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Leon Spinks, Dead at 67, Fell Far and Fast After Shocking Muhammad Ali
No one could ever confuse former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks, who on Friday night finally succumbed to the multiple cancers that for several years had been slowly devouring his internal organs, with handsome film star Robert Redford. But achieving a seemingly impossible goal, in real life for “Neon Leon” and on the silver screen for Redford, does suggest a possible link.
It is one thing to fulfill a dream few thought possible. It is quite another, once the dream becomes reality, to enjoy the tsunami of attention that can make a sudden and unprepared star a sort of Cinderella in reverse. In 1972’s The Candidate, Redford portrayed a young and ambitious senatorial nominee who, against all odds, wins election. In the final scene, he slips out of the victory party to be alone with his thoughts. Upon being joined by his campaign adviser who tells him he has to come back to meet with a throng of journalists, the stunned new senator-elect asks, “What do we do now?”
Leon Spinks, who someday would shock the world by upsetting the great Muhammad Ali, launched his longest-of-long-shots plan to become heavyweight champion when, at age 13 and constantly picked on by older boys in St. Louis’ notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project, he heeded the advice of a Teamster official named Mitt Barnes to take up boxing as a means of better defending himself on the street. The oldest of seven kids (six sons and a daughter) raised by his mother Kay after the father had left home, Leon proved a quick study in the pugilistic arts, if not academically. A dropout midway through his junior year of high school, he became a father at 17, enlisted in the Marine Corps at 19, and by the time his service hitch ended had won 178 of 185 amateur bouts and was fast-tracked for eventual success as a pro. He was a bronze medalist at the inaugural 1974 World Championships, a silver medalist at the 1975 Pan American Games and then a light heavyweight gold medalist at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, at which his younger brother Michael also took gold as a middleweight.
In 1994, Michael, who would go on to win both light heavyweight and heavyweight titles as a pro, recalled how he frequently got the worst of it in sparring sessions with his older brother, until the day when he proved to himself that he at least had significantly narrowed the gap between them.
“It was back in St. Louis, in the early ’70s,” Michael said. “Me and Leon were passing by this gym, somewhere we’d never been in before. Leon said, `Hey, let’s check this place out.’ There was a ring in there, and Leon found a couple of pairs of gloves. We pulled them on and went at it for three rounds.
“I couldn’t believe I was actually winning. You have to understand, Leon had always beaten the dog out of me. He always beat the dog out of everybody. Leon was the man in those days. There wasn’t anybody who could beat Leon. There wasn’t even anybody who could last three rounds with him. He used to beat me up so bad, I’d cry. He beat me like we weren’t even brothers. But he was trying to help me, in his own way. He’d say, `Mike, I know I take it hard on you, but if I took it any easier, you wouldn’t learn anything.’
“I threw off the gloves and said, `Hey, man, I beat your ass. I got you.’ And that was it. We never sparred again. Looking back, that might have been my proudest moment in boxing. I figured if I could do that well against Leon, I could hold my own against anybody. From that point on, I was a completely different fighter. I had confidence in myself.”
Maybe Michael was even as confident in his ring abilities as was Leon, who wangled a lucrative contract with Top Rank after the Montreal Olympiad while Michael went back to his old job as a janitor at a St. Louis chemical plant, where his duties included, as one co-worker later observed, “scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets.”
For Michael, who later joined Leon in the Top Rank fold, his star turn as a pro would come later. It arrived startingly soon for Leon, who, with just seven pro fights (6-0-1, 5 KOs), was tapped to challenge WBC/WBA champ Ali on Sept. 15, 1978, at the Las Vegas Hilton. Virtually no one gave Leon much chance to even be competitive, much less win, but the 24-year-old underdog believed he had a fight plan to get the job done, one previously authored against Ali by Joe Frazier.
