McCall’s Plight a Crying Shame

The saddest sight I ever did see in the prize ring was Joe Louis’ head bouncing off the bottom rope and his balding pate glimmering in the ring lights as he was knocked out by Rocky Marciano in 1951.

The next saddest was the so-called “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975, when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier literally destroyed each other and never were the same again. It was not boxing’s finest hour.

Then there was Johnny Owen. Johnny was the skinny little Welshman who got destroyed at the hands of Lupe Pintor in a title fight (bantamweight) at the Olympic in 1980. I saw him at California Lutheran Hospital shortly before he died of the beating by Pintor.

Owen, who grew up in the coal mines of Wales, was so skeletally made he was known as the “Merthyr Matchstick.” He was pale as a ghost. You could see what he had for breakfast if he stood next to the light, and he was so bony that if you threw your hat at him, wherever it landed, it stuck. It didn’t look as if he had ever been out in the hot sun in his life; in fact, he spent most of his childhood 100 feet underground.

It was a terrible mismatch. Pintor looked as if he had never been out of the sun in his life and he was rippled with muscles.

I remember talking to Davey Moore as he sat on a rubbing table after his knockout by Sugar Ramos in Dodger Stadium in 1963. He was dying at the time, but we didn’t know it. Neither did he as he sat clutching at the back of his neck trying to explain his defeat. He wouldn’t live long enough to do it and slumped over suddenly in the arms of his manager, Willie Ketchum, where he was to explain pitifully, “Willie, I want to go to sleep.” Moore died two days later.

In movies, there was that heartbreaking scene in “On the Waterfront” as Marlon Brando, playing a prizefighter, turns his tear-stained face to his brother [Rod Steiger] to weep, “I coulda been a contender!”

I felt echoes of all of them the other night as I watched the star-crossed young pugilist, Oliver McCall, disintegrate before our eyes.

It was hard not to feel for McCall in his chance at history at the Las Vegas Hilton that night. It was like watching a man go to the electric chair.

Oliver McCall was a deeply troubled young man who had set out in life to be a basketball player. No Michael Jordan, he was nevertheless no one to mix it up with under the basket. So much so, that, one night, as he flattened an opponent or two in pursuit of a rebound, a teammate suggested “You’re in the wrong business.”

So he went from swingman on the basketball court to swing man in the ring.

He wasn’t Michael Tyson, either, but he hit hard and ignored pain. This made him a perfect sparring partner and, in turn, a perfect opponent for England’s Lennox Lewis when he wanted to show off his new World Boxing Council title in London’s Wembley Stadium on Sept. 24, 1994.

Big mistake. In the second round, McCall caught the overconfident 5-to-1 favorite with a smashing right hand to the chin and floored him. Lewis got up but couldn’t continue. Considerably to his surprise, to say nothing of that of the fight game, Oliver McCall became champion.

He had, as it happened, no idea how to handle that. McCall could handle being a contender, but being champ was a little beyond him. It was pretty heady stuff, but McCall wasn’t cut out to be titleholder. He went in and out of drug rehab, he once threw a Christmas tree across a hotel lobby, he scuffled with the cops--and he lost to Frank Bruno.

Now, no one loses to Frank Bruno, but McCall found a way. So, they decided to get McCall back in the ring with Lennox Lewis for a little restoration work on Lewis’ image. The fight mob pretty much convinced itself the knockout by McCall was a one-punch fluke.

McCall went into the rematch in the clutch of so many demons that he had to turn to religion to exorcise them.

His religion taught him it was wrong to hurt people.

So, sometime in the middle of the rematch with Lewis, McCall turned pacifist. He didn’t leave the ring, he just broke off hostilities.

Only trouble was, Lewis missed the point. He couldn’t believe his good luck, a disarmed, reluctant opponent standing before him all but waving a white flag. If you like that, you should go pull wings off butterflies.

It was one of the strangest bouts in fistic history. You felt embarrassed to be watching it. Then, the camera panned in and you noticed with a start that McCall was weeping uncontrollably like a lost child or one whose dog has just died.

The fight game reacted with typical insensitivity. It announced McCall’s purse would be withheld for non-performance. If you could imagine anything more beside the point.

Here was a man undergoing a psychic breakdown, dueling Lord knows what private nightmares and being pummeled all the while by one of the hardest punchers in the game.

It’s a cruel sport. They give fighters physicals. They try to make sure their blood pressure is all right, their pulse and temperature normal--but nobody tries to see if they’re mentally prepared.

McCall was one confused young man in there. He had clearly lost touch with reality.

There used to be a procedure in the boxing game for dealing with bouts like these. The ref would declare them “No Contest,” the non-fighter would be unpaid, put on probation, held up to public scorn.

But you have to wonder how many of the game’s tragedies could have been averted if the overmatched fighter bowed to the inevitable. Quitting in your corner was once considered honorable in Britain. Not here. Here, in a tradition going back to the gladiators and the lions, you stand there and absorb punishment, keep going till you make the hospital emergency room or get to be known as that staple of the fight game, the “fighter who can take it.”

Maybe McCall was weeping for us.