There are times when the theatrical titles of major fights carry more entertainment punch than the event itself. After the recent epidemic of disastrous evenings in pursuit of the heavyweight championship of the world – the Tyson Bite Fight, Oliver McCall’s nervous breakdown in his loss to Lennox Lewis and Henry Akinwande’s impersonation of a frightened octopus in his hapless challenge to the recrowned Lewis – the public was assured that next time Lewis went in there, things would be different. Wasn’t Andrew Golota the Polish assassin? For the first time since Rocky Marciano in the 1950s, and the brief reign of Ingemar Johansson in ’59–’60, a new heavyweight on the scene was given a serious chance to become the first white heavyweight champion in 40 years.
True, his twenty-eight victories were amassed over the usual collection of ‘opponents’, with the possible exception of Samson Po’uha, whom he butted and bit and finally knocked flat in five. Still, in his two DQ losses to Riddick Bowe, Golota had badly punished and outclassed the rich and enigmatic former champion, and done it with a lively jab, power punches that had Bowe reeling, and impressive speed for a man as big as an NFL linebacker at six feet four, two-hundred-and-forty-plus pounds. If you took away the mindless low blows that cost him the Bowe fights, Golota was essentially undefeated, which is virtually the way the oddsmakers saw it as they made Andrew (Foul Pole) Golota even money against the far more experienced WBC champion who had lost only one fight (a quick knockout at the hands of McCall) in his somehow lacklustre eight-year campaign to convince the American public that he was a worthy and legitimate heavyweight champion.
In more than 30 fights after winning Olympic gold (and defeating Bowe), Lewis had demonstrated explosive take-out power with straight right hands that had destroyed Mike Weaver, Razor Ruddock, Frank Bruno and Tommy Morrison. But a tendency to lose concentration and drift marked his fights to decision with Tony Tucker and Ray Mercer.
So it was Golota and not the British-born champion who had caught the imagination of the crowd, that great beast who lurks in the darkness of the arena and now in living rooms and bars on every continent.
Much of the support for Golota was nasty racist. For all the gains of the civil rights movement, with African Americans now looming as gridiron heroes rather than pariahs at Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia universities, the serpent of prejudice still slithers across our American landscape. No one would actually come out in public and call Golota the Great White Hope. But in a sea of black heavyweight champions and top contenders, he was the only Caucasian game in town, and a lot of suppressed resentment of black domination of the fight game triggered the prolonged ovation for Golota when the Lewis fight was first announced.
So, ‘The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Brawl’ seemed an appropriate teaser for the proposed toe-to-toe between the six foot five, 250-pound Lewis and an opponent of almost equal height and weight.
Feeling in the sold-out Convention Center on the Boardwalk of Atlantic City was running high. Indeed, that is understatement. It was boiling over. Especially in the cheap seats in the balcony where the large and rowdy Golota rooting section, waving Polish flags and swilling beer, found a ready opposition in the British boys flashing their Union Jacks and matching the Poles bottle for bottle and taunt for taunt. The atmosphere recalled the notorious soccer wars that have taken the lives of overwrought fans from England to Italy. This seemed to be a case of The Drunker They Are, the Harder They Brawl as fights broke out all over the upper tier. There was a hairy moment when a couple of Golota supporters with faces decorated in the colours of the Polish flag were dangling over the edge of the balcony a struggling Brit draped in a full-size Union Jack. Security officials, who were all over the hall this time (in contrast to their insufficient numbers and failure to control the ethnic riot in the Garden for Bowe–Golota I), saved Lewis’s man from a 50-foot swan dive into the crowded $500 seats below.
