Low life
Decline and fall
Jeffrey Bernard
If you saw Monday night's charade between John Conteh and the American, Ivy Brown, oil television you'll most likely agree that there's nothing quite so depressing in the World of sport as watching someone on the Way out and groping their way into oblivion. The better they were, the sadder it is. Len Hutton at the end of his day scratching for runs. Randolph Turpin in New York for the last Ray Robinson fight set up for it by shrewder men and then utterly bewildered by excesses of all kinds syphillitic and out. Any Often good horse taken to the well once too alten and with no more stops to pull out. It makes you want to turn your face away unless you actually like to see humiliation. Not that Conteh was great, but he was good. No one can be a world champion and that bad, But I never want to see him again, What I didn't like about Monday's fight, apart from Conteh's lacklustre performance, and that's being polite, inept was More like it, was all the paraphernalia on the fringe. There was Micky Duff, the matchmaker, in the ring after the fight and smiling dishonestly as though to tell us it was the dog that farted. In his corner there Was George Francis, Conteh's ex-manager and now his trainer, urging him to come on to Brown with wild gesticulations.
He most likely couldn't have cared less whether Conteh advanced and finished his man off or not, and it's not without significance that they call the night of the fight 'pay night'. That's what matters. Add to that a BBC commentator like Harry Carpenter who'd lose his 'job if he asked one honest or pertinent question and you begin to wonder if the ignoble art of one man knocking the shit out of another really is experiencing a renaissance.
No, it's a pity old pugs don't crawl away like elephants to die. The usual routine is talk of retirement punctuated by two or three lousy fights, then a lull followed by an abortive come-back fight, then eventual retirement to become a publican if enough money is left to buy the wretched stock.
The old Reuters and Keystone photographs go up on the wall, there'll be a token gesture to help the odd boy's club, many a boring evening over the beer and down memory lane, the odd article in a newspaper entitled 'Where are they now?' and, finally, a touchingly simple funeral in the East End attended by a selection of cauliflower ears and boneless noses.
I remember taking Alan Rudkin to lunch one day. If ever a man deserved to win a world title he did, but he failed in three attempts that he went all over the world to make. In his last title fight he was flattened by the Mexican Rueben Olivares. Olivares was probably the hardest hitter the bantamweight division has ever known. He knocked out 63 opponents in 72 bouts. Anyway, over the coffee, cigar and fizzy lemonade I inevitably had to ask him about that fight in Los Angeles when Olivares stopped him in the second round. His eyes actually glazed over as though he'd been hit there and then again. 'Christ, it was terrible,' he said very slowly. He could feel the memory.
I often think about Rudkin on that day when I watch the one English fighter who I really think can make it to the top and stay there for a bit without making us want to turn away. Charlie Magri, the Stepney flyweight, has got all the potential and all I can see standing between him and a world title is a positive regiment of Mexicans and assorted oriental bombshells. He put his last American-based Mexican opponent away, albeit after soaking up one avoidable but very nasty right-hander, and he must remember to box more than fight.
Raymond Chandler once said, througn the mouth of our hero Philip Marlowe, 'There's nothing tougher in the world than a tough Mexican,' and that certainly applies to the lighter weight divisions in the world of boxing. Incidentally, Jewish-FrenchNorth Africans are extremely hard too.
Perhaps Conteh should have met a Mexican last Monday then we'd be spared the inevitable we're surely going to be forced to witness soon. His past personal problems and recent financial wrangles have tensed him up beyond unwinding. If he doesn't turn it in soon he won't even be able to earn the odd after-shave television commercial. There will just be those faded photographs to gaze at.
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