For King, a Heavy Problem

There are certain verities we live by. Who controls the Dardanelles controls Asia Minor. Who controls the high ground controls the battlefield. Who controls the oceans rules the world.

Sport has its equivalents. And one of them is that whoever would control boxing must control the heavyweight championship.

It is a notion that makes Don King gnash his teeth. You might say, it makes his hair stand on end.

Throughout history, the great promoters--whom King would emulate--have more or less owned the heavyweight title. Tex Rickard needed Jack Dempsey. Mike Jacobs had Joe Louis.

It’s all very well to make do with the occasional lightweight champion or middleweight titleholder, but the heavyweight is top of the line. He is the glamour figure of his sport. He reels in the millions, sets the tone of the game.

The fight game is in the doldrums right now. Reason: It has no heavyweight champion worthy of the name. The titleholders are a colorless, almost anonymous, pseudo-champion lot. They cannot walk into a room and have heads turn the way a Louis or Dempsey or Muhammad Ali could. A heavyweight champion is ordinarily the most recognizable sports figure on the planet. But these guys have to carry calling cards. You should win a lottery if you can pick Michael Moorer or Lennox Lewis out of a crowd of cab drivers.

It’s no secret the real champion is in the Indiana state pen. Mike Tyson could stop traffic on any street corner in America, maybe the world. Ali could draw a crowd in Patagonia. Lennox Lewis would have to produce identification to buy a dinner in his hometown, whereas Ali never even needed a passport.

Promoter King sees himself as straining to keep boxing alive in this interregnum. He has had to make do with the next-best thing to a heavyweight champion--a lightweight and featherweight brawler who had never been beaten.

Julio Cesar Chavez was a tough, relentless little warrior who made his fight like a guy chopping a tree. There wasn’t much scientific about Chavez, but he was as exciting as a tropical storm. He was loved in Mexico, admired in the United States and feared by guys who had to fight him anywhere.

He won titles in the backwaters of the boxing realm, the makeshift championships with the belittling adjectives in their titles. Years ago, the fight game used to have “junior” lightweights and “junior” welterweights before the denigrating character of these labels hit home. The only regular title that had a hyphenated designation in the old days was the “light” heavyweight championship, and the sport found out early how even this minor qualification cheapened the championship. No one ever knew or cared who the light-heavyweight champion was. He deferred to the unqualified heavyweight champion in purses, fame, drawing power and worldwide charisma.

The fight game learned from this to the extent it realized labeling was important. Thereafter the junior-lightweight champion gave way to the super-featherweight champion and the junior-welterweight became the super-lightweight. Madison Avenue came to the fight game.

King began to lose his sub-heavyweight meal ticket when, for the first time in 90 fights, Chavez didn’t win in San Antonio last September. True, he didn’t lose, either. He got an undeserved draw against Pernell Whitaker, a boxer so light-hitting his nickname is “Sweet Pea.”

Then, in January, they brought in little-known Frankie Randall, a boxer so lightly rated he dropped out of the game altogether for two years. Randall was believed to be that all-purpose foil of the fight game, “strictly an opponent.”

Well, the “opponent” thrashed Chavez. Chavez not only lost the fight, he was unceremoniously dumped on his backside with a left-right combination in the 11th round. No one else had ever floored Chavez. By the end of the fight, Chavez’s face looked like a pizza with everything.

Don King, so to speak, was leveraged out. Without Chavez, he had no hole cards.

Of course, a little thing like having no legitimate champion cannot be expected to discourage Don King. He thrives on illusion. His idol, to give you an idea, is P.T. Barnum. Lots of people in this world look up to saints or statesmen or war heroes; King’s role model is the man who said there was a sucker born every minute and who made the world think there were headless ladies, wolf boys, mind readers and talking horses.

So, King is not a man to take the count on one knee. Accordingly, he proposes to take up the slack in our pugilistic entertainment by putting on a card he calls “Revenge!” What it is, of course, is just a bunch of sequels. Remakes.

Chavez-Randall II is one of the four title fights (super-lightweight) on the King card at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Saturday night.

Randall is a personable enough nobody whose interesting characteristic to this chronicler is that he can’t see without glasses. A blood brother. He has astigmatism, which means he might rap out at the TOZ (or LPED) line on the eye chart.

It also means he might have to fight Chavez by ear. Nearsightedness would seem to be a fatal drawback in a fighter going up against Chavez because if there’s one thing you might want, it is to be able to see perfectly.

On the other hand, of course, faulty vision might explain Randall’s victory in the first fight. To see Chavez coming at you with murder in his heart is to fear him. If Randall had to fight him by Braille, it would be a little less terrifying.

King’s card holds out promise for vengeance for Terry Norris against Simon Brown, James Leija against Azumah Nelson and Julian Jackson against Gerald McClellan, but the reversal King will be looking for will be Chavez against Randall.

For the real fight fan, probably any one of King’s four fights will be better than, say, a Riddick Bowe-Moorer fight. Or the Evander Holyfield-Moorer fight. But real revenge for King will be getting the heavyweight title back. It’s the one championship that doesn’t need “super” in its title.

“But I promote like Mike Todd! P.T. Barnum! I keep the show going!” trumpets King. “Look at the historic fitness of these fights! An all-time dream card! It’s high time we put boxing into the 21st Century!”

And what of a return, a revenge by Tyson? “It will be nice to have a heavyweight champ who doesn’t have to fight a contender who’s a) over 40; b) a drunk; c) overweight; or d) a drug addict!” shouts King.

Barnum couldn’t have said it better.