SPECTATOR SPORT
Rounds and rounds
Frank Keating
YOU NEVER saw a man get through a career so fast. At Las Vegas on Saturday, the world heavyweight champion, Evander Holyfield, had swaggered in to defend his title with a gleaming, confident menace and a grin almost as wide as his pectorals. The beady eye and buccaneer's black beard made him look as scarily invincible as Pop- eye's arch-enemy in the cartoon strip. In the first reel anyway.
In the event it was the challenger, Michael Moorer, who was gulping down the spinach between rounds, and long before the end of the statutory dozen you could see Holyfield ageing terribly before Your very eyes. Grotesquely almost, he could not keep his gumshield in; his eyes were blank in a face suddenly like a monarch's on a well-worn antique coin.
Moorer will want a few easy challenges and bank manager benefit matches before giving any chance to Britain's Lennox Lewis (who fights next week in Atlantic City). And by the time the new champion is ready again for serious warfare, the spectre at Saturday's feast might well have arrived in very substantial and vengeful person. In May 1995, Mike Tyson is due to be released from his Indiana penitentiary.
The disgraced former (and generally undisputed) champion will still be a couple of months short of his 30th birthday when he is a free man next spring. He claims to be flea-fit and ox-strong — in body and
most assuredly, he boasts, in mind. Tyson has been working out, it is said, as much in the gymnasium as the prison library. Accor- ding to the respected writer Pete Hamill in last month's edition of Esquire magazine:
Tyson reads constantly, hungrily, voraciously . He has been poring over Niceolo Machi- avelli. He wrote about the world we live in. The way it really is, without all the bullshit . I'm also reading this thing about Heming- way and he says he doesn't ever want to fight ten rounds with Tolstoy. So I say, "Hey, I bet- ter check out this guy Tolstoy!" I did, too. It was hard. I sat there with the dictionary beside me, looking up the words. But I like him. I don't like his writing that much because it's too complicated, but I just like the guy's way of thinking.'
Hamill said Tyson had also claimed to have read the biographies of Mao, Marx, Cortes and Genghis Khan. What, nothing sporting? Shame. You feel like sending him pronto the selected essays of, say, Matthew Engel and Imran Khan at least. Tyson did show some remorse in the interview for his conduct out of the ring when he was such an irresistible champion inside it: 'I was just a kid doing all that crazy stuff. I wanted to be like the old-time fighters, like Harry Greb and Mickey Walk- er, who would drink and fight.'
The jailbird former champion shows he knows his boxing history all right. Greb and Walker remain legends. They fought a bes- tial middleweight thriller in New York in July 1925. Greb won. Later that night, both fighters happened to meet at the celebrated nightspot Guinan's. Matily, they licked their wounds and drank champagne togeth- er. Hours later, they left the club arm-in- arm. As they waited for taxis, Mickey said, 'Harry, ol' friend, if you hadn't hit me low in the third I'd have licked you tonight.' Said Greb, stung, 'Why, you bum, I could beat you with no hands,' and went to wind up his right. At which Walker said, 'Oh yeah,' pulled Harry's jacket from the collar down to the elbows so he couldn't swing — and then bopped him a more ferociously savage left hook than he had managed in Madison Square earlier in the evening right on the button. Harry flew into the air and his back hit an adjoining wall like in the films. Still champ, but now cold mutton.
To misquote Master Tyson's new friend, Mr Hemingway, 'Life itself is the best left- hooker I ever saw — although some say it was Mickey Walker of New Jersey.'
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