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For Fight 'Fixer' Charles Farrell, A Life Rigging Records And Engineering Careers
For Fight 'Fixer' Charles Farrell, A Life Rigging Records And Engineering Careers
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April 28, 2017
Bill Littlefield
This article is more than 2 years old.
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"I fixed a lot of fights over the years," Charles Farrell says.
He can say he fixed a lot of fights over the years without worrying about the consequences, because …
"I covered my tracks very well," he says. "And the statute of limitations, of course, has long since run."
Charles Farrell (left) stands with boxer Floyd Patterson (right). (Courtesy Charles Farrell)
The Art Of The Fix
Farrell says the art of fixing a fight is often more subtle than 'Kid, this ain’t your night,' a wink, and a paper sack full of cash.
"I mean, after all, what we’re talking about is illegal," he says. "So you don’t need to get into specific language. What you’ll do is you’ll talk about a fighter that you’ll have who needs to 'stay busy.'"
“Stay busy” means “win." Everybody knows that.
"So the other guy knows that you need someone to lose to your fighter, and he’ll say, 'I’ve got somebody who’s in the gym, but not much, lately. He’s not in great shape,"' Farrell explains. "OK, so now we’re talking about somebody who’s probably not going to go the distance. The response to that is, 'That’s OK. I only need three or four rounds of work.' And the other guy will say, 'OK, well, my guy’s only good for three rounds.' And you can fine tune without ever saying, 'I want this fight to be fixed.' But the fight is as fixed as it can be, and you will get exactly what you want."
If you’re surprised to hear that’s the way the business of prize fighting gets done, Charles Farrell says you’ve got company.
"I don’t think it’s widely known," he says. "People don’t want to believe this. Of course not. And they don’t want to feel they’ve been fooled and cheated. But they have been."
So now you know how a result gets arranged before the alleged contest begins. Maybe it’s time for a story about how that can happen even after the contest ends. The cast of this little drama, which transpired 20-odd years ago, includes Farrell, of course, and a former heavyweight champion.
Managing Leon Spinks
"Well, Leon Spinks was a man who was, at that point, about 40 years old," Farrell says. "And he had never taken care of himself. And I understood that his value as a fighter, if in fact there was any value to him at this stage as a fighter, was as an opponent for other fighters."
Against his better judgement, Farrell took on the task of managing Spinks. After all, Leon had once beaten Muhammad Ali. Maybe his name could still draw a crowd. And if Farrell could get him a couple of wins and create the illusion of a comeback, maybe it could draw a big crowd. He arranged a match with a guy named Eddie Curry, whom Farrell describes as a fellow who could fight a little, if nobody told him not to.
"He would fight anyone," Farrell says. "And he would generally be knocked out in the first round. And I assumed that Leon could beat him."
Unhappily for Farrell and Spinks, Eddie Curry assumed otherwise. In fact, he lasted eight rounds, and out-boxed Spinks in most of them.
Leon Spinks. (AP Photo)
And since Eddie’s understanding was that he’d signed up for an eight-round fight, when the bell rang to end the eighth, he returned to his corner and held out his hands so the corner man could remove his gloves.
"Eddie Curry won a unanimous decision. It was announced in the center of the ring," Farrell says.
And that would have been the end of Leon Spinks as a draw — if Charles Farrell hadn’t remembered that the poster advertising the fight didn’t say "eight rounds."
"And I caught this typo which advertised the fight as being a 10-round fight," Farrell says. "And I said to Eddie Curry’s manager, who was also a commissioner, and also a guy with whom I had done business – 'business' in italics – before, 'Well, we have two more rounds.' And Eddie Curry refused."
As you’d perhaps have done, if you’d been Eddie Curry. He’d done was he was paid to do. But Farrell, seeing an opportunity for a W where there had been none, persisted.
"I said, 'No, this is a 10-round fight. You have to fight. Leon is ready to go. Round nine starts in one minute.' And I’m looking at an imaginary watch," Farrell says.
