Boxing: Showbiz takes over from noble art

By KEN JONES in London

When did professional boxing begin its descent from a noble test of human courage and endurance to just another cheap branch of show business?

What happened to the mysterious dignity that enabled it, above all else, to withstand the urgent sloganising of abolitionists?

What, some of us are asking, would Harold Conrad have made of the pathetic scenes televised from Manhattan this week when Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson confronted each other at a press conference held to drum up business for the heavyweight championship?

A tall, street-wise New Yorker who cut his teeth on the long-defunct Brooklyn Eagle when any number of US fight writers were happily in the pay of promoters, turning a blind eye to blatant mis-matches and the freezing-out of worthy contenders, Conrad had departed this life with a reputation as boxing's supreme publicist.

Nobody could sell a fight like Harold. He could sell other events, too, like Evil Knievel's phoney attempt to fly over Snake River Canyon on a motorbike.

Asked about the success or otherwise of this zany enterprise, Conrad replied: "Like everything else I'm involved in, a classy stuff-up."

It was a long way from the truth. Conrad could go back to the young days of Joe Louis. He had known Sophie Tucker, made a friend of Louis Armstrong. The hoodlums Lucky Luciano and Johnny Apollo had been on his dance card.

He was the model for Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of a cynical, ultimately conscience-stricken sports writer turned publicist in the film of Budd Schulberg's controversial boxing novel, The Harder They Fall.

In the final scene, Bogart taps out the words, "Boxing must be banned, even if it takes an act of Congress to bring it about ... "

Conrad never believed that.

When nobody would touch Muhammad Ali after he had refused the draft, Conrad trekked from state to state seeking some way of getting him back into the ring.

If you wanted to push a fight, you sent for Conrad. He had the touch, knew every angle.

"I'm growing weary of making up stories for you guys," I remember him saying before a title fight in Las Vegas.

By then, Conrad was getting on in years, but however phoney the angles they usually had class. So, I think, this week's events would have appalled him.

Maybe, though, he saw it coming, sensed that an explosion in the telecommunications industry and proliferation of self-serving administrations would lead to network control and invite the destruction of boxing.

"What the hell is going on here?" Frank McGhee, late of this life and the Daily Mirror, asked Conrad before Ali engaged in his last contest, a miserable loss to Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas.

Had Don King been beaten up? Who held the money? Conrad had no answers. It was an admission of failure.

Photographs of fighters shaking hands, smiling at each other before championship fights can be found behind the hard covers of boxing literature. Louis and Max Schmeling, who became friends. Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott.

The great Welsh featherweight, Howard Winstone, went a total of 42 hard rounds for the world championship against Vicente Saldivar, of Mexico, without either man uttering a cross word.

In retirement, Saldivar would visit Winstone at his home in Merthyr Tydfil.

If fighters didn't always think well of each other, hostilities were usually confined to the ring.

Things began to change with the onset of stage-managed phoney belligerence. Before Ali took the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston in 1964, his wild behaviour at the weigh-in suggested he was in need of psychiatric attention. Years later, Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee would reveal that it was a stunt designed to unsettle Liston.

One stunt followed another: the hard stares, the insults, the put-downs, the scuffles.

When television pictures of Wednesday's squalid proceedings in Manhattan reached the Independent sports department, people from elsewhere, people who, I imagine, have no great interest in boxing, quickly gathered to watch, clearly fascinated by what they have come to expect.

Tyson's reputation as a convicted rapist and his brutish behaviour goes before him: the very look of him is what matters.

Having been down this road many times before, and seen professional boxing descend into one of life's cheaper side-shows, I turned away.

The hard truth is that it is Tyson's persona that makes the contest against Lewis worth more than a can of beans.

The fighter who once spread terror throughout the heavyweight division is no more, but Tyson, the ogre, the primitive, still sells. Conrad knew him, but then Conrad knew all manner of things.

- INDEPENDENT