Why Not Make a Federal Case of It?

This is the column you don’t want to read.

Mike Tyson chews off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in the biggest-money fight of all time, and you want to see more action than just a one- or two-year suspension from boxing.

John Horne, Tyson’s co-manager shrieks incoherently about Holyfield in the aftermath and Don King still collects upward of $20 million, and you want sweeping regulations enforced to prevent a repeat of this sad moment.

Justifiably, you feel you can’t trust the sport as long as King owns a chunk of it, or callow men are allowed to injure it before an eager audience, or another mega-fight is reduced to a melee, tickets refundable for nobody.

You want an all-powerful commissioner (Judge Landis? David Stern? Zeus?) to knock heads together. You want a federal commission to wipe out the blight. You want boxing to be clean, or to be banned altogether.

And you know what? Not much is going to change.

Boxing, sport’s bouncy bastion of anarchy, will keep moving along, staging big and little shows around the world, making men rich and driving others into poverty . . . as it has for decades, through different threats and crises, through glorious times and repellent crimes.

Boxing, governed solely by the marketplace and the public’s will to witness sporting violence, survives exactly because it is so unstable, unregulatable, unmanageable by any single organization.

It pops up wherever two fighters can be lured into a square ring by someone looking to make money, before whatever crowd he can draw to whatever site he can open up.

Sometimes, it produces brilliance--Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Dempsey. Sometimes, it produces blood and bitterness. Sometimes, it gives us men like Tyson and King, who alternately disgust and intrigue the world.

This sport has never had a set schedule, a World Series, a permanent roster, a home field, a board of governors or any real driving force, except history and money, and not in that order.

You can’t manage the sport mostly because you can’t dictate who is willing to take a financial risk--you can’t eliminate the Don Kings of the world, because it is exactly their moxie and salesmanship (and perhaps corruption) that puts together events like Holyfield vs. Tyson.

If King weren’t so good at what he does, nobody would have cared that the outcome was so disgraceful.

“Boxing is so different than other sports,” said Richard DeCuir, who recently ended a highly regarded six-year run as the California State Athletic Commission’s executive director and does not support the idea of a federal board to oversee the sport.

“What I have learned is it is difficult to regulate this sport in Southern California from an office in Northern California, so trying to regulate the nation from D.C. would be a phenomenal task.

“The sport is too fluid--there’s too much activity and mobility with the fighters and the managers and the seconds. . . . The whole boxing industry changes from day to day.”

Don’t look to the major sanctioning bodies for fair and judicious oversight--the World Boxing Council, World Boxing Assn., International Boxing Federation and all the other two-bit, three-letter belt-givers are as culpable for the chaos as anybody.

These groups are not regulators, they’re competitors, like ABC vs. Fox vs. NBC. The alphabet organizations are simply looking to put on the biggest shows, with the best stars, and to put the most cash in their coffers.

While still in prison, Tyson was moved up to the No. 1 contender position in the WBA and WBC rankings, even though he hadn’t fought in three years. These groups will surely do it again, however long he is suspended Wednesday by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

“All this talk about new regulations and a federal commission is just talk-talk-talk,” said Larry Hazzard, chairman of the New Jersey boxing commission.

“Tell me how would a federal commission have prevented what Mike Tyson did Saturday night? How does all that mumbo-jumbo prevent what Oliver McCall did [by refusing to defend himself against Lennox Lewis in February]?”

Promoter Bob Arum, King’s main rival, claims that putting the ultimate power in the hands of a federal voice--and away from the states--eliminates the conflict state commissions feel between penalizing a promoter or fighter and the desire to hold money-making fights in their states.

“It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Arum said, “and King takes advantage of it.”

But the state commissions themselves, DeCuir and Hazzard say, are the last and best way to make sure promoters provide for the fighters’ safety and adhere to basic rules of fairness.

The recently signed McCain Bill tightens state jurisdiction by forcing all commissions to adhere to medical suspensions of other states. It is less clear about disciplinary suspensions (which might be a Tyson loophole to fight in a less-organized state, such as Oklahoma or Colorado), but Hazzard and DeCuir say that almost all states have always honored other commission’s disciplinary bans.

“We’ve been on the ropes before,” Hazzard said. “We continue to move forward in the sport, despite and in light of what has occurred.

“I don’t think we should go on the defensive--that boxing is jeopardized by what he did. Mike Tyson’s career is in bigger jeopardy than the sport of boxing. And that’s the way it should be.

“I don’t think the sport of basketball is bad because of Dennis Rodman. I don’t think baseball is bad because of Roberto Alomar. And boxing isn’t bad because of Mike Tyson’s actions.”

WHAT NEXT?

Tyson isn’t the only one whose future is in limbo.

King, who scraped by during Tyson’s three-year jail term because Julio Cesar Chavez was at his height, has no such alternative this time around, and already faces a $15-million loss from his deal with the MGM Grand if Tyson cannot fulfill the last fight of the six-fight deal he signed when he came out of prison.

But King is famous for his survival skills. Behind the scenes instead of his usual spot barking to the world at large, he is apparently maneuvering to move Tyson out of the hands of controversial co-managers Horne and Rory Holloway, who are being blamed for inciting Tyson to idiocy.

Horne, once King’s loyal disciple but who grew increasingly difficult even for King to handle the longer he was with Tyson, and old Tyson friend Holloway are being pushed either into the background or out entirely, and Tyson’s public apology Monday is being viewed as entirely a King production to temper the upcoming punishment.

“Don is being very calm, he’s acting very professional and in a very methodical and thoughtful matter,” said Showtime executive Jay Larkin, who said he has been speaking to King on a daily basis. “We’re actually relying a lot on Don to maintain calm in the camp right now.

“I think Don realizes he has a significant problem on his hands.”

A BIG VACANCY

DeCuir, who left office two weeks ago to take a governor-appointed job as the No. 2 man at the Department of Health and Human Safety, is credited with turning the California commission into a fairly well-organized, judicious authority from the heap of trouble he took over seven years ago.

DeCuir, who had no ties to boxing before his appointment, brought an administrator’s mind to commission business--and separated it from the tangled conflicts that had bogged it down in the past.

“In my opinion, he was the best executive officer this commission has had in the 15 years I’ve been associated with the commission,” Forum Boxing executive John Jackson said. “There were several problems when he got there, and he cleared them up: the pension plan, and the neurological program, just to name two.”

Said DeCuir: “I tried to separate the commission from the industry and reestablish the commission’s authority, which had pretty much eroded. I think Chairman Bill Eastman and I made the California commission, love it or hate it, pretty much state of the art, and that was not the case back in ’91.”