Heavyweight Division Has Lightweights

Heavyweight reset, June 1996:

Riddick Bowe-Andrew Golota. Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon. Henry Akinwande-Alexander Zolkin. Michael Moorer-Axel Schulz. All coming this summer. . . . Excited yet?

The correct answer is: Are you kidding? The promoters keep promising bigger things down the road, keep pointing to monster matchups for the fall or spring or, hey, can you wait for November of 1997?

But for the slice of the public that’s not desperately bored with the whole division, the best thing out there is a potential fall bout between Tyson and Evander Holyfield, a wind-up warrior long past his better (or even healthy) days.

To even get to that bout, on July 13 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Tyson must execute the ritual early knockout of Seldon, a weak-willed, jabbing journeyman who was blown out years ago by Bowe but somehow ended up as the World Boxing Assn. champion.

Then Holyfield, who two years ago was found to have a congenital heart problem, must get clearance from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which is no sure thing.

If it happens, Holyfield, who was too exhausted to pounce on a wounded Bowe and probably wouldn’t have fared well against Tyson even five years ago, isn’t likely to last longer than four rounds.

Lennox Lewis, man or myth?

The guy is 6 feet 5, has a right hand that can dent walls and screams that everybody is ducking him.

So why does he avoid every chance he gets--and he gets a lot of them--for a breakthrough bout against either Bowe or Tyson?

There’s something missing here, but it’s not Lewis’ knack for gaining money and titles through any means that do not include fisticuffs.

Lewis fought hard in court to force Tyson to fight him, or at least to make Tyson choose between fighting Lewis and publicly backing out by dropping the World Boxing Council belt Tyson recently won by blowing out Frank Bruno.

But, instead of pressing the issue, Lewis’ camp took $4 million to step aside from a shot at Tyson, probably forever. Tyson will quietly give up the belt, and Lewis will probably be pitted against former champion Oliver McCall, who knocked out Lewis in their first meeting, for the vacated title.

The decision to pass on Tyson was complicated by feuding TV networks (Lewis is a Time Warner fighter; Tyson is a Showtime man), and promoter Don King’s intractability on the issue. But boxing’s a risky sport--you either believe in yourself or you don’t--and Lewis seems all too willing to cut deals rather than take a leap of courage into the ring.

Is Moorer the bravest, the dumbest or just the least marketable contender around?

Moorer, the guy who got whacked by George Foreman 1 1/2 years ago, has the guts and the bad fortune to want to win back the title in the ring, so he’s traveling to Germany for a June 22 International Boxing Federation title bout against Schulz, the athletic German.

Moorer had a rematch set with Foreman for early this year, but that was canceled when Foreman demanded more cash.

Is Tyson-Bowe the answer?

It’s better than anything else, even though both fighters have displayed differing degrees of sloppiness in recent outings.

Bowe, inactive since knocking out Holyfield last November, faces a large, slow Golota on July 11 at Madison Square Garden, and Bowe eats this kind of fighter alive.

And with the guaranteed millions still left on his MGM and Showtime contracts, Tyson has little motivation to fight anybody who might test him. When the MGM deal is up--which could be by the end of this year--that’s when you start looking for the mega-fights.

Meanwhile, the Bowe and Lewis camps are taking one more swing at putting together a November fight between Bowe and Lewis, bitter foes since Lewis beat him in the 1988 Olympics. But neither side seems inspired to make it happen, and both camps say it could be even bigger the more they wait.

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Though Oscar De La Hoya would have preferred to face IBF 140-pound champion Kostya Tsyzu, promoter Bob Arum closed a deal this week for De La Hoya to face his WBC mandatory challenger, former 135-pound champion Miguel Angel Gonzalez, Sept. 14, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Arum says he hasn’t decided whether the fight will be on pay-per-view or closed circuit, but this one won’t bring in anywhere near the $45 million to $60 million total of last week’s De La Hoya-Julio Cesar Chavez closed-circuit promotion and is probably a PPV fight.

Assuming he beats Gonzalez, billed as the poor man’s Chavez, De La Hoya has an HBO fight due for December, and after that, Arum and promoter Dino Duva are closing in on De La Hoya vs. WBC welterweight champion Pernell Whitaker for March or April, almost certainly on PPV.

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De La Hoya, after watching the video of his fourth-round technical knockout of Chavez, says the result was clear.

“There’s no reason to fight him again,” De La Hoya said. “It was an easy fight.”

And De La Hoya says he isn’t bothered by talk in the local Latino community that the victory was tainted because of Chavez’s early, profuse cut.

“They’ll never accept the fact that I beat their hero,” De La Hoya said. “That doesn’t bother me at all. I know I beat him. I know I outclassed him.”

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Boxing Notes

Interesting sidelight on the 450,000-person closed-circuit gate in about 70 California closed-circuit venues last Friday for the Chavez-De La Hoya bout: The usually cash-starved State Athletic Commission collected 5% of the gross, and, for the first time since 1981, was able to return money to the state’s general fund--to the tune of $200,000.

In a tuneup for his Aug. 23 lightweight bout against veteran Livingstone Bramble in Atlantic City, N.J., Rafael Ruelas is expected to face Huntington Beach’s Mike Walsh on July 10 at the Beverly Hilton. . . . Gabriel Ruelas was all set to fight Jesse James Leija if Leija had beaten Azumah Nelson June 1, but after Nelson’s one-sided knockout victory, nobody wants a third Ruelas-Nelson bout because Nelson has already beaten Ruelas twice. Ruelas instead is a tentatively set to face former 126-pound champion Tracy Harris Patterson sometime in August.