COMMENTARY : Boxing Carries Torch for Bombast and Lies

Outside the Waldorf-Astoria’s truly grand Grand Ballroom, there were juices and bagels and fruits and cheeses and about 7,000 types of sweet rolls, all served on an acre of shining silverware.

Inside, there were several hundred well-fed press people and as many impostors (all you had to do was sign your name and list a media affiliation to get in) watching a movie screen on the ballroom stage. First it showed a quick chronicle of Mike Tyson’s knockouts, accompanied by a rap music score. Then a brief screening of heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield’s ring highlights, accompanied by Bette Midler’s version of “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

Then the screen went up. Behind it, frozen like mannequins, stood Tyson and Holyfield. Side by side, in dark business suits, Tyson wearing a vanilla snap-brim hat with a red band. As they stood there staring at the audience, the place was quieter than an empty church. Then they sat on either side of the dais, with their respective handlers.

Hurray for Hollywood. Hurray for hype. The prefight buildup to their Nov. 8 heavyweight championship bout at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nev., which both sides claim can’t be stopped, even if an Indianapolis grand jury indicts Tyson on rape charges as early as next week, had officially begun.

There are many great sports and many great sports events, but no sport can even begin to touch the bombast and pomposity and sheer unadulterated misrepresentation of facts that are standard operating procedure whenever big-time boxing people gather.

But there are also laughs. Whenever human land sharks -- guys who double-cross for a living -- start making nice to each other and throwing around the word “integrity” as happened in the opening minutes of Wednesday’s 90-minute media bash, you have to smile.

Tyson’s main man, Don King, who proved again why he deserves a doctorate in verbal absurdity, was so entertainingly ridiculous that he even brought smiles to the face of Holyfield, a man who puts people to sleep faster out of the ring than in it.

Even boxing people have a shred of sense when added hype isn’t necessary. This fight has no phony title: There won’t be any T-shirts calling it “A November to Remember.”

“We don’t need any hype or superlatives or catchy phrases,” Holyfield’s promoter, Dan Duva, said. “All we need to say is Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield.”

But of course, they ended up saying a lot more. If they hadn’t, their egos and the media would have been terribly disappointed. A guy from Caesars announced the hotel was sold out 14 days after the fight was set, faster than the 16 days it sold out for Hagler-Leonard.

The match will be shown on pay-per-view for the average price of “$40, give or take a couple of dollars,” Duva said.

“Dan Duva didn’t make this fight,” Duva said. “Don King didn’t make this fight. Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson made this fight. They demanded this fight. If this doesn’t get your heart beating a little faster, you’re in the wrong room and I’m in the wrong business.”

Something that might have gotten Tyson’s heart beating a little faster occurred when a young man in a tuxedo strode down the center aisle and took the audience microphone during the press conference and said, “Mike, I’m not from the press. I’m here to serve you a summons.”

And he did, throwing some papers toward the dais. His name was Rickey Graham, and he said he was serving Tyson in the case of Rosie Jones, the 1990 Miss Black America who charged Tyson with grabbing her buttocks while being photographed with the boxer in Indianapolis.

Tyson, who spent nearly three hours testifying before a Marion County, Ind., grand jury Friday on a separate charge, that of raping an 18-year-old woman in her hotel room, did not answer questions about the problems in his personal life.

“Any more questions?” Duva asked. “Any more summonses?”

Someone asked if outside activities might distract Tyson from the Holyfield fight?

“Only if I die,” Tyson said.

Would he be disappointed if he won the fight, but not by a knockout?

“I’m going to knock him out,” Tyson said.

The man from Caesars announced the opening betting line from Vegas had Tyson as a 2-1 favorite, and Tyson emphasized he expected it to end fast.

“I’m sure your hot dog won’t get cold,” he said.

“Excuse me, Mr. Mike,” a media impostor in the audience said, “but Holyfield is the best.”

“It’s very easy for you to say that because you sit so far away,” Tyson said.

After the formal part of the dog-and-pony show was over, Tyson met the press in a side room. Earlier in the big room, he said, “Evander is an extraordinary fighter with a great teacher (trainer George Benton). But I am the best fighter. The (championship) belt will be around my waist when the fight is over.”

In this more private setting, Tyson said, “I don’t respect any other fighters. They don’t stand a chance. Why should I respect them?”

Including Evander?

Tyson dropped his head and lowered his voice.

“Including Evander.”

One of Holyfield’s assistants said the champion will win the fight because he is more intelligent than Tyson. But it was King, he of the electrified standup hair, a man who routinely accuses his opponents of “trickeration,” who carried on the loudest and the longest, and the most hilariously.

In harnessing “all the forces from the ghettos of Harlem to the mountains of Appalachia,” King said, Tyson will do to Holyfield what “George Tecumseh Sherman” did to Holyfield’s hometown of Atlanta in the Civil War. Nobody bothered to interrupt -- is it possible to interrupt Don King? -- and tell him he meant “William” Tecumseh Sherman. He was rolling.

“It’s the day of reckoning, and the return to glory,” King said. “It’s been a long and perilous journey from Tokyo (where Buster Douglass beat Tyson) to Caesars Palace and we’re going to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and render to Tyson what is Tyson’s.”

If the courts don’t render first.