Promotion Is Second to None

It all began with Tex Rickard. He took the fight game off the barges and put it on Park Avenue. He made it as In as polo with the upper classes. Unlettered, uneducated, he hunted for his gold in the Klondike with a deck of marked cards and the nerves of a guy who would bet it all on the color of the next cow.

He made his fortune in the fight game, but there’s no evidence he was otherwise interested in it one way or the other. He landed the biggest attraction of his day--Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries--by the simple expedient of buying Mrs. Johnson a fur coat when no one else would even speak to her. He put a half-million dollars in gold in a store window in Goldfield, Nev., to promote his fight and he put the first million-dollar gate together in New Jersey because New York was too squeamish to permit it (Dempsey-Carpentier) in 1919.

He was a hayseed, a rube, but he beat New York at its own game. He was the first to print gold-backed tickets and make a fight seem like an invitation to a palace. He was 50 years ahead of his time in hiring press agents and selling movie rights. His stock comment was, “I never seed anything like it!” He never got rich because he kept pushing the chips back out onto the table.

He made Jack Dempsey and vice versa. In 1927, Gene Tunney got the unheard-of purse of $990,000, and he gave Rickard $10,000 so he could make out and photograph for posterity the boxing world’s first million-dollar check. Rickard rolled high. He won or lost with a shrug.

He was a private man in a flamboyant business, and he fretted a lot. He was particularly frightened when he matched Luis Angel Firpo with Dempsey. He thought Dempsey might kill him, maybe literally, and cause a riot at the box office of fans wanting their money back. He went to the champ and asked him to take it easy. Dempsey went flying out of the ring in the first round, but Rickard needn’t have worried--the fight mob never squawks at a knockout. It’s the 15-round bloodless gavottes that get them to throwing chairs.

After Rickard and Dempsey, the fight game went into a decline. There was a series of boring artisans until Joe Louis and Mike Jacobs came along. Joe was the wrong color for those racist times, but boxing had been integrated long before the railroads were. Long before there was a Jackie Robinson, there was a Joe Gans and a Peter Godfrey.

Mike Jacobs, like Rickard, wasn’t a sportsman, either. He was a ticket speculator. And he knew a Broadway attraction when he saw one, and he knew Joe Louis was to sports what Bernhardt was to theater or Valentino to the movies: a sure-fire seat-filler. Jacobs didn’t care for the fight game all that much. He interfered with the normal order of things only once: when Max Schmeling was entitled to a title shot at the champion James Braddock. Jacobs maneuvered him out of it and Louis into it. Jacobs did not want the heavyweight championship going to Adolf Hitler.

In spite of their groundbreaking, it’s unlikely either Tex Rickard or Mike Jacobs could have foreseen what their sport has turned into: a money pit that makes Tunney’s million dollars look like a tip for the hatcheck girl.

Tonight at the Mirage hotel here in this improbable metropolis, two prizefighters who probably could not have warmed up Dempsey or Louis as sparring partners will divvy up more than $32 million for 36 minutes--or less--of fist-fighting. Buster Douglas, whom no one ever mixed up with Gene Tunney, will get more than $24 million. His opponent, Evander Holyfield, whom no one ever mixed up with even Floyd Patterson, will get in excess of $8 million.

That’s what it has come to. Two guys who might be fighting the semi-main 25 years ago--one guy’s too little, the other guy’s too fat--are going to get more money in half an hour than John Jacob Astor probably got out of furs in his lifetime.

The successor to the Rickards and the Jacobses is an equally improbable character--a brash, aggressive young casino operator who ignores a catastrophic eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, to put on a fight that, for sheer weight of numbers, makes the Rickards and Jacobses look like tinhorns.

Steve Wynn has hypothecated $40 million on this extravaganza. Rivals say he was crazy, that Wynn’s nickname should be “No.” Thirty-two million dollars was too much to ante up for these fighters. But Wynn points out the rival offer was $29 million, adding: “And they have no casino to promote.”

Like Rickard and Jacobs before him, Wynn is not interested in promoting a sport--just a casino. Numbers such as these boggle the mind, but Wynn says he saw money begin flying around because of a simple accident of fate, the one that saw Buster Douglas knock out Mike Tyson in Tokyo last February. “When I saw Buster knock out Tyson in Tokyo,” Wynn says, “I came right up out of my chair. I thought, ‘Holy geez! We’ve got a whole new ballgame here! This busts things wide open!’ ”

Wynn saw the opportunities for his casino. This is what bigtime pugilism has become, a shill for a crap game.

But if 10% of the nearly 15 million homes wired up for pay television in this country pony up $35-40 for Douglas-Holyfield, Wynn not only hypes the crap tables, he meets the nut. “I make the Mirage the most famous hotel in America,” he says. “The fight is one day. We’re open 365.”

Apart from that, Buster Douglas-Evander Holyfield, even though it’s for the title, is just a kind of complicated elimination bout. Mike Tyson is the promoter’s dream today, the logical successor to Rickard’s Dempsey and Jacobs’ Louis. At first blush, it would seem as if the two guys tonight were contesting for a stateroom on the Titanic. Because whoever wins here is going to run into the iceberg--Tyson.

“This will be a big fight because nobody knows who’s going to win,” says Steve Wynn.

In a sense, he’s right. You go to a fight for the same reason you go to the opera--you know how it’s going to come out, but you go to hear Caruso sing or Toscanini conduct. A Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis fight is a case in point. Or you go because you can’t decide who’s the better man.

This may be a contest to see who is worse. Buster Douglas, at 246 pounds, appears to be about as ready for a 12-round ordeal as Orson Welles would have been. Still, Holyfield may not have enough sense to stay away from him till he melts.

Either way, it’s as American as pie a la mode, which Buster slightly resembles. It’s a slice of Americana. Rickard and Jacobs would understand perfectly. So would P.T. Barnum and any guy with a tent and a wagon load of snake oil. You used to have to own steel mills to pull down this kind of one-day money. As Rickard would say, “I never seed anything like it.”