Will Steele Bend? Showtime Special Reviews the Fight

Richard Steele erred. Anyone who knows boxing and has reviewed the tape of the Mike Tyson-Razor Ruddock fight says the referee stopped it too soon.

Steele’s mistake will be the focal point of the replay on Showtime Saturday at 10 p.m. In a 90-minute special, the seven-round fight will be shown in its entirety, complete with Tyson’s expletives, and then all the principals involved will discuss the controversial finish.

Steele will appear in a taped interview.

Ferdie Pacheco, the commentator on the live pay-per-view telecast, also will take part in Saturday’s discussion. He wasn’t pulling any punches Thursday.

“When I saw the fight live, I thought Steele’s decision was (hasty),” Pacheco said from New York. “After reviewing the tape, there’s no doubt about it.

“Steele did not follow any of the criteria for stopping a fight. He never looked at Ruddock’s face, he never looked in his eyes, he never spoke to Ruddock.

“I was sitting at ringside with a headset on, and I could hear as clear as day Ruddock screaming, ‘What?’ when Steele stopped the fight.

“Tyson threw four punches just before the end of the fight. I thought that maybe all four had landed. But by reviewing the tape, you can see that only the first, a hook flush to Ruddock’s head, connected.”

Somehow, it seems, whenever promoter Don King is involved, things get messy.

It’s not that King didn’t put together a good show. The Simon Brown-Maurice Blocker undercard fight lived up to its billing, and the hard-hitting main event had viewers saying “ooh” and “ah” after almost every punch.

But in the end, this pay-per-view show turned into pay-per- pew. It smelled.

Skeptics question King’s ties to Steele.

Whatever actually happened, the perception is that Steele went out of his way to help King’s fighter, as he appeared to have done last March when he stopped the Meldrick Taylor-Julio Cesar Chavez fight. That time, Steele gave a victory to Chavez, another of King’s fighters, with two seconds left.

Pacheco blames the Nevada Boxing Commission for using Steele in the Tyson-Ruddock fight.

Steele had refereed a fight in Japan on Thursday night and another in Las Vegas on Sunday night. Also, Murad Muhammad, Ruddock’s promoter, had objected to the use of Steele.

“Here (the commission) had Mills Lane and Carlos Padilla available, but they went with an exhausted referee who wasn’t even wanted (by Ruddock’s people),” Pacheco said.

Pacheco says Steele’s stopping of Chavez-Taylor, unlike Monday’s decision, can be justified.

“He checked out Taylor and tried to speak to him,” Pacheco said. “He saw the fighter was in danger and, not concerned with how much time was left, stopped the fight in the interest of safety.

“No one is more concerned with safety in boxing than I am. I never shut up about it.

“But Ruddock was in no danger when Steele stopped the fight. He had no way of telling whether Ruddock was in danger or not. He had his back to him. He decided to appoint himself sole arbitrator and decide the fight all by himself.”

The finish wasn’t the only thing wrong with King’s show. At closed-circuit locations throughout Los Angeles, a thunderstorm caused audio and video problems.

At the Spice nightclub in Hollywood, the picture, which had broken up several times earlier, went out totally at the start of the seventh round.

It came back briefly, long enough for patrons to hear one of the announcers saying, “It’s over,” but then the picture went out again.

It came back in time for a replay of the finish, but customers were not pleased.

There reportedly were blackouts at other locations as well.

For the next big pay-per-view fight, Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman April 19, the plan now is for licensed closed-circuit locations to be limited to the Forum, the Anaheim Convention Center and the San Diego Sports Arena, plus a few bar-restaurants in outlying areas such as Santa Barbara-Ventura, San Bernardino-Riverside and Palm Springs.

At the big arenas, the closed-circuit show will be tied in with live cards, all for $30 or $40 in Los Angeles and $25 or $35 in San Diego.

Event Entertainment President Rick Kulis, who owns the Southern California closed-circuit rights to the April 19 fight, said it really isn’t practical to distribute such shows to small establishments.

Kulis said there are just too many problems involved in licensing the places that show the fights legally and policing those that don’t.

However, the backlash to the limited showings may create a new set of problems.

CBS will be joining tonight’s Ohio State-St. John’s Midwest Regional game at Pontiac, Mich., in progress. Tipoff is 4:40 p.m., PST, but CBS’ coverage won’t begin until 5 p.m.

The problem is, the 4:30-to-5 p.m. time block belongs to the local stations, and giving it up would be costly.

So, you wonder, why not simply start the game after 5 p.m.?

Because that would be after 8 p.m. in Pontiac and would mean the second game of the doubleheader there, Duke-Connecticut, would start after 10 p.m.

The NCAA has a rule against tipoffs after 10 p.m. for tournament games.

CBS asked the NCAA to bend that rule, but the NCAA, to its credit, this time didn’t kowtow to television.

TV-Radio Notes

The Kings will make their first over-the-air television appearance in six years on Sunday. Their game at Edmonton will be carried by Channel 5 at 5 p.m. This will enable people without cable to see the Kings as they battle for their first division title in their 24-year history. . . . Channel 5 would like to carry 10-15 King games next season. Channel 13 also is interested.

Football is back. The 12-week World League of American Football season begins this weekend. The USA network will have a game at 5 p.m. Saturday and ABC will have a game Sunday, delayed, at noon. The league can’t be considered big time until all telecasts are live, but some innovations should make the games worth watching. . . . Brent Musburger and Dick Vermeil will be the ABC announcers. The USA network will use several announcing teams. The commentators include Dan Marino, Boomer Esiason and Warren Moon.

SportsChannel has named Duke Snider and Al Downing as Dodger commentators. They both will work the home opener against San Diego on April 12, but after that it will be either Snider or Downing, with Snider scheduled to work 19 games, Downing 15. Joel Meyers will be back as the play-by-play announcer. Snider and Downing replace Ron Cey, who showed considerable improvement as last season progressed. . . . Ken Wilson and Ken Brett, the Channel 5 Angel announcers, also will work the 35 games on SportsChannel.

SportsChannel offers live coverage of the San Luis Rey Stakes at Santa Anita Sunday at 4:30 p.m. . . . Santa Anita has made an agreement with Channel 9 for all feature races to be shown during the station’s nightly 8 p.m. news. . . . The Santa Anita Derby April 6 will be carried by Armed Forces Radio, which is heard in 138 countries.

Richard Steele is scheduled to appear on Prime Ticket’s “It’s Your Call” next Wednesday at 6 p.m. . . . The Los Angeles Athletic Club’s John Wooden Award winner as the nation’s best college basketball player won’t be announced until April 3, but Wooden’s All-American team will be named on Roy Firestone’s “Up Close” Wednesday.

Radio talk: KORG (1190) in Anaheim begins a new weeknight sports talk show with Bob Elder Monday. It will run from 5 to 6 p.m. Regular contributors will include Vince Ferragamo, Bruce Penhall, Lon Brunk, Steve DeSaegher and Preston Dennard. . . . Peter Vent, after a three-month stint in Las Vegas, is back at KIEV (870) most weeknights at 9:30 p.m. . . . A topical drive-time show that sometimes gets overlooked is the one with Larry Kahn and Mike Lamb on KFOX-FM (93.5). Rich Marotta used to be Kahn’s partner, but Marotta is now at KFI.