The Nation's Pulse/ The Harder They Fall
Gold, Victor
The Harder They Fall by Victor Gold A few years back I met with John Kasich, a young congressman said to be looking for new challenges, on the off-chance I could interest him in a modest proposal...
...d) has the boxing commission that sanctioned the match in his hip pocket...
...But when these paying "spectators," whether watching from Phoenix, 1 Sparring With Hemingway and Other Legends of the Fight Game, by Budd Schulberg...
...From the twenties to the 1960s, the Mob (or, as they preferred to be called, "the Syndicate") worked out of New York and Chicago...
...Came the sixties and Muhammad Ali, who brought with him his personal promoter, the electric-frizzed King, trenchantly described by Schulberg in his recent book, Sparring with Hemingway, as an "ex-numbers boss and supposedly rehabilitated jailbird...
...Not that King is the only predator in his field, or that his departure from boxing would bring a bright new day of free and fair competition...
...Sulaiman, as president of the sanctioning body, then appeared at a hastily called news conference to state that the title would not change hands, pending an investigation of the referee's conduct...
...When Holyfield fought Foreman in 1992, Duva both promoted the match, and was Holyfield's manager, while his father Lou served as Evander's trainer...
...His chief rivals, who put Evander Holyfield and George Foreman up as reigning champions during Tyson's absence, are Bob Arum, Dan Duva, and Shelly Finkel...
...As the biggest draw in boxing, Tyson can call the shot on who he wants to fight...
...but for three decades, from the era of Ali to that of Mike Tyson, he has outdone all his predecessors, not to mention his contemporaries, in the art-and-craft of "arranging" matches, rankings, referees, and fight proceeds to his corporate and personal liking...
...The Harder They Fall by Victor Gold A few years back I met with John Kasich, a young congressman said to be looking for new challenges, on the off-chance I could interest him in a modest proposal to apply the Sherman Anti-Trust and Monopoly Act to a mega-million-dollar professional sport...
...King in his time has pulled off mini-miracles of persuasion, once in the seventies talking the U.S...
...In the event, Douglas—the one element in the equation King didn't own or control—delivered a shocker, knocking Tyson out...
...Navy into furnishing a warship for an afternoon of rigged fights billed as an All-American boxing tournament...
...1 The American Spectator October 1995 65...
...c) plays a major role in deciding who the referee and judges will be...
...Ivan R. Dee, 256 pages, $25...
...Douglas became champion, and not long after, to further complicate King's corporate life, Tyson was convicted of rape in Indianapolis...
...Thanks to the Marquis of Queensberry, kicking, butting, and gouging are no longer permitted inside the ring...
...Boxing as a corporate enterprise has been the exclusive franchise of a few select promoters and managers since the 1920s...
...An example of King's influence is that Tyson, who has not fought in four years, already has been inserted as the No...
...Tyson and whoever King decides he'll meet in a "title" fight next year—Riddick Bowe, Evander Holyfield, Bruce Seldon, Oliver McCall—could square-off in an empty gym and still come away with ten to fifty million dollars apiece, thanks to fans willing to pay outlandish sums to see the fight in their dens or, overseas, in theaters...
...Norris's power came from his ties to major fight managers who supplied the talent for his TV extravaganzas...
...In pre-cable days, the "live" on-site gate was all-important...
...Think of it: The great Joe Louis, who fought for more than fifteen years and defended his heavyweight title no fewer than twenty-six times, had total career earnings of $4.6 million—without time off to serve a prison sentence...
...b) has a financial interest in the second fighter...
...Kasich didn't get where he is by being indifferent to constituent passions...
...The history of boxing is filled with slickers, hustlers, con men...
...Jake LaMotta, the "Raging Bull" of middleweight fame, later told congressional investigators of throwing a match to a Mob-owned fighter, "Blackjack Billy" Fox, who was being built, Camera-like, into a title contender...
...Fights were fixed, favored boxers built into gate attractions...
...Suppose, for example, I had set out a scenario in which the Browns/Bengals, having had the best season record in the American Football Conference, were told by the league, "Sorry, we think a New York team would draw a bigger TV audience and more revenue on Super Sunday...
...This time, however, millions had witnessed Douglas's convincing win, and no amount of bluster or finagling could erase the memory of Tyson on the canvas, groping for his mouthpiece...
...What followed, like much of what routinely occurs in Don King's world, was both venal and farcical: exit King the promoter, enter King the manager, intervening to have his hand-picked referee disqualified and the results of the fight reversed...
...that [Riddick] Bowe will get a fight with Tyson anytime soon...
...Bill Richardson (D-N.M...
...0 ld fighters fade away, new fighters arrive, but the system, whether run by Mike Jacobs, Jim Norris, or Don King, stays the same—with one contemporary difference: Cable television and pay-per-view TV have turned boxing into a sport that generates its major revenue not from the site where a fight is held, but from interstate and international audiences...
...But if you're interested, maybe we can arrange something next year, provided you cut a friend of ours in on your profits...
...Boxing has ever been a sport that exalts family values...
...at the start of every new congressional session, that's just what the country needs—anotherfederal regulatory agency to duplicate the work of half-a-hundred state boxing commissions...
...If a fighter's handlers didn't deal with Jacobs, they didn't get the big-money bouts...
