Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  Never sitting down through their twelve hard-fought rounds, staggered a few times but always fighting back and moving forward, George begins to take on mythical powers. Holyfield may hit him two to one, but he calmly walks through the hard rain of punches to land his own.

  What makes his stand all the more dramatic, of course, and sets him up for folk heroism, is the fact that so many mockers and naysayers wrote him off before the battle as a pugilistic traveling salesman touring the country mugging for TV cameras and selling tickets with a combination of back-country wisdom and back-country jokes featuring his oversized eating habits and waistline.

  In the press room before the fight one of the best-informed boxing writers in the business, with whom I’ve compared pre-fight notes for years, confessed to me that he was really ashamed to be covering this fight. “It’s a farce,” he said. “It’s getting to be more like wrestling all the time. George hasn’t fought his way into this fight, he’s talked his way into it. I don’t see him getting through the second round.” And the loquacious Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who came to fistic fame as Ali’s ring doctor and cornerman, worried out loud that a man Foreman’s age could suffer a fatal heart attack in there, predicting another black eye for boxing.

  There were a few Foreman supporters in the press room, including this one, who remembered how Alex Stewart had shaken Evander in the fifth round before the champion took him out in the eighth. Anyone watching Big George split heavy bags on his ranch in Texas knew the 260-pounder was as strong as the bulls he raised. Sooner or later, we reasoned, even without the speed of the Holyfield footwork and jab, even without the heady tactics of George Benton (which George had given me a demonstration of in the men’s room of the Trump Plaza), Big George would get to him with the big punch come Round 7 or 8.

  George did land those punches in the second round, the seventh, and even occasionally, as the going slowed, after Round 10. The Holyfield jaw nullified George’s power, just as Holyfield’s three hundred or more punches beat on Foreman like a drum—giving off a lot of sound and fury, signifying that this time George Foreman had come to prove that he was a better fighter at forty-two than he had been at twenty-two.

  I can’t remember anything quite like this since Daniel Mendoza, known as “Mendoza the Jew,” retired after losing his title to “Gentleman” John Jackson in 1795, and then came back over ten years later to whip young Harry Lee in fifty-three rounds. I missed that one, but I hear that was a hell of a fight, too. Mendoza was forty-two. He retired as a folk hero, lecturing in theaters and giving boxing lessons, his pupils including members of the royal family.

  If Big George never fights again, he’s given us exactly what we need in these days of cynicism when the underclass, the lower class, and even troubled members of the middle class are groping to find a way.

  Into their midst strides Big George Foreman, the Survivor. “If I c’n do it, comin’ up from nowhere, you c’n make it,” he preaches with that sweet smile that’s mysteriously replaced the Sonny Liston scowl we saw in Zaire seventeen long years ago. Just as mysteriously he’s taken over Ali’s role as Boxing’s Philosopher. “What I did means we all got the power to do it,” he says, and the pitchman tells us something about what we can do on this Planet Earth. “We don’t need no more Chernobyls. We c’n clean up this world. I went into that fight positive. Just the opposite of what I was feeling going in there with Ali in Zaire. I went into this one thinking that nothing he can throw at me will stop me. That’s what I feel about life. That’s what I tell my people when I talk to ’em in church Sunday mornin’.”

  I look at him and wonder: Is he our Paul Bunyan of the ’90s? Our John Henry? On the scorecard it may have been 115-112. But in the game of life, move over Norman and Colin, Big George wins it going away.

  [August 1991]

  Tyson vs. Tyson

  YEARS AGO, WRITING about quite a different kind of achiever—the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald—I wrote an epitaph: “In America nothing fails like success.” Fitzgerald had said it a little differently: “In America [thinking of success] there are no second acts.” Certainly not for Mike Tyson.

  It is difficult to think of another young man in America who came from so far down to so far up in so short a time. All the expensive toys of success, some of the things people work all their lives for, can never attain, and only dream about, Bentleys and Rolls, hotel suites à la Donald, thousand-dollar suits, and women, women, women, beautiful women … it was all there for Mike, the Four Seasons of Success all the famous must endure, squeezed into a few, frenetically short years of Rise and Fall.

