Looking at It His Way, Fight Wasn’t So Bad

In the late rounds, when it appeared more and more evident that the fight in the ring was going to be a wall-to-wall stinker, the smile on the face of a man in Row 3 grew broader and broader.

Ronald (Butch) Lewis might have been the only guy in the crowd at the Mike Tyson-Bonecrusher Smith junior prom Saturday night who was enjoying himself. From his point of view, it was a great fight. Not Dempsey-Tunney, perhaps, but it went just the way Butch wanted it to go--boringly. If you looked closely, you could almost see the canary feathers at the corner of Butch’s grin.

It was my friend Herbert Warren Wind, I believe, who once dubbed tennis “the Balkans of sport.” The game, he felt, was constantly awash with open border skirmishes.

Well, if tennis is the Balkans, boxing is West Beirut. It’s the no-man’s land of athletics, anarchy in 8-ounce gloves. Its symbol should not be ring ropes, it should be barbed wire. Its coat-of-arms should be double-crosses rampant on a field of bald-faced lies.

The fights in the ring are governed by the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules. The ones outside the ring are governed by Attila the Hun’s. It’s like Saturday night in Dodge City. The law is whatever the guy with the gun says it is.

That side of the business is full of Fritzie Zivics. Talk about eye gouges, hitting after the bell, below the belt, rabbit punching, kidney punching, hitting a guy when he’s down--these guys make Tony Galento look like a vicar.

Which is why Butch Lewis had this seraphic smile on his face Saturday night. The worse the fight got, the happier he got.

You see, before that debacle in the desert, Lewis was known in the fight game as a guy who had performed the unthinkable in pugilism. He seemed to have knocked himself out. And claimed foul anyway.

Butch was the fight promoter who had sewed up the rights to the guy who was widely considered to be the “real” heavyweight champion of the world.

The fight game is such that there are, at any given moment, more heavyweight champions in the world than there are crocodiles--and just as hard to tell one from the other.

But if there was such a thing, Butch’s claim seemed to be the most legitimate. Michael Spinks’ link to the throne trailed back through Larry Holmes to Ken Norton to Muhammad Ali, a real purple accession as valid as any Hapsburg’s or House of Windsor’s. I mean, Michael was not Michael Dokes, John Tate, Mike Weaver, Tony Tubbs, Tim Witherspoon or any of the other whodats of the modern fight game. He was credentialed.

So, when cable television came along looking for a way to unify the division and restore the marquee value to the title again, it followed they had to have Spinks in any elimination tournament.

Butch Lewis went along and even struck a partnership with rival promoter, Don King--to be called “Dynamic Duo Inc.”--and HBO and the Hilton hotels. Lewis signed an agreement pledging Spinks to participation in the elimination tournament.

This was all right so long as Spinks was flattening European tank-town palookas, but Spinks’ people--read: Butch Lewis--got restive when it became apparent he might end up fighting a live tiger such as Mike Tyson for a paltry couple of million. Lewis proposed that Spinks step out of the tournament for one fight--at 10 times as much--against the illusory Gerry Cooney.

Now, Gerry Cooney is an interesting case history in that no one is quite sure there really is one. There used to be one. He got all the way up to a title fight with Larry Holmes once, but, when he got his block knocked off, he disappeared from view like Judge Crater or Amelia Earhart.

There have been periodic sightings since then. As with the California condor or Big Foot, there have been people who claim to have seen a Gerry Cooney but, by and large, you have to take it on blind faith. Cooney is like that proverbial man upon the stair. He wasn’t there again today. He’s the fistic version of the Easter Bunny.

But, there’s one thing for sure: If there is a Gerry Cooney, he’s white. And you can make a lot of money fighting him if you can find him and get him in a ring--neither of which is all that easy.

Butch Lewis thought he had the problem licked. He tried to get out of the elimination tournament long enough to knock out Cooney for several million easy dollars.

His tournament partners thought that would be OK--provided Cooney took Spinks’ place in the tournament and fought the rest of the field in the event that he beat Spinks.

Now, Cooney, of course, doesn’t want to fight anybody. And this would certainly, maybe especially, include a certified assassin such as young Mike Tyson.

So, when Lewis couldn’t deliver Cooney, his colleagues just thought, “Well, that’s that. Now we forget about Cooney and get back to the fights in the contract.”

Butch didn’t want to forget Cooney. He preferred to forget the tournament.

But, first, he found, he had an elimination tournament of his own to get through. He had to get by 1)Don King, 2) HBO, 3) Time-Life, which owns HBO, and 4) the Hilton hotels.

Then he got into an unscheduled bout with the International Boxing Federation, of which Michael Spinks is the champion. They announced that if Spinks withdrew from the tournament, they would take his title away because he wouldn’t fight--get this!--Tony Tucker.

Tony Tucker?

Don’t look at me. Your guess is as good as mine.

You can see why defendant Lewis had a vested interest in seeing two tournament heavies stink out the joint the other night. If Tyson had proved to be the second coming of John L. Sullivan or if the fight had been one they write poems about, no one would care if Michael Spinks ever laced on another pair of gloves.

If Mike Tyson had electrified the world, Spinks--and Butch Lewis--would be standing there with no title, no place in the tournament, up to their hips in lawsuits.

As it is, Spinks may be holding the only pat hand. Butch Lewis didn’t knock himself out, after all. He got up at 9 and looks as if he can still stick and move--and hit on the break if necessary.