Eddie Curry’s manager tried to put his fighter’s gloves back on, but it was no go.
"He’s not gonna fight another second," Farrell says.
So Farrell suggested another route to the result that he and Spinks needed…a route where no one would get hurt.
"And so I said, 'Look. We get the win.' And his manager said, 'All right, but can we take care of this in the back? In the back room.' And I said, 'Yes.'"
The fight wasn’t televised. Who was gonna know?
"All we need to do is phone it in to the record book as a TKO win for Leon," Farrell explains. "As long as it’s reported as that, that’s what the record will say. And I don’t care what 300 people have seen. It’s not going anywhere. And so we made a deal, and Leon got the win, and I wound up with Leon."
"And at one point I was relatively sure that some harm was going to come to me. And I thought, 'I’m not a tough guy. Maybe it’s time.'" Charles Farrell
So rigging the record, that’s another way to fix a fight. Charles Farrell once invented an entire career for a guy named John Carlo, who had never fought at all.
The Fight That Wasn't Fixed
It may seem unlikely that one of Charles Farrell’s greatest regrets about his career in boxing involves a fight he didn’t fix, because he didn’t think he needed to. Farrell’s guy in that fight was a heavyweight named Mitch Green. He came with baggage.
"Well, there were actually a number of times that his career was sidelined by gunshot wounds," Farrell says. "But a very specific one was just after I signed him to a contract. He got into an argument on the street about Mike Tyson. They had fought in the ring. They had also fought on the street. And Mitch had lost a decision to Mike, which bothered him a lot. And someone talked to him about it, and he got upset. He slapped the guy, and the guy went back into his house, got a gun, and shot Mitch right behind the knee, right in the femur."
Eventually Mitch Green recovered, which turned out to be something of a mixed blessing for Farrell. He’d put Green up and supported him for 18 months. Then he arranged a fight that was supposed to launch Green’s comeback.
The fellow in the other corner was Bruce Johnson.
"Bruce Johnson is one of these guys, and you see them often in boxing, who is a naturally good athlete, but understands that the way he can make money in boxing is to lose to name fighters. And it means that he goes into each fight trying to figure out what the easiest route out — without taking an obvious dive — is. And that’s how he makes a living. So it doesn’t serve his interest to be too good a fighter," he says
The Art Of The Fix
Farrell says the art of fixing a fight is often more subtle than 'Kid, this ain’t your night,' a wink, and a paper sack full of cash.
"I mean, after all, what we’re talking about is illegal," he says. "So you don’t need to get into specific language. What you’ll do is you’ll talk about a fighter that you’ll have who needs to 'stay busy.'"
“Stay busy” means “win." Everybody knows that.
"So the other guy knows that you need someone to lose to your fighter, and he’ll say, 'I’ve got somebody who’s in the gym, but not much, lately. He’s not in great shape,"' Farrell explains. "OK, so now we’re talking about somebody who’s probably not going to go the distance. The response to that is, 'That’s OK. I only need three or four rounds of work.' And the other guy will say, 'OK, well, my guy’s only good for three rounds.' And you can fine tune without ever saying, 'I want this fight to be fixed.' But the fight is as fixed as it can be, and you will get exactly what you want."
If you’re surprised to hear that’s the way the business of prize fighting gets done, Charles Farrell says you’ve got company.
"I don’t think it’s widely known," he says. "People don’t want to believe this. Of course not. And they don’t want to feel they’ve been fooled and cheated. But they have been."
So now you know how a result gets arranged before the alleged contest begins. Maybe it’s time for a story about how that can happen even after the contest ends. The cast of this little drama, which transpired 20-odd years ago, includes Farrell, of course, and a former heavyweight champion.
Managing Leon Spinks
"Well, Leon Spinks was a man who was, at that point, about 40 years old," Farrell says. "And he had never taken care of himself. And I understood that his value as a fighter, if in fact there was any value to him at this stage as a fighter, was as an opponent for other fighters."
