Category Archives: Boxing

Boxing, Chicago Tribune

BOXING FINALLY MEETS ITS MATCH

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Boxing has never been particularly choosy about its patrons. Nobody checks pedigree, only the color of the money.

Boxing has been run by more crooks than saints and too many of its performers wore numbers before they wore gloves.

The center of boxing used to be New York, until Muhammad Ali took it on a world tour. Ali needed to hustle entire governments to get his millions for his fights.

No longer is any of that true or necessary. You won’t find the big-money fights in a geography book, or in Madison Square Garden, and you don’t really need the approval of either of the Latin American sanctioners who pass along their titles like wrestling promoters.

All you need is the blessing of a casino, or to be within the sight or sound of one.

You know it’s a big fight if the noise of the bell is drowned out by the clanking of the dollar slots.

A distinctive pecking order has emerged to define the importance of fistfights. Atlantic City gets the small ones, Reno gets the medium ones and Las Vegas takes the large and extra large.

Figuring it out is no harder than shopping for men’s undershirts.

Sportsmanship has nothing to do with any casino’s motives. Simple greed is the reason almost every important fight that comes along these days has the blessing of those windowless gambling houses full of people in tuxedos taking money from people in distress, not unlike fight promoters, come to think of it.

Still, there is an honesty to this, not a notion commonly associated with the suspicious world of boxing. Fistfighting is a lure, the come-on for the regular line of business, which is separating gamblers from their money.

Larry Holmes will fight someone named David Bey at the Riviera in Las Vegas next month and Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns will follow in another month at Caesars Palace.

Caesars is rather the godfather of all of this. It put up $4 million of the purse that put Sugar Ray Leonard against Hearns a few years back. It bankrolled Holmes and Gerry Cooney with $6 million.

Cable and pay TV and closed-circuit marketing jack up the purses beyond all reason.

Promoter Bob Arum figures that Hagler and Hearns will generate a $40 million gate, which would break the record of $36 million that curious witnesses paid to see Holmes and Cooney.

What do the casinos get from all of this? When Holmes fought Ali, Caesars estimated that on the night of the fight alone, just at its own tables, it took in a profit of $1.3 million.

Hagler vs. Hearns is expected to generate an extra $150 million in gambling action.

The Livingstone Bramble-Ray Mancini fight in Reno was fairly small as such things are measured.

The tourism authority paid the promoters nearly $600,000 to have the fight in Reno and crossed their fingers that the town might make a small profit and be spoken kindly of by visiting press. The first was easier to achieve than the second.

Reno looks as if someone took a giant push broom and shoved all the debris of the high desert up against the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are the only redeeming feature of the place and are, to their credit, a safe distance from the mobile home, pickup truck, brown-grass capital of the Western world.

The place is so ugly that even neon is too classy for it, like putting jewelry on a bag lady.

One visitor’s opinion aside, Reno’s chief intention was to lure fresh bodies into town, and enough came to generate around $5 million in business for the weekend.

The relationship between boxing–or any sport–and casinos is a fascinating one. Football is deathly afraid of gambling. Baseball kicks out Hall of Famers like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for playing golf with preferred casino customers. Bobby Knight thinks that anyone who disagrees with him has a bet on the game and believes that published point spreads are proof of journalism’s pact with the devil.

Boxing, true to its roots, takes the money up front and would even deal a little blackjack if asked.

There is something overwhelmingly evil about gambling on the scale on which it is done in Nevada, but the state would simply not exist unless people wanted such a place.

Neither would boxing exist, especially after so many attempts at suicide, unless people wanted such a sport.

In the end, the two deserve each other. Maybe boxing has found a marriage that will work.

Boxing, Chicago Tribune, Professional

MANCINI FALLS AGAIN WHILE CREDITS ROLL

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Dateline: RENO – When art imitates life, especially if it is made-for-television art, happy endings can be scripted, which for Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini is that proud moment three years ago when he won the lightweight boxing championship of the known world.

That is when a just-completed TV movie ends Mancini’s life, when he is on top, not when he is fighting back or just fighting on.

What we have here is a clear case of premature biography.

Real life has a way of continuing after the last commercial, often not for the better, and a champion at 21 can be a relic at 23 if he is not careful whose fists he meets face first.

Such as those of Livingstone Bramble, who relieved Mancini of his championship eight months ago and kept Mancini from reclaiming it Saturday night.

The decision was unanimous but astonishingly close, with each judge giving Bramble the margin by only one point. Had the vote gone to Mancini, it would have been like the steer getting the decision over the butcher.

“Ray fought a great fight,” said Bramble. “I didn’t think anybody could give me a fight like that.”

