Boxing Fails to Leave Us With a Kodak Moment

I made meaningful eye contact with Bo Derek while the two of us sat ringside at the Hearns-Hagler fight many years ago in Las Vegas, so obviously I’m not here to tell you there’s no value to the sport of boxing.

But I know there is going to be a lot of analysis and deep thought given to Mike Tyson’s biting Lennox Lewis on Tuesday, and the pro wrestling manner in which fights are being promoted.

Jon Saraceno, columnist and boxing expert for USA Today, reacted immediately by scribbling: “[Tyson] is a bewildered, anguished, tortured man for whom redemption never will find a safe harbor.”

I would think it would have been Lewis who was the bewildered, anguished and tortured man unable to find a safe harbor after being bitten on the leg while just standing there at a news conference--and then being sent to the hospital for a tetanus shot.

I know I’ve had the feeling I should get a tetanus shot after some of the news conferences I’ve attended, but the editors always insisted I make deadline and finish my stories about Disney’s ownership of the Angels and Ducks before doing anything else.

That might explain, however, why USC Athletic Director Mike Garrett tells everyone it appears I’m foaming at the mouth to talk with him.

Anyway I don’t normally pay that much attention to boxing, treating it a lot like horse racing, women’s basketball and bobsled racing--three sports that would be helped tremendously by periodic all-out brawls.

It’s the ruckus in New York, for example, that brought my attention to boxing this week.

So I opened The Times on Wednesday morning expecting to see Tyson munching on Lewis’ leg with the intention of draping the picture over my wife’s cereal bowl to help with her latest diet--only there was no picture.

I’m told Sports Editor Bill Dwyre was so bothered by the latest boxing news conference melee that he refused to allow a picture from the brawl to appear on the first page of the sports section. Instead, the newspaper ran a photo of Shaq standing on his head and Monica Seles making the kind of face she’d shred if it came out of her own Polaroid.

Seles’ photo also showed what incredible muscles she has in her arms, and imagine what a news conference melee between Seles and Jennifer Capriati or one of the Williams sisters could do for the sport of tennis.

Tell me Dwyre wouldn’t plaster those pictures all over the front page of the sports section and ask for copies to hang on his office walls.

Dwyre put Steve Springer’s story on the Tyson brawl in the front-page spot normally reserved for serious news, which weakens his “ban the boxing photo” argument, but I wouldn’t want to make a big deal out of that in case he’s in the mood to ban something or someone else from the newspaper.

He said the rash of disruptions at recent boxing news conferences gave him the feeling the newspaper was being dragged into the promotional world of professional wrestling. Without boxing pictures, however, the first five pages of the sports section Wednesday featured 10 photos--five of which were dedicated to tennis being played in Australia--and not one of them Anna Kournikova.

Someone here must think Dwyre is partial to tennis.

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DWYRE’S CORRECT, of course, and I can’t see myself ever writing those words in a sentence again. Boxing has reached the stage where the hype has to be hyped to get attention and sell more cable hook-ups. But there’s a thin line between hoax and macho confrontations, Vince McMahon’s experience as a scripted showman and Tyson’s apparent urge to be institutionalized again.

In a sport orchestrated for the most part by Don King and Bob Arum, and documented by broadcasters and sportswriters, who accept aberrant behavior as good copy, it’s going to be a difficult task understanding just what is outrageous.

After viewing Tyson on display at a news conference in L.A. last year--the boxing scribes chirping with delight because he was filling their notebooks with gutter talk about his mental condition--I was stunned Wednesday to scan the Internet and find the following headline atop the work of New York Daily News columnist Vic Ziegel: “Tyson Boxing’s Worst Enemy--Has Made Mockery of Sport.”

Now that’s outrageous--boxing eating its own. Where would the interest in boxing be the last decade without Tyson and the headlines his antics have inspired?

Tyson is what makes the sport so popular with boxing aficionados, allowing them to rhapsodize about the destruction he delivers inside the ropes, and then on occasion sounding off with moral indignation when he has wronged his fellow man or woman outside the ring.

Let’s be honest: Horse racing should be so lucky to have a jockey who is just crazy enough to punch his horse in the nose for losing.

My guess is we would definitely run that picture.

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I’M TOLD L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn was on radio recently saying it would be a good thing if the NFL returned here because it has to be awkward for the league having only 31 teams.

Houston is already the league’s 32nd team, of course, beating out Los Angeles, which makes me wonder what the mayor and NFL officials were talking about when they met last month.

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TODAY’S LAST word comes in an e-mail from Ho Yun:

“I agree with you about trading Lamar Odom for an on-court leader.

“Would an Odom-Latrell Sprewell trade make any sense?”

Absolutely. I know there are times when I feel like choking Alvin Gentry.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com