Against his better judgement, Farrell took on the task of managing Spinks. After all, Leon had once beaten Muhammad Ali. Maybe his name could still draw a crowd. And if Farrell could get him a couple of wins and create the illusion of a comeback, maybe it could draw a big crowd. He arranged a match with a guy named Eddie Curry, whom Farrell describes as a fellow who could fight a little, if nobody told him not to.
"He would fight anyone," Farrell says. "And he would generally be knocked out in the first round. And I assumed that Leon could beat him."
Unhappily for Farrell and Spinks, Eddie Curry assumed otherwise. In fact, he lasted eight rounds, and out-boxed Spinks in most of them.
Leon Spinks. (AP Photo)And since Eddie’s understanding was that he’d signed up for an eight-round fight, when the bell rang to end the eighth, he returned to his corner and held out his hands so the corner man could remove his gloves.
"Eddie Curry won a unanimous decision. It was announced in the center of the ring," Farrell says.
And that would have been the end of Leon Spinks as a draw — if Charles Farrell hadn’t remembered that the poster advertising the fight didn’t say "eight rounds."
"And I caught this typo which advertised the fight as being a 10-round fight," Farrell says. "And I said to Eddie Curry’s manager, who was also a commissioner, and also a guy with whom I had done business – 'business' in italics – before, 'Well, we have two more rounds.' And Eddie Curry refused."
As you’d perhaps have done, if you’d been Eddie Curry. He’d done was he was paid to do. But Farrell, seeing an opportunity for a W where there had been none, persisted.
"I said, 'No, this is a 10-round fight. You have to fight. Leon is ready to go. Round nine starts in one minute.' And I’m looking at an imaginary watch," Farrell says.
Eddie Curry’s manager tried to put his fighter’s gloves back on, but it was no go.
"He’s not gonna fight another second," Farrell says.
So Farrell suggested another route to the result that he and Spinks needed…a route where no one would get hurt.
"And so I said, 'Look. We get the win.' And his manager said, 'All right, but can we take care of this in the back? In the back room.' And I said, 'Yes.'"
The fight wasn’t televised. Who was gonna know?
"All we need to do is phone it in to the record book as a TKO win for Leon," Farrell explains. "As long as it’s reported as that, that’s what the record will say. And I don’t care what 300 people have seen. It’s not going anywhere. And so we made a deal, and Leon got the win, and I wound up with Leon."
"And at one point I was relatively sure that some harm was going to come to me. And I thought, 'I’m not a tough guy. Maybe it’s time.'" Charles Farrell
So rigging the record, that’s another way to fix a fight. Charles Farrell once invented an entire career for a guy named John Carlo, who had never fought at all.
The Fight That Wasn't Fixed
It may seem unlikely that one of Charles Farrell’s greatest regrets about his career in boxing involves a fight he didn’t fix, because he didn’t think he needed to. Farrell’s guy in that fight was a heavyweight named Mitch Green. He came with baggage.
"Well, there were actually a number of times that his career was sidelined by gunshot wounds," Farrell says. "But a very specific one was just after I signed him to a contract. He got into an argument on the street about Mike Tyson. They had fought in the ring. They had also fought on the street. And Mitch had lost a decision to Mike, which bothered him a lot. And someone talked to him about it, and he got upset. He slapped the guy, and the guy went back into his house, got a gun, and shot Mitch right behind the knee, right in the femur."
Eventually Mitch Green recovered, which turned out to be something of a mixed blessing for Farrell. He’d put Green up and supported him for 18 months. Then he arranged a fight that was supposed to launch Green’s comeback.
The fellow in the other corner was Bruce Johnson.
"Bruce Johnson is one of these guys, and you see them often in boxing, who is a naturally good athlete, but understands that the way he can make money in boxing is to lose to name fighters. And it means that he goes into each fight trying to figure out what the easiest route out — without taking an obvious dive — is. And that’s how he makes a living. So it doesn’t serve his interest to be too good a fighter," he says
The Bittersweet Science. (Photo Courtesy of Levi Stahl)
No wonder, then, that Farrell didn’t bother fixing the Green-Johnson bout. Johnson knew his job. But had Farrell felt it was necessary to do some pre-fight business with Johnson’s corner ...
