He Can’t Subpoena His Crown

Only one man has ever won the heavyweight championship of the world from the floor.

He may be shortly joined by another.

You should win heavyweight championships with left hooks, right crosses, hard jabs, fancy footwork. Mike Tyson is about to try to win one with a flurry of whereases, parties of the second part, stipulations, and in consideration whereofs.

You ever think you’d live to see Mike Tyson needing a lawyer to win a fight for him?

Max Schmelings win fights on one knee, not Mike Tysons.

You think Joe Louis would, so to speak, go to court to get a knockout reversed? Picture Ali doing it, can you?

It isn’t as if the various boxing commissions in charge of the sport nowadays were serious people. These are a bunch of cutups who will write you a whole new division of boxing if the price is right and the check’s good. This is a cast of characters who will install new wrinkles like cruiserweights, paperweights or super junior middleweights--whatever you want to legitimize your television show as a “title” fight. Checkbook pugilism.

These comedians have now told us that what they’re going to do is throw out the results of last weekend’s heavyweight title fight. They’re going to tell the guy who got knocked out that he actually won. Even if they first have to bring him to. Match that around your better parlor magic tricks.

It’s not a bad trick. If it works, we next strip Gene Tunney posthumously of his 1927 heavyweight championship. While we’re at it, we reverse the order of the 1985 World Series. That one, you will remember, clearly turned on an umpire’s decision that subsequent replays showed to be a wrong one. It opened the floodgates and enabled the Kansas City Royals, down two games to three, trailing 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth with the bases empty and the Cardinals about to claim the world championship, to rally for two runs and a victory after the side should have been out.

Don’t you imagine there’s been a Wimbledon or two that could be reversed on a technicality? Let the lawyers loose and we may yet lose World War II.

Boxing, it always seemed to me, had been most immune to this kind of tinkering. I mean, so Dempsey was helped back in the ring against Luis Firpo. So, he cold-cocked Jack Sharkey when Sharkey’s head was turned to protest to the ref. You don’t take it to the Supreme Court, you stage a rematch.

Boxing always seemed to me to be the most atavistic of all sports. It traced back to the caveman days. You think the Cro-Magnon man could take his case to a higher court? “Protect yourself at all times” was boxing’s motto, not, “Get me Caruso!”

I’m kind of ashamed of Mike Tyson. I thought he would take his lumps like a man and not go crying to whiplash attorneys to get his title back for him. Mike always looked to me like a guy who was a throwback to the days when men were men and it was either him or the dinosaur. Mike always looked as if he were fighting for the right to drag you back to the cave and have you for dinner. I never figured Mike for a guy who even needed a referee, never mind a boxing commission and L. A. Law.

We all just love legal nitpicking. They have taken law into the far reaches of Alice’s Wonderland. Regaining the heavyweight championship for a fighter they have to revive first is duck soup for guys who can get a serial killer’s knife back to him or get an America’s Cup for a yacht that just lost four straight races by half a day.

For all we know, Mike Tyson probably wasn’t read his rights before he was knocked out.

Boxing, it always seemed to me, was above this forest of rules and counter-rules that govern most other sports. The way you tell a winner of a boxing match, it always seemed to me, you took a look at both fighters in the last round. The one standing up was surely the winner. Next, you picked the one who was bleeding least or who looked less like something hanging off a French cathedral. I always thought you should judge by, Who would win this fight if it went on? The fine points of scoring bored me. I mean, how do you score a murder?

When the Tyson-James Douglas fight ended the other night, the winner was not hard to pick out. In the first place he was upright. In the second place, his opponent could not see out of one eye, the count had just reached 11 and, if the referee had permitted the contest to continue, Mike Tyson wouldn’t have needed a lawyer, he’d have needed a priest.

So Buster Douglas got the benefit of a long count? He got up, didn’t he? That’s what you’re supposed to do when the referee holds up nine fingers.

Let’s examine the original long count, Dempsey-Tunney 1927. The referee there--properly--did not begin the count (as the rules specified) until the fighter scoring the knockdown had repaired to the farthest neutral corner.

That rule, as it happened, should have been called the Jack Dempsey Rule because it was put in precisely because Dempsey was notorious for standing over a fallen opponent (Jess Willard and Luis Firpo are two who come to mind) and slugging them again before they could get fully to their feet.

So, when Dempsey went to a nearby (and not neutral) corner after flooring Tunney, referee Dave Barry shouted at him, “Neutral corner, Jack!” And Jack scowled, “I stay here!” Barry dragged him to a neutral corner before starting the count.

What should Tunney have done? Crawled around on his hands and knees to find the knockdown timekeeper at the bell and say, “How much time do I have?”

No. And neither should James (Buster) Douglas.

If it is the intention of the boxing commissions simply to force a rematch, it is not laudable but at least logical. It would be a big mistake for Buster to risk his newly won title against anyone but Tyson. An Evander Holyfield fight he might lose--at one-tenth the purse he could command for Tyson.

If he’s dumb enough to risk that, maybe they’re right to take the title away from him. He can’t be trusted with it.

But Mike Tyson is a student of boxing history. Does he want to be the answer to the trivia question, “Who were the only two fighters to win the heavyweight championship from a prone position?” Does he want to show his grandkids a picture of himself stretched out on the floor with a purple mound where his eye used to be and say, “This is a picture of Grandpa winning the heavyweight championship fight in Tokyo in 1990”?

I like the old-timers’ way of handling defeat. When Dempsey lost to Tunney the first time and came home all beat up, and his wife, Estelle Taylor, asked him what happened, Jack said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” When Louis got knocked out by Rocky Marciano, he looked at the long faces of his supporters and said, “Hey, I knocked out lots of guys!”

You just forgot to duck, Mike. And, hey! You knocked out lots of guys!