They’re Sure Not Working for Scale

The biggest exercise in futility I know of--this side of a fight with your wife--is a heavyweight championship weigh-in.

What a heavyweight contender--or champion--weighs should be of interest only to his tailor. Or his doctor. He can weigh anything to infinity. The bigger they are, the harder they hit. But actually, Mickey Walker fought heavyweights--including Primo Carnera who weighed 270--at 168 pounds.

Weigh-ins are studies in irrelevancy too. Unless they’re for a Buster Douglas, who comes in the ring looking as out of shape as a streetcar conductor or Henry the Eighth. You just wanted to see if Buster would fit in a corner. And have room to fall down.

The last guy who could turn a weigh-in into an Event with a capital E was Muhammad Ali. Ali used a weigh-in the way Barrymore used a stage, for all kinds of histrionics.

No one who was there can ever forget the time Ali showed up for the first Liston fight weigh-in. He was screaming and banging a snake-headed gold cane on the floor like a certifiable madman. He was Cassius Clay in those days, but he was so wild-eyed and frothing at the mouth that some thought he was having a stroke. His blood pressure soared, his pulse rate speeded till the attending physicians got concerned. They weren’t sure whether he should be in a ring or a straitjacket.

We were convinced he was terrified. But it was all calculated. Later that night, after the fight (in which Liston quit in his corner), Ali confessed to me it was all an act aimed at shaking up Liston. “A man like him, no education, superstitious, ignorant, he afraid of one thing in this world--an insane man,” Ali explained to me after the fight. “I made him think that’s what I was. I shook him up.”

They weigh the wrong things at these weigh-ins anyway. What they should put on the scale is the aorta. Avoirdupois has less to do with the outcome than the heart of the matter.

Mike Tyson is ordinarily full of menace at a weigh-in. He appears to be looking at his opponent the way a lion might look at a zebra or a mugger at a drunk with a Rolex.

Evander Holyfield doesn’t need a scale, he needs a stethoscope. At any rate, that was the word at the last weigh-in. You may remember the chief concern then was not his weight but his cardiology. Not “heart” as in “courage,” but “heart” as in “pericarditis” or “atrial fibrillation.” Doctors from as far away as the Mayo Clinic (and as near as home--his wife is a doctor) were ambiguous about his ability to fight at all, never mind a Tyson. Some thought he should be in an oxygen tent, not a ring. The question was not whether he could win the fight but whether he could survive it. Tyson was not only 20-1 to knock him out, he was 5-1 to kill him. In fact, Tyson was such a prohibitive favorite, Holyfield was even money not to show up. He’s the only guy in history who got “Get well” cards on the eve of a championship fight.

Holyfield didn’t let the doctors stop the fight, but he let the referee stop it when Tyson was the one who needed intensive care by the 11th round.

Even so, getting in a ring with Mike Tyson is no place for a guy with a faint heart, whether it’s caused by fear or cholesterol. But Evander Holyfield proved there’s nothing wrong with his heart--either physically or metaphysically.

So, Holyfield doesn’t have heart trouble but he does have limitations. “Tyson hits harder than me, he’s faster, younger, but that doesn’t always add up to victory,” he tells you. “I have fought lots of guys who hit harder, but I hit oftener.”

Of course, Holyfield is an adherent of the principle put forth by President Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Holyfield will drink to that. With fear removed, the only thing Evander had to deal with was Mike Tyson itself. And, with his best weapon, fear, removed, Tyson was no more of a problem to Holyfield than, say, a Michael Dokes.

Tyson weighed 218 and so did Holyfield on Thursday, if you’re into trivia. Both fighters looked hungry. Neither looked scared. But if Evander Holyfield hits the floor Saturday night at the MGM Grand, it won’t be fear that put him there, it will be fury.