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'The Greatest'--World boxing heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali posed for this portrait |
ISHOULD HAVE turned the TV off. But I didn't. Instead I just sat there, mesmerized.
The year was 1982, a cold, gray Saturday afternoon in November. I'd finished grading papers and didn't have anything better to do. Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini was fighting a Korean boxer named Duk Koo Kim at Caesar's Palace, and so I watched.
It was not a pretty fight. No fight with Mancini was ever pretty because he cut so easily. He usually won, but afterward his doughy face always looked as though it had been run through a meat grinder.
Pretty or not, the fight thrilled. For 13 rounds a bloodied Mancini pummeled his opponent and got pummeled in return. Both fighters, though small, pounded each other with blows that might have leveled a heavyweight. In the later rounds Kim suffered terrific punishment, and I remember thinking, "How much more can he take?" I silently wished he would just go ahead and fall.
Toward the end, with Mancini hitting him almost at will, Kim staggered to the right side of the ring but still didn't go down. The announcer mentioned, rather matter-of-factly, that in a press conference before the fight the Korean kid had vowed to win the title or "die trying."
Then, it happened.
A vicious, compact hook from Mancini in round 14 hit Kim flush on the temple. He crumpled and dropped to the canvas. I thought to myself, "That's it. He won't get up now." Less than a week later, Duk Koo Kim died in a Nevada hospital.
Seeing a man killed in the ring should have put me off the sport for good. Certainly, that fight made continuing as a boxing fan hard to justify. But vicarious violence is addictive; and so I still watched, occasionally, though never again in quite the same way. Boxing is a guilty pleasure. After this fight, watching yielded far more guilt than pleasure.
As a kid, I'd read and heard stories about the great fighters of the '30s, '40s, and '50s: Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Jersey Joe Walcott and the like. But they were mostly just names. I knew bits and pieces of their larger-than-life history and had seen a few of their pictures in books. But I didn't quite know what they were about.
I didn't really become a boxing fan until 1971, when TV held a tournament of sorts aimed at choosing a worthy opponent for the former champ, Muhammad Ali. As every student of boxing history knows, Ali had been stripped of his title a few years earlier, at the zenith of his career, for resisting the draft and refusing to go to Vietnam ("Man, I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong," he'd said).
Deep down I knew Ali was the legitimate champ, but I didn't want to admit it. I couldn't stand his loudmouth antics, his braggadocio, his cocksure arrogance. It wasn't until later that I'd come to regard him as he regarded himself, "The Greatest."
At any rate, I watched "ABC's Wide World of Sports" week after week as fighters beat each other up for the future privilege of climbing into the ring with Ali and earning a huge payday.
For a while it looked as though the aging Floyd Patterson would be the one. But Patterson lost to Jimmy Ellis. Then Jerry Quarry, tagged by bigots and racists as "The Great White Hope," had a brief chance. Eventually, Joe Frazier won out.
Much to my delight, Smokin' Joe won his first bout with Ali to take the heavyweight crown. But two years later as I sat with my brother on the top bunk late at night, my ear pressed against a transistor radio, listening incredulously through the static, Frazier lost his title to a hulking young fighter named George Foreman. Unbelievably, young George knocked the champ down six times in two rounds before the referee stopped the carnage. Pictures in the next week's Sports Illustrated showed Foreman's vicious uppercuts actually lifting the smaller Frazier off the canvas.
For a couple of years in the early '80s I avidly followed the career of Sugar Ray Leonard. I didn't like him (another pretty boy, like Ali), but he was undeniably good.
Then came the Mancini fight, forcing boxing fans everywhere to confront the ugly truth: that boxing is the rawest, most primal of all sports. You probably shouldn't watch, but once drawn in, it's hard to turn away.
JOHN B. AMOS is a lifelong resident of the town
Email: jamos@stab.org.