By the time ‘God Save the Queen’ had been played, and the seemingly endless Polish national anthem, patriotic allegiances had been whipped to fever pitch. Everybody was ready for battle, it seemed, except one of the combatants, or should we say, the supposed-to-be-combatant. Andrew Golota, the hulking tough from Warsaw by way of Chicago, who had talked so boldly for the TV cameras about his readiness to achieve his dream of becoming heavyweight champion, had been whistling Dixie, or whatever they whistle in Warsaw to summon bravado to cover up fear. In truth, hours before the fight, Andrew had suffered a severe anxiety attack. Be it fear or stage fright, the giant Golota’s behaviour suggested that he had just heard that the death penalty was about to be enforced in the State of New Jersey. His crime? Presuming to contend for WBC’s baroque heavyweight belt without being emotionally prepared to mount the stage. Instead of riding to the arena in style, Golota decided to walk from Caesars Palace to the ring site about a mile down the tawdry pawn shops and delapidated liquor stores of Tennessee Avenue.
Professional fighters get to the grounds about two hours before fight time to rest, prepare themselves mentally and warm up for half an hour. But Golota arrived just 30 minutes before his ring appointment, to veteran cornerman Lou Duva’s consternation. Attendants noticed that he was pale and cold. As referee Joe Cortez gave the traditional instructions, Lewis reminded me of a revved-up thoroughbred entering the starting gate. You could almost feel the power and confidence radiating from him as he stared – not into Golota’s eyes, because the challenger in refrigerated anxiety could not bring himself to look at his executioner.
I had wondered about Golota’s state of mind the evening before in the Caesars Palace version of Planet Hollywood, where the usually upbeat Lou Duva had joined us for a few minutes. He was sky-high on his kid in the eight-rounder opening the telecast, Fernando Vargas. ‘I’m in love with a beautiful blond,’ he quipped, ‘a dynamite kid, a coming champion.’ But when I asked him about his entry in the main event, I was struck by his failure to accentuate the positive. I don’t remember when I’ve heard a trainer or manager predict less than convincing victory for his corner. In Vegas for the De La Hoya fight, Camacho’s trainer Pat Burns told me he was so high on Macho that he wouldn’t be surprised if he won by KO. So much for the credibility of trainers’ predictions. Now in the gaudy, star-struck café, Duva was saying, ‘I don’t know. We’ll see. He’s a funny kid. Strong as hell. But you never know what’s going on in his head. We’ll just have to see tomorrow night.’
Not exactly an overwhelming vote of confidence, I noted at the time.
Now they were coming out of their corners for round one, Lewis breaking smartly from the gate like Cigar, and Golota like the blindfolded nag of the picador already sensing the punishment in store.
With the first ticks of the ring clock, the bravado title ‘The Harder They Brawl’ was obsolete. A series of quick jabs and fervent right hands to the unprotected Caucasian jaw and Golota was doing a Peter McNeeley, down and nearly out before some of the Fancy had found their scalper-priced $1,500 seats. Cortez allowed the massacre to continue a few more ticks as the now semi-conscious Golota stumbled into more overhand rights than he needed to convince himself, the now-silenced Poles and the boisterous Brits that the ‘Brawl’ was just another ignominious first-round-over-and-out.
In Lewis’s career, 1997 will be remembered as the year he defeated an emotional wreck, a clutch artist and a self-destructive anxiety freak. As Lewis himself put it neatly if not so kindly at the press conference, ‘I just wanted to get rid of all the misfits in the heavyweight world.’
Back in his dressing-room, misfit No. 3, trying to work up nerve to meet the nosy press, suddenly pitched forward, his body shaking in convulsions, in danger of swallowing his tongue. According to Gary Hope, an ex-boxer friend of mine in the Golota camp, no paramedic or doctor was immediately available (a strange oversight given Golota’s condition on leaving the ring). A quick-thinking assistant trainer shoved his leather wallet in Golota’s mouth to save him from suffocating on his own tongue. For at least ten seconds his heart had stopped completely, as if God was counting him out along with Joe Cortez. But next morning he was released from the local medical centre with no brain damage indicated on the CAT scan. In other words, whatever brains Golota brought to Atlantic City he still retained when he returned to Chicago, to brood on his next career move. The honest WWF might be a suitable venue. In that world of theatrically packaged violence, our chopped-down Pole could bite, aim for the wedding tackle and employ those other endearing tactics so cherished by the Neanderthals who actually seem to believe what they’re seeing at their wrestling ‘championships’.