  Nor did it take a clairvoyant or a know-it-all to predict this fall. Allow me the self-indulgence of quoting myself on the eve of Tyson’s defense of his newly won title against artful dodger Michael Spinks. Flash back—four years ago:

  “No matter how many different directions Spinks tries to move away from Tyson or toward him, no matter how many distractions, how many public airings of private dirty laundry have interrupted his training, how much he misses the guiding hand of surrogate father [Cus] D’Amato and assistant surrogate, the late Jim Jacobs, no matter if he’s only 50 percent of the 100 percent he could have been if he had totally dedicated himself to preparation like the great champions he reveres, no matter.

  “So on goes Tyson, on to more astronomical gates and astronomical troubles. One can’t help feeling that for this man-child in this gilded world, with his $4.5-million dollhouse, his Bentley, his Rolls, his women, and his business controllers, the worst is yet to come. … God help the winner. The biggest fight of all may still be Tyson vs. Tyson.”

  For make no mistake about it, the fight in the Indianapolis courtroom that ended with the tragic knockout of once-mighty Mike wasn’t a mismatch between a comely 108-pound Sunday school teacher and an awesome 250-pound fox in a henhouse of Miss Black America beauty contestants. It was Tyson taking on Tyson, a contest he had been fighting and losing ever since D’Amato got off at his final stop on life’s subway seven years ago.

  That winter Mike was one of the mourners and speakers in the ring at Cus’s 14th Street Gym, where the memorial service was held. Mike spoke slowly and simply and in tears. A very big, little kid, wanting his daddy. Ready to fill in for Cus was Jim Jacobs, the legendary handball champion and a knowledgeable fight fan who had cornered the market on fight films. Jacobs worshiped Cus and thought of the heavyweight prodigy not as an incredible money machine but as a vulnerable human being who needed his devoted support.

  I remember suggesting to Jim that I meet him for lunch the day of the Spinks fight. “Budd, I’ve got to stay close to my fighter!” Jim said like an anxious father. But the tragedy unfolded. Sophocles couldn’t have written it better. Jim Jacobs dies, prematurely, of leukemia. His businesslike, very white partner, Bill Cayton, loses the young, rich, wild-blooded, uneducated champion to Don King, he of the electric hair, of wiles and smiles, with all the s’s written in $’s.

  After the Douglas debacle, Tyson is back winning fights, every one except the Tyson fight. Anyone following boxing knows a great fighter needs a great corner. People not only saying, “Anything you say, Mike—you got it!” but the teachers too, in and out of the ring. D’Amato, and then his assistant, Kevin Rooney, were teaching Mike to jab, move his head, throw combinations. After firing Rooney, his last tie with a meteoric career, Mike was left with only the yes-men. He was slower now, dumb, throwing one ponderous punch at a time. Over the hill at twenty-five!

  And out of the ring, blowing every round, street fights, car wrecks, beating on men and women. He wasn’t just raping an eighteen-year-old. He confused international celebrity with a license to rape the world. A walking time bomb. In that white stretch limo you could hear the ticking. Now the orphan with the golden chance to fight his way out of juvenile delinquency comes face to face with a woman from Indiana who, ironically, specialized in sex-crime prosecutions before she became a judge.

  Cus used to call “Time!” at the end of a three-mi
nute workout. But Cus is long gone, and when Judge Gifford calls “Time!” it’s back to the slammer. It’s midnight for Cinderella, and Don King is a sorry stand-in for Prince Charming.

  And now back to you, Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

  [February 1992]

  The Mystery of the Heavyweight Mystique

  WHEN I WAS ASKED TO choose “my favorite” for an anthology of “Best Sports Articles,” I reviewed in my mind the hundreds of boxing pieces I’ve written, from my Sports Illustrated-Marciano-Liston-Ali days to the more recent Larry Holmes and Holyfield campaign for the New York Post and Boxing Illustrated. My pick was a piece I did for Esquire on “The Mystique of the Heavyweight Championship,” how it rose above all sporting events, including the World Series and the Super Bowl, to become a morality play that raised it to a level above mere athleticism.

