Bowe’s No Big Deal After Fidel

There’s an axiom in the fight game, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

To which, some comedian once rejoined, “No, no! The bigger they are, the harder they hit !”

Jorge Luis Gonzalez is a case in point. If he wins the heavyweight championship of the world, not a longshot, by any means, he will be the biggest, at least the tallest, heavyweight champion in history.

Primo Carnera, otherwise known as “the Ambling Alp,” was 6 feet 5. Jess Willard, “the Pottawatomie Giant,” was 6-6.

And the harder they fell.

Jorge Luis is 6-7. And he may not only become the biggest heavyweight champion, he may become the first Latin American to win the coveted title.

You would think this would set off dancing in the streets of his native Havana. Uh-uh. The leader forever of Cuba, Communism’s last stand in the hemisphere, Fidel Castro, is hoping for a reverse Bay of Pigs. He hopes his countryman gets stopped in his tracks.

The No. 1 Fidelista will be rooting for the American, Riddick Bowe, when Bowe fights Gonzalez for the World Boxing Organization heavyweight championship at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on June 17.

Castro has branded Gonzalez a traitor to the cause, a disgrace to his country.

That’s because Gonzalez escaped the clutches of Castro, and he didn’t have to take a leaky boat over 90 miles of pitching sea. Jorge Luis went over the wall in, of all places, Helsinki. Marched into a Finnish police station and requested asylum.

Gonzalez won 213 amateur bouts and now has won 23 consecutive pro bouts, 22 by knockout, but his most important decision was over Castro. Fidel always had the reach advantage, but Jorge got out of his reach. He also escaped Castro’s Sunday punch, the firing squad.

Before that, the Cuban strongman pretty much kept Gonzalez on the ropes. He did this by continuing to boycott Olympics, where Jorge could have showed his skills to the whole world.

Gonzalez’s predecessor, Teofilo Stevenson, pretty much became a pugilistic legend by winning the Olympic heavyweight championship at Munich in ‘72, at Montreal in ’76 and at Moscow in ’80.

Gonzalez never got that spotlight. Fidel’s politicking kept him out of the L.A. Olympics in 1984 and Seoul in 1988. He boycotted Los Angeles because Mother Russia did. Most people can’t remember why he skipped Seoul in ’88. Including, probably, Castro.

Meanwhile, playing off Broadway, Gonzalez kept piling up an impressive record. At the Pan Am games in 1983, he soundly whipped Tyrell Biggs, who won the Olympic gold at L.A. the next year. In 1987, he decked Bowe four times in the Pan Am semifinals, then whipped Lennox Lewis in the final. A year later, in the Olympics Gonzalez couldn’t go to, Lewis beat Bowe for the gold at Seoul.

A lot of people were surprised when Bowe took the Gonzalez fight, remembering that Riddick had thrown his World Boxing Council championship belt into the trash rather than give Lennox Lewis a rematch.

There have been fighters who excelled with the left hook. Others made an art form out of footwork. Some perfected the right cross, the old 1-2, the body shot. But the modern pug has to master the art of the weigh-in. It’s become an important part of the boxer’s arsenal.

You will recall, before his fight with Larry Donald, Bowe thoroughly cowed his opponent by popping him in the chops at a press conference even before the weigh-in. Donald got the message and spent his subsequent fight like a guy looking for a bed to hide under.

It’s a ploy perfected by Muhammad Ali. He used to turn opponents into masses of uncertainty with his weigh-in antics. His finest hour was the weigh-in before the first Sonny Liston fight--his last as Cassius Clay--when he showed up in such a frenzy, screaming and frothing at the mouth, that his blood pressure soared into the stratosphere, high enough to alarm the ringside physician.

We scribes put it down to fear. Noise is the classic defense against fear--whistling past the graveyard, if you will. We thought he was crazed with fright.

Crazed is the operative word here, and it was a calculated move by Ali. It was Liston who was spooked. He thought Ali was a crazy man. He fought almost timidly, whereas, by fight time, Ali’s blood pressure was quite normal and it was Liston who began behaving hysterically.

Jorge Luis Gonzalez relishes weigh-ins too. It’s like a bomber dropping leaflets before the attack. He has already showed up, creating disturbances at Bowe weigh-ins, even weigh-ins of Bowe’s stablemates.

He taunts Bowe.

“I am the lion! He is the hyena!” he told me at breakfast the other morning. “When we fight, he will fly away! Fly away! I make him disappear! He will throw no punches at our weigh-in, otherwise the fight will start right there!”

With his head shaved on top and a ponytail in the back, Jorge is a fearsome looking specimen. He may become the first Latin American since Argentina’s Luis Firpo to fight for the crown. If he wins, he would be the first Cuban to hold a championship since Benny Paret in the early ‘60s.

The responsibility does not figure to awe Gonzalez. Anyone who starts his pro career with a decision over Fidel Castro is apt to consider Riddick Bowe just a set-up, a pushover.