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.