In Boxing, It’s Simply Moorer of the Same

Boxing as an industry kills me. It is the only business I know with a death wish.

It’s run by the kind of people who would drown canaries if there was a buck in it. I sometimes think no other kind could run it. People who get upset by a Don King should know that he’s merely the latest in a long line of con artists who have manipulated the sweet science to their own larcenous ends. Before him, there was Doc Kearns. He bankrupted a whole state with his chicanery once and he may have loaded Dempsey’s gloves in the Willard fight. Put it this way: He would have if he could.

There was Jack Hurley. Doc Greene once chronicled an episode in which a footpad acquaintance of Hurley’s told him proudly he had just rolled a drunk for a $400 bankroll. Hurley expressed scorn. “You’re an amateur,” he rasped (Hurley despised amateurs). “You should go right back now and put $200 back in his pockets. When he wakes up, he’ll just think he blew the $200. I mean, he’ll think, why would somebody rob me and leave $200?”

That’s all you have to know about Doc Hurley.

They don’t fix fights anymore. I mean, how do you fix a guy who gets $30 million from the pay-per-view audience? Back in the days when even the winner’s share was only $25,000, a gambling fix was easy.

So today, they fix the game.

Their latest caper is--do you believe this?--they have ruled that the “logical” contender for Evander Holyfield’s heavyweight title is--a little drum roll, professor!--Michael Moorer!

There will be a short pause while you look at each other and ask, Michael Who? I mean, it makes you wonder what they had against Scott Ledoux or Tyrell Biggs, right?

Let’s face it, Michael Moorer is not exactly your basic Manassa Mauler. There is no public clamor for his services anywhere. If he fights for the title, there will be plenty of good seats available. Also bad ones.

You see, there is only one sense-making title bout for the champion. Holyfield against the Belting Brit--when did you expect to see that alliteration used to describe a British fighter?--Lennox Lewis.

Lennox Lewis, it so happens, is the World Boxing Council titlist, an eminence he succeeded to when Riddick Bowe impulsively threw his championship belt into a dumpster. Lewis got his title the same way bag ladies do--out of the trash bin.

But since he’s undefeated and the WBC champion, logic calls for him to meet Holyfield to unify the title. Evander is the International Boxing Federation, whatever that is, and World Boxing Assn. champion.

It would take Alice in Wonderland to unscramble today’s jabberwockian jumble of alphabetical “authorities.” (Every guy with a cellular phone or an answering machine is a “commissioner” today.)

Boxers aren’t for sale, but championships are. If TV wants a title to go with its promotion, some “czar” is glad to provide them with one--for a fee, of course.

The fine Machiavellian hand of Don King is seen in this latest caper. The reasoning is a bit devious--but it always is with Don. It goes this way: King has a fighter named Oliver McCall. He has a commitment to fight Moorer. Now, if Holyfield, in disgust, relinquishes his championship, McCall and Moorer would fight for the championship. Holyfield has said if he can’t fight Lewis, he’ll quit.

Now, a Moorer-McCall meeting would not exactly be Dempsey-Tunney or Ali-Frazier, for all of that. It would be the most anonymous heavyweight title bout since Marvin Hart fought Tommy Burns in 1906--unless you count the Pinklon Thomas-Trevor Berbick classic in 1986.

It’s not unusual for boxing to shoot itself in the foot. Even in the Dempsey era, a natural matchup of Dempsey against Harry Wills was blocked. The reason then was an old familiar one--racism. Wills was black. Boxing moguls wanted no repeat of the Jack Johnson era.

Dempsey was accused of “ducking” Wills, which was not true. It was not Dempsey’s idea, it was the commission’s. When Jack Sharkey defeated Wills decisively, and Dempsey KOd Sharkey, the whispers subsided.

A “natural” in the mid-1930s would have seen champion Max Baer fight Joe Louis for the title. Instead, he was authorized to give a title shot to an unknown light-heavyweight named James J. Braddock, who had lost 14 fights in the previous three years, including one knockout. Naturally, Baer lost to him--and Max had to fight Louis as an ex-champion.

When Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis the following year, he was entitled to a fight against Braddock for the title. He even went through a charade of training for the signed fight and showing up for a weigh-in for a phantom fight. But the commissioners were understandably loath to see the championship go to Hitler’s Germany and they permitted Braddock to pull out of that fight and meet Louis (for a lot more money) instead.

Louis fought everybody put in front of him. So did Rocky Marciano. But when Rocky retired, he killed the “natural” of his era--a meeting with Floyd Patterson.

With the decline and disappearance of Muhammad Ali, the greatest collection of so-what? titleholders in history strode onstage. But out of the miasma of Tim Witherspoons and Mike Weavers and Michael Dokeses came Iron Mike Tyson.

Boxing found a way to cobble that up. With the connivance of the WBC, Mike took a tuneup in Japan instead of the “natural” against Holyfield. He got knocked out by Buster Douglas. And the game has been chaotic ever since. Parachutists jump in the ring, lawsuits fly around like confetti in a high wind, fighters run out on obligations like porch climbers fleeing a burglary.

So, stand by for Oliver McCall, who may come along to join Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jim Corbett and John L. Sullivan any day now.

I’ll tell you one thing: Stallone would never make a movie out of that. We’ve had titleholders named Sonny and Buster, even Ezzard and Ingemar and Muhammad--but Oliver? Oliver is for Supreme Court justices, not heavyweight contenders.

Whatever happened to Tuffy and K.O. and Terrible Terry? Whatever happened to the days when Michael Moorer wouldn’t be a main event, he’d be a sparring partner? And somebody named Oliver would be coming in the ring carrying a pail, not a belt.