No ABCs for Real Champs

Time was in this country when you knew who all the boxing champions were. I mean, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champ--period. You didn’t need a box of initials to identify him. Joe Louis was champ. Everybody in the world knew it.

Today, you not only don’t know who the division champs are, you don’t even know what the divisions are. In the old days, there were eight of them--flyweight, bantamweight, featherweight, lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, light-heavyweight and heavyweight. Every schoolboy knew who the titleholders were.

There were, to be sure, two competing governing bodies. There was the New York State Athletic Commission. And then, there was everybody else, otherwise known as the NBA, the National Boxing Assn.

Only rarely did they have competing champs. New York was really the Big Apple, and everybody knew it. Madison Square Garden was the Big Top. If you weren’t the champ in New York, you weren’t really the champ. The NBA kind of tacitly accepted it, went along.

The rules were somewhat loosely applied. Dempsey, for example, didn’t defend his title for three years once, from 1923 to 1926, but nobody took steps to strip him of his title even though the rules mandated a defense every six months.

The game was simpler then. The commissions put in a brace of new divisions, junior lightweight and junior welterweight, but that was because there was a surfeit of little fighters in those Depression days. Kids had no other way to get doughnut money.

Today, the control of the sport, if that’s the word I want, has passed into the hands of a cast of Third World characters who seem to invent a new division every time television wants to hang a title label on a fight that would have been a walkout in the old days. For a fee, they will give you a title: the super-junior-cruiserweight-over-&-under-150-pounds division or the East North American and Pacific Rim Super Paperweight Championship. For a fee, of course. I’ve given up trying to figure out who the middleweight champion is today. The last clear-cut one I remember was the original Sugar Ray. Or maybe it was Mickey Walker. You get the feeling a matchmaker calls up one of the governing agencies and says, “I’ve got a fight between two club fighters out of the Virgin Islands; what have you got in the way of titles for me? Something not too expensive--it’s just for a ‘Wonderful World of Sport’ segment.”

You couldn’t even count the heavyweight champs. Would you believe there was a time when Larry Holmes wasn’t the champ but John Tate, Mike Weaver and Michael Dokes were?

It was anarchy. Good Lord, wasn’t Pinklon Thomas champion for an hour-and-a-half? Or was that Tim Witherspoon? Tony Tucker held the same title as Gene Tunney. Or am I thinking of Tony Tubbs? Maybe both of them did.

No matter. We all thought some semblance of order had been restored with Mike Tyson. Mike was like Louis. He didn’t need to carry around some alphabetical designation with him. He carried his own commission around with him--a right to the jaw.

But when Mike lost to Buster Douglas in Tokyo, a lot of us were afraid the system would spring a leak again. And it has.

Buster was able to make a fight with Evander Holyfield because Evander stepped aside to make it possible for Douglas to meet Tyson in the first place. Evander was the No. 1 contender and, as such, entitled to that shot.

So the powers that be consented to Holyfield-Douglas. You question Buster’s wisdom. He provably could have gotten an extra $10 million letting Tyson knock him out instead of Holyfield. But Buster never passed calculus in school.

Now is when the cloud of bureaucracy begins to form over the division again.

Jose Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council, the most powerful of the ruling bodies, is an engaging fellow who laughs easily, a Lebanese-born resident of Mexico City, a successful businessman. He’d be a nice guy to split a chiles relleno with. He has lots of friends. One of them is Don King, who got him to invalidate Buster Douglas’ knockout of Mike Tyson for a few hours in Tokyo last February--because Buster was the beneficiary of a putative long count.

Evander Holyfield is the heavyweight champion of the world. At the moment. The trouble is, he wants to fight George Foreman, an overage, overweight old party who hasn’t fought anything more formidable than a pork chop in years and who will be 43 by the time he meets Holyfield in April.

Sulaiman, not surprisingly, wants Evander to fight Tyson, King’s fighter, next. He has threatened to vacate Holyfield’s title if he persists in fighting Foreman instead.

This, of course, would open the door for the Tony Tuckers, Trevor Berbicks and Bonecrusher Smiths again. All the immortals. Who knows? We might even get Ossie Ocasio back into the picture.

The proposition is simple: By commission law, Evander has to make a mandatory (read: Tyson) match within a calendar year. But he can fight an optional fight (read: Foreman) in the meantime.

Or he could if Sulaiman lets him. The other “governing” bodies of the fight game--the World Boxing Assn. and the International Boxing Federation--have not yet been heard from. But Sulaiman holds that Holyfield is “morally” obligated to fight Tyson because Mike was the victim of the long count.

But why? If anyone was morally obligated to give Tyson a first defense, it was Douglas.

But logic has never been the long suit of these alphabetical kingdoms. It’s typical of the obfuscations they like to lay on the sweet science. It’s a good thing they weren’t around in the old days. Dempsey might not even have been a contender.