“I watched him fight Joe Frazier, and I knew then I had to give him pressure like he’d never seen before,” Leon said of the punches-in-bunches he intended to throw at Ali, then 36 and as overconfident as Spinks was hopeful. “By the time I got to Ali, I knew how to beat him before I ever fought him. Then I learned the pressure of being champion.”
The shocking split decision for Spinks, accomplished before just 5,298 paying spectators, did not appreciably diminish the star power of Ali, but it made the victor an instant sensation. It also changed his life and career in ways he could not have anticipated, both good and, even more obviously as it turned out, bad. Being the new heavyweight champion and conqueror of arguably the greatest heavyweight of all time had the same effect on Leon, even more so, in fact, than winning an election he never thought he could, had on Redford’s fictional character six years earlier.
In quick order, the WBC stripped Spinks of its version of the title for declining to fulfill a mandatory defense against Ken Norton in favor of a much-better-paying, much-higher-visibility rematch with Ali, who was determined not to make the same mistakes he had made the first time around. Guys from Leon’s St. Louis neighborhood and hordes of other aspiring hangers-on sought to gain the champ’s ear, and in many instances did.
The do-over was scheduled for Sept. 15, 1978, in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, the lead-up to which was a spectacle of excess to rival Mardi Gras. Some 63,350 fight fans packed the arena, among them such celebrities as Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, Jackie Onassis, Liza Minnelli, Jerry Lewis, Telly Savalas, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge and Lily Tomlin.
It was hoopla to an extent that Ali, as much as any boxer ever, could handle in stride. Not so for Spinks, who even before arriving at the fight site had demonstrated that he was crumbling under the demands of his newfound notoriety.
The late Butch Lewis, who promoted both Spinks brothers, recalled how Leon disappeared for days at a time when he should have been in the gym and focusing on the task at hand. Rumors flew that he was pub-crawling not in the comparative safety of the French Quarter, but in dives in crime-infested neighborhoods that even the local police were hesitant to go into.
“He was drunk every night he was there,” disgusted Top Rank founder Bob Arum said of Leon’s hard-partying ways. “Leon went to places our people didn’t dare go to. I’m surprised he didn’t wind up with a knife stuck in him.”
The shenanigans weren’t so amusing to highly regarded Philadelphia trainer Georgie Benton, who had been brought in to plot Leon’s strategy for the first fight and stayed on for the second, ostensibly in conjunction with lead trainer Sam Solomon. But Benton and Solomon seldom agreed on anything, and then there was the matter of Leon’s 70-member entourage, all of whom figured they merited a spot in his corner on fight night.
Shortly before the fight, Solomon told Benton that Spinks’ small army of would-be advisers would take turns working in his corner. “Sam said, `You go up one round and work and then Leon’s brother (Michael) can go up one round,’” Benton said of a mob scene unlike any seen for a fight of that magnitude. Benton’s frustration increased until, after the sixth round, he simply walked away, out of the Superdome and into the night.
“It was a zoo,” he would say later. “It was like watching your baby drown. There was nothing you could do about it. I had no more control of the guy. I was useless. All I could do was get the hell out of there.”
The unanimous decision for Ali – by margins of 11-4 and 10-4-1 (twice) in rounds – was a foregone conclusion, and pretty much evident to everyone early on. Ali was back on top, a king re-crowned, and Leon Spinks was generally dismissed as a one-hit wonder that never should have enjoyed even a temporary stay in his sport’s throne room.
“I don’t think Leon Spinks will ever fight again,” a miffed Arum said after the fight. “It’s only my opinion, but I don’t think so. He doesn’t like to fight, he doesn’t like to train. He was drunk about every night down here. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get him back into a gym.
“He has money and he doesn’t have to go back (to boxing). To tell you the truth, I think down deep he’s glad that he lost that title. He is a simple guy. He doesn’t need the lifestyle of Muhammad Ali. Leon Spinks’ money will last a long time. He doesn’t live like Muhammad Ali.”