...No, I told Kasich, the only way to reform boxing—to protect not only the Cameras but fans of the sport—is to deal with it not as a moral crusade but as a business enterprise: a corrupt enterprise, to be sure, with an inglorious history of heavy-handed, anti-competitive practice that falls perfectly within the meaning of the Sherman Act...
...Hardly...
...His was the classic case of the exploited athlete that reformers point to when they argue that boxing ought to be outlawed or at least regulated by a national commission...
...1 challenger in both the WBC and WBA...
...Not so with boxing, the unfathered sport of Anglo-American tradition...
...The IBC's Wednesday and Friday night fights were, in those days, the male-bonding ritual that the NFL's Monday Night Football would later become...
...It wasn't that Kasich, a genuine sports buff, didn't like my idea...
...It was no secret in those years that most of Norris's fight connections—managers like "Blinky" Palermo and local "promoters" like Frank Carbo—fronted 64 The American Spectator October 1995 for the Syndicate, which controlled gambling coast-to-coast...
...Cleveland, or London, pay anywhere from $45 to $55 a head for a title fight, as they did in the recent TysonMcNeeley farce, what guarantee is there that the fight is on the up-and-up---especially when the promoter is also (a) the manager of one fighter...
...It didn't work...
...The same would have been true had the sport been professional baseball or basketball...
...It was Norris's International Boxing Club, working through the networks, that took the sport into the television age...
...A short rendition of that history, to make my case: • It didn't start with Don King...
...It might have turned out differently, of course, had the sport involved been not boxing but professional football...
...Now, three years later, Mike Tyson is back, newly converted to Islam and living in Don King's personal Mecca, Las Vegas, as he gets into shape for a title fight some time in 1996, after a few warm-ups against Camera-like heavyweights...
...But as the Washington Times reported after Tyson's release from prison: It's unlikely...
...In the 1950s, promoter James D. Norris succeeded Jacobs as the kingmaker-and-breaker of boxing...
...As an Ohioan, he would have instantly seen the merit of a plan to keep the Cleveland Browns/Cincinnati Bengals from getting euchred out of the Super Bowl by an avaricious promoter...
...tee chairman about opening a full-scale investigation...
...Kasich or any other sports-minded lawmaker would have been on the phone before I'd finished my pitch, talking to the Justice Department or some commitVictor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Outside, however, everyone going into the game, other than guileless dupes like Primo Camera, knows he is entering a work environment in which no holds are barred...
...No sale...
...Now, in the 1990s, the big money comes from home viewing...
...Camera, the flesh-and-blood model for Budd Schulberg's hapless heavyweight in the novel/film The Harder They Fall, was brought over from Italy in the early 1930s to win the championship via a series of set-ups—then lose it, along with every cent he'd earned, after the Mob had squeezed him dry...
...1 That, King may be...
...So I began paying visits to Capitol Hill, beginning with Kasich...
...New York promoter Mike Jacobs, operating under the aegis of "The Twentieth Century Sporting Club," controlled champions like Joe Louis, Ray Robinson, and Henry Armstrong...
...As for creating a national commission, the solution put forward by Rep...
...or pro football, with its juiced-up behemoths colliding at 4.7 speed...
...It proceeds from the sure knowledge that however brutal boxing may be, it is not—barring the election of Hillary Clinton as president with Pat Schroeder as her running-mate—going to be outlawed...
...It's likely that Tyson will fight one of those champions next, and, if successful, fight the other in an effort to unify the titles and solidify King's power . . For the record, we are talking here about a fight in which Tyson, a non-champion, is expected to earn anywhere from $50 million to $75 million, and his promoter/manager-by-proxy King, under indictment for mail fraud, will make at least that much—all from a monopoly enterprise that falls within the scope of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, as applied to other sports...
...Don King, who promotes Tyson, controls the heavyweight title of both the World Boxing Council and the World Boxing Association...
...In any case, who's to say boxing is any more crippling or inhumane than the Daytona 500, with its juiced-up engines...
...T he modest proposal I outlined to Kasich is much more practical...
...Then, in the 1980s, came a quantum surge in profits from theater and arena screenings, with King and other insiders controlling who, among their relatives and friends, would run the closed-circuit franchise...
...B ut if King was down, it was only to take an eight-count, to gather his wits until Tyson came back...
...King and Sulaiman had to back down...
...As an unreconstructed, socially-incorrect fight fan, I'd decided to stop complaining about the venal nature of the game and do something about it...
...When, for example, Tyson put his heavyweight title on the line against James "Buster" Douglas in 1990, King promoted the match under an exclusive cable contract, managed the champion, supplied a journeyman challenger and, to close the circle, got the bout approved by his friend Jose Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council (WBC...
...For the first time in a decade, the Shark didn't own the heavyweight championship...
...but none as brazen, enduring, or successful as the Shark...
...The man is the consummate boxing hustler, the best since Jack Hurley was sacking whole towns in setting up "title" fights for Dempsey in the twenties...
...and (e) holds exclusive rights for fight promotion with the cable network showing the fight...
...only that, as ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee, he had bigger fish to fry than the Great Black Shark, Don King...
...That's been tried before, both in England and the United States, and it worked no better than Prohibition...
...He also promotes WBC champion Oliver McCall and WBC champ Bruce Seldon...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