Meanwhile, on the high road and taken seriously at last is the now focused and very determined Mr Lewis, who may be as good as the British boxing fraternity have been trying to tell us. ‘If he had been an American fighter you would have had him up there with Holyfield and Tyson long before this,’ a London correspondent complained in the press room. ‘He’s the best in the world right now. He’ll knock out Holyfield.’
Lewis v. the winner of Holyfield–Moorer is the logical title fight come spring ’98. If this were Wimbledon or the US Open, these would be the mandatory finalists. But expecting logic in the Byzantine world of boxing is like expecting Fidel Castro and Jesse Helms to sign a mutual admiration pact. Lewis punches people for HBO and the WBC. Holyfield/Moorer, by hook or by crook, is a Don King promotion now, on the rival cable’s Showtime, with WBA and IBF titles as the bait. Getting these disparate elements together takes a bit of doing. Like getting Iran and Iraq to join in a co-production of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’.
But for the sake of unity, clarity and sanity in pugilistica (well, we can dream, can’t we?), let’s join our British cousins in hoping Lennox Lewis gets the opportunity to move on from the misfits to meet the best heavyweight left standing in 1998. And thus restore to the much-abused championship of the top division its traditional mystique.
[1998]
So once again Lennox Lewis – in his five-round TKO of the latest pretender to the crown – proves himself to be the Rodney Dangerfield of the heavyweight division. Yes, he is the champion of the world, at least in the myopic eyes of the WBC. And yes, he has lost only one fight in ten years (albeit an embarrassing knockout at the hands of embarrassing Oliver McCall). And yes, three heavyweight champions – Riddick Bowe, Mike Tyson and now Evander Holyfield – have managed to avoid his persistent challenge, in which he says, in his own soft, English-accented voice, that he is indeed ‘the greatest heavyweight in the world today’.
Maybe. But if so, after defending his title successfully against the only man ever to keep him down (McCall) and the Carnera-sized contender (Akinwande), and then the conqueror of George Foreman (at least officially), Shannon Briggs, why did Lewis once again leave the ring with the rude booing of unimpressed fans pursuing him to the dressing-room while their cheers were reserved for the bravehearted but still obviously inexperienced loser, young Mr Briggs? Why is this elegant black man built to epic proportions at six feet five and two hundred and forty-five pounds – the only British-born boxer to win a heavyweight belt since Bob Fitzsimmons a hundred years ago – vocally disrespected at every performance?
While it may mystify the 32-year-old Lewis, who could attribute it to anti-British feelings that go all the way back to our eighteenth-century revolution (and manager Frank Maloney doesn’t help matters as an over-the-top patriotic fashion plate in his tailored Union Jack), still this old ringsider has seen enough of Lewis’s appearances to understand why our fans continue to be underwhelmed and make those rude noises despite his string of KOs.
Take round one of the recent Briggs encounter. Lewis came out like a champion determined to impose his will, jabbing and moving forward, a game plan that worked very nicely for all of 30 seconds, when the strong but raw challenger found he could tag Lewis solidly with a left hook to the jaw. Follow-up blows were soon driving the WBC champion backward. An excited Shannon Briggs was moving forward now, tagging the panicked Lewis again and again. Instead of beating a strategic retreat, moving away from danger, or knowing how to stop suddenly and tie his man up, Lewis literally turned his back and cowered against the ropes. Yes, he was an Olympic gold medallist (indeed, stopping talented young Riddick Bowe), but this defenceless behaviour as Briggs drove him back against the ropes, with only those strands saving him from a possible knock-down, reminded us that after more than 30 professional fights a Lewis in serious trouble could revert to the sorriest kind of amateur mistakes.
If the round had been twenty seconds longer, or if Briggs had had a tick more ring savvy, the 12 to 1 underdog might have won an unprecedented one-round victory. In the press sections all the ‘experts’ (which included everyone I polled before the opening bell) who saw Lewis as an easy one- or two-round winner, looked at each other in self-bemused shock. We were beginning to question Lewis’s chin, remembering that Frank Bruno had him ready to go. And the McCall thing. A very serious demerit for a heavyweight: chin trouble.
