A Referee’s Goal Is Anonymity : Boxing: Richard Steele drew unwanted attention by stopping the Chavez-Taylor bout--but he would do it again.

When referee Richard Steele stopped the Julio Cesar Chavez-Meldrick Taylor championship fight with two seconds left, the outcry was considerable.

Taylor, score cards later showed, would have won a split decision in the March 17 fight. But at 2:58 of the 12th round, Steele peered into Taylor’s eyes after Taylor had risen from a knockdown at the count of eight. Steele didn’t like what he saw and stopped the bout.

Taylor’s handlers were incensed. His trainer, Lou Duva, had been on the ring apron during Steele’s count, screaming at Steele that the round was over, which was incorrect.

Both Steele and Taylor were distracted by Duva during the count. When Steele asked Taylor, “Are you OK?” Taylor looked at Duva instead of answering Steele.

Reaction was split. Some said Steele should have seen the blinking red light behind Taylor’s head, indicating that fewer than 10 seconds remained in the round. Some said the fight shouldn’t have been stopped in any case; that the referee should have known so little time remained; that Taylor lost millions of dollars in purses down the road.

Others supported Steele fully, pinning blame on Duva for the stoppage.

The Nevada Athletic Commission, which assigns referees, digested all this. Then, in late March, it was faced with selecting a referee for the next Las Vegas title fight, between featherweights Jorge Paez and Louie Espinoza on April 7.

The selection: Richard Steele.

“Yes, I guess you could say we were trying to deliver a message,” Chuck Minker, the commission’s executive director, said recently. “We supported him fully; we feel he handled Chavez-Taylor the right way.”

Chavez-Taylor and Paez-Espinoza were Steele’s 70th and 71st world championship fights. Many believe Steele is pro boxing’s best referee. Minker can’t say that, because he has to keep other prominent Nevada referees happy. But Minker feels free to deliver another message: “ . . . I will say, if you study a list of bouts we’ve assigned him to work in the last few years, that would pretty much speak for itself.”

It would be easy to write that Steele, 46, has become almost as familiar at big Nevada fights as some of the boxers he has refereed. But his ring work is so unobtrusive, his movement so consistent and his presence so understated that he’s often not noticed at all.

If you can’t remember who refereed a famous fight, chances are it was Richard Steele.

“One of the characteristics of a good referee is that he doesn’t get in the fighters’ way, doesn’t get in the fans’ way, and that you hardly notice he’s in there,” said Duane Ford, Nevada Athletic Commission member.

Steele has worked bouts involving Sugar Ray Leonard four times, Tommy Hearns four times, Marvin Hagler twice and Mike Tyson once.

He’s gaining on fellow Nevada referee Carlos Padilla, who has worked 74 world title fights, believed to be the record. A third prominent Nevada referee, Mills Lane, has worked 40.

Steele, though often in the ring with some of the wealthiest athletes in the world, is a light year or two away from their income brackets. And that’s how it should be, he said.

The going fee for a referee in a major championship fight is $2,500, paid by the promoter.

“I’m like everyone else. I’d like to make more money, but there’s another side to it,” he said recently.

“If you were to get to the point where referees were coming into the sport primarily for the money, you’d be in trouble. You’d have guys in there making decisions to keep their jobs, not based on what’s best for the fighters.

“The way I look at it, I make $20,000 to $30,000 a year for part-time work, which has taken me all over the world, so I’m not going to kick about that.”

Steele has a full-time job as the 4 a.m.-to-noon supervisor in the blackjack pit at the Golden Nugget. He’s also a minister, ordained in 1984 at the Calvary Southern Baptist Church in Las Vegas.

Steele is an ex-fighter, and he says to be a good referee, you need to understand that almost all boxers are too fearless.

“My primary responsibility in (the ring) is the safety of the boxers,” he said. “That’s often a problem, because fighters get themselves into a danger zone. They’re too courageous for their own good. Most fighters come up from poverty backgrounds. They’re kids who’ve been told all their lives to go forward, don’t retreat, keep fighting, fight for everything you can get, never surrender.

“So, when they get hurt, it’s just not in their nature to quit. That’s where a referee comes in, knowing when a fighter has had enough. In the case of Taylor, when I looked into his eyes, I didn’t like what I saw there.

“I didn’t care how much time was left, who was winning the fight or how much money was at stake--that has nothing to do with my job. I decided Taylor wasn’t going to take one more punch.”

For many in the Las Vegas Hilton Center that night, and many more watching on HBO, Steele was the compelling figure in the fight’s final round. After waving his arms, signifying that the bout was over, he put his arms around Taylor, looked into his eyes and smiled. It was a rare study, however fleeting, of a moment of compassion in a blood sport.

The camera captured an understanding man, whose expression seemed to say to Taylor: “You fought the good fight, be proud.”

Richard Steele knows pain. He was a light heavyweight in the late 1960s and fought on many cards at the Olympic Auditorium. Jimmy Lennon, the ring announcer there, used to introduce him as “the Man of Steel.”

Steele started quickly, knocking out nine of his first 10 professional opponents, but a stubborn injury prompted his early retirement.

