BOXING / TIM KAWAKAMI : Knockout Matchups Taking Hold

Months of nothing, then, wham! every important heavyweight who can pull on a pair of trunks and cause a TV executive’s heart to flutter suddenly is lining up fights and jockeying to be first into the ring.

Call it the Mike Tyson effect, although those who aren’t part of the Tyson camp strenuously emphasize that his long-awaited re-emergence is only tangentially related to the burst of activity.

Anyway, with Tyson’s Aug. 19 debut against Peter McNeeley on the horizon, nobody wants to be left behind, and everything is loose and lively in this usually comatose division. Here are the other big bouts already scheduled or about to be announced:

--Oct. 7: Lennox Lewis vs. Tommy Morrison. This fight was supposed to happen two years ago but was quashed when Morrison got smashed by Michael Bentt, on HBO.

--Nov. 4 in Las Vegas: Riddick Bowe vs. Evander Holyfield, for the third time, on TVKO, Time-Warner’s pay-per-view arm.

--Also Nov. 4 in Las Vegas: Tyson, assuming he gets past McNeeley (a safe assumption), is scheduled for his second bout, possibly against Lou Savarese or Buster Mathis Jr., on Showtime or Showtime’s PPV arm, SET.

--February: George Foreman’s rematch with Michael Moorer, on TVKO.

Two major heavyweight bouts on Nov. 4 in Las Vegas?

This is showdown time in cable country, probably the biggest face-off Time-Warner and Showtime have ever had, and the reason for it is, at the root, Tyson. With the major organizations twisting themselves deeper into obsolescence, HBO and Showtime will be calling the shots and making fights happen.

Showtime has Tyson, Showtime has paid him a lot of money and Showtime wants him to fight on the prime television dates. Time-Warner, which usually doesn’t have to worry about dates for its major heavyweight fights, has Bowe, Holyfield and Foreman under contract, and needs prime dates for them too.

So, for now, both sides are drawing lines, unsheathing verbal swords, and sticking to their plans for Nov. 4.

“We think Bowe-Holyfield III is the biggest heavyweight fight that can be made,” said Seth Abraham, head of Time-Warner Sports. “These guys have slugged it out for 24 rounds to a draw, and our job is to make the most attractive fights. And we are proceeding.”

Showtime’s Jay Larkin, pointing to the unique $50,000 deposit his company has already paid one distributor to reserve the date, said he is not about to back away from Nov. 4.

“If HBO decided to put Bowe-Holyfield opposite Tyson, if they’d do something as self-destructive as that, we would put Tyson on regular Showtime, non-pay-per-view,” Larkin said. “We’ve already discussed it, already discussed it with Don King, and we believe we’re prepared to go to that extent.

“We refuse to be bullied, and that’s what it’s coming down to. It’s simply a case of the big guy, well, the guy who thinks he’s the big guy, trying to push us around.”

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From Abraham’s point of view, HBO is trying to organize the chaos. He says he’d love to fit Tyson into the reorganization process, but since Tyson is a Showtime fighter, he knows there’s no way that can happen.

“We are trying to organize a series of heavyweight fights, not a tournament, but a series with the heavyweights that we have under contract,” Abraham said.

“We’re in effect two-thirds of the way there with Bowe-Holyfield and Lewis and Morrison. The third piece is George and Moorer. Out of that, what we would like to do is have the man who will be recognized by sports fans as the heavyweight champion of the world.”

There are no concrete plans for the winners of the Time-Warner bouts to fight one another, but Abraham talks about setting up a bracket of younger fighters, possibly including Alexander Zolkin, Andrew Golota and Axel Schulz, among others, with the winner fighting one of the winners from what you might call the Time-Warner first round.

All this would happen concurrent to Tyson’s uncertain comeback, which may or may not take him to a title fight against either Oliver McCall of the World Boxing Council or Bruce Seldon of the World Boxing Assn. by early next year.

Larkin agrees that some of the HBO fights are big, but warns that trying to control the division and excluding other companies won’t work.

“Personally, I think Bowe-Holyfield is a terrific fight,” Abraham said. “None of us mean to denigrate Bowe-Holyfield. It’s a fight that certainly has appeal. That doesn’t mean it has to happen at our expense.

“What their plan is, I don’t know. I don’t know what HBO has in mind. I do know it’s absurd for HBO to declare their own heavyweight champion. If they want to declare the HBO heavyweight champion of the world, I think they’re setting themselves up to ridicule. I believe there’s a great deal of conflict of interest involved when a telecaster believes they’re promoters. Networks have gotten into trouble with that in the past.”

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Rock Newman, promoter for Bowe, says there’s no way a Tyson fight against somebody like Lou Savarese can compare to the interest that will be generated by Bowe-Holyfield III.

“I welcome a Tyson fight,” Newman said. “Bowe-Holyfield blows anything that they could come up with out of the water. Tyson? Please. We’ve got filet mignon vs. Gainesburger.”

It was literally minutes before Newman was set to announce a Bowe-Morrison bout for November that Holyfield said he wanted to fight Bowe, causing a day of chaos and some unusual discussions between Bowe and Morrison, originally scheduled to fight each other.

“It clearly was the most convoluted negotiation I’ve ever been involved in, down to the point where part of what it was going to take to make this a reality was for Tommy Morrison to agree to fight Lennox Lewis,” Newman said. “A part of the bizarre negotiation had Bowe sitting at a conference table with Tommy and them discussing strategies to fight Lennox. It was absolutely strange.”

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Boxing Notes

Tonight against Vincenzo Nardiello in London on Showtime, World Boxing Council super-middleweight champion Nigel Benn fights for the first time since February, when he stopped Gerald McClellan in the 10th round, then watched horrified as McClellan lost consciousness and went into a coma. “I wouldn’t ever want to go through anything like the last one,” Benn said. “Apart from being worried about what had happened to McClellan after we’d both gone to the hospital in separate ambulances, I ended up so sore I couldn’t even climb into bed the night after the fight.”

Although there is a clause that would force new WBC and International Boxing Federation light-flyweight champion Saman Sorjaturong, the man who shocked Humberto (Chiquita) Gonzalez with a seventh-round knockout victory last Saturday, into a rematch if Gonzalez wants one, don’t be shocked if there is some WBC or IBF tomfoolery. Gonzalez has never been one of the WBC’s favored fighters, and Don King has former champion Michael Carbajal and WBC strawweight champion Ricardo Lopez both awaiting bigger paydays.