meal ticket showed no such grace. At the post-fight press conference the overheated Arum was posturing that he would never promote another fight in a state that allows gambling on boxing. Apparently after having promoted scores of fights in Vegas, he had just discovered that betting on fights was legal in Nevada. Oscar took up where his promoter left off, insisting that he had won the fight and threatening that he had the resources to hire the best lawyers and seek a reversal of the decision. He wasn’t doing this for selfish reasons, he insisted. Not at all. He was doing this for the good of boxing, to clean up the sport. Give us a break, Oscar. With your purse of $23 million (to the winner’s measly $5 million) you’re not only crying all the way to the bank but shamelessly raining on Shane’s victory parade.
From the Los Angeles Times to all the New York papers and on to the BBC and the clear-eyed Steve Bunce, the working press called it as we did. So did Hitman Tommy Hearns and Lennox Lewis. And when ace trainer Teddy Atlas reran the tape silently he found that without the HBO spin he had to reverse his decision. So add one more knowledgeable vote to the Mosley column. Instead of fighting it out in court, Oscar should be looking to fight it out in the ring. The rematch deserves a rematch. But let’s not hold our breath. Despite his protestations, we doubt Oscar wants to get back in the ring with Shane, even for another 20 mil.
De La Hoya is still a very good fighter, but his dream of ending up as one of the all-time greats in the company of Louis, Ali and Robinson is dashed by that nagging lack of stamina. If he were a racehorse he would be a great miler and might even win the Derby, but he’d never win the Belmont. The thoroughbred Mosley would always run by him at a mile and a half.
See you at the next one, George. And don’t be too upset about our friendly disagreement. You know what they say about great champions. They can do everything – except pick a winner.
[2003]
What optimists like to call the Information Age may be more accurately identified as the Misinformation Age. With the verbal Niagara of the Internet and the magical leap through the wires of the fax machines, the force of the old-fashioned P.T. Barnum pitchmen has been multiplied, magnified and amplified 10,000 times 10,000.
How else to explain the astronomy of the hype that kept building Oscar De La Hoya v. Feliz Trinidad to heights never before reached in the history of boxing’s non-heavyweight championships? It was to be, the latter-day hypesters assured us, nothing less than the ‘Fight of the Millennium’.
That modest claim alone should have put us on guard against let-downs and anticlimaxes. If our two young, undefeated welterweights were really to create together the fight of the last 1,000 years, where would that leave Louis and Conn, Robinson and La Motta, Leonard and Hearns, not to mention Mendoza and Humphries, Cribb and Molineaux? Or Hamilton and Burr?
A millennium used to mean 1,000 years, but in the quick-talk of the hypester it’s become a fancy mouthful for 1999, which seems to work fine because the memory of Generation X doesn’t seem to reach back much farther than that. Remembering Emile Griffith’s classic series with Benny Paret and Luis Rodriguez or the Robinson–Gavilan–Billy Graham–Basilio days, we wondered how Trinidad–De La Hoya could qualify as the Fight of the Century much less all that millennium jazz. Indeed, the overcautious encounter, with Oscar sticking and moving and Felix chasing and missing for nine boring rounds, followed by an out-of-gas Oscar running for his life in the last three, with the desperate Felix finally loading up on those chopping right hands, didn’t even make it the Fight of the Night. There was more emotion in the cruiserweight semi-final as Dale Brown (who he?) stood his ground against the Kazakhstan Terror, Vassily Jirov, only to take a devastating blow to the belt line that left the tan kid from Calgary gasping for breath and momentarily paralysed.
The most dramatic moments in the Trinidad–De La Hoya dance were left to their respective promoters, the fight game’s artistically juxtaposed odd couple, Don King and Bob Arum. If words could score knock-downs and draw blood, Arum would have been in danger of having the press conference stopped to save him from further punishment. Through months of bitter negotiations on how to cut up the biggest boxing pie in welterweight history, Arum had held the upper hand with De La Hoya his crossover star eclipsing Trinidad, whose following was limited to Puerto Rico and hard-core fight fans. King and his boy had to settle for half of Arum and Oscar’s $21 million guarantee.
But the unexpected split decision had created a dramatic turnaround. Waving his little Puerto Rican flag, the teflon Don, who’s got more lives than a litter of cats, actually broke into a victory dance while the usually articulate Arum was choking on silence, his complexion reddening to the point where reporters wondered if it might presage a heart attack.
‘Good has triumphed over evil!’ King announced, with that championship chutzpah that has made him the despair of his army of detractors. ‘The lights have gone out in Arumsville! The air is out of the balloon! Felix Trinidad is the greatest welterweight in the world! He ran down the rabbit! Viva Felix Trinidad! Viva Puerto Rico!’ The Rs became more Hispanically accentuated as Don rose to the occasion, the once and future king.
