Boxing: Last rites for sport's greatest prize

By JAMES LAWTON

Here in Kentucky, where the genius of Muhammad Ali was taken off the streets and nourished 50 years ago, they are preparing the last rites of heavyweight boxing.

They are building the ring in the Freedom Hall Arena where tomorrow Mike Tyson, two years after being destroyed by Lennox Lewis and, for the best part of 20 years, by himself, fights 31-year-old Briton Danny Williams.

The reality is that for what used to be the most prestigious prize in all of sport, the right to say you were the best heavyweight in the world, they might as well be erecting a scaffold.

Heavyweight boxing is at the end of its rope.

Who says so? Well just about everyone, including some of its most brilliant champions, and the TV money men who underwrite the sport.

Men like Larry Holmes, one of the great holders of the title who ended the last reign of Ali in 1980. "Tyson is 38 now and he hasn't been a real fighter for at least 10 years," Holmes says, "but he is the only one the people want to watch. Why? Because there's no one else to see. No one else to excite the crowd.

"Tyson is the last of the heavyweights ... he's the last man standing. Where did the others go? They got old and they never got replaced. They didn't get replaced because there wasn't enough dedication, enough heart - and because there was too much easy money."

The view is echoed in the muffled world of an Ali afflicted by Parkinson's Syndrome and too many punches. He recently observed in the seclusion of his farm in Michigan: "It just ain't the same anymore ... the hunger's gone."

In Philadelphia, the sentiment is endorsed by one of Ali's greatest foes. Joe Frazier is an occasional visitor to the gym where he honed his eviscerating aggression, but what his diminished vision permits now brings no sparkle to his eyes.

He yearns to see a mirror of himself 30 years ago, the young Smokin' Joe, throwing the hooks and the searing crosses which lifted his wars with Ali into a class of conflict so compelling Frank Sinatra was required to scrounge a photographer's credential to get to ringside for their first fight at Madison Square Garden. Now Frazier sighs, "That kind of fight don't exist anymore."

George Foreman who, with Ali and Frazier, made the Seventies into a golden age, is of the same view. "There's no doubt it's as bad as it's ever been," says the man who pounded Frazier to defeat and then lost to Ali in arguably the most sensational fight in heavyweight history.

"But you know I haven't quite lost all hope. We've been low before - people forget that when Ali beat Sonny Liston in Miami Beach most of America believed Liston had thrown the fight. Everyone was saying the fight game was finished. Right now heavyweight fighting is dead, but they've said that before and along comes a hero who can change everything."

If the great champions take a bleak view, boxing's last major paymaster concedes that as far as the heavyweights are concerned he is finally ready to throw in the towel. Jay Larkin, the chief executive of Showtime television, brokered the last heavyweight extravaganzas, Lewis v Evander Holyfield (twice) and Lewis v Tyson - fights he conservatively reckons came at least five years too late.

"I'm afraid Tyson is the last show in town," he says. "When he's gone there is simply nothing left to catch the imagination of the people. I can't even tell you if the American team has a heavyweight in the Olympics. [They have, Devon Vargas, an Hispanic who is not expected to get through the early rounds.] In the old days the Olympics produced heavyweights like Ali and Frazier, Foreman and Lewis ... now it throws up Audley Harrison, who, with all due respect, is not quite the answer.

"Tyson is the last authentic heavyweight, the last one who reminds you of the aura and the magnetism of being the world heavyweight champion."

For Larkin the reasons for this change stretch way beyond boxing itself. "Maybe a lot of it was for the wrong reasons, but when the world heavyweight champion was standing there in the ring, with the world wanting to know what he is going to do next, what he represented was the end of about 200 years of socio-economic history all packed into 20x20 of canvas.

"For me the story that sums it up best is the one of the convicted man being dragged to the execution chamber. 'Save me, Joe Louis, save me,' he shouted. There, you saw it, the fabled status of the heavyweight champion. You saw what the people thought of the man who wore the crown. Anything was within his power. Outside of Tyson, you don't see it now. You don't see heavyweight boxing touching people as it used to."

- INDEPENDENT