Well, Spinks’ career ring earnings – pegged at $5 million, with $3.75 million for the second Ali fight – didn’t last as long as Arum had predicted. Nor did Leon slip away from the fight game, never to be seen or heard from again; he did get another shot at the heavyweight title, losing on a third-round TKO to Larry Holmes on June 12, 1981, and then on a sixth-round stoppage to WBA cruiserweight ruler Dwight Muhammad Qawi on March 22, 1986. His final bout, an eight-round points loss to Fred Houpe on Dec. 4, 1995, left him with a record of 26-17-3, with 14 KO victories and nine defeats inside the distance. The only boxing Hall of Fame in which he is enshrined is Nevada’s. Michael, on the other hand, was 31-1 (21) as a pro, along the way becoming a multimillionaire and first-ballot inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1994.
“I know I could have made Leon upwards of $50 million if he had disciplined himself doing the right thing for four or five years,” said Butch Lewis, who died in 2011.
After his boxing career ended, Leon lingered on the fringes of combat sports. For someone who had outhustled and defeated a legend like Ali, it had to hurt his fans to see him go into a ring with a wrestler named the Mighty Wojo who lifted him up and threw him onto a cold concrete floor. He capitalized on what remained of his celebrity status here and there, including a gig as a greeter at Mike Ditka’s restaurant in Chicago.
“I have no regrets,” Spinks, his voice a bit slurred, said during his time at Ditka’s restaurant. “I had my good times. I won a gold medal. I won the heavyweight title. I reached as high a point in sports as I could.”
And if he had to do it all over again, what changes would he make?
“People pull you here, they pull you there,” he said of his hectic seven-month title reign. “I was not the type who trusted people right away. I was trying to take care of my business and box, too. You can’t do two things at one time. It was my downfall. When I did start to trust people, they took advantage of me. I found myself with a bunch of people around me I didn’t even know. They had me running in the fast lane.”
Leon was able to find some domestic happiness with wife Brenda Glur Spinks, whom he married in Las Vegas on Oct. 9, 2011. She was by his side when he passed away, but because of COVID-19 restrictions only a few close friends and family members – including his son Cory, who won versions of the welterweight and junior middleweight title — were present.
He remained upbeat even as his medical issues worsened. In 2014 he suffered intestinal damage and was hospitalized after swallowing a piece of chicken bone, which led to multiple surgeries. Then, in mid-December of last year, the TMZ gossip site reported he was in a Las Vegas hospital and “reportedly fighting for his life.” The prostate cancer he had been diagnosed with had spread to his bladder, assuring an outcome as certainly negative as his defense against Ali had been. But he fought as he could, for as long as he could, and that is in and of itself a testament to what had once made him special.
Rest in peace, Leon. So many fighters, good ones, have never known the exhilaration of being an Olympic gold medalist, or a heavyweight champion of the world.
A New Orleans native, Bernard Fernandez retired in 2012 after a 43-year career as a newspaper sports writer, the last 28 years with the Philadelphia Daily News. A former five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Fernandez won the BWAA’s Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism in 1998 and the Barney Nagler Award for Long and Meritorious Service in 2015. In December of 2019, Fernandez was accorded the highest honor for a boxing writer when he was named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the Class of 2020. Last year, Fernandez’s anthology, “Championship Rounds,” was released by RKMA Publishing.
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Philly’s Jesse Hart Continues His Quest plus Thoughts on Tyson-Paul and ‘Boots’ Ennis
Jesse Hart (31-3, 25 KOs) returns to the ring tomorrow night (Friday, Nov. 22) on a Teflon Promotions card at the Liacouras Center on the campus of Temple University. During a recent media workout for the show, which will feature five other local fighters in separate bouts, Hart was adamant that fighting for the second time this year at home will only help in his continuing quest to push towards a second chance at a world championship. “Fighting at home is always great and it just makes sense from a business standpoint since I already have a name in the sport and in the city,” said Hart (pictured with his friend and training partner Joey Dawejko).
Hart’s view of where his career currently resides in relation to the landscape in the light heavyweight division leads you to believe that, at the age of 35, Hart is realistic about how far he can go before his career is over.
