Bruno Is Necessary, Just Barely

The very proper British gentleman, massive but elegant in his Savile Row suit, bench-made shoes, regimental tie and jeweled cuff links, strode into the hotel ballroom. The photographers hardly looked up from their buffet plates of char-broiled chicken and fruit salad. No cameras whirred on the TV stand.

The British boxing champion, the Queen’s own, Frank Bruno, was polite, pleasant. Coffee was offered to him.

“Do you have tea?” he asked in that accent, curiously Cockney but coming out in the deep melodious baritone of his West Indian ancestry.

Suddenly, the doors flew open and into the room rushed this powerful, tank-sized young man with an open collar, rumpled linen suit and the glittering eyes of a born warrior. You had the sense of something that had just escaped.

The photographers galvanized into action. Plates of potato salad hit the deck as they scrambled for cameras, vantage points, close-ups, lighting angles. It was worth your life to be in their path. It was like a prison bust-out.

“You there in the suit,” one of them called out to Frank Bruno. “Could you just move a little to the right?”

Mike Tyson had arrived. The Brute. The Elemental Force. The Irresistible Object.

Mike Tyson is more than just a pug. He is a celebrity. He is a Barbara Walters special. He doesn’t just belong to the sports pages. Tyson makes the front pages. His face glares out at you from the covers of a dozen scandal magazines and papers.

Tyson’s pictures sell. So, sprinkled in among the legitimate news photogs and TV cameramen, are the paparazzi. Their photos go into publications that revel in sleaze. “ ‘Mike Beat Me!’ Sobs Ex.” “Champ in Disco Brawl!” “ ‘She Just Wants My Money!’ Cries Champ.”

He’s America’s resident caveman. He comes into focus as a guy in a leopard suit, carrying a club and dragging something by the hair behind him. Mike’s image is right out of “One Million B.C.” He shouldn’t be fighting Frank Bruno. He should be fighting a dinosaur.

Tyson is the incarnation of that famous cartoon of the fighter looking across the ring at a terrifying opponent while his manager tells the ref, “My boy says he don’t fight till he hears it talk.”

Jack Dempsey had this little high-pitched girlish sing-song voice. Gene Tunney sounded like a Shakespearean actor. And Mike Tyson has this little-boy lisp, curiously appealing coming out of that mass of muscle and menace. If you only heard Mike Tyson, you’d want to sit him on a desk and buy him an ice cream cone and put the sergeant’s hat on him. But if you’d see him coming, you’d cross the street. And cross yourself.

Tyson senses that he belongs in a ring. Out of it, he’s a lion in the streets. People scatter at his approach.

“I’m just trying to find out who I am,” he said at his news conference at the Hilton ballroom the other morning. “I’m going back in the ring. I’m going to do something that I do better than anybody on this planet.”

That would be destroy whatever they put in front of him.

Frank Bruno is just the instrument in this rock concert. He was as overlooked as the bean salad at the hotel news conference.

Frank’s trouble is that, despite his West Indian forbears, he’s still a British fighter--and they have been somewhat less than devastating on these shores.

The prototype of the breed was an Anglo-Saxon marshmallow named Phil Scott, who pioneered a new way to win prize fights--lying flat on his back. Phil fought in the days before the protective cup and it was inadvisable to hit him anywhere below the Adam’s apple or even, on occasion, the forehead. The first blow of the fight would land, whereupon Phil would fall down shouting, “Foul!” a tactic that earned him the sobriquet Phaintin’ Phil Scott, the horizontal hero.

Frank Bruno wins his fights standing up. But that’s his trouble. He fights like the redcoats at Concord, squared off and upright. He terrorized European fighters with his devastating punch--31 knockouts in 33 fights--but when he met Americans who swarm and crouch, Bonecrusher Smith and Tim Witherspoon, he got as horizontal as Phaintin’ Phil.

A limousine picked up Mike Tyson at the airport. A car-rental bus picked up Frank Bruno. A hundred cameramen and 7 TV channels kept their lenses focused on Champ Tyson at all times. Bruno got his picture taken only when he was standing next to Tyson.

They don’t need a morgue full of Bruno’s pictures. He’s not going to be giving away his new Bentley at a Lincoln Tunnel toll booth. He’s not going to be wrapping another car around a tree after a fight with his wife. He’s not going on a TV special where his loved ones will label him a manic depressive.

All he’s got to do is show up at the Las Vegas Hilton Feb. 25 and become a line in Mike Tyson’s record. If he can go the distance, they may knight him.

Still, there’ll always be an England. Says Sir Frank of his opponent: “Deep down, all this controversy (pronounced con-trah-versy) is going to affect him somewhere down the line. He’s only human.”

Frank better hope so. Tyson’s other opponents may want some proof.