BOXING / EARL GUSTKEY : Maybe This Match Simply Isn’t in Cards

As Caesars Palace was down to its last few hundred remaining tickets for its Nov. 8 Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight, the cloud hanging over the event seemed to grow darker this week.

The longer a woman’s accusation of rape hangs over Tyson, boxing people are saying, the more likely it becomes that Holyfield-Tyson won’t happen. Not in 1991, anyway.

If so, then this, surely, is a match that wasn’t meant to be.

Once, a guy named Buster Douglas demolished an already agreed-to Tyson-Holyfield match. Now, 18 months later, an 18-year-old beauty contest entrant’s accusation of rape against Tyson threatens to do the same.

Promoters are still showing up and saying all the correct things. But many in the boxing community are saying that if an Indianapolis grand jury later this month indicts the former heavyweight champion, Caesars Palace will begin looking for another opponent for Holyfield, if they haven’t already begun to do so.

“We are proceeding as if it’s business as usual and if something happens to change that, then we will deal with it,” said Rich Rose, vice president for sports for Caesars World, parent company of Caesars Palace.

“It’s a great event and we hope to be able to present it.”

But a boxing executive at another Las Vegas hotel this week predicted that an indictment of Tyson would kill the fight.

“If it was us, I’m sure we’d drop it in the case of an indictment,” he said. “It just wouldn’t be appropriate to continue with it . . . with one guy under indictment for a crime like that.

“If it was something like tax evasion, that would be one thing. But with a crime of personal violence, you’d handle that differently.”

George Foreman probably will be Holyfield’s opponent if Tyson is indicted. George Yoshinaga, an inspector for the California Athletic Commission, finds irony in Foreman’s current legal sparring with Holyfield’s management team.

Foreman thought he was going to get a rematch with Holyfield on Nov. 8, when Tyson’s promoter, Don King, suddenly accepted terms for a Holyfield fight.

Foreman sued. A settlement is in the works.

Yoshinaga, an inspector for the California Athletic Commission, said he, too, once had Foreman’s name on a contract.

“There was talk in 1979 that Foreman was thinking about a comeback, and a boxing promoter in Japan, Muneo Mizoguchi, asked me to look into it,” Yoshinaga said.

“I flew to Texas to meet with Foreman, and he agreed to go to Japan to meet with Mizoguchi--if he was given first-class air travel and a first-class hotel. That was agreed to.

“He was in Japan for 10 days. Mizoguchi’s people took him all over Tokyo, gave him lavish gifts, picked up a lot of very big restaurant tabs . . . and then at the end of his stay Foreman told them his religious beliefs prevented him from ever boxing again. At this point, I’d say they’d spent about $10,000 on him.

“However, he did sign a contract with the Japanese people, stipulating that if he ever did make a comeback, his first three fights would be in Japan.

“Years later, he announced he’d fight again. So I called him and reminded him he’d signed to fight in Japan. His response was: ‘So what are you going to do, sue me?’

“So it’s ironic to me that he’s now trying to sue Holyfield over a verbal agreement when he laughed about one he’d signed with the Japanese promoter.”

Turning to another heavyweight, a brand-new one, it looks as if Emanuel Steward’s big gamble paid off last week with Michael Moorer.

He had moved his unbeaten light-heavyweight up to the heavyweight division, but didn’t like the view. Too crowded.

“We were looking at six months or so of fighting guys like Tony Tubbs, Tyrell Biggs, Jesse Ferguson . . . “ Steward said. “So I decided to move him up quickly in class to Alex Stewart. I felt it was a risky fight for Michael, but I also felt that if he could beat Alex, it would mean instant credibility.”

And that’s just what Moorer (25-0) achieved with his four-round knockout of Stewart, the Jamaican who had been beaten previously only by Holyfield and Tyson. He had Holyfield in serious trouble before losing on a TKO, then was beaten in one round by Tyson last December.

“Now, Michael has leap-frogged over guys like Joe Hipp and David Bey,” Steward said. “The Stewart knockout means he won’t get beat up by a lot of bigger, stronger guys before he gets his title shot.

“Remember one thing about Tyson--when he came up, he was the only outstanding young heavyweight around. Now, you have guys like Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis, Tommy Morrison, Ray Mercer, Bruce Seldon. . . . That’s a tough group to fight your way through.”

Steward said that Moorer, as a light-heavyweight, had been about 203 pounds between fights, and had increasing difficulty getting down to 175.

Steward said he knew he had a prospect in Moorer when in 1987, as an amateur, Moorer knocked a prime-time Steward fighter out in the gym.

“When Michael was an amateur middleweight, I was using him as a sparring partner for Darnell Knox, when Knox was training to fight Michael Nunn,” Steward said.

“Michael got in there one day and knocked Darnell cold. I had to make sure he had easy sparring partners the rest of the way. I’m sure that’s why he lost to Nunn (on a fourth-round TKO)--he’d already been beaten by Michael in the gym.”

Here’s a response from Bob Rey of Newport Beach, who heads LBA Associates, the promotional group that had promoted the Larry Holmes-Trevor Berbick fight in Florida last April.

Rey called about last week’s item reporting that Holmes, the former champion, had fired Rey’s group.

“Larry Holmes isn’t in a position to fire anybody,” Rey said. “We paid him $125,000 to promote his next four fights, and he signed a contract.”

Boxing Notes

Martha Louis, widow of heavyweight champion Joe Louis and a longtime Los Angeles attorney, died Friday at 78 in Wayne, Mich. Public visitation will be held at Swanson’s Funeral Home in Detroit Monday and Tuesday, followed by private burial services Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery. She will be buried next to her husband, who was champion from 1937 to 1949. He died in 1981.

No one knows for sure if Gwen Adair of Los Angeles is the world’s only female pro boxing referee, but she is about to be joined by Kazuko Uchiyama of Shizuoka, Japan, who, having worked her first pro fights as a judge, will soon get her first refereeing assignment. . . . The late Sugar Ray Robinson was recently inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

Kick-boxing promoter Peter G. Lucas is asking for state legislation that would remove his sport from control by the California Athletic Commission and create a separate martial arts commission. . . . The San Diego boxing community hopes the Terry Norris-Brett Lally junior-middleweight fight at the San Diego Sports Arena on Aug. 17 will do well enough at the gate to mark a return of major pro shows to San Diego.