“Make good fights, win those fights, fight as much as I can and stay busy, that’s the way the light heavyweight division won’t be able to ignore me,” he says. Aside from two losses back in 2017 and 2018 to current unified cruiserweight champion Gilberto Ramirez at super middleweight, Hart’s only other defeat was to Joe Smith during Smith’s most successful portion of his career.
When attempts to make fights with (at the time) up-and-coming prospects like Edgar Berlanga and David Benavidez were denied with Hart being viewed as the typical high risk-low reward opponent, it was time to find another way. So, Hart decided to stay local after splitting with Top Rank Promotions post-surgery to repair his longtime right-hand issues and hooked up with Teflon Promotions, an upstart company that is the latest to take on the noble endeavor of trying to return North Broad Street and Atlantic City to boxing prominence.
In essence, it is a calculated move that is potentially a win-win situation for all parties. Continued success for Hart along with some of the titles at light heavyweight eventually being released from Artur Beterbiev’s grasp due to outside politics, and Jesse Hart just may lift up Teflon Promotions into a major player on the regional scene.
Tickets for Friday’s show are available on Ticketmaster platforms.
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As we entered November, a glance at the boxing schedule made me wonder if it was possible for the sport to have a memorable month — one that could shine a light forward in boxing’s ongoing quest to regain relevance in today’s sports landscape. Having consecutive weekends with events that could spark interest in the pugilistic artform and its wonderful characters was what I was hoping for, but what we got instead was more evidence that boxing isn’t immune to modern business practices landing a one-two punch on the action both inside and outside of the ring.
Jaron “Boots” Ennis was expected to make a statement in his rematch with Karen Chukhadzian on Nov. 9, a statement to put the elite level champions around his weight class on notice. What we witnessed, however, was more evidence of how current champions in their prime can be hampered by having to navigate a business that functions through the cooperation of independent contractors. Ennis got the job done – he won – but it was a lackluster performance.
It’s time for Ennis to fight the fighters we already thought we would have seen him fight by now and I do believe there is some truth to Ennis rising to the occasion if there was a more noteworthy name across the ring.
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Some positives emerged from the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul event the following week. Amanda Serrano, Katie Taylor, and women’s boxing are finally getting the public recognition they deserve. Mario Barrios’s draw against the tough Abel Ramos, also on the Netflix broadcast, was an action-packed firefight. So, mainstream America and beyond got to witness actual fights before being subjected to Paul’s latest circus.
Unfortunately for fans, but fortunately for Paul, the lone true boxing star in the main event dimmed out from an athletic standpoint decades ago. In this instance modern business practices allowed for a social media influencer to stage his largest money grab from a completely unnuanced public.
As Paul rose to the ring apron from the steps and looked around “Jerry’s World,” taking in the moment, it reminded me of an actual fighter when they’re about to enter the ring taking in the atmosphere before they risk their lives after a lifetime of dedication to try and realize a childhood dream. In this case though, this was a natural-born hustler realizing as he made it to the ring apron that his hustle was likely having its moment of glory.
In boxing circles, Jake Paul is viewed as a “necessary evil.” What occurs in his fights are merely an afterthought to the spectacle that is at the core of the social media realm that birthed him. Hopefully the public learned from the atrocity that occurred once the exhibition started that smoke and mirrors last for only so long. Hopefully Paul’s moment of being a boxing performer and acting like a true fighter comes to its conclusion. But he isn’t going away anytime soon, especially since his promotional company is now in bed with Netflix.
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Boxing Odds and Ends: Oscar Collazo, Reimagining ‘The Ring’ Magazine and More
With little boxing activity over the next two weekends, there’s no reason to hold off anointing Oscar Collazo the Fighter of the Month for November. In his eleventh pro fight, Collazo turned heads with a masterful performance against previously undefeated Thammanoon Niyamtrong, grabbing a second piece of the title in boxing’s smallest weight class while ending the reign of the sport’s longest-reigning world title-holder. The match was on the undercard of the Nov. 16 “Latino Night” show in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia headlined by the cruiserweight tiff between Mexico’s Zurdo Ramirez and England’s Chris Billam-Smith.
