SPECTATOR SPORT
October black and blues
Frank Keating
OCTOBER is a vicious month. The clocks go back, the bells start ringing and bow- tied referees bend to toll to ten the knell of parting pugilists. Eighty-one Octobers ago, Jack Johnson brutally made the first de- fence of his heavyweight title, 'tearing the length of his knuckle-glove on Ketchel's front teeth as the challenger fell as if shot through the heart', according to the San Francisco Examiner of 17 October, 1909. I daresay Kid Cain duffed up Sugar Bay Abel in October. Certainly it was the month Muhammad Ali had the best and the worst times in the ring — beating Joe Frazier with heroically gruesome grandeur in Manila in 1975, and five autumns later quitting on his stool after ten rounds with Larry Holmes in Las Vegas. That was the first stop on his harrowing journey to the twilight home of the rest of his life.
Same place, same month, they are at it again. For the first time this week James Douglas puts up the world heavyweight title he won when he so dramatically dismantled the myth of the hitherto in- vincible and not so noble savage, Mike Tyson. Douglas is from Columbus, Ohio. The only man to forecast his victory was Tun May, of the Columbus Dispatch. He fights Evander Holyfield, from Atlanta, a strong, silent type, whom I came
across six years ago when he was a sullen greenhorn boxing in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. He had finished sparring and was lying down being massaged in the locker-room, wearing nothing but a large pair of dark glasses and two little Walk- man, pop-music headphones clamped to his ears. I asked the usual corny question about his boyhood in Atlanta. He un- hooked slowly his specs and speakers and motioned for me to repeat myself. 'Well, sir', he said, 'it wasn't quite the sort of neighbourhood you had to start throwing left hooks as soon as you got out of the door of your house — but it helps.' Tyson frets and fumes for a rematch with the winner. So does another one-time ogre and champion, George Foreman, who is now 42 and was in London a few weeks ago painfully signing up one more hired stumb- lebum for the Flat Earth Society. George looks now like a benign and jovial, folksy
rocking-chair extra in Porgy and Bess. But he still has a hell of a wallop on him, and nobody would be surprised (except the Columbus Dispatch) if the championship all came down to something like the 50th `fight-of-the-century' between Mike and ol' George sometime around next, well, Octo- ber.
Sitting down to tea by the Thames with Foreman gigglingly spouting the Bible mid posing for family snaps with passing cock- neys, I remembered it was all of 16 Octobers ago — the 30th — that we had piled into the Dominion Cinema at Oxford Circus with trepidation, pleading with the gods not to allow him to hurt too much our favourite totem, Muhammad, in the jung- le. The famous rumble.
We should have had more faith. The lights went out for George in the middle of the eighth, and came up for us in the middle of the night, and half London's underworld toughs were seen to be wiping away little tears of pleasure at Ali's spec- tacular nerve. 'George fell', said Norman Mailer who was at the ringside for real, `pole-axed like a six-foot, 60-year old butler who had just heard tragic family ' news'.
Awesome, awful stuff. But, alas, irres- istible. Oh yes, and Douglas to win in four.
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