Great, maybe. Courageous, certainly. Mancini fought with one eye closed and blood streaming down his face for the last eight rounds.

Mancini swung and missed. Bramble swung and hit. The actual count, which tells more about the fight than the judges’ numbers, were 1,349 punches thrown by Mancini, only 381 landing for a hitting average of .280. Bramble threw 1,220 punches and connected with 674, for .550, a mean batting average, as Mancini’s face could testify.

Mancini was cut over the left eye in the first round and on the right eye in the third. The chief question for the last half of the fight was not if Mancini would finish but if he would bleed to death first.

Mancini’s corner worked on both eyes with sponges big enough to wash a truck and still couldn’t soak up all the blood.

“No way did I want the fight stopped,” Mancini said. “The cuts did hinder my fighting. I couldn’t see all the punches coming, and I had to keep wiping the blood out of my eyes.

“It seems like the last half of my career, cuts have been a problem. After a while, you can’t kid yourself.”

Does that mean, as he had hinted before the fight, that Mancini will now retire?

“I know I look like I just went through a meatgrinder,” Mancini said, “and if I made the decison right this moment, I would probably call it a career.

“What I want to do is take a nice long rest, pray a lot, get some tender loving from my family and then decide.”

Mancini’s manager, David Wolf, had no hesitation in casting his vote for retirement.

“My own feelings are that this should be the end,” said Wolf. “There was just so much dignity in the way he fought this fight, it seems like the right way to call a halt.”

Mancini’s father, Lenny, concurred. “If it was up to me,” the elder Mancini said, “I would tell him to forget about it.”

“You’ve got to remember I’m his baby,” Mancini said.

Bramble doesn’t think Mancini should quit. “I don’t see another lightweight out there who can beat him,” Bramble said.

This was the same Bramble who had said before the fight:

“I want to cut him up, flatten him and forget him,” said Bramble before the fight. “If he gets too close, I will bite his ears off.”

Now, that is a serious threat considering Bramble is a vegetarian. Of course, he did not say anything about swallowing.

Mancini made no threats, only a promise.

“The difference between this fight and the first is that I will be victorious,” Mancini said.

In their first fight, eight months ago in Buffalo, Mancini was leading on two of the three judges’ cards when the referee stopped the fight in the 14th round with Mancini bleeding like dressed pork, though not even Mancini disputed Bramble’s victory.

“I love being the underdog,” Mancini said. “It’s the American way.”

Mancini did not join in the prefight hype with the same energy as did Bramble. Mancini also reacted to Bramble’s antics much more passively than before the first fight, when Bramble employed a bogus witch doctor to put a curse on Mancini.

Not even a voodoo doll, into whose eyes Bramble stuck pins, or a human skull Bramble gave Mancini as a gift appeared to bother Mancini. Mancini merely turned the skull over to find it was made in China.

“All I can think about is getting my title back,” Mancini said.

Before he lost that title, Mancini was in a position to be the next superstar of boxing, the natural heir to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

He had a natural appeal. He had guts and grit and enough talent to get by. He was unpretentious and hard working, and he was white. That didn’t hurt at the gate.

“Mr. All-American boy,” Bramble said with scorn.

Mancini was a growth industry. There were Boom Boom dolls and Boom Boom athletic gear and Boom Boom posters.

Mancini had everything, including the right motives for being in the seamiest sport of them all.

And that brings us back to the movie, which is titled “Walk in Your Shadow,” the name coming from a poem that young Mancini wrote in devotion to his father.

In its eagerness to give us Mancini’s brief life, TV may have forgotten that Mancini himself is not quite through with it yet, but for the purposes of prime-time melodrama, all the good stuff is already over.

Nothing that Mancini can possibly do from here will improve upon what so far has had the scent of bad fiction.

“It’s a real-life ‘Rocky’ story,” said Dan Duva, promoter of the rematch with Bramble.

As a child, Mancini heard the stories of how his blue-collar father, Lenny, the original “Boom Boom,” could have been the champ if he hadn’t had to go to war for his country.

His little fingers could touch the scars left by enemy shrapnel and his heart could feel the wounds that ended his old man’s dreams.

He swore that when he grew up, he would be the champ his dad never was but could have been, would have been, if only . . .

Check your TV listings later this fall and stock up on Kleenex.

Mancini wanted to play himself in the film and was briefly considered before the part was given to Doug McKeon, whom you may remember as the kid who liked to “suck face” in “On Golden Pond.”

In any case, the thing was being shot at the same time Mancini was otherwise preoccupied with trying to win back the title that climaxes the movie.

That is where the TV movie of Mancini’s life wraps things up, with tidy sentiment, the night little Ray wins the title, the night a loving son gives to his father the gift of immortality.

