The Undisputed King Won’t Only Be Don

Don King was in Los Angeles on Thursday. But I probably don’t have to tell you that. If you were anywhere within a 25-mile radius of the Grand Olympic Auditorium, you felt the temblor caused by his booming voice.

If someone had called Kate Hutton at Caltech, she would have reported a Richter scale reading of about 6.5. That was relatively low for King but high enough to obscure the fact that Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis also attended the news conference.

King doesn’t need them until March 13, when they are scheduled to fight at Madison Square Garden in a heavyweight championship unification bout. He verified that when he said the promotion will be titled, “King’s Crowning Glory.”

He also said that the fight will be dedicated to “the greatness of womanhood in the world.” His examples were Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks and Susan McDougal. You hardly ever hear those three mentioned in the same sentence.

For those wondering what womanhood has to do with this fight, King explained by saying neither Holyfield nor Lewis would have been born without it.

Good point.

Actually, this fight is about more than Don King.

There hasn’t been an undisputed heavyweight champion since 1992, when Riddick Bowe dropped his World Boxing Council belt into a garbage can out of defiance over the mandate to fight the organization’s No. 1 contender, Lewis.

By the time he fights Holyfield, Lewis will have been chasing that title for about seven years. Efforts to coax Mike Tyson, Bowe and then Holyfield into the ring have, until now, failed.

It would have been in King’s best interest for this negotiation to meet with the same fate. If Holyfield loses, King is, in effect, shut out of the heavyweight division. But Holyfield, tired of hearing from Lewis’ camp that he was obstructing the fight, insisted that King make the deal.

“You better be careful what you ask for because you might get it,” Holyfield warned Lewis on Thursday. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Is you really ready?’ ”

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Defending the objectivity of his computer, one of three used in compiling bowl championship series rankings, Jeff Sagarin said in Thursday’s USA Today, “I always have my human thoughts. But the algorithm runs unchecked.” . . .

I don’t know about you, but I’d feel better if the national championship were determined by DeShaun Foster, Michael Bishop or Travis Henry running unchecked. . . .

In a subsequent radio interview, Sagarin predicted that, if UCLA, Tennessee and Kansas State win Saturday by similar margins, the Fiesta Bowl will match No. 1 UCLA against No. 2 Kansas State. . . .

Look for Tennessee fans to blow their rocky tops, much as they did when Peyton Manning finished second in Heisman voting. . . .

Milton Kahn, a Santa Barbara publicist, suggests that all three teams meet in Tempe if they remain undefeated. . . .

Each could play a half against the others, with the one scoring the most points winning the title. Call it the Menage a Trois Bowl. . . .

John Robinson had the opportunity to take on a real challenge by accepting the coaching job at Hawaii, which has lost 18 consecutive games. . . .

Instead, he went to Nevada Las Vegas, which has lost a mere 16 in a row. . . .

The L.A. Sports & Entertainment Commission calendar is now available. . . .

Read it and weep. The first date you see when you open the calendar is Dec. 1, 1998, which was supposed to be the night the Bulls visited the Clippers. . . .

Michael Jordan is again scheduled to be in town for a game against the Lakers on Feb. 7, if there is an NBA season and if he decides to play. . . .

Long Beach, in a bid with the L.A. Sports Council, is the U.S. bid city for the 2003 World Aquatics (swimming, diving, water polo and synchronized swimming) Championships. FINA, the international governing body for the sports, will choose the host city next March. . . .

Anything you want to know about ice hockey other than the name of the NHL’s official dentist? . . .

The sport’s first encyclopedia, “Total Hockey,” is available in bookstores. . . .

Trainer Lou Duva, whose Jose Luis Lopez faces James Page in a World Boxing Assn. welterweight title fight Saturday in Atlantic City, N.J., reports that the deli at Bally’s has named a sandwich for Don King. “A little tongue and a lot of baloney,” Duva says.

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While wondering if Disney could create Texasland to make Roger Clemens feel as if he were playing closer to home, I was thinking: Too bad the Kings don’t have a player like Wayne Gretzky, one unbeaten college football team will lose Saturday, or else I’m reading these algorithms wrong.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.