$5-Million No-Hitter for Tyson

The subject was fight-fixing for fun and profit, form and distance.

I went to, at the time, the world’s foremost authorities, Honest Bill Daly and Lefty Remini.

Lefty handled Tami Mauriello, a heavyweight contender, and Honest Bill Daly believed World War II was fixed. Honest Bill’s specialty was dishonesty.

The discussion centered on whether the fix was in at Jack Johnson’s fight in Havana with Jess Willard. Since Johnson was lying on the floor at the time, shielding his brow from the sunlight with a gloved fist as he was counted out, the bulk of the evidence was that larceny was afoot.

“Never!” hooted Lefty Remini. “The fight went 26 rounds, didn’t it? No fixed fight goes 26 rounds! A fixed fight goes two minutes [or 1 minute 49 seconds?]. No fighter who is going to take a dive stands there for two hours getting hit. Why should he? A fix goes less than a round. That’s the way you tell if a fight is fixed. First, it has to be a one-round knockout.”

Lefty is long gone, now. But you wonder if he would have noticed that the recent Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight met his criteria.

The second set of viable criteria has to do with whether the knockee absorbed any punishment from the knocker.

“If he goes down from a phantom punch, call the cops,” advised Remini. “And don’t pay off--unless they break your kneecaps.”

A fight like this was said to be “in the bag,” because, in those days, the payoff money was usually delivered in a small valise filled with unmarked 20s. It was also described as “taking a dive” or “going in the tank.” Some fighters displayed Olympic form at this. The trick was not to make a big splash.

Fight-fixing was as hard to prove as any other form of mob larceny and the crooks’ lawyers were called “mouthpieces” and were as adept as their modern counterparts at suppressing truth. To my recollection, the only recorded instance of a fixed fight being proven was the Jake Lamotta-Billy Fox bout in 1947.

Jake threw that fight, he later admitted. Billy Fox was one for Ripley, a black middleweight out of Philly whose record was unique in boxing history: Every single fight he ever had had ended in a knockout--51 of them--when he climbed into the ring with Lamotta that November day in ’47. That means, assuredly, that a number of them had been as preordained as the Lamotta fight was to prove to be. Billy was a mob fighter, with all that entailed.

But that fight went four rounds.

“I hadda wait till he hit me!” Lamotta, who enjoyed punishment, later complained.

There is some evidence Bruce Seldon didn’t even wait for that the other night against Mike Tyson.

But the prevailing wisdom in this day and age is that you can’t fix a fight anymore. Not when fighters cut up purses of $30 million or so. Bruce Seldon got $5 million. Gamblers can’t fix fighters who command that kind of money. Fights used to be fixable when the purse would be a few grand, not a few mil.

But the Seldon scenario goes like this: Bruce Seldon had the title and not much else. He even got that by fiat, not by punches. He defended it against a nobody named Joe Hipp in an event about as well attended as a poetry reading in Abilene.

So, the plot goes, promoter Don King approached him with the proposition: Fight Mike Tyson and get a great payday, $5 mil to be exact, and escape with all your teeth and eyes and ears and enjoy it.

You have to think Uncle Don was not at all interested in another Buster Douglas outcome for his meal ticket, Tyson. Whether he mentioned this in passing to Bruce Seldon with a hint he’d like not to see a repetition, we’ll never know.

Promoter Bob Arum, no apologist for promoter King, doesn’t think so.

“The fix was in, but not that kind of fix,” Arum explained. “King fixed it, all right, but by manipulating the ratings and rulings so that Bruce Seldon became champion by just standing there like a guy waiting for a bus.”

What happened was that the World Boxing Assn., whoever they are, took the title away from George Foreman because he wouldn’t defend against Tony Tucker, whoever he is. Foreman didn’t want a Tucker fight because nobody would show up for it but Tucker.

Seldon, who had been knocked out twice, was given a title shot against Tucker, for what obscure reason no one--with the possible exception of Don King--knows for sure. Pitting them for the vacant title was a little like Paul Tagliabue ruling that Tampa Bay and the New York Jets should play to see who goes to the Super Bowl.

Seldon beat Tucker on a decision and suddenly had a $5-million property at his disposal--but only if he fought Tyson.

“That’s how the fight was fixed!” Arum said. “You don’t have to pay Seldon to take a dive. He makes a career of going down without being hit. He went down without being hit against Riddick Bowe and to some extent against Oliver McCall.”

King knew he would disappear on Tyson’s way across the ring.

Commissions used to rule “no contests” in fights in which an opponent went down without being hit, which seems reasonable enough under the circumstances. But they also held up the fighters’ purses, which caused some consternation and inconvenience. But commissions aren’t as game as they used to be. They take dives too.

Honest Bill Daly would have understood the whole tableau perfectly. Honest Bill even found the Jack Johnson fight to be fixed.

“Johnson waited till his wife showed up at ringside with the satchel,” he explained. “He didn’t take much punishment. Willard had trouble finding him.”

It’s nice to know there are still some old-fashioned verities. The good old fight game doesn’t change. It clings to its traditions. In this day of on-line, Internet, dot com, and voice mail, it’s reassuring to know somebody has some respect for the old ways.

The coat of arms of the good old fight game is still a pair of six-ounce gloves rampant on a field of double-crosses, broken hearts and glass chins. It’s heartwarming. Some things never change.