SPECTATOR SPORT
Last rounds
Frank Keating
ABOUT HALFWAY through the fateful ten rounds of his fight with Nigel Benn, whenever there was a momentary respite from the mutual savagery, Gerald McClel- lan grotesquely pushed the gumshield from his mouth to gobble in some rank ringside air. It looked worrying, but those in the know said it was not unusual because American boxers now tend to use the big- ger, safer gumshields from US football. Anyway, McClellan was ahead on points, seemingly more damaging than damaged. But as the awful end approached he was blinking obsessively, and rubbing his eyes as if to clear his focus — once it was as if he was complaining to the referee that he had been thumbed in the eye, or headbutted, by his opponent. But that was certainly not the case.
The warrior's subconscious was telling him the war was being lost. The placid, noble, surrender — centre-stage and genu- flecting on one knee when all his gymnasi- um instinct must have been demanding of him to rise for one last assault — obviously averted his immediate death.
Up to the ninth round, McClellan's cor- nermen had been exhorting, 'Stick the bitch!' and 'Dance, motherfucker!' — just a matey enough Illinois-prizefight translation of the olde-English 'jab and weave'. At the beginning of the doom-laden tenth, they slapped his bottom and sent him out with, `This is it, kid! Make this the last round, this the finish!' And so it was.
I thought of a lunch I'd had in Soho in 1984 when Emile Griffith was in London as manager of one of Frank Bruno's oppo- nents. Eighteen years earlier, a far less serene and gentle Griffith had knocked out the champion Benny Paret at Madison Square Garden in the twelfth. Paret never came to and died three days later. Griffith said his mind had totally blocked out any recall of his final, fateful fusillade:
I can remember nothing more than finishing the eleventh and my manager Gil Clancy slapping my face and screaming, 'You're los- ing, so just keep punching till the referee has to stop it . . .' That's all I remember and, God help me, I guess that's what I went and did.
Sixty-five years ago, at the 'Old Rec' grounds, San Francisco, Max Baer, the future world champion, knocked out Frankie Campbell in the fifth. At the end of the fourth, his second, 'Greaseball' Mal- oney, later testified, the last uttered sen- tence of Campbell's life had been, 'Some- thing feels like it broke in my head.'
The following morning, on Campbell's being pronounced dead of a double cere- bral haemorrhage, Baer was arrested by San Francisco homicide officers at the Hotel Whitcomb and charged with manslaughter. He spent a night in jail before bail of $10,000 could be raised. It was months before the charge was dropped. Had it proceeded, it might have been a test case with mighty and enduring repercussions.
Johnny Owen of Tredegar, for one, might now have been 15 years older than he was when he died in Los Angeles. I saw Johnny in September 1980. By fluke, the Post Office that day was installing the family's first-ever telephone. Dad left Mum with the dialling code for Los Angeles minutes before they left. She rang his training camp each evening to tell him to look after him- self. Exactly a fortnight later, soon after dawn on the Saturday morning, the phone rang. Would Mrs Owen accept charges for a collect call from America? It was a family friend, Byron, who kept the Tredegar pub. He was speaking from a corridor in LA's California Hospital . . .
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