"All I needed to add was one sentence: 'But the fight does not see the third round.' And he would have agreed to it," Farrell says. "As a matter of fact, he would have agreed to it happily. And I would have had a win for Mitch Green, which I desperately needed."
It didn’t work out that way. When the bell rang, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound Mitch Green stood idle in the center of the ring. Farrell thinks Green was upset that he wasn’t getting enough attention and alludes to paranoia and a history of erratic behavior. In any case, Green listlessly absorbed Johnson’s harmless punches. After two rounds and several warnings, the referee stopped the fight, because it wasn’t a fight at all.
"I was furious," Farrell says. "As a matter of fact, Mitch and I got into a shouting match at the hotel right after the fight. Because I’d spent what, for me at least, was a lot of money on him. More than that, I’d worked very hard to engineer his comeback."
Now there would be no comeback. And all because Charles Farrell hadn’t thought it necessary to establish with all concerned – before the fight – that there was a script so basic that even the distracted, apparently disgruntled Green would have followed it.
"Absolutely, I should have fixed that fight. It would have been one sentence. Yes," he says.
As Mitch Green’s impersonation of a mummy against Bruce Johnson suggests, managing boxers is not an entirely predictable way to make a living, even if you’re adept at arranging results. And it can be risky. Farrell figured that out some years ago.
"I also got involved with some really, really bad people, for whom I was fixing fights," he says. "And some things didn’t go our way. There were some mistakes made, which I corrected, and I can’t really go into them. But these were dangerous people. And at one point I was relatively sure that some harm was going to come to me. And I thought, 'I’m not a tough guy. Maybe it’s time.'"
Charles Farrell is now a jazz pianist. Read his essay,“Why I Fixed Fights,” in a new collection,
No wonder, then, that Farrell didn’t bother fixing the Green-Johnson bout. Johnson knew his job. But had Farrell felt it was necessary to do some pre-fight business with Johnson’s corner ...
"All I needed to add was one sentence: 'But the fight does not see the third round.' And he would have agreed to it," Farrell says. "As a matter of fact, he would have agreed to it happily. And I would have had a win for Mitch Green, which I desperately needed."
It didn’t work out that way. When the bell rang, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound Mitch Green stood idle in the center of the ring. Farrell thinks Green was upset that he wasn’t getting enough attention and alludes to paranoia and a history of erratic behavior. In any case, Green listlessly absorbed Johnson’s harmless punches. After two rounds and several warnings, the referee stopped the fight, because it wasn’t a fight at all.
"I was furious," Farrell says. "As a matter of fact, Mitch and I got into a shouting match at the hotel right after the fight. Because I’d spent what, for me at least, was a lot of money on him. More than that, I’d worked very hard to engineer his comeback."
Now there would be no comeback. And all because Charles Farrell hadn’t thought it necessary to establish with all concerned – before the fight – that there was a script so basic that even the distracted, apparently disgruntled Green would have followed it.
"Absolutely, I should have fixed that fight. It would have been one sentence. Yes," he says.
As Mitch Green’s impersonation of a mummy against Bruce Johnson suggests, managing boxers is not an entirely predictable way to make a living, even if you’re adept at arranging results. And it can be risky. Farrell figured that out some years ago.
"I also got involved with some really, really bad people, for whom I was fixing fights," he says. "And some things didn’t go our way. There were some mistakes made, which I corrected, and I can’t really go into them. But these were dangerous people. And at one point I was relatively sure that some harm was going to come to me. And I thought, 'I’m not a tough guy. Maybe it’s time.'"
Charles Farrell is now a jazz pianist. Read his essay,“Why I Fixed Fights,” in a new collection,
“The Bittersweet Science."
This segment aired on April 29, 2017.
