Boxer Pays a Steep Price for One More Chance at Glory

Greg Page was 42, over the hill and losing his edge.

In his bones--and in his ego--the former heavyweight champion wouldn’t believe what was clear as the battered nose on his face. His best days were over.

He wanted one more chance at a title. If George Foreman could do it at age 48, why couldn’t he?

So on March 9, Page put on his white boxing robe and strode across a cavernous, smoke-filled room where old ladies normally play bingo.

A thousand people sitting on metal chairs at folding tables could read the words stitched in ominous red letters across his hefty back as he stepped into the ring: “Feel the Knockout Power of the Lord.”

But 10 rounds later, in the last seconds of a hard fight, Page was down. The referee counted to 10. Page didn’t get up.

He was taken by ambulance across the Ohio River to Cincinnati’s University Hospital, where he spent days in a coma, listed in critical condition after surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. His trainer, in an account that has been disputed, said Page slammed headfirst onto a canvas with non-regulation padding.

A closer look reveals a quite different story about that night and another side of boxing--a sport many find barbaric, yet mesmerizing.

This side of boxing has nothing to do with Las Vegas spectacles that lure Hollywood celebrities to ringside seats. These are not big-money fights, such as the recent bout in which then-champion Evander Holyfield collected $5 million even in losing. The names here do not call up instant images: the erratic excesses of Mike Tyson; the impish elegance of Oscar De La Hoya.

This is blue-collar boxing. It’s a life in which men travel from town to town, supporting families by beating each other for as little as $400 a fight, doing a job that regularly breaks noses, hands and ribs, and sometimes batters brains into damaged goods.

Page’s March 9 bout with up-and-coming boxer Dale Crowe, 24, was his 76th fight--his overall record 58 wins with 48 knockouts, 17 losses and one tie.

In 1984, he knocked out Gerrie Coetzee in the eighth round to win the World Boxing Assn. heavyweight championship and $500,000.

He was a long, long way from those days when he entered the ring at Peels Palace, a bar and social club that hosts everything from cancer benefits to state-sanctioned boxing. He’d get $1,500 for this fight.

By the last few rounds, Page looked exhausted. But he was fighting his heart out for the Kentucky championship in this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town beside a thundering interstate. Peels Palace manager Guy McFadden said Page desperately wanted to win and to return to big-time boxing, the kind broadcast by HBO and ESPN.

“Page said it was a steppingstone to doing what George Foreman did,” said McFadden, a transplanted New Yorker who smokes menthols and sports a Mets baseball cap.

“He came here to win,” McFadden said. “He was serious.”

Since last month’s bout, Page’s condition has been upgraded from critical to fair. He was moved April 3 to a Louisville rehabilitation center. Family and hospital staff will not publicly discuss his injuries.

Those who have visited him say Page’s eyes are open and he is alert, but cannot speak or move one side of his body.

The fight is being investigated by the Kentucky Athletic Commission, which sanctions and regulates boxing matches.

“On boxing itself, I can’t say that I’m an expert,” said commission executive director Nancy Black, who attended the first fight of her life two weeks after the Page match. “I do know the Kentucky laws and regulations and am quite capable of enforcing them.”

According to those rules, a boxer must pass a routine physical by the ring doctor within eight hours of the fight. Oxygen is supposed to be on hand. Unlike many other states, Kentucky doesn’t require a pre-fight CAT scan to show current or potential brain damage such as a blood clot. There also is no requirement for an ambulance, and none was present during the Page-Crowe fight.

“What are they trying to do, save the taxpayers $200?” asked Cedric Kushner, an internationally known promoter. “One should have an ambulance on site, doctors on site, emergency medical technicians on site.”

Each state should have the same safety rules, Kushner said. “We’re in a very dangerous sport. We don’t deny that, those of us who are prepared to admit the truth.”

Despite the complaints of trainer James Doolin, who claims Page was in top condition and has threatened to sue Peels Palace, the commission and others, many say Page’s head never hit the canvas.

According to state athletic commissioners and others who saw the bout, or viewed a videotape of it, a worn-out Page staggered into the ropes and slumped to the floor with his legs and rear end on the canvas, his head lolling on the ropes.

“The ringside doctor said the exhaustion brought on a stroke,” said Terry O’Brien, the fight’s promoter.

“Greg Page wasn’t in shape for this fight,” O’Brien said. “He hadn’t been trained properly. If we’d known how out of shape he was, we wouldn’t have brought him up here” from his Louisville home.

Peels manager McFadden said Page looked dead on his feet. “I said to the guy sitting next to me, ‘He’s exhausted,’ ” McFadden recalled.

In the last 10 seconds, Crowe landed a left punch--not a particularly powerful one--to Page’s chin, causing the older boxer to lean into a clinch, McFadden said. Crowe pushed him away, a normal boxing move. That’s when Page fell against the ropes.

“There was no haymaker,” McFadden said. “It was a push.”