To his credit, Lennox was able to regroup for round two, re-establish his jab and move forward, though he’s not exactly a Larry Holmes, or even a Holyfield, when it comes to aggressive forward rhythm. He won the round but with a mouth sucking for air. A front-runner again but with the ugly first round having taken its toll. He was wanting in stamina.
In the next two rounds Lewis was winning the jabbing debate and throwing his speciality, crossing right hands that knocked Briggs down so hard that it now became a question of how many times the gutsy but unsophisticated challenger could get up. But to everyone’s surprise, and especially Lewis’s, he not only struggled to his feet but swung wild, desperate blows, some of which landed. And each time he did, Lewis was shaken again. Even against a dazed, wide-open opponent, he was unable to slip, defect or duck the punches coming at him, deficiencies that made for an exciting fight rather than proof of Lewis’s (and trainer Emanuel Steward’s) claim to being the world’s No. 1 heavyweight.
Round five. Lewis was tired, but not too tired to knock the battered Briggs down again. Once more the former model climbed that ten-storey ladder back up off the canvas. This time he swung so wildly and futilely that the momentum carried him back to the floor. A grateful Lewis, breathing hard, saw the merciful referee move in to save the exhausted challenger from ineffectual heroics.
So the heavyweight championship circus rolls on, the flawed and vulnerable WBC champion to meet the unproven Croatian, Zeljko Mavrovic, while wba–ibf champion Evander Holyfield takes on Henry (The Octopus) Akinwande, who qualified for the honour by getting himself DQ’d for hanging onto Lennox Lewis like a life raft in a storm.
So we’re saying again that the only contest that deserves billing for the ‘Heavyweight Championship of the World’ is Holyfield v. Lewis. After watching Lewis use his left jab erratically, alternating crisp with tentative, throwing straight right hands à la Holmes, but unable to stay in focus three minutes a round, one would think Evander might lower his asking price from $20 million to a modest $16 million to unify the titles.
But this isn’t the fight game; it’s the boxing business where the champions, managers, promoters and cable guys will keep on giving fight fans the business until a stand-up commissioner – a Senator John McCain, if you will – imposes order and reason on a fascinating sport mired in greed, galloping egos and anarchy.
As the first boxing editor of Sports Illustrated, 50 years ago, I founded a mythical organisation called APPPFF, the Association for the Protection of the Poor Put-upon Fight Fan. After watching the champions and their sponsors loop around each other in the Gimme Gimme Waltz, maybe it’s time to call the old boys back into action again.
[1998]
There was a time when I regarded the heavyweight champion of the world with a reverence just this side of religious fervour.
I never met the early heroes of the century, Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson. But when Jack Dempsey came to our house in Hollywood in the mid-’20s, courting my mother’s friend, actress Estelle Taylor, I remember worrying that the hand that was shaking his was damp with awe. My father had told me of his explosive knockout of the Argentine wild man Luis Firpo.
In the Golden Age of Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bill Tilden and Bobby Jones, the heavyweight champion of the world was still the greatest of the great. He walked with Epeus, whom Homer hailed in his blow-by-blow description of a classic KO of Euryalus, who ‘Beneath the ponderous arm’s resistless sway / Down dropped he nerveless and extended lay’.
From Homer to Mailer, we have revered our undisputed champions. We think of Louis and Marciano, Foreman and Ali, our gods of the heavyweight mystique. We think of the special hush that comes over us as we tense forward in the darkness of the arenas, with millions more plugged into television, the whole world holding its breath as the announcer intones those magic words: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for the heavyweight championship of the world . . .’
The heavyweight champion was no mortal man but stood with Lancelot and Galahad, no longer merely a splendid fist fighter but a legendary hero. Even those people who disdain boxing as a brutal sport had to acknowledge the magic and symbolism of the heavyweight championship.
When Jack Johnson won it some 90 years ago, white America was so affronted that it had to pass a special law to entrap the black champion and drive him from the country. And the only way he could return was without that precious belt.
