He’s Given the Sport One More Black Eye

I couldn’t tell if Oliver McCall was punch drunk, punch drugged, psyched up, freaked out, or if his head would spin like Linda Blair’s after being possessed by a demon. Somebody, however, had better tell the Las Vegas Hilton’s event planners that if they ever stage another heavyweight championship fight like last Friday’s, they had better hold it in a rubber room.

With the bout between McCall and the obnoxious Lennox Lewis in progress during Round 4, in a scene unlike any I have seen, McCall’s trainer, George Benton, said of his fighter, “This man’s mind is gone.”

HBO’s Larry Merchant asked Benton on the air, “You mean you think his mind has snapped?”

“You ever seen anything like this?” Benton asked back.

Weeping in his corner when the round was over, McCall sat upon his stool--which is more than he had done after the previous round--looking for all the world like a man about to be strapped to an electric chair. Benton, not knowing what else to say, leaned toward his boxer confidentially and pleaded, “Don’t do this to yourself, don’t do this to yourself.”

A concerned referee Mills Lane asked, “Oliver? Oliver, do you want to fight?”

“I got to,” McCall muttered.

He rose, unsteady as a toddler from a crib. Lennox Lewis approached from the opposite side of the ring. McCall squared away, put up his dukes. And then, exactly as he had during the previous two rounds, McCall put down his dukes, strutting away disdainfully from Lewis as a matador might from a bull.

Lewis didn’t know whether to pursue him, or schedule an appointment. Were he trying to rope-a-dope Lewis, the way McCall maintained a day later when his fog had theoretically lifted, well, someone might remind McCall that the entire theory of rope-a-doping is predicated on making the opponent punch himself out, while you absorb blows. McCall’s “strategy,” the mope-and-weep, would have succeeded only if Lewis grew tired of looking for him and checked out of the Hilton.

In Round 3, Lewis threw 78 punches, McCall 15.

“He’s hardly fighting right now,” Jim Lampley said on TV.

“Unless he’s playing the greatest game of possum I ever saw,” Merchant speculated.

At round’s end, McCall, rather than return to his corner, wandered around the ring. He did everything but take the “Round 4” card from the woman in the Budweiser swimsuit. Benton, his trainer, couldn’t look. A second cornerman called out, “Oliver! Oliver!” in a vain attempt to call him back. It fell on deaf ears. McCall’s mind was mush.

Round 4 was worse. That’s when Benton acknowledged his man was melting down. George Foreman wished aloud he could step into the ring and give McCall a hug, let him know everything would be all right. Me, I felt for Lewis. Those who consider it painful watching a grown man cry should be instructed to punch one sometime. The last time I saw anyone this unstable in a fistfight, I was in first grade.

The ref stopped the fight, 55 seconds into Round 5. It should have been stopped 55 seconds into McCall’s drug rehab.

Arrested three times in 1996--twice for drugs, once for the masterfully plotted crime of throwing a Christmas tree--and placed in a substance-treatment program only a few weeks ago, McCall did not belong in a ring reserved by Don King, he belonged in a room reserved by Bette Ford. He hadn’t fought in 11 months and shouldn’t be fighting anything now but his habit.

A former Mike Tyson sparring partner who got too much too fast, McCall’s best feature was a skull as thick as a brick. He has never been knocked out. The only fight Lewis ever lost, it was to McCall, who floored him 2 1/2 years ago in England and stood there watching Lewis get counted out by a fast count.

I have never been impressed by Lewis. His jab is a kitten-with-yarn left paw, and he is remarkably arrogant for somebody who first got the World Boxing Council championship belt because Riddick Bowe stuffed it in a trash bin. Lewis had a 272-day layoff before Friday, and I am confident that either Evander Holyfield or Tyson could stuff him in a trash bin.

Upon leaving the dressing room, McCall, the self-called “Atomic Bull,” ran to the ring at full gallop and sprang up three steps in a single bound. He was rip-snortin’ and raring to go. He fought two rounds like your basic, semi-normal pugilist. And suddenly his gray cells turned into cottage cheese.

A man this addled has no business being a boxer. Obviously, he should be a promoter.