How to Become a Former Champion

Well, it wasn’t Dempsey-Firpo. But it’ll do. It was a barge fight.

Two guys who are as easy to hit as a small straight in a wild-card game took turns teeing off on each other in the heavyweight championship fight here Friday night.

Evander Holyfield lost his title, but he didn’t lose much else.

You don’t trade bites with a lion. You don’t go swimming with crocodiles. And you don’t carry the fight to a guy who outweighs you by 30 pounds and can see clear over your head.

Holyfield didn’t know whether to fight him or climb him. Holyfield had no more idea how to fight him than how to get up the Matterhorn. He did the worst thing you can do: He walked into him.

Riddick Bowe, the new champion, makes his fight like a guy waiting for a bus. He’s about as mobile as the Washington Monument. Boxing is a speed sport and Riddick crosses the ring like a glacier crossing Colorado. Holyfield’s play was to flit around until he could make Bowe look like a guy chasing his hat in a high wind.

Holyfield chose to go out like a champ. It wasn’t smart, but it was gallant. He kept hurling himself onto Bowe’s fists. He rapped Bowe smartly enough, but he eventually impaled himself on Bowe’s uppercuts. “I thought I could win right up to the late rounds,” he said ruefully after the fight.

The fight hung on one punch during the 11th round. That’s when Holyfield lost his title. He got floored--and that was decisive. It wasn’t even a clear knockdown. Bowe kind of mugged him. He spun him into the ropes, turned him completely around--and then clubbed Evander in the back of the head like a guy bringing down a blackjack. When Evanderhit the floor, he got up an ex-champion.

Bowe isn’t Jack Dempsey. He didn’t exactly throw a shutout. I had the fight 115-115, even giving Bowe the 11th by 10-8. Without the knockdown, I let Holyfield keep his title.

The fight was as unscientific as an abacus. They both left the best punch in boxing in the dressing room. The left jab is the money punch in boxing. It is to pugilism what the curveball is to baseball, the lob to tennis. These guys left it out of the arsenal. The only concession Holyfield made to the sweet science was that he swarmed over Bowe. If he had fought at long range, he would have disappeared like the Japanese fleet at Midway.

In the last analysis, Holyfield fought a contender Friday who was not 1) old; 2) fat; 3) slow; 4) nearsighted; or 5) all of the above and sick to his stomach, too.

Bowe didn’t appear to be any of these things. He had all his teeth and eyes and hair and he could see without bifocals. You will remember the last guy Holyfield fought, Larry Holmes, threw up between rounds and complained he lost his contact lens early in the fight and couldn’t figure out where Holyfield kept vanishing to.

But Bowe fairly glowed with youth and health. His temperature was 98.6, his blood pressure in the low 100s and his pulse rate about that of a basking shark.

Holyfield eventually couldn’t handle the weight and height advantages. He looked like a guy going up an Alp. He should have called time while he went back to the dressing room to get a rope, a pick ax, a pair of lederhosen and a yodel.

It wasn’t a great fight, but it was a very good one. Bowe is the heavyweight champion of the world--at least, until Mike Tyson gets out of prison or Lennox Lewis, who beat Bowe during the ’88 Olympics, gets his shot.

Bowe is like an Indianapolis race car. He has this one flaw: He can’t back up. He is like a guy setting a pick in basketball. He is so stationary, he looks like a punching bag with ears. But you better make him come get you. Holyfield didn’t. Or couldn’t. Holyfield isn’t Willie Pep.

With two fighters as easy to hit as these two, you’d think we would have got Dempsey-Firpo. We didn’t. But neither did we get what the fight mob calls an “agony fight,” i.e., two guys circling each other all night waiting for an invitation to throw a punch. The plot was easy to unravel: Holyfield went down in a dark cellar without a gun to see what the noise was. He must have bought the old bromide, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

But we know the answer to that one, and he found it out: “The bigger they are, the harder they hit.”