Stop Referee, Not the Fight

It has long been the notion here that you can never stop a prizefight too soon, only too late. There are some fights that should have been stopped before they were started. They stopped Benny (Kid) Paret’s fight with Emile Griffith one lifetime too late, for example.

The list is long of pugilists who went ignorantly to their executions, who would be alive today if the referee were less full of fight.

A crowd is bloodthirsty. It abhors a cease-fire. It wants total destruction of one gladiator or the other. A fight mob would never spare Saddam Hussein. A fight mob is frequently a chorus of Neroes. They would root for the lion. “Get the other eye!” is the motto of the guy 10 rows removed from the bloodshed. The night Ernie Schaaf climbed into the ring with Primo Carnera, the audience was shrieking, “Fake!” and, “Get up and fight, you bum!” as Schaaf lay dying on the ring floor.

They once asked Sugar Ray (the real one) why he didn’t let up on an opponent named Jimmy Doyle. “Couldn’t you see he was hurt?” the inquest wanted to know. “It’s my business to hurt people,” Sugar Ray curtly--but accurately--let them know. “It’s the referee’s business to see how hurt. I don’t stop fights, I start them.”

Having said that, it gives me no joy to say I think the Mike Tyson-Razor Ruddock fight the other night was stopped too soon.

And, I know the Meldrick Taylor-Julio Cesar Chavez fight was stopped too soon. Or more correctly, too late.

It is probably cheeky to contradict a referee’s action on the basis of something seen on television.

Far be it from me ever to call a referee “squeamish.” The last thing you need in a fight is a good, game referee. And I am sure Richard Steele, like most refs, has no desire to preside over a homicide.

But Donovan (Razor) Ruddock had not even been knocked off his feet in the round that referee Steele stopped his fight with Tyson Monday night at Las Vegas. He did not appear to be significantly hurt. The ferocity of the Tyson attack appeared more to befuddle him than damage him. In fact, referee Steele had started a count in an earlier round when Ruddock clearly appeared to have tripped after an exchange in which, if anything, he had hurt Tyson more than vice versa.

So, why isn’t referee Steele being hailed as a great humanitarian, a referee, finally, with the soul of a healer not a serial killer? A regular Mother Teresa in bow tie and boxing shoes?

Well, there is the nagging doubt that referee Steele was protecting not fighter Ruddock, who is promoted by an unconnected Canadian, Murad Muhammad, but fighter Tyson, who belongs to the well-connected Don King, a Steele confidant.

Among other things, Razor Ruddock had exposed ex-champion Tyson up to that point as a semiskilled brawler who is extraordinarily vulnerable to a left hand.

Razor Ruddock is not Gene Tunney or any Sugar Ray. You wouldn’t call him “Slick.” But he does have this dangerous, ponderous left hand, and his fight strategy appeared to be to neutralize Tyson’s rushes with not very deft clinches and then bang Tyson on the jaw in the breaks.

It was crude but effective. It pounded some respect into Tyson and left the spectator with some suspicion that the late rounds of this fight were going to be decidedly more interesting as Tyson’s stamina diminished and his jaw began to swell.

Referee Steele took care of that prospect.

Was Razor Ruddock becoming too dangerous to the scheme of things? We’ll never know. But referee Steele’s previous action was even more eyebrow-raising. Don King’s other meal ticket, Julio Cesar Chavez, had never lost a fight. But he was losing one on March 17 of last year to Meldrick Taylor, who was ahead on all cards when Chavez suddenly knocked him off his feet with little more than 10 seconds remaining in the bout. Taylor reached his feet at the count of eight, but referee Steele unaccountably decided then and there to stop the contest and declare him technically knocked out. There were two seconds remaining at the time--two!

It was, on any account, the most extraordinary cessation of hostilities in the long history of the ring. In the two seconds remaining, Julio Cesar Chavez would not have had time to get across the ring and resume hostilities. There wouldn’t even have been time for the obligatory glove wipe. It was a flagrant attempt to spare Chavez the ignominy of defeat. Taylor would have won the fight, the most remarkable string in pugilistic history would have been broken and Don King would have been out a meal ticket.

Was Richard Steele unaware there were only two seconds remaining? Well, a red light blinks on the ring posts with only 10 seconds remaining in every round.

Did Richard Steele do it again the other night?

The bottom line here is, Razor Ruddock was able to walk out of the ring under his own power and onto the Arsenio Hall Show instead of to an iron lung or a brain scan and intensive care. Maybe we should be happy with that. Maybe Mike Tyson doesn’t need any help.

On the other hand, maybe Richard Steele just hates fighting. Maybe he’d rather be a Red Cross nurse.