All in all, not a bad present.

Most of us only get neckties. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Livingstone Bramble measures Ray Mancini. Keywords: BOXING

Biography, Boxing, Chicago Tribune

CHAMP’S CORNER CRAWLING WITH PALS

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Dateline: RENO – The soft side of Livingstone Bramble, the Rastafarian who took away Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini’s lightweight fist-fighting title by pounding Mancini’s face into sausage last summer, is that Bramble loves pets.

Bramble won’t go anywhere without his animal friends and insists on even bringing them with him to work.

Think of the guilt you have felt when leaving home to the sounds of Bowser whining on the other side of the door. Bramble would never be so heartless.

He has brought many of his household favorites with him from his home in New Jersey. And the hotel where he is living and training couldn’t be nicer about it, though it usually discourages anything but casino pigeons.

It is not uncommon for Bramble to sign autographs while one of his adoring little pals nuzzles his neck, and he often will park one of them in the corner of the ring while he spars for his rematch with Mancini, or maybe hang it over the top rope. Wherever it is most comfortable.

Bramble’s concern for his pets is a treasure to see, and infinitely more urgent than his concern for the health of Mr. Mancini, whom he has taken to calling “Boy-cini” and whom he promises to rehumiliate here Saturday for cable television.

Two of Bramble’s constant companions are Turtle and Dog, the first of which is a 7-foot python and the second a 5 1/2-foot boa constrictor, neither of which will eat anything that isn’t alive. Feeding time is Bramble’s favorite part of the day.

Why they are called Turtle and Dog is not quite clear, except that Bramble’s favorite pet is called Snake, and he had the name first, even though Snake is a serious pit bull terrier that once bit the head off a friendly poodle. Or so the story goes.

Bramble likes Snake so much that he has taken on the nickname of Pit Bull himself, proving that he is generous and ecumenical when sorting out all of God’s creatures, be they large, small, slithery or full of teeth.

However, one can only be grateful that it was not Bramble’s job to name all animals in the first place, otherwise we might be calling a cockroach a sparrow, a vulture a lamb, and have no idea what to call lawyers.

Part of Bramble’s warm-up ritual is to chase a chicken while Turtle and Dog watch with interest, but Bramble never catches the chicken. It is just his way of keeping each of them in shape, like doing roadwork with a friend.

There has been no talk that Bramble’s unique method of exercise will be made into a video cassette, but the possibilities are intriguing: “Now on tape. In the privacy of your own living room. Trim down, firm up and stay fit by chasing your dinner around the house”–boiled, not fried, of course.

It has been said that animal lovers tend to take on the characteristics of their pets. Bramble will not dispute this theory.

“When I fight, I shoot out my jab and then bring it back real fast,” he says. “Just like my snakes when they’re going after a rat.

“When I get somebody in trouble, I just keep pouring it on, using my killer instinct, just like my pit bulls if they were in a fight to the death.”

How, then, can anyone who is so in touch with the harmony of nature be judged harshly, even if Bramble did beat up everybody’s boy next door, which is what Mancini was to us all, although I cannot think of any kid on my block who ever killed a foreigner with his fists, as Mancini did. At least not in public.

Bramble has yet to be widely accepted as champion. His victory over Mancini was decisive and undisputed, even if it was only the second main event Bramble had ever fought.

He has fought 24 times since leaving his home in the Virgin Islands six years ago, losing once and drawing once. Bramble oftens fights with the wrong hand from the wrong stance, appearing awkward and vulnerable in the process. He gets by on tenacity as much as skill, and the same could be said of Mancini.

He has a 9-inch reach advantage on Mancini, 74 to 65, and one year of age, 24 to 23. But, mostly, Bramble has weirdness.

Mancini confessed to being shaken up by Bramble’s sense of mischief before the first fight. Bramble kept calling Mancini a murderer for the ring death of Korean Duk Koo Kim, not something Mancini was anxious to remember, and Bramble is not exactly the kind of guy Mancini was used to running into at the neighborhood pool hall.

Bramble does not wear the dreadnoughts of the Rastafarian religion, but he does wear his hair in corn rows, as well as the occasional snake around his neck.

Mancini’s people last week wanted to make sure that Bramble’s braided corn rows were not an unauthorized weapon and requested the Nevada boxing authories to check them out.

An official dutifully went to Bramble’s camp and insisted that Bramble rub his hair against the official’s cheek.

Coming away unscarred, the official proclaimed that Bramble’s hair was soft enough to be admitted to the ring, though both snakes have to be left in the room or pay their own way to ringside. Thirty seats ought to be enough.

PHOTO: Livingstone Bramble.