  In the grip of this mystique I flew from L.A. to N.Y. for that first and still unforgettable Joe Louis-Billy Conn thirteen-round epic. When the Supreme Court gave back to Muhammad Ali his right to resume his career and he finally went head-to-head with Joe Frazier, the packed Madison Square Garden was so charged with electricity that it seemed as if we had to hold our breath not to set that historic hall on fire. When Ali was matched with then-champion George Foreman, I knew I had to fly to Zaire to watch “the People’s Champion” outthink and dramatically defuse Big George.

  My piece on the heavyweight mystique tried to capture that special hush that comes over the crowd, tensing forward in the darkness of the great arena, and the millions plugged into TV around the world as the announcer heralds those magic words, “Ladies and gentlemen … for the heavyweight championship of the world …!”

  Whether he be John L. Sullivan or Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey or Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Marciano, Ali, or finally Mike Tyson, the undisputed king of the heavyweights was the undisputed champion of the world, reigning above all other athletes and invariably the most recognizable human being on Planet Earth. When you think of our great ones, Dempsey, Louis, Ali, you think of their championship belts as symbols of magical supremacy. In the court of King Arthur they would have walked with Lancelot and Galahad. The operative word in reaching out and grasping that magical world was pride. Yes, money was involved, for after all, these knights are professional fistfighters who make their living by the give-and-take of punishment in the prize ring. But without pride these are warriors going into battle with empty scabbards, who suddenly, as the bell rings for the opening round of their ordeal, reach for their swords and realize in panic that somehow they have left their weapons behind—in their lavish hotel suites, or their white stretch limos, or in the gold-fixtured Roman baths of their new, five-million-dollar, thirty-room palaces complete with indoor swimming pools, bowling alleys, and state-of-the-art projection rooms.

  Sitting close to the Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe contention for the current heavyweight championship in Las Vegas a few months ago, while doing my job as a boxing reporter, scoring a close, hard-fought twelve-rounder by three points for the recycled Holyfield, other notes involving pride and character and deteriorating patterns of behavior occurred to me.

  With the exception of Holyfield, who at least has managed to maintain a work ethic despite his multimillion-dollar, country-gentleman lifestyle, our haunted heavyweight championship has been seriously diminished by a disgraceful parade of what I would designate as a new division: the Overweights. While Louis and Marciano and Ali liked their good times too, they had too much pride, too much fistic character not to know that their championship comes with a heavy price tag: self-punishment in preparation for their title defenses, so intense that I have often found it almost painful to watch. I think of Rocky Marciano driving himself month after month in the isolation of an old farmhouse above Grossinger’s to get ready for Ezzard Charles and Archie Moore. I remember in Angelo Dundee’s Miami gym the then Cassius Clay jackknifing fingertips to toes on a rubbing table more than one hundred times and pausing only to groan, “Oh, this is so borin’!” and then resuming with even more intensity. And I watched him up at Deer Lake running mile after mile in heavy boots to make it harder. Was there ever a true champion not willing to pay the price?

  A roll call of heavyweight “champions” since the end of the Larry Holmes era suggests that something has gone seriously wrong with our prize-ring morality. When we think (if we must) of interlopers like John Tate, Michael Dokes, Tim Witherspoon, Pinklon Thomas, Greg Page, Tony Tubbs, and Buster Douglas, all of them sadly listed in the record book as “heavyweight champions,” we realize what a sea change we’ve suffered, what a near-mortal blow to the mystique of the heavyweight championship of the world.

  I’m thinking of an afternoon when Greg Page, facing Tim Witherspoon for the “heavyweight championship” in Las Vegas that evening, showed up at the bar where I happened to be sitting (I was in training to write, not fight) to down a couple of beers. In “fight” after “fight” the champions and challengers removed their robes to reveal a tire of fat or “love-handles” no self-respecting champion would ever dare indulge and expose. And sad to say, these Pages, Thomases, Tubbs, and others weren’t your everyday bums, they were big, quick talented men who held the promise of everything—except pride and character. I think of a big, strong fella like David Bey, another might’ve-been who came to his big nights looking as if he could rent himself out as a nursing mother.