When Joe Louis destroyed Max Schmeling, millions of Americans who had never seen a boxing match cheered him as the defender of democracy against fascism, a victorious portent of the war to come.
And when Ali returned from his exile in the Vietnam years, he became a hero of Greek proportions to the Bob Dylan generation. Whether he faced Frazier or Norton or Foreman, he seemed to be fighting not only for black pride – somehow succeeding in making his noble black rivals ‘white’ – but for some mysterious universal principle.
Which brings us up to – or rather down to – the first undisputed champion of the twenty-first century: the Jamaican–Canadian–Brit, Lennox Lewis Esq.
A marvellous physical specimen at six feet five, two hundred and fifty pounds, the first British-born heavyweight to hold the title in over a century, alas our new standard-bearer has neither magic nor mystique.
For someone so physically well endowed, he is curiously and annoyingly lacking in fistic passion. He is not a fighter who throws caution to the wind. Indeed he seems to embrace that doubtful quality like a seductive mistress. He has, at times, an exceptional jab. But instead of snapping it consistently, like the excellent Larry Holmes, at least half the time he is content to paw with it, not so much careless as lazy. He has power in his right hand, but again, unless there’s an easy opening, he keeps it cocked without firing, like a sniper who doesn’t fire because it will expose his position.
In the first go with Holyfield, on my scorecard he won nine of the twelve rounds but had to settle for a suspicious draw. Lewis was facing what looked like a very old warrior, piling up points with his jab. But nothing reflects character more nakedly than boxing, and Lewis’s comes across as smug, self-satisfied and lazy. He does enough to win, in a style frustrating and boring. You want to send him reruns of Larry Holmes’s fights so he could see what a series of swift jabs and straight right hands can accomplish. Holmes had skill and will. Lewis has skill and won’t.
In the rematch last November, Holyfield showed he’s finally on the cusp of fistic senility. But at least this time he tried to jab with Lennox and to move in under that 84-inch reach. In the middle rounds he was finally scoring, wobbling Lewis with old-fashioned right hands. But that was to be the high-water mark for doughty old Evander, who kept walking into trouble in rounds eight through eleven.
And that’s where Lewis showed his curiously passive fistic character. Instead of taking advantage of Evander’s visual fatigue, he kept on with his lazy jabs and only occasional combinations. In the twelfth and final round our new champion borrowed a page from Oscar De La Hoya. With only three minutes to go he had obviously scored the bout in his head and figured he didn’t need the round to win. He let the old man take it by default. By not trying hard enough.
Even so, we had Lewis up by two. But we couldn’t get mad at ringside colleagues who saw it for the Holy man from Atlanta. Give him an ‘A’ for a valiant last stand.
So now, at last, we have a champion who’s got all three belts – or is it half a dozen? But flying home from the clang and clatter of Las Vegas, we couldn’t help comparing this largely lacklustre fight with the great ones we’ve seen.
Heavyweight history: the one-hundred-and-sixty-nine-pound Billy Conn going into the thirteenth round ahead on points and wanting to knock Joe Louis out; Rocky Marciano, battered and bloody, taking out Jersey Joe Walcott with a savage and historic right hand in another unforgettable thirteenth; the inspired Ali taking Foreman’s best shots and then stopping Big George in the mesmerising eighth on Conrad’s fabled Congo River . . .
That’s what we fly across continents and oceans to see.
But, as my old friend, AP veteran Eddie Schuyler, said to me as we were comparing notes on the new champion’s chess-game performance, ‘They don’t have great fights any more . . .’ At least in the heavyweight division.
So, do we pass on the next heavyweight title fight? To be a fight fan is to be a cockeyed – or is it black-eyed – optimist, with hope everlasting.
On the roll call of challengers, Michael Grant still looks green. David Tua is strong but predictable. Maybe if they got Ike What’s-his-name out of jail . . . Or reinvent rusty Iron Mike . . . ? Somewhere on this planet there must be a heavyweight who brings passion and intensity to a heavyweight division now ruled by a reluctant dragon.
In the name of Epeus, Daniel Mendoza, Joe Louis and Ali, please bring back the heavyweight mystique.
[2000]