Is Boxing on the Ropes?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 24, 2000 | by Thom Loverro

Reeling from a string of embarrassing fights, questionable decisions and outright swindles, boxing has fallen out of favor with fans. The sport is in `total decline,' admits one observer.

Marc Ratner walked around the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas looking like a happy man. Then again, the world heavyweight-championship rematch fight between Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis hadn't yet taken place. "I'm smiling now," said Ratner, executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission. "I hope I'm smiling in a couple of hours."

He was. No one was bitten in the ring or rioted in the arena. There were no politicians calling for an investigation, and no indictments were handed down. It didn't matter that the fight between Holyfield and Lewis -- which Lewis won in yet another questionable decision -- was not particularly entertaining or memorable. The fact that it came off without incident was worth smiling about. "We needed to have a fight that was good for boxing, and we got one," said Lou DiBella, a vice president of HBO Sports, which broadcast Holyfield-Lewis II on its pay-per-view network.

But was it enough? Has boxing, which always has operated in murky fashion, fallen too far from grace to be saved by a good, or even a great, fight?

The sport is reeling from a series of controversies in and out of the ring, the latest a 32-count indictment handed down in November against four officials of the International Boxing Federation, or IBF, one of the three major boxing organizations that sanctions fights. The indictment claims that IBF officials took bribes in return for ranking fighters. Three of those indicted -- president Bob Lee Sr., his son Bob Jr. and former Virginia boxing commissioner Donald William Brennan -- have pleaded not guilty. A fourth official, Francisco Fernandez of Colombia, is out of the country and remains a fugitive.

There are indications the public is running out of patience -- and interest. The pay-per-view numbers for Holyfield-Lewis II were 800,000 buys, far less than the 1.2 million for their first fight. The Mike Tyson-Frans Botha fight coaxed 700,000 buys, fewer than half what Tyson drew for his comeback fight against Peter McNeeley in August 1995.

And to complicate matters, lawyers have brought a precedent-setting class-action lawsuit against the promoters and cable-TV operators involved in the second Holyfield-Tyson fight, which ended in the third round when Tyson was disqualified for biting Holyfield on the ears.

The heat is on from various state law-enforcement agencies as well. The Nevada attorney general's office has begun an investigation of sanctioning bodies. New Jersey appointed a grand jury to investigate the IBF, focusing on the first Holyfield-Lewis fight last March at Madison Square Garden. (Most observers believed Lewis clearly won the fight, but one judge scored it for Lewis, another deemed it a draw, and IBF judge Eugenia Williams, incredibly, scored it for Holyfield -- a fighter in the stable of notorious promoter Don King.) Recently, a New York state Senate committee has called for a number of boxing reforms, including the creation of a federal authority to oversee the sport.

"This is a terrible time for boxing," says Bert Sugar, editor of Fight Game magazine. "It seems to be in total decline. R was one of the three most popular sports at the turn of the century, and now, on a list from one to 10, charitably it would be No. 24."

Scandal is nothing new in boxing. The sport always has operated on the fringes of legitimacy and seemingly has hit bottom several times in the past. In the early 1960s, a U.S. Senate investigation led by Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, revealed organized crime's influence over the sport, including former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta's confession that he threw a fight against Billy Fox in 1947.

In 1977, ABC dropped a television tournament -- the United States Boxing Championships -- after it was learned that Ring magazine had supplied phony records for several of the fighters in return for payoffs. Some fighters also claimed the tournament was rigged to favor King's fighters, though no formal charges ever came out of those allegations.

The fact is, King, the sport's top promoter, has danced away from trouble as nimbly as Muhammad Ali in his prime. He once killed two men during his days as a numbers runner in Cleveland, but one slaying was ruled self-defense, and he was pardoned after serving five years for the second murder. King has been indicted twice on federal tax-evasion and wire-fraud charges, acquitted both times. He also was targeted in an FBI investigation that hinted at ties to organized crime, but the probe eventually was dropped.

Though bruised and battered, boxing has managed to survive such scandals. But several incidents in the 1990s have exposed the sport's seamy underbelly as never before. Some believe boxing began its current slide when Tyson lost to James "Buster" Douglas, a 40-1 underdog, in February 1990 in Tokyo. Douglas stopped Tyson in the 10th round, but after the fight King (then Tyson's promoter) pressured World Boxing Council, or WBC, President Jose Sulaiman into declaring that Tyson was still the champion -- on grounds that the referee failed to count accurately when Tyson knocked Douglas down earlier in the fight. Only a huge public outcry forced Sulaiman to reverse himself.