My notes read: ‘Press conference much more exciting than fight. Don screaming. Bob sweating. The Don-and-Bob show. Don ecstatic. Bob tortured. “You look like your mother just died,” a Latin reporter twists the knife.’ Bob tries to remind the press corps that twenty of twenty-four of those polled at ringside had Oscar winning, with only two for Trinidad and two scoring it a draw. But Don was in his element now, spewing the eloquence he mastered in the prison library.
What a delicious contrast, these two: Arum, the Harvard Law School graduate recruited for Bob Kennedy’s Department of Justice, and King, the prize student of the University of the Street who earned his Masters in Self-Promotion in the Ohio penitentiary. Only in Fight Game America could this pair from the opposite ends of the social spectrum be brought together to co-promote their incredibly enriching but artistically disappointing spectacle.
Like the other major fight of the year, Holyfield–Lewis, this had ended in the kind of split-decision controversy that inevitably leads to talk of a rematch. Strictly on points, De La Hoya had a thin edge, but tired and overconfident, convinced he had enough winning rounds ‘in the bank’, he had passively surrendered to Trinidad at least the last three rounds. If Oscar won the contest, he blew the fight.
‘I want to be one of the great legends of boxing,’ he keeps saying. But all the great legends we’ve seen, from Armstrong to Ali, fought the last round as if their lives depended on it. Oscar ‘fought’ this one as if his profile depended on it, as he took great pains to protect that for the movie offers that could be in the offing.
So, will there be a rematch? Back to the Don-and-Bob show. ‘I have no problem with the rematch,’ King chortles. ‘I would say “immediamente” in Spanish, ‘immediately’ in English and ‘right now!’ if you speak street. Nothin’ to negotiate. Just take the contract we had ’n turn it upside down. Put my name on top ’n yours on the bottom.’ ‘That’ll be the day,’ the outmatched, outvoiced Arum tried to interpose. But Don is all over him, throwing more punches than Oscar and Felix in their 12 rounds of inaction. ‘Short-time pain for long-term gain!’ King gloats. ‘Oscar’s shining star has dimmed! He’s no longer the Golden Boy, he’s . . .’ For a moment the volume drops. Don’s mike is dead. ‘Shut the hell up!’ Arum had suggested, before deciding to do that for him by pulling the plug.
But Bob Arum should have known that Don King carries his own built-in amplification system. From his numbers-running days in the mean streets of Cleveland, he had known the power of the human voice, and now he only had to notch it up a few decibles to accuse: ‘You see, censorship! Can you believe this in America? A clandestine conspiracy! Sabotage! I thought they only did this in Russia! Or Red China! They can’t stand the truth! Can’t accept that Tito [Trinidad] is the greatest in the world! Viva Tito! Viva Puerrrto Rrrrico!’
And then, finally, this contemporary, improbable Black Tex Rickard was off to the victory party and Bob Arum and his disappointed and disappointing champion were left at the podium with $21 million worth of egg on their faces.
Would I fly across the country again to see Trinidad–De La Hoya II? Not if they boxed with as much mutual self-respect as they did the first time. But it might be worth it to catch the rematch between the canny Harvard barrister Bob Arum and the born-again Puerto Rican patriot and Ohio slammer’s gift to pugilistica, the self-acclaimed champion of Good over Evil, Maestro King.
‘I’ve been to the mountain top,’ Martin Luther King said, ‘and I’ve seen the promised land.’ Don King’s style is to buy the mountain. And as for the promised land, Don’ll tell you he’s got options on it.
[2000]
P.S. After an eighteen-month layoff following his knockout loss to Bernard Hopkins for the middleweight crown, Oscar took on the Nicaraguan Dirty Mouth, Ricardo Mayorga, for the WBC one hundred-and-fifty-four-pound title, and added one more championship belt to his collection. So what’s next for the Golden Boy? He could hang ’em up after the most remunerative career by a non-heavyweight in the history of the sport, and devote the rest of his life to his successful boxing promotions and investments. Or he could hold to his dream of a farewell fight on Mexican Independence Day, 16 September. The only problem is, with Felix Trinidad in retirement, the logical rivals are the defensive marvel Winky Wright, or Floyd Mayweather, Jr. If I were Oscar, I’d stay home with the gorgeous wife and kiddies, and all those businesses working for him. He doesn’t need the 20 mil. He’s done more for the popularity of boxing than anyone since Muhammad Ali. That should be honour enough, as instead of Winky and Floyd, he takes on Arum and King, in his new role as head of Golden Boy Promotions.
[2006]