Collazo was a solid favorite, but no one expected the fight would be as one-sided. Collazo put on a clinic, as the saying goes. He took the starch out of Niyamtrong with wicked body punches before ending matters in the seventh. A left uppercut sent the Thai to the canvas for the third time and the referee immediately stepped in and stopped it.
Collazo, wrote Tris Dixon, “dissected and destroyed a very good fighter.” Indeed. A former Muay Thai champion, Niyamtrong (aka Knockout CP Freshmart) brought a 25-0 record and was making the thirteenth defense of his WBA strap.
A Puerto Rican born in Newark, Jersey, Oscar Collazo turned pro after winning a gold medal in the 2019 Pan American games in Lima, Peru. He was reportedly named after Oscar De La Hoya (we will take that info with a grain of salt), names Hall of Famer Ivan Calderon as a mentor and is co-promoted by Hall of Famer Miguel Cotto.
Collazo, 27, won the WBO version of the 105-pound title in his seventh pro fight with a seven-round beatdown of Melvin Jerusalem. He won a world title faster than any Puerto Rican boxer before him.
His goal now, he says, is to become a unified champion. He would be the first from the island in the modern era. Although Puerto Rico has a distinguished boxing history – twelve Boricua boxers are enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame — there hasn’t been a fully unified champion from Puerto Rico since the WBO came along in 1988.
The other belt-holders at 105 are the aforementioned Jerusalem (WBC) and his Filipino countryman Melvin Taduran (IBF). Both won their belts in Japan with upsets of the Shigeoka brothers, respectively Yudai (Jerusalem) and Ginjiro (Taduran). Collazo would be a massive favorite over either.
A far more attractive fight would pit Collazo against two-time Olympic gold medalist Hasanboy Dusmatov. In theory, this would be an easy fight to make as the undefeated Uzbek trains in Indio, California, a frequent stomping ground of Collazo’s co-promoter Oscar De La Hoya who had a piece of the action when Dusmatov made his pro debut in Mexico. However, it’s doubtful that Dusmatov’s influential advisor Vadim Kornilov would let him take such a treacherous fight until the match-up had been properly “marinated,” by which time they both may be competing in a higher weight class. The Puerto Rican, who began his pro career at 110, is big for the 105-pound division notes the noted boxing historian Matt McGrain who is partial to the little guys.
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Outside the ropes, the big news in boxing in November was the news that The Ring magazine had been sold to Turki Alalshikh. The self-acclaimed Bible of Boxing, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2022, was previously owned by a subsidiary of Oscar De La Hoya’s company, Golden Boy Enterprises, which acquired the venerable publication in 2007. Alalshikh purportedly paid $10 million dollars.
Alalshikh, the head of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, confirmed the sale on social media on Monday, Nov. 11.
“Earlier this week, I finalized a deal to acquire 100% of The Ring Magazine, and I want to make a few things clear,” he said. “The print version of the magazine will return immediately after a two year hiatus and it will be available in the US and UK markets. The magazine will be fully independent, with brilliant writers and focusing on every aspect in the sport of boxing. We will continue to raise the prestige of The Ring Titles, and plans are already underway to have a yearly extravagant awards ceremony to celebrate the very best in the boxing industry.”
Alalshikh, blessed with an apparently unlimited budget, is already the most powerful man in the sport and more than a few concerns have been raised about his latest venture, especially in light of an incident involving prominent British scribe Oliver Brown.
Brown, the chief sports writer for the Telegraph who had previously covered three of Tyson Fury’s fights in Saudi Arabia, had his credential pulled for the Joshua-Dubois show at Wembley Stadium after calling the event “a grisly conduit for glorifying the Saudi regime.”
