Cricket on Telly and Witherspoon’s Belly

The newspapers this morning are full of the Big Boy George Heroin Bust. Whether or not this is front-page stuff back in the States is unknown to those of us who have not seen an American daily for several weeks, save one USA paper (hint, hint) that will remain unnamed, a paper so single-purposed in its recent sports coverage that we have taken to referring to it as Len Bias Today.

Today’s tellyvision is an eye-opener. For some weird reason, they are running a rerun of a football game between the University of Texas and the University of Houston, interrupted periodically by an advertisement featuring NFL supper star William Perry of the Chicago Bears lifting a refrigerator.

Perhaps this is designed to manufacture a proper frame of mind for the upcoming scrap here between another bunch of Texas footballers, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Super Bowl champion Bears. It will be at this exhibition that, if the 300-plus-pound Perry carries the football and gets tackled, the Britons in the audience surely will sing: “In London, Fridge is falling down, falling down, falling down . . . “

Alas, this is not the only great Britain sporting event in sight. Wimbledon is behind us, but the British Open golf classic is just up the high road in Scotland. Also, the world championship Karpov-Kasparov chess match has attracted considerable interest here, particularly considering its tie to the hit musical “Chess” that remains one of the London theatre district’s hottest tickets. (Sort of Bobby Fischer Meets Evita .)

Television, meantime, has been supplying plenty of action-packed cricket--the object of which, we at last have figured out, is for a gentleman dressed in a beekeeper’s suit to take a 19th-Century headmaster’s paddle and thwack a croquet ball hurled violently at him by an asylum escapee wearing a nice V-neck sweater from Harrod’s.

And lest we forget, British TV also has brought us the Jackie Stewart Skeet Shooting Classic, lacking only Jackie, who should have been describing each gunshot in his famous Scottish burr. No doubt he was out somewhere driving his mota cah.

There is, amazingly enough, an event coming up that is as large in scope as any of the aforementioned, a spectacular one-on-one match, featuring one of the biggest people in England--and no, this has absolutely nothing to do with Sarah Ferguson.

It has to do with Frank Bruno, who, on the evening in question--or, rather, at the eerie hour of 1 to 2 in the morning next Sunday--has a chance to become the first British-born heavyweight boxing champion of the world since Bob Fitzsimmons.

Wedding, schmedding. Prince Andrew will be the second-most popular man in his kingdom this month if, by some chance, the rippling-muscled Bruno can take the measure of the tough and tubby Terrible Tim Witherspoon, the World Boxing Assn.’s heavyweight champion.

Bruno, 24, is terribly popular here. He even has a best-selling biography out. His recent triumph over Gerrie Coetzee, the over-the-hill South African, was so encouraging to sports-mad Britons that they have conveniently forgotten the bops on the jaw Bruno took from that immortal Joliet, Ill., ex-convict, Jumbo Cummings, or the 10th-round knockout punch Bruno took from that crusher of few bones, Bonecrusher Smith.

Regardless of these mishaps, Bruno is given a good chance to win this fight by himself, by his handlers and by some of those who will pay ridiculous prices (50 to 150 pounds) for faraway seats in a huge football stadium (Wembley) for an after-midnight fight arranged for the prime-time Saturday convenience of a television network (HBO) that is over an ocean away.

Bruno’s chance appears to lie in the fact that Witherspoon has shown up at his training camp with a striking resemblance to Refrigerator Perry. To say that Witherspoon looks rather fat is to say that fish look rather wet. If they drew 12 numbers and two arrows on his belly, he could pass for Big Ben. This guy is the Prince of Whales.

“I don’t know if I am kidding myself or I am seeing things, but his body doesn’t look as if he has been training for three months,” Bruno himself felt compelled to say of his opponent.

It is possible that when Witherspoon heard he would be paid nearly 2 million pounds, he misunderstood, believing instead that the promoters hoped he weighed 2 million pounds. In any case, at his open training camp in the Essex countryside--Bruno’s camp has been closed--Witherspoon publicly has failed to jab away his flab, sleepwalking through brief and sluggish sparring sessions while fight czar Don King, his royal lowness, the man who put the “p.u.” in pugilism, insists at the top of his lungs that “Turrible Tim” will be prime rib by fight night.

Witherspoon, for his part, mocks the form of his foe. “Most muscle-bound guys can’t take a punch,” he prattled. “It don’t do any good to have all them muscles in your head and cheeks. All them weightlifters that try it go down first punch.”

A glass jaw does appear to be Bruno’s Achilles heel. And Witherspoon can hit. Friends fear that one solid left hook will settle the matter of Beefcake vs. Blubber once and for all. Said Henry Cooper, one of the few good British heavyweights since Fitzsimmons, of Bruno’s inability to take a lick: “None of us likes to get hit on the chin, but Frank doesn’t seem to know what to do about it.”

Bruno knows better than to try to intimidate Witherspoon, who has mixed it up on even terms with Larry Holmes and who would not back off, as Bruno himself put it, if a bus came rolling toward him.

“He comes from Philadelphia, and nothing scares him,” Bruno said, evidently considering this self-explanatory.

Even so, Fearless Frank has tried to rattle Terrible Tim. He has teased him about the marijuana traces that turned up in Witherspoon’s dope test following the January decision over Tony Tubbs that gave him the WBA title. He also has teased Tim the Tub that a championship belt belongs around a waist that it can get around.

Witherspoon just says watch them muscles go down.

It will not be long before we know whether Bruno of Britain wears the crown. One suspects, however, that Queen Elizabeth will not be seen at ringside, squeezing a rolled-up program, guzzling a beer and yelling: “Knock him on his arse!” She probably will just stay home and watch Baylor-Texas Tech.