But in his day, Page could land punches that would make your ears ring. “A monster with tremendous boxing skills,” Muhammad Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, said in 1979, the year Page went pro.

Gregory Edward Page, born on the wrong side of Louisville, had wanted to be a champion since childhood. By age 15 he was sparring with Ali, also from Louisville.

Page mimicked the Ali shuffle and began daring opponents to hit him by just standing there, bouncing and shaking his head. As an amateur, he was called the new Muhammad Ali. In the mid-1970s, at a Cincinnati Golden Gloves match, Page danced all over the canvas and so confounded his teenage rival the boy dropped his fists and gaped. Page knocked him out.

In 1978, at the age of 20, he became the National Golden Gloves heavyweight champion. One year later, he turned pro.

In 1982, promoter Don King entered the scene. The story goes that King attended the funeral of Page’s father, paid for the service and threw himself sobbing onto the coffin. He left with Page’s signature on a contract.

But Page discovered, as had many others, that life with King--a publicity hound whose unforgettable hair looks like he styled it by sticking a fork into an electrical outlet--can be vexing.

Another heavyweight, Tim Witherspoon, once sued King, claiming fraud and conflict of interest. He won $1 million in an out-of-court settlement. Page confessed to a reporter he once carried a .357 magnum to a 1986 fight so he could shoot King, but thought better of it.

Before winning his WBA championship, Page climbed into the ring with Witherspoon for a World Boxing Council title fight. Page looked flabby and unfit. He fought so poorly, the crowd booed. Witherspoon won by decision.

Page did go on to win a world title, but his promising career soon went downhill.

In 1985, five months after winning it, Page lost the WBA championship on points to Tony Tubbs. He never fought for the title again.

Page continued to box, but also became a sparring partner and trainer with one glorious moment: In 1990, he knocked down Tyson, then the heavyweight champion, during a practice session before Tyson’s knockout loss to James “Buster” Douglas.

Three years later, after Page was knocked out in the ninth round by Bruce Seldon, he retired from professional boxing. It was a brief departure.

In 1996, he was back. His opponents were mostly no-names, his venues far from the glitter gulch of Vegas: Tennessee, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, Oregon and Kentucky.

Why did Greg Page keep boxing?

Michael Mudd, a member of the Kentucky Athletic Commissioner and a former boxer, knows the answer.

“Because some people just love boxing,” says Mudd, drinking coffee and smoking in a Louisville restaurant. “I love to fight. I’ve fought everywhere. In a parking lot behind a liquor store, a warehouse, everywhere.”

His last bout was in 1999 at age 53.

Mudd said his opponent was supposed to be 40 years old and weigh 175. Instead, the man was 30 and weighed 200 pounds. Mudd was punched so hard, his sternum cracked. He suffered a heart attack, but didn’t quit.

“I said, ‘Hell, I feel OK. Let’s keep going.’ ”

He lost, by the way.

Mudd is a man who speaks his mind and couldn’t care less what others think. Commissioner Black made herself spokeswoman for all things related to the Page fight. “No one’s going to tell me who I can talk to,” Mudd said.

He first met Page as a teenager. “Greg was a brooding kind of kid. He was very intense, somewhat of a thinker. He didn’t trust people and I can understand that, because there’s not many people you can trust in boxing.”

Mudd started at 15. He and his buddies would box each other in the basement of the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Occasionally, “somebody upstairs would get drunk and come down and go a few rounds with us.”

He’s been an ironworker and local government bureaucrat, but always he’s lived in the boxing circuit to which Page retired.

“The boxing business is really this: An agent picks up all his fighters. Takes them to the next town for a fight. Then he drives them to the next town,” Mudd said. “They make $400 a fight for four rounds. So in three days, they can make $1,200. That’s pretty good money for a man with a family.”

Mudd was not at the Page fight. But no one who’s seen it or the videotape, he said, has told him Page hit his head. “I find it hard to believe Greg was injured in that fight,” Mudd said. “He was a tough guy.”

If the canvas pad wasn’t the regulation 1 inch, Mudd said, Page’s trainer has no one to blame but himself.

“It’s Doolin’s job to check the pad. That’s his fighter up there.”

Commissioner Black will not comment on the fight investigation.

Mudd, a red-faced man with leathery cheeks, loves to smoke despite his heart attack. His nose has been broken four times, he says. Some guy would bust it with a left hook, another would break it with a right. Each time, he says, “it kinda laid on the side of my face.” Finally, “it got busted so many times it ended up in the middle.

“But it doesn’t look too bad. Most of the ugliness on me I was born with.”

He feels bad for Page. Terrible things happen in boxing, Mudd said.

“Look, your brain sits in liquid in your brain pan--so your brain is constantly being crashed against one side of the cranium or the other during a fight,” Mudd said. “But some of these guys love boxing and they can’t give it up.”

Promoter O’Brien puts it another way.

“Some of them never know the glory’s over. It’s up to the trainer or manager to sit them down and say, ‘Hey, it’s time to get a job.’ And, I’d say, some of them just can’t do anything else.”