This Fight Wasn’t a Mismatch, It Was Really a Non-Match

Well, the train won the wreck. The tank won the war. The rope won the hanging. The river won the flood. The cannon beat the spear. The battleship sank the canoe. The mugger got the watch. The flood got Johnstown. The bank got the money.

Brute strength conquered in the end. It usually does.

A creature so awesome you wondered what they did with the tusks of what surfaced in the Convention Hall here Monday night and squashed a 212-pound fighter who thought he was the heavyweight champion of the world as if he were something he found crawling up his leg.

The last time anyone saw anything this ferocious it had a horn on its nose and it lived in a river and charged land rovers. It walked through Michael Spinks as if he wasn’t there.

It wasn’t a fight, it was a felony. It was a fight only if you consider the iceberg and the Titanic a tossup. They should have blindfolded Michael Spinks. Or, better yet, Mike Tyson.

They said Michael Spinks’ very awkwardness would work for him. Well, he wasn’t all that awkward. He fell straight down like everybody else. It was just as well gravity was working. He got hit so hard, if he went straight up, he wouldn’t have come down yet. The ground broke his fall. Tyson almost broke his back.

At least Tyson didn’t eat him.

Never have so many paid so much for so little. The “fight” lasted 1 minute 31 seconds. Tyson probably could have knocked him out on the way out of the locker room. Or on the way in.

The public paid in excess of $70 million for this insult to the intelligence. Barnum must be crying someplace today. The public has a taste for catastrophes. This one was as one-sided as an orphanage fire. If you missed it, get some films of the German Army going through Belgium or those baby seals getting clubbed on a rock in the St. Lawrence river.

Michael Spinks said he liked to put a little terror in his life. For an encore he should go find a castle where the owner sleeps in a coffin and turns into a wolf. Mike Tyson said he could “see the fear in his eyes” right away. I’ll bet. Anybody who wouldn’t be afraid of Mike Tyson coming at him with clenched fists just doesn’t understand the situation. A live lion would have fear in its eyes.

Mike Tyson is 218 pounds of pure menace. Michael Spinks climbed in the ring with a robe brocaded and bejeweled and an entourage of tuxedoed hangers-on. Tyson had no robe, no towel, no socks and no pity. They should have put a hood over his head. It wasn’t a bout, it was an execution.

Spinks prayed in his corner before the bell. He must have thought he was about to meet his Maker.

He had a very bad fight plan. He got up the first time he got knocked down. He tried to the second time. Fortunately, he couldn’t make it. Or we might have had a homicide instead of a knockout. This time, Michael Spinks stayed down till the count reached 11. He wasn’t taking any chances.

Michael Spinks is a nice man. He’s good to his mother, he helps little old ladies across streets, he has a nice sense of humor. He just can’t fight. He got $13.5 million for making the fourth briefest appearance in heavyweight title history. He goes down in the record books. I emphasize down . Tyson won’t be able to recognize him if he meets him on the street. Unless he falls down. You get a picture of Tyson looking puzzled if he comes up to him, then saying: “Wait a minute. The shoes look familiar. Would you mind lying down?”

What can you say about a fight that died 91 seconds after it started? You couldn’t even call it a mismatch. It was a non-match.

Tyson has this 20-inch--or maybe it’s 80-inch--neck. Spinks has this kind of pencil neck. Spinks has this kind of junk pitcher’s game plan, he tries to tap you to death. Tyson fights you 3 minutes of every round and throws rocks. It was almost as if they untied a hungry leopard and pointed him at a live steak.

They thought Tyson’s merry marital madcaps might have disrupted his focus, might have made him vulnerable. Tyson throws them off easier than he did Spinks. The press got him so angry, he took it out on poor Spinks. If they don’t let up on him, New York may be next.

“You tried to embarrass me, you tried to disgrace me and my family,” he chided the press bitterly in a shambles of a press conference. “All my life has been chaos, the only way you could get to me was through my family because basically I’m an OK person,” he said.

“This might be my last fight,” he threatened.

At $22 million for a little more than a minute and a half’s work, it’s not likely he’ll join a monastery no matter what the press writes about his home life.

The problem is finding a worthy opponent. How about the Penn Central Metroliner? Or a shark in a tank.