One afternoon, during a sparring session in a downtown gym, former heavyweight champion Ken Norton broke one of Steele’s ribs. A year later, a journeyman heavyweight named Scrap Iron Johnson broke the same rib.

“I broke the same rib three times after I turned pro,” he said. “After I did it the third time, I went to see Dr. Robert Kerlan, and he said I had a weak spot in the rib, that one solution would be to remove it.

“Well, at that point (in 1972), I had a 16-4 record as a pro, so I just decided to retire.”

Jackie McCoy, who was Steele’s trainer in his fighting days, remembers a big hitter but a sometimes wild man.

“I never handled a fighter who could hit any harder than Richard,” McCoy said. “The guy could knock down a wall. But he had a tendency to get too wild in there, though, and his stamina wasn’t always what it should have been.”

Steele was once a would-be football player at Manual Arts High School, where a teammate was future major league baseball standout Paul Blair. Like many of the fighters he referees today, Steele had more heart than ability.

“I was small for my age, and the first year I went out for football, I broke my leg,” he said. “I came back the next year and broke my arm. I’d go crashing into guys much bigger than me, and I kept breaking up my body.

“I enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and went out for the Camp Pendleton football team--or started to. Maybe by then I was smarter. When I saw how big those guys were, I changed my mind.

“A friend of mine at Pendleton suggested I go out for the boxing team, so I did.”

In the mid-1960s, Camp Pendleton had world-class boxing teams. In 1964, two of Steele’s teammates wound up on the U.S. Olympic team--Charlie Brown, who earned a bronze medal, and Maurice Frilot. Another teammate was Roosevelt Sanders, later assistant coach of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team and now head coach of the Camp Lejeune (N.C.) Marines.

Steele had a 27-5 record as a Marine boxer.

When his pro career ended because of his fragile rib, Steele took a job in a plumbing fixture factory. He had become friendly with a referee, Joey Olmos, who suggested that Steele try it.

“Joey told me it had been 30 years since California had a black referee, that he thought I’d be pretty good at it,” Steele said. “So I started working cards in places like Bakersfield and San Bernardino, getting $50 for an entire card.”

Steele was soon a main-event referee by night. By day, he was a campus policeman at Crenshaw High School.

His first world title bout, the first of 71, was a 1976 Forum bantamweight match between Carlos Zarate and Paul Ferreri. He had worked bouts in Nevada--and apparently impressed commission members.

“I got a call one day and was told I’d been nominated to work the (Larry) Holmes-(Gerry) Cooney fight, but that there was a problem--I didn’t live in Nevada,” Steele said.

“I told them that if they thought that much of my work, then I’d solve that problem and move to Las Vegas. That was 1982, and it was the smartest move I ever made.”

Soon afterward, whenever big Las Vegas fights appeared on worldwide television screens, chances were good that the referee was Steele.

And now, chances are, wherever refereeing clinics are held, Steele is at the microphone. The International Boxing Federation is holding a June clinic in Las Vegas, where Steele and Lane will be in charge.

What makes a good referee?

“The thing most people like about Richard is his consistency,” Minker said. “If you noticed in the Chavez-Taylor fight, there were a lot of borderline low blows by both fighters, and some referees might have stepped in and stopped the action with warnings.

“But these were two experienced guys, and Richard knew they weren’t deliberately hitting low, so he’d just say, ‘Keep ‘em up, keep ‘em up,’ and let them fight.

“Richard is a guy who is so smooth in there, you’re not even aware of him during the fight, and that’s how it should be. And he works as hard in the gym to stay in shape as some of the fighters do.”

Steele was asked to name the most exciting fight he’d ever worked, but he couldn’t pick one.

“There’s just been so many,” he said. “I’d say the Hagler-Hearns fight would rank right up there. I know this, I got kind of caught up with it because they had that great first round, and I remember thinking to myself how tired I was after the first round, and I hadn’t thrown a punch.”

Steele, weighing only slightly more than his fighting weight, runs every morning. He figures he needs all the strength he can muster to pry, say, Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas out of a clinch. He does 100 sit-ups every morning and 100 every evening.

And Steele knows when he’s working an exciting fight.

“Pro boxing is an entertainment business,” he said. “If I feel the fighters aren’t doing much, I’ll say something like, ‘Hey, man--this is a fight, not a dance.’ I do all I can to make sure the fans get their money’s worth, and a referee does have control over the flow of action to a certain extent.

“Boxing’s a wonderful sport. I love it. It gets a lot of heat from some people, but boxing is safer than it’s ever been.”

Some of boxing’s biggest names were tossed at Steele, and he was asked to comment on them:

--Sugar Ray Leonard. “Great technical fighter, courageous . . . has the ability to overcome his opponent, no matter what it takes.”

--Tommy Hearns. “Great, dangerous puncher who made himself into a gladiator. And he really enjoys fighting.”

--Julio Cesar Chavez. “Pound for pound, one of the best of all time. A great will--you just can’t stop him.”

--Roberto Duran. “A great fighter seven or eight years ago. But time has caught up with him.”

--Mike McCallum. “Maybe the most underrated fighter around today.”

--Mike Tyson. “A great puncher, but I wish the people who had him first had taught him to box. There will be more fights in his career--Douglas won’t be the only one--when just being a great puncher won’t be enough for him.”