Boxing : If He Defeats Spinks, Tyson Could Surpass Sullivan’s 10-Year Reign

He was a wife-beater, a violent alcoholic, a racist--and the most beloved sports figure of 19th-Century America.

John L. Sullivan was also the first American athlete to earn a fortune from sports--about a million dollars during his career--and the first to fumble it all away.

When Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks fight June 27 for about $33 million, it has a chance to go down as the richest boxing event of all time.

Sullivan’s era was the 1880s, and as a sports and entertainment figure, he towered over that decade like a colossus. He was the first American sports superstar. In that single decade, he took an outlawed sport off the river barges and into modern arenas.

When he won his first important fight, it was on a barge anchored in the Hudson River off Yonkers, N.Y. It was 1881. Sullivan was 22, a slab-muscled powerhouse from Boston. His opponent was a New York street thug, John Flood, a 3-1 favorite.

There were 400 men on that barge, each of whom had paid the unheard of sum of $10. (What a difference a century makes: Ringside for Tyson-Spinks is $1,500.) The Sullivan-Flood purse was $1,000, with $750 going to the winner.

Sullivan knocked Flood out in the eighth round.

Nine months later, in Mississippi City, Miss., Sullivan won the world bare-knuckle championship with a ninth-round knockout of Paddy Ryan. He was boxing’s dominant, all-conquering figure until 1892, when San Francisco’s Jim Corbett knocked him out in the 21st round at New Orleans.

In a recently published book, “John L. Sullivan and His America” (University of Illinois Press), Michael T. Isenberg presents a scholarly, socio-economic portrait of Sullivan the fighter, and also Sullivan the drunkard-adulterer-spendthrift-wife beater-bully.

Sullivan had an annoying habit of greeting old friends with a fierce pinch of the shoulder, squeezing hard until he’d raised a black and blue mark.

“Sullivan ran through a million bucks in his lifetime (1858-1918), and in his day that was real money,” said Isenberg, who is a U.S. Naval Academy history professor.

Isenberg’s accounts of Sullivan’s later years detail fund-raising banquets, held frequently in Boston and New York, to bolster the old champion’s finances. According to Isenberg, however, they weren’t necessarily humiliating experiences for Sullivan.

“To Sullivan, I think it was a chance late in life to press the flesh, to get his due from his adoring public,” Isenberg said. “It was sort of like psychic compensation.”

Sullivan toured America and Europe in his prime, often offering $1,000 to any man who could last four rounds with him.

On his American “Grand Tour” of 1883-84, Isenberg writes that Sullivan cleared $80,000. There were roughly 50 takers, he said, on the $1,000 proposition, and Sullivan reportedly finished up about 50-0.

Sullivan made hundreds of thousands more as an actor and entertainer, during and after his boxing career.

For generations after his death, it was not unusual to find a Sullivan portrait on the wall of an Irish-owned Boston-area bar.

On the theme of boxers making and spending fortunes, Isenberg found that scenario hasn’t changed in a century.

“It just doesn’t seem to matter, whether it’s Irish kids from hard-scrabble backgrounds (like Sullivan), or blacks and Hispanics from today,” he said. “When they’ve had no training in how to manage money, they’re ripe targets for opportunists.”

Isenberg, in his research, found an oft-repeated error by boxing historians. It’s boxing dogma that the 1892 Sullivan-Corbett fight was the first gloved championship fight. Not so, Isenberg said.

“Sullivan had soft hands and hated bare-knuckle fights,” he said. “In his entire career, he fought only three times with bare knuckles.”

Sullivan’s 10-year reign a century ago may be recalled with increasing frequency in coming years by boxing scholars, if Mike Tyson blows away Michael Spinks, as many expect.

After Spinks, most agree, there’s no one out there.

Tyson’s embattled manager, Bill Cayton, talks of probable future opponents such as Frank Bruno of England (Sept. 3 in London), Francesco Damiani of Italy and Adilson Rodrigues of Brazil.

Stateside, Tyson has already defeated four of the Americans in most top-10 rankings--Tony Tucker, Tyrell Biggs, Jose Ribalta and Pinklon Thomas. Carl Williams and Tim Witherspoon, both of whom lost to Larry Holmes, are probables down the road.

The only opponent on Tyson’s appointment calendar who figures to raise any excitement at all is Evander Holyfield, who is stepping up from cruiserweight.

So are we looking at maybe a Sullivan-like reign here? Or maybe even a Rocky Marciano reign? Joe Louis held the heavyweight championship the longest, 12 years, and holds the record for title defenses, 26. Tyson, who is only 21, has already defended it seven times. At his present pace, he could break Louis’ record for title defenses when he’s 27 or 28.

Or he could quit.

Mike Tyson, Inc., will earn between $40 and $50 million this year, of which Tyson should clear about $8 million. Indications are, however, that he’s having difficulty combining both a marriage to movie star Robin Givens and his boxing career. He is outspokenly unhappy with his manager, Cayton, but seemingly can’t do anything about it until his contract runs out, in 1991.

And so if he beats Spinks and then announces he’s retiring, not many insiders would be shocked.

After all, put yourself in Mike Tyson’s shoes. If you had $8 million, would you rather go back to training camp and get ready to fight a long parade of stiffs, or stay home, with Robin Givens?