Moorer Has Been Down, but He’s Up on This Card

When Michael Moorer got knocked out by the 45-year-old George Foreman with one stunning blow to the chin in the 10th round of a fight in which he was comfortably ahead, the fight mob figured that would be the end of Michael Moorer as a force in boxing. More than his chin would be bruised. So would his self-esteem.

They forgot that Dempsey got knocked out by Fireman Jim Flynn--in one round--two years before he became heavyweight champion of the world.

They overlooked the fact that Joe Louis got knocked out by Max Schmeling one year before he became heavyweight champion of the world. Unnoticed was that even Gene Tunney lost his American light-heavyweight championship to Harry Greb four years before he took the heavyweight championship from Dempsey.

Even Jack Johnson got knocked out early in his career by Joe Choynski.

It happened to the best of them. Ezzard Charles got knocked out before he got his title shot by Lloyd Marshall. Jersey Joe Walcott got kayoed by Al Ettore and Tiger Jack Fox before he became titleholder. Only Rocky Marciano came to the heavyweight championship undefeated and left it the same way.

“Losing only destroys losers,” the late Honest Bill Daly used to say.

The trouble was, the fight game had figured Michael Moorer was the new Marciano. He’d had 35 fights and won all of them, 31 by knockout.

The fight before the Foreman fight, he had defeated Evander Holyfield, no less. The notion that he would have anything more than a complicated workout against the 45-year-old Foreman never occurred to anyone in the gyms. Or anyone running a Vegas book. They wondered if it should be allowed. Foreman might get hurt.

It was Moorer who got hurt. In the career and in the pocketbook.

But history was on his side. Dempsey came back after his knockout to become “the Manassa Mauler.” He knocked out 24 of his next 27 or so opponents--and one of them was Fireman Jim Flynn, for whom he returned the disfavor, knocking him out in one round.

Joe Louis came back after the Schmeling fiasco and proceeded to knock out 14 of his next 16 opponents--and one of them was Schmeling, whom he knocked out in the first round.

So, if the greatest champions in the history of the game could shake off humiliating defeats, why not Michael Moorer? If Dempsey and Louis could take it, who was he to sit around feeling sorry for himself?

Floyd Patterson was so ashamed when he was knocked out by Sonny Liston, he left town in a bearded disguise. But Michael Moorer would have none of it.

Michael Moorer didn’t don a fake beard, change his name or move to a monastery. He didn’t even join the Marines. He did what Dempsey did. And Louis did. He went out and got fights. He warmed up with a nobody named Melvin Foster, whom he beat easily, then went to Dortmund, Germany, to fight Axel Schulz. He won, not easily.

He was reduced to an undercard fight--the semi-main to the featured Tyson-Holyfield fight last November. It was humbling to be on a preliminary fight on a card featuring a fighter he had beaten, but Moorer dealt with it, administering a workmanlike beating to the game South African, Francois Botha, flooring him twice in a 12-round decision.

And, when Holyfield knocked out Tyson in the main event, it boosted Moorer’s stock almost as much as Holyfield’s. After all, Moorer had beaten him.

Michael Moorer has one incalculable advantage over every opponent he runs up against: He is a left-hander. Now, this may be minimally advantageous to tennis players, blackjack dealers, quarterbacks and crapshooters, but it is a huge edge in the ring.

It was the studied opinion of the one-time lightweight champion, Joe Brown--known as “Old Bones” because of his clanky body and curmudgeonly disposition--that all left-handers should be drowned at birth.

For one thing, you cannot effectively cut off the ring against a lefty. It’s like shadow-boxing and the shadow hits you back.

No left-hander had ever held the heavyweight title before Moorer. His unorthodoxy was hard to solve for everyone but George Foreman. But George, being George, probably didn’t notice.

Moorer just might be the uncrowned champion. He fights a newcomer named Vaughn Bean--not to be confused with “Butter”--at the Las Vegas Hilton next Saturday.

Bean’s longest fight to date has been seven rounds. And Moorer hopes to keep it that way. Bean is an unknown quantity who personally changed his nickname from “Vicious” to “Shake and Bake” as soon as he found a dictionary.

“I didn’t like what [vicious] means,” he told reporters the other day.

Moorer doesn’t have a nickname. Except possibly “Lefty.”

Do the memories of the Foreman fight remain in his psyche, cloud his confidence now?

“No. A fighter must expect to be beaten,” he said from his training camp. “It’s the nature of the game. You don’t dwell on it. You just pick up and go from there. It’s something to be risked when you’re a boxer. People just don’t understand. There’ll be a day when you’re going to lose, no matter who you are. You learn from it and go on.”

Dempsey couldn’t have said it better. You can’t keep a good man up.