Another Champion Is Brought to Earth

Even for boxing, this was bizarre. America’s most eccentric sport did it again.

Forget the Long Count. Forget the Schmeling foul. Forget the Shelby, Mont., fight that bankrupted a state.

The Riddick Bowe-Evander Holyfield fight here Saturday night will be remembered for a guy who jumped out of an airplane to get in on the action in the middle of Round 7. I mean, I’ve heard of gate-crashing, but this was ridiculous. He came from the one place the security police couldn’t block off--the sky.

He delayed the fight for 21 minutes. Unfortunately for Riddick Bowe, it was resumed.

The trouble with Riddick Bowe (rhymes with “slow”) is, he was miscast as a champion. Hollywood would send him back.

He is too good-natured to be a champion. You know how heavyweight champions are supposed to be. Full of menace. They should scowl a lot, act as if being champ were a heavy responsibility, like being secretary of state or something.

Bowe acts as if it were a sitcom. A spoof. As if being heavyweight champion were shtick.

He tries to be like his idol, Muhammad Ali, of whom he does a passable nightclub imitation. But he forgets Ali could be deadly serious when his title was on the line. When it came to his championship, Ali could make the secretary of state look frivolous.

You half-expect Bowe to climb in the ring with a seltzer bottle, a false nose that lights up and a joke book. You want Jack Dempsey, you get Jack Lemmon. You kind of wait for Riddick to come to center ring and scream, “It’s Saturday night!”

It’s probably what un-did him Saturday night. Unfortunately for him, Holyfield doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.

So, the title’s back in the hands of the 9-to-5 guy. Holyfield was never very funny. He never wears funny hats or puts cayenne pepper in the camp Cokes or goes around saying, “Did you hear the one about . . . ?”

Holyfield simply stands there and out-hits you. He lets you do the one-liners.

Holyfield was never very humorous. Or interesting, either. He is in need of a charisma transplant.

Now that he has the title back, it will go back to gathering dust. Holyfield always treated the title as if it were brain surgery, not ho-ho-ho.

He never lost any fights. But he never looked good winning any. He had no flair. He made his fight like a guy laying carpet. Or doing windows. He wasn’t a great boxer. He wasn’t a great puncher. He simply went 12 rounds.

When he went 12 rounds with 43-year-old George Foreman and 40-year-old Larry Holmes and won but hardly marked them in the process, the public wrote him off as Robo-champ, a guy who went through the motions but who had dials instead of instincts. He was about as exciting to watch as bread pudding, so nearly unknown that guys would hand him their parking tickets at banquets. But he just wins, baby.

No one ever called Bowe the Manassa Mauler, either. For one thing, he lacked the “killer instinct,” that phrase they invented to describe the reaction Dempsey or Joe Louis responded with the first time they saw their opponent begin to look panicky or wobbly. Bowe kind of paints a knockout. He puts his man on canvas the same way a Gauguin might, one brush stroke at a time.

But Bowe had a little flair. The champion he was most like was Max Baer. Slapstick Maxie almost never drew a serious breath in his life. He clowned in the ring. And he clowned out of it. He killed two men in the ring, but he spent most of his career waiting for his laugh.

Even death was a skit. When he lay dying in a Hollywood hotel, he couldn’t resist going out without leaving them laughing. When he phoned downstairs for a doctor, the room clerk wanted to know if he wanted a house doctor. “No,” Baer said, “you better send me a people doctor.” Baer never could resist a straight line even if it was the last one he would ever hear.

Did Bowe lose his title because he didn’t take it seriously enough? It’s possible. You half-expected him to stop in mid-ring sometimes and say, “Hey, Evander, these are the jokes!”

If so, it was stand-up comedy’s worst hour. Bowe was unmasked as a slow, clumsy mass of flesh. He was like the guy in the gorilla suit. Scary to look at, but a pussycat underneath. Holyfield was too fast for him. He had quicker hands, quicker feet, quicker reflexes. He outslugged him, he outboxed him, out-fought him and out-smarted him.

“I don’t boast or brag, “ Holyfield said later. All he does is fight you three minutes of every round. Not even a sky-diver diverts Holyfield.

“I thought for a minute about that tennis lady who got stabbed and I wondered if something like that was in,” he said. He quickly returned to the task at hand. He usually does.

“I had a job to do and I did it. You got to watch out for distractions, “ Holyfieldsaid.

He is dull, single-minded and content to win by one point. But he is nobody’s straight man. If Bowe wants to get laughs, he will have to fight Ed McMahon. Holyfield is deadly serious. With the emphasis on deadly.