A Pug From Mean Streets Is Uptown

The fight game is (choose one):

(a) A grimy and seamy, smoke-filled throwback sport attended by a chorus of people who look like the cast of a 1930s Edward G. Robinson movie, or a group shot of the FBI’s 10 most wanted from a post-office wall.

(b) A chic, elegant after-dinner show attended by Yuppies in three-piece suits, their scrubbed and stylish career wives decked out in Rodeo Drive’s latest, trailing a tasteful scent of Chanel over the whole proceeding as if it were a Broadway opening or a charity ball.

If you go to the Marriott Hotel in Irvine next Thursday and repair directly to the ballroom, you will probably be surprised to see that, there at least, the correct answer is B.

Boxing--hold onto your hats!--has become as upwardly mobile as the Ivy League, as Establishment as the bond market, as Republican as Orange County. The game of hobos, cons, cane-cutters and racketeers has become as trendy as a boutique. The rowdy racket of Jake LaMotta, Stanley Ketchel, the Belting Brakeman, and the Manassa Mauler has become as socially correct as croquet on Long Island, as high society as a Beaux Arts ball.

John L. Sullivan must be spinning in his grave. So must Ruby Robert Fitzsimmons and Jack Johnson. Doc Kearns must be wondering where he went wrong.

Nosebleeds have become a spectator sport for the country-club set. Unconsciousness is in. “Tennis, anyone?” has been replaced by “Get the other eye, Louie!”

Mink at ringside is not all that uncommon for big heavyweight championship fights or casino extravaganzas in Vegas or Jersey. But a monthly club-fight card? In a suburban hotel in Reagan country?

It’s like seeing the Queen Mother at a bullfight. I mean, whatever happened to polo in this country? Doesn’t anybody chase foxes anymore? What’s next? Nancy Reagan climbing into the ring with swabs in her ear?

Shouldn’t these people be out selling bonds? Why don’t they just go to the opera like their families have always done? Fights are for ethnics, blue-collar wearers, truck drivers and saloon keepers, not WASP stockbrokers. What do they do, shout “Fight fiercely!”?

Tex Rickard, the late, great fight promoter, would have approved. Rickard was the first guy to take the sport off the barges and out of of the mining towns and put it on Broadway. He was the first to print up gold tickets so that they looked like deeds to a diamond mine or a law degree from Harvard. He was the first to put tuxedos and diamond tiaras at ringside.

Not since Nero had such opulence gazed down on a blood sport.

“I never seed anything like it!” he was moved to exclaim when he saw what kind of a fight crowd he had produced for Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier.

Don Fraser is a fight promoter from the old school. You can tell by the big cigar, the well filled stomach, the unwrinkled brow.

When most sports-crazy kids of his generation grew up, their heroes were guys like Pete Rose or Babe Ruth or Joe Louis. When Don Fraser was growing up in suburban Los Angeles, his heroes were Honest Bill Daly, a promoter nicknamed The Boy Bandit, and ticket czars Mike Jacobs and the legendary Tex Rickard.

Don served a proper apprenticeship. He was publicity agent at the old Hollywood Legion, where the flower of Hollywood used to come to the Friday night fights; a fight flack at the Olympic Auditorium, a matchmaker for the fabled Aileen Eaton, boxing commission director in Sacramento, and promoter at the Forum for the famous Jack Kent Cooke.

Fraser has been in the game long enough to be unsentimental about it. He knows that pugs are creatures who eat at one end and usually fall to the floor on the other. He knows that managers and promoters are masters at double-entry bookkeeping, that checks bounce, that the toughest guys in the game are not always the ones in the ring.

He once sat in a room with promoter Jackie Leonard, who was sweatily on the phone to the late Frankie Carbo, the godfather of the boxing game, begging him to call off the triggers because he didn’t have enough money to pay off Kid Gavilan.

Fraser put on Ali-Norton II in their heavyweight series. He was the liaison for Cooke and Jerry Perenchio when they staged Ali-Frazier, bouts 1 and 2.

“I went to New York and this high-priced press agent they hired handed me a list of ex-champions he wanted at the fight. He had four dead guys on there, including Jack Johnson and Max Baer. I told him if he could get in touch with those guys, we didn’t need the fight, we could get richer that way.”

Fraser thought he knew the way to get rich in the fight game in L.A. Lease the dingy Olympic and schedule two Mexican cult heroes, one from below the border, one from the States. Get the word out, wait for the border exodus and day-of-fight sale, then hope there’s a clear-cut victory so that the seats won’t be torn out, cars set afire, or snakes tossed into the ring. That, presumably, would make enough money to tide him over for three or more buildup cards.

“When this fellow from the Marriott Hotels came to me with an idea to promote boxing in the Irvine Marriott, I thought he was crazy. ‘Who’s gonna come?’ I asked him. ‘The gardeners?’

“Well, I’ll tell you who came: Guys in Mercedes and button-down collars. Ladies in Paris originals. The white-wine set.

“They don’t care who’s fighting. They don’t boo a bad fight. They say, ‘Well, the poor fellow’s trying.’ They don’t throw things. They don’t get mad at bad decisions. They say, ‘Well, it might have been closer than it looked.’

“They know their Mercedes will be in the parking lot and not at an auction in Virginia when they get out, that valet parking doesn’t mean the valet will take your car and park it in Kansas City.

“I sell out every month. People say, ‘Why don’t you do it every week?’ and I say, ‘I want it to be happening, not a streetcar.’ ”

It’s the politest form of pugilism known to man. “Don’t they tend to yell, ‘Stop it!’, and get squeamish when someone gets cut?” Fraser is asked.

He grins. “You’d be surprised how game the upper class is,” he says. “They been getting a bad rap.”