“I frankly do not trust Alalshikh to keep his personal aims from influencing the publication’s content,” says boxing writer Patrick Stumberg. One thing is certain: So long as the publication remains in the hands of the Saudis, the word “sportswashing” will never appear in the pages of The Ring magazine.
The Ring is the second major online boxing magazine to change hands this year. In February, Boxing Scene, one of the most heavily-trafficked sites in the ecosystem, was sold to Canadian-American entrepreneur Garry Jonas, best known as the founder of ProBox, a promotional entity headquartered in Plant City, Florida.
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Mike Tyson’s showing against Jake Paul was mindful of something that Jimmy Cannon once wrote: “…the flesh was corrupted by time. The mind operated as if it was in another man’s head…the talent has been contaminated by age.”
Cannon was describing Joe Louis in Louis’s farewell fight against Rocky Marciano.
True, Jake Paul is no Rocky Marciano. To include their names in the same sentence borders on sacrilege. But the fabled Brown Bomber was 37 years old when he was rucked into retirement by Marciano on that October night at Madison Square Garden. At age 58, Mike Tyson was old enough to be Joe Louis’s father and yet human lemmings by the thousands couldn’t resist betting on him.
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The Hauser Report: Some Thoughts on Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul
Jake Paul boxed his way to a unanimous decision over Mike Tyson at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Friday night. The bout, streamed live on Netflix, was one of the most-watched fights of all time and, in terms of the level of competition, boxing’s least-consequential mega-fight ever.
We’re living in a golden age for spectator sports. Sports generate massive amounts of money from engaged fan bases and are more popular now than ever before. Today’s athletes are more physically gifted, better conditioned, and more skilled than their predecessors. Their prowess is appreciated and understood by tens of millions of fans.
Not so for boxing. For the sweet science, this is an era of “fools’ gold.” Yes, fighters like Oleksandr Usyk, Canelo Alvarez, Terence Crawford, and Naoya Inoue bring honor to the sport. But boxing’s fan base has dwindled to the point where most people have no idea who the heavyweight champion of the world is. The sport’s dominant promoter has a business model that runs hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the red. And most fights of note are contested behind a paywall that shrinks the fan base even more. Few sports fans understand what good boxing is.
Mike Tyson is 58 years old. Once upon a time, he was the most destructive boxer in the world and “the baddest man on the planet.” Prior to last Friday night, he hadn’t fought in nineteen years and hadn’t won a fight since 2003.
Jake Paul is a 27-year-old social media personality who wasn’t born when Tyson lost his aura of invincibility at the hands of Buster Douglas. Paul began boxing professionally three years ago and, before fighting Tyson, had compiled a 10-1 (7 KOs) record against carefully chosen opponents.
Netflix has roughly 283 million subscribers globally, 84 million of them in North America. Recently, it made the decision to move into live sports. On December 25, it will stream the National Football League’s two Christmas games on an exclusive basis.
Netflix took note of the fact that Tyson’s 2020 exhibition against Roy Jones drew 1.6 million pay-per-view buys and concluded that Tyson-Paul had the potential to be the most-viewed fight of all time. It purchased rights to the fight as an attention grabber and subscription seller for (a best-estimate) $40 million.
Tyson-Paul was originally scheduled for July 20. A compliant Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations sanctioned the bout as an official fight, not an exhibition. In deference to Tyson’s age, the fighters agreed that the match would be contested over eight two-minute rounds (women’s rules) with 14-ounce gloves (heavyweight gloves normally weigh ten ounces).
But on May 26, Tyson became nauseous and dizzy while on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles and needed medical assistance for what was later described as a bleeding ulcer. The fight was rescheduled for November 15. Later, Tyson described the incident on the plane as follows: “I was in the bathroom throwing up blood. I had, like, eight blood transfusions. The doctor said I lost half my blood. I almost died. I lost 25 pounds in eleven days. Couldn’t eat. Only liquids. Every time I went to the bathroom, it smelled like tar. Didn’t even smell like shit anymore. It was disgusting.”
