You Have to Prove Belt Fits

In 1930, Max Schmeling became the heavyweight champion of the world while lying on the ring floor at Yankee Stadium, groaning.

In 1992, Lennox Lewis became the heavyweight champion of the world while on holiday in Jamaica.

Schmeling became champion by default. Lewis became champion by phone.

Unser Max was the only heavyweight champ in history to win the title by foul.

Unfortunately, winning the title by phone--or Federal Express--has become commonplace.

At least you could say Schmeling won the title in the ring. It was only the fourth round when he slipped to the floor, clutching his groin and grimacing in pain. His legacy is the metal cup the fight game required contestants to wear from that time onward so that no one else would ever become heavyweight champion while being carried out of the ring and revived.

Nothing, it seems, can prevent the spread of the title by registered letter, voice mail or cablegram.

The circumstances are the least bit peculiar. In boxing, they always are. You have these alphabet soup directorates in the game who carry on a mystifying series of directives creating new divisions (television pays higher for “championship” fights), new champions and new (not necessarily better) horizons for the game. Venality doesn’t play by the Marquis of Queensbury Rules.

You would think, on the face of it, that winning a championship other than by getting your hand raised over a vanquished foe was unsporting, un-American, unfashionable and unthinkable.

But history shows us Schmeling was a pretty good fighter. He lost the rematch with his fouler, Jack Sharkey, but barely, and he thrashed a pretty good contender, Young Stribling, in his only defense. He later was the first man to beat Joe Louis in his prime and one of only three who beat him at all.

And Lennox Lewis’ accession to the throne may be poetic justice of another sort.

Lennox Lewis is the only man to beat the current established heavyweight champion, Riddick Lamont Bowe. It happened at the ’88 Olympics in Seoul.

Now, winning an amateur, big-glove, three-round Olympic fight, with restrictions put on the direction and character of the punches thrown, is not to be equated with a 12-round, small-glove pro title fight, where you can fight out of a crouch, throw hooks from any position and get away with everything short of kicking and biting.

So, the consensus was Riddick Bowe had been victimized, as so many before him, by the bizarre collection of rules the Olympics bring to their version of pugilism, enforceable by a collection of referees who seem to have learned their craft from a study of old Chaplin movies. Riddick Bowe’s connections encouraged this interpretation.

But Lennox Lewis didn’t get any help from any play-by-the-numbers referee or any cockamamie computer that racked up invisible punches. Lennox Lewis brought his own referee with him--a left hook. He knocked Bowe out in two rounds. He floored him twice.

Of course, you can’t win the heavyweight championship of the world in the Olympics, any more than you can win it sitting on the floor. But Lewis contends Seoul was not a fluke. It was the future.

“The man (Bowe) showed he had no heart,” Lennox said on his visit to America this week to promote his forthcoming fight with Tony Tucker. “I could see it in his eyes. His eyes were gone. So was his courage. He was glad they stopped it.

“Now, he says I’m avoiding him. Why would I do that?”

There is a large school of thought in the fight game that holds that the only way a British fighter can win a heavyweight title is by fax. Perfidious Albion has been notable in the past for the indirect victory. In the pre-Joe Louis era, Old Blighty sent over a passel of hopefuls, most of whom proved to be sporting chins made of pure Spode china, which splintered when hit. They had to seek out a more oblique direction to a title.

The best practitioner of the art was a Londoner named Phil Scott, who promptly came to be called “Phainting Phil” and “Phalling Phil” in the tabloid press.

Phil took phull advantage of the loophole in the rules that let you win phlat on your back on an opponent’s putative phoul. Phil came to be known as “Phouling Phil” when he would hit the floor after the first couple of exchanges, clutching his trunks and screaming in pain.

Phil won the British heavyweight title that way and picked up an incredible seven victories on fouls in a three-year period in this country. The mandating of the protective cup--and the seven knockouts he suffered--ruined Phil’s career. Once the referee kept counting, Phil was phutile.

Lennox Lewis did not faint his way to the title. Or even feint his way. He demolished a pretty credible contender, Razor Ruddock, in two rounds but got the (WBC) title when Bowe declined to meet its ultimatum that he defend against Lewis first. And, on May 8 at the Mirage in Las Vegas, Lewis will defend that title against Tucker.

Tucker is no weekend in Cannes. He has lost only one fight in his life--to Mike Tyson, of whom you may have heard. And he went the distance with Iron Mike. Not too many can make that statement.

Lennox hopes to become the first Brit in this century to win the heavyweight title, or since the Cornishman Bob Fitzsimmons, who won it in 1897.

If he can topple Brother Tucker and then draw his Bowe (“He prefers to fight for money, not honor,” he says of Bowe), Lennox Lewis hopes to win the title outright and show that when they gave the title to him by phone they didn’t get a wrong number.