Hearns’ Bout Gets Silent Treatment

There is a fight Saturday night in Atlantic City, N.J., a title fight between Thomas (Hit Man) Hearns and Michael (Silk) Olajide, and it’s being held at the Taj Mahal, Donald Trump’s latest monument to greed and gaudiness, but damn few people besides The Hit Man, The Silk and The Donald know anything about it.

The reason for that can be summed up in two words: Irving Rudd. Or, more accurately, the absence of same. On Monday, Bob Arum, the promoter of Hearns-Olajide, was asked about the lack of publicity for this fight, which should be garnering some attention, even if it is for Hearns’ WBO super-middle-weight title.

“Because . . . Irving’s in the hospital,” Arum thundered, with customary sensitivity. But the message was clear: With all due respect to John Totaro and Lee Samuels and Tom Cosentino and all the other fine young publicists who work for and with Top Rank, there is only one I. Rudd.

Four weeks ago Wednesday, Rudd--Unswerving Irving to his friends in the media, I. Rudd to himself and “The Bro” to Hearns and the rest of the Kronk Boxing Team--went under the knife for coronary bypass surgery. Today, such operations are usually routine, even for 75-year-old men whose hearts have suffered the strain of working for both Arum and Don King in the same lifetime.

But complications set in, respiratory difficulties, and Rudd has spent most of the past month on a respirator, incommunicado, while Gert, whom he always refers to as “my bride,” sits by his side, waiting to hear the next anecdote about Jersey Joe Walcott or Jackie Robinson or Sugar Ray Leonard or Cardigan Bay or the days he spent working Jacobs Beach.

For the unitiated, one did not get a suntan at Jacobs Beach -- it was that portion of Eighth Avenue in New York that was the center of the boxing world in the 1940s and ‘50s. On Jacobs Beach was the old Madison Square Garden, the office of matchmaker Mike Jacobs, and Stillman’s Gym, where Rudd had his first exposure to boxing and characters such as Razor Phil Lewis, Mushky Jackson and Benny The Whoosh.

Irving Rudd first worked his magic as the press agent for a Harlem fight club called the Rockland Palace, where outstanding black fighters such as Walcott, Tiger Jack Fox and Elmer “Violent” Ray fought weekly, largely ignored by the white media. He went on to work for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Yonkers Raceway (where his idea of deliberately misspelling the word as ‘RACEWYA” on the marquee on opening day resulted in newspaper coverage across the country), King (for nine months) and, since 1978, Arum. Everybody who is anybody in New York sports knows Irving Rudd, and most have been helped by him in some way. Nobody, not even King, dislikes him.

“Pure and simple, the man is a mensch,” said Bill Mazer, the New York radio and television sportscaster along with whom Irving Rudd has been fighting the Battle of Brooklyn ever since Walter O’Malley moved Da Bums to the left coast in 1957. Mazer’s favorite Irving Rudd story concerns the time someone observed that “Howard Cosell is his own worst enemy.”

Countered Rudd: “Not while I’m alive.”

And Tom Kenville, Madison Square Garden’s boxing publicist who worked for Top Rank with Rudd back in the late ‘70s, remembered when Irving, all 5-foot-3 of him, was assigned the job of babysitting Leon Spinks during his training for the rematch with Muhammad Ali in New Orleans. At the time, Spinks’ disappearing acts made Houdini look like a bumbling amateur. Spinks’ training consisted solely of hitting the heavy bag, and one day, a Japanese welterweight named Ryu Sorimachi -- who was fighting Carlos Palomino on the undercard -- was working the bag before an admiring bunch of Japanese tourists and refused to surrender it.

“Irving, if this guy doesn’t get off the bag soon, Leon is going to disappear,” Kenville told Rudd. “What are we going to do?”

“Leave it to me,” Rudd said. He walked over, whispered a few words to the Japanese contingent, and BINGO! -- everyone quickly dispersed.

“What did you say to them?” Kenville asked.

“I just told them if they didn’t get lost, I was going to sing four choruses of ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ ” Rudd said.

The word Wednesday was Rudd had made it through the rocky early rounds and is going to recover. He probably will return to work at some point. But this weekend, for the first time in 10 years, there will be a Thomas Hearns fight but no phone calls from Irving Rudd, pitching story ideas. No items about how Thomas visited a bunch of school kids, or beat Emanuel Steward out of $500 at the poker table, or challenged Isiah Thomas to a little one-on-one.

In their place are an abundance of Hearns-Rudd anecdotes culled from their 12-year association, and in lieu of fresh material, they will have to do for now.

--Rudd on Hearns’ closeness with a buck: “People always ask me if Thomas Hearns is cheap. I say, ‘Not anymore.’ When he was just starting out, he was cheap. Now that he’s a great champion, he’s frugal.”

--Rudd on a rematch between Hearns and Marvin Hagler: “I’d rather see the two of them do lunch, and I want to see who picks up the tab, because I have a feeling cobwebs would grow around them before either guy makes a move.”

--Hearns on Rudd’s insistence that interviews be conducted at their previously agreed-upon time: “Irving, you suffer from the white man’s disease: Punctuality.”

--Rudd on his relationship with Hearns: “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me. And that’s how it’s been for 10 years now--we’ve done nothing for each other.”

But more important, there is the Kronk jacket given him by Hearns that Rudd loves to wear, with the inscription, “Irving the Bro” on the breast, and there are the two huge floral arrangements in his hotel room sent by Hearns and his manager, Emanuel Steward. They know, even if the general public does not, that this time, someone very important is missing.

So now it will be Mike Tyson vs. Henry Tillman, the man who beat Tyson twice as an amateur, on June 16 at Caesars Palace, and they’re calling it “Hell to Pay.” The co-feature will be George Foreman taking on Adilson Rodrigues, a much better match.

Why, you might ask, would anyone wish to see Tyson fight Tillman, especially since Tillman has been knocked out by Evander Holyfield and Dwain Bonds and once retired for 22 months after losing to Canadian punching bag Willie deWit?

Obviously, there’s only one explanation for “Hell to Pay.” Although Tyson wants a rematch with Buster Douglas, he and his manager have told Tyson to go to hell, so Tillman’s the poor sucker who’s got to pay. Either that or Tyson made a deal with the devil -- or was it Don King? -- and now Hell is calling in its IOUs.

Either way, “Hell to Pay” will be hell to watch.