Does that sound like a 58-year-old man who should be fighting?
As Eliot Worsell noted, Tyson-Paul contained all the elements of a successful reality show. “There are for a start,” he wrote, “celebrities involved, two of them. One is ‘old famous’ and the other ‘new famous’ and both bring large audiences with them. They need only tap something on their phone to guarantee the entire world pays attention. And that, in this day and age, is all you really need to green light a project like this.”
But Worsell added a word of caution, observing, “This has been the story of Jake Paul’s pro boxing career to date; one of smoke and mirrors, one of sycophants telling him only what he wants to hear. He has been fed a lie just as Mike Tyson is now being fed a lie, and on November 15 they will both play dress-up and be watched by millions. They will wear gloves like boxers and they will move like boxers – one hampered in this quest by old age and the other by sheer incompetence – and they will together make ungodly sums of money.”
There was early talk that 90,000 fans would jam AT&T Stadium on fight night. Initially, ticket prices ranged from $381 to $7,956. And those prices were dwarfed by four tiers of VIP packages topped by a two-million-dollar “MVP Owner’s Experience” that included special ringside seating at the fight for six people, luxury hotel accommodations, weigh-in and locker room photo ops, boxing gloves signed by Tyson and Paul, and other amenities.
But by Monday of fight week, ticket prices had dropped to as little as $36. Ringside seats were available for $900. And the press release announcing the eventual MVP Owner’s Experience sale backtracked a bit, saying the package was “valued at $2 million” – not that the actual sale price was $2 million. It also appeared that the purchase price included advertising for the law firm that purchased the package since the release proclaimed, “Just as every fighter in the ring stands to represent resilience, grit, and the pursuit of victory, TorkLaw stands in the corner of the people, fighting for justice and empowering those who need it most.”
That said, the fight drew 72,300 fans (inclusive of giveaway tickets) to AT&T Stadium. And the live gate surpassed $18 million making it the largest onsite gate ever in the United States for a fight card outside of Las Vegas. More than 60 million households watched the event live around the world.
The undercard featured a spirited fight between Mario Barrios and Abel Ramos that ended in a draw. Then came the second dramatic showdown between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano.
Taylor-Serrano II was for all four major sanctioning body 140-pound belts. Two years ago, Katie and Amanda did battle at Madison Square Garden on a historic night that saw Taylor emerge with a controversial split-decision win. Katie is now 38 years old and her age is showing. Amanda is 36. Taylor was an early 6-to-5 betting favorite in the rematch but the odds flipped late in Serrano’s favor.
Amanda began Taylor-Serrano II in dominating fashion and wobbled Katie just before the bell ending round one. That set the pattern for the early rounds. Serrano looked like she could hurt Taylor, and Taylor didn’t look like she could hurt Serrano.
Then in round four, Serrano got hurt. A headbutt opened a gruesome gash on her right eyelid. As the bout progressed, the cut became more dangerous. From an armchair perspective, it looked as though the fight should have been stopped and the result determined by the judges’ abbreviated scorecards. But the ring doctor who examined Serrano allowed it to continue even though the flow of blood seemed to handicap Amanda more and more with each passing round.
In round eight, referee Jon Schorle took a point away from Taylor after the fourth clash of heads that he thought Katie had initiated. By then, Serrano’s face resembled a gory Halloween mask and the bout had turned into a non-stop firefight. Each woman pushed herself as far as it seemed possible to go.
In the eyes of most observers, Serrano clearly won the fight. This writer scored the bout 96-93 in Amanda’s favor. Then the judges had their say. Each one favored Taylor by a 95-94 margin.
“My God!” blow-by-blow commentator Mauro Ranallo exclaimed after the verdict was announced. “How does one rob Amanda Serrano after a performance like that?”
In keeping with the hyperbole of the promotion, one might say that it was the most-watched ring robbery (although not the worst) in boxing history.