  Pride and character, the flags of this hard trade all the way back to Mendoza the Jew two centuries ago, where have you gone? How could you desert a champion on his way to greatness, like Mike Tyson, and abandon him in the sloth and self-indulgence with which he went into the ring to defend this title against Buster Douglas? And Buster, after a hero’s welcome back home in a town of winners, Columbus, Ohio, how dare you shuffle into the Holyfield fight looking as if you’re ready to go partners with David (Moo-cow) Bey and his fellow Overweights?

  Which brings us to the most recent one-year one, Riddick Bowe. A year ago a well-tuned Bowe, at 235, jabbed and out-fought the doughty, smaller Holyfield. Obviously Bowe loved being champion of the world. He world-traveled, tried on an ill-fitting Ali persona, built a garage for his sixteen cars, and ate so high on the hog that he went into training for the Holyfield rematch looking like one, up to 300 pounds. In two months he sweated that off to the official weigh-in figure of 246. He then raced off to his favorite soul-food restaurant to make up for lost time.

  My first note at ringside—jotted while the interminable pre-fight celebratory intros drone on—reads: “H. looks in shape 100%. B. jumped through ropes last year. This time climbs through slowly. Trunks pulled high to cover the flab. Soft around the middle.”

  You could say that was the story of the fight. Bowe stormed out of his corner at the opening bell, scoring so furiously we wondered if Evander would survive the round. Evander did, of course, as he always does, with his notable “bottom,” that schoolboy-athlete determination. We also wondered if Riddick had thrown everything into those first three minutes, as if hoping another quick over-and-out would spare him the demands of having to drag those 250-plus pounds through eleven more rounds?

  After four rounds the answer was becoming obvious. Holyfield was still there, in shape, composed, and scoring so heavily in the fifth that another ten or fifteen seconds might have chopped big Riddick down.

  The middle rounds belonged to Holyfield, who was moving in and out this time, rather than standing foolishly and bravely toe-to-toe as he had done in the first one. To his credit, Bowe didn’t quit, as we had seen some other overweight “champions” do. He hung in, breathing hard, with “sluggish” turning up in my notes again and again, but coming on to win the ninth, and in the final three minutes trying for a knockout his corner must have told him he needed if he didn’t want to blow it, à la Tyson or Douglas.

  This is a fight a conditioned Bowe could have won, but the decision went to pride and character over hedonism and selfindulgence. No one will ever c
all Evander Holyfield a great champion. He neither punches with the conviction of a true heavyweight nor moves with the grace of say, an Ezzard Charles. But at least he’s an honest practitioner who takes the championship seriously enough to work for it and not simply assume it’s his by right of eminent domain.

  In a postfight press conference, an unusually subdued Rock Newman—Bowe’s promoter, in an unfamiliar mode of humility—acknowledged that “Riddick was still a growing boy,” though it wasn’t clear whether the reference was to waistline or emotional maturity. A sad Rock suggested that this loss could be a learning experience motivating Bowe to “reevaluate himself both as a fighter and as a human being.” My note on this one: “Good idea, if maybe a little late?”

  In this era of overpriced paynights for closed-circuit warriors, when a prizefighter like Bowe can earn $15 million without bothering to show up for the major event of the year even looking like a prizefighter, much less the champion of the world, that weird sound you hear emitting from Arlington Cemetery may be Joe Louis rattling around in his grave.

  [March 1994]

  Epilogue

  AS WE GO TO PRESS, a most unlikely champion rules the heavyweight division: Big, Lovable George Foreman (once Big, Nasty George Foreman), at age forty-five the oldest man ever to hold the title. He had won it in the fall of ’94 from moody Michael Moorer, who had a nifty right jab and won all the early rounds but paid no heed to trainer Teddy Atlas’s drumbeat of advice: Keep moving counterclockwise, away from that right hand. That’s all old George had left. His jabs were sloppy and his movements slow. If Moorer had listened to his frenetic trainer, he would have won an easy decision, and George would be back shilling for Meineke. But there was Moorer stubbornly in front of Foreman, forgetting all about Atlas and the counterclockwise jazz, and than boom Big George saw the opening for the short right-hand chop on the kisser, and down went Moorer, suddenly a glassy-eyed ex-champion (in his first defense after a close win from Holyfield), and there was our born-again preacher, whom all us seasoned boxing experts (or know-it-alls) had written off as over-and-out after Ali destroyed him in Zaire twenty years earlier.