CompuBox is an inexact tabulation. But there’s a point at which the numbers can’t be ignored. According to CompuBox, Serrano outlanded Taylor in nine of ten rounds with an overall 324-to-217 advantage in punches landed.
From a boxing standpoint, Taylor-Serrano II made the evening special. Casual fans who don’t know much about the sweet science saw a very good fight. But they also saw how bad judging undermines boxing.
Meanwhile, as good as Taylor-Serrano II was, that’s not what Netflix was selling to the public. Jake Paul’s most recent events had engendered disappointing viewer numbers. This one was a cultural touchstone because of Tyson.
Paul has worked hard to become a boxer. In terms of skills, he’s now a club fighter (which is more than 99.9 percent of the population could realistically dream of being). So, what happens when a club fighter fights a 58-year-old man who used to be great?
Jack Johnson fought until the age of 53, losing four of his last six bouts. And the two he won were against opponents named Rough House Wilson (who was disqualified in what would be his only recorded professional fight) and Brad Simmons (who was barred from fighting again in Kansas because he was believed to have thrown the fight against Johnson).
Larry Holmes fought until age 52, knocking out 49-year-old Mike Weaver at age 51 and winning a unanimous decision over Eric Esch (aka Butterbean) in his final bout.
Paul was a 2-to-1 betting favorite. Serious PED testing for the fight was a murky issue but seems to have been minimal. Taylor and Serrano underwent VADA testing in advance of their bout. Tyson and Paul didn’t.
Tyson weighed in for the contest at 228.4 pounds; Paul at 227.2 (well over his previous high of 200). Following the weigh-in, Mike and Jake came face to face for the ritual staredown and Mike slapped Jake. But the incident was self-contained with no ripple effect and had the feel of a WWE confrontation.
That raised a question that was fogging the promotion: “Would Tyson vs. Paul be a ‘real’ fight or a pre-arranged sparring session (which was what Tyson vs. Roy Jones appeared to be)?”
That question was of particular note because sports betting is legal in 38 states and 31 of them were allowing wagers on the fight.
Nakisa Bidarian (co-founder of Paul’s promotional company) sought to lay that issue to rest, telling ESPN, “There’s no reason for us to create a federal fraud, a federal crime. These are pro fights that consumers are making legal bets on. We have never and we’ll never do anything that’s other than above board and one hundred percent a pro fight unless we come out clearly and say, ‘Hey, this is an exhibition fight that is a show.'”
Tyson looked old and worried during his ring walk and wore a sleeve on his right knee. The crowd was overwhelmingly in his favor. But it’s an often-repeated truism that the crowd can’t fight. And neither could Mike.
Once upon a time, Tyson scored nine first-minute knockouts in professional fights. Not first-round. First-minute.
Against Paul, “Iron Mike” came out for round one as hard as he could (which wasn’t very hard) while Jake kept a safe distance between them. Then Tyson tired and took all the air out of the fight. By round three, he was in survival mode with his head tucked safely behind his 14-ounce gloves. And Jake didn’t have the skills to hurt him.
The CompuBox numbers favored Paul by a 78-to-18 margin in punches landed. In other words, Tyson landed an average of two punches per round. The judges’ scores were 80-72, 79-73, 79-73 in Jake’s favor. It was a “real” fight but a bad one.
“I love Mike Tyson,” Terence Crawford posted on X afterward. “But they giving him too much credit. He looked like trash.”
Prior to the bout, Tris Dixon wrote, “Tyson-Paul is a weird event, and I can’t think of anything even remotely like it in terms of the level of fighters, celebrity, and their ages. The event is unique, and morally and ethically it is questionable. It is a cynical cash grab. I can’t see it being particularly entertaining as a high-level sporting event. But I’m sure once it starts you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.”
All true. But let’s remember that there was a time when Mike Tyson was universally recognized as the best fighter in the world. Not many people in history have been able to say that.
—
Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is a personal memoir available at www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1
In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
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