Related:
One Journalist's Attempt To Solve 'The Murder Of Sonny Liston'
Tony Moran: The 42-Year-Old, Homeless Boxing Champion
This segment aired on April 29, 2017.
Related:
One Journalist's Attempt To Solve 'The Murder Of Sonny Liston'
Tony Moran: The 42-Year-Old, Homeless Boxing Champion
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Was legendary boxer Sonny Liston murdered?
Shaun Assael is an American author and award-winning investigative journalist. He is the author of four books that deal with sports, crime and culture. Wikipedia
Born: February 4, 1962 (age 58 years), New York, New York, United States
Education: New York University
Books
The Murder of Sonny Li...
2016
Steroid Nation: Juiced H...
2007
Sex, Lies, and Headloc...
2002
Wide Open: Days an...
1998
SPORTS
Was legendary boxer Sonny Liston murdered?
Sonny Liston was a ferocious fighter, the heavyweight champion of the world and the man Cassius Clay beat to win the title for the first time, igniting his own legend. And yet, outside of boxing, Liston was a haunted man, initiated early into a life of crime and decimated by drugs when his boxing career faltered.
His untimely end was long thought to be accidental and self-inflicted, courtesy of a heroin-filled needle in his arm. Now the book “The Murder of Sonny Liston” by Shaun Assael wonders if another might have pushed the fatal plunger.
‘So, you’ve come to ask me if I killed Sonny Liston.’
Liston was born in Forrest City, Ark., possibly in the early 1930s — the day and year are unknown — the 24th child of a “miserable miscreant” sharecropper father. He wound up in St. Louis as a teen and began robbing restaurants and gas stations. He landed in prison, learned to box and rose through the sport quickly.
When Liston became the top challenger to champ Floyd Patterson by 1960, it was a national scandal, as Congress debated whether Liston — whose criminal record included breaking a cop’s leg in 1956 — was civilized enough to get into a boxing ring and beat another man to a pulp.
Testifying before a Senate committee on the matter, Liston said he had no education, was forced to work from a young age to help feed his father’s 25 children and could sign his name but not write his own address.
He also was asked about mob-connected promoters he dealt with, and said, “I wouldn’t pass judgment on no one. I haven’t been perfect myself.”
The controversy became a flashpoint. Baseball’s Jackie Robinson said he wished Liston’s record were better but that he deserved the title shot, while President John Kennedy “urged Patterson to find [an opponent] with a better ‘character.’ ”
Liston got his title shot in 1962, winning the belt in the first heavyweight title fight ever decided in the first round. Patterson got a rematch a year later and lost again by first-round knockout.
While training for the rematch in Las Vegas, according to Assael, Liston met a well-connected bookie named Ash Resnick, who made himself Liston’s personal concierge, “offering Sonny everything from fine clothes to consorts,” and became part of his inner circle.
One of Resnick’s best friends was boxing legend Joe Louis, who would, in time, become close with Liston. According to the FBI, Resnick used Louis as a “bodyguard companion” — an enforcer — on collection calls.
Clay was Liston’s next challenger. A gambler associate of Resnick’s later told the FBI that Resnick advised him a few days before the fight that Liston would win in the second round but then called a few hours before the bout saying to forget the advice. Liston lost the title to Clay, and the associate told the FBI, “Resnick knew that Liston was going to lose.”
Clay, now known as Muhammad Ali, won the 1965 rematch by knockout. But the winning punch looked to many like it barely made contact, and Joe Louis Jr., sitting ringside for the fight with his father, later said he and his dad were “perplexed” that Liston received no medical care after the punch. To many, the whole situation screamed “fix.”
According to Assael, a theory emerged that Resnick, on Liston’s behalf, made a deal with the Nation of Islam, which was connected to Ali, to have Liston take a dive in exchange for a percentage of Ali’s future earnings.
Nothing was ever proven, but Nevada state assemblyman Gene Collins told Assael that in 1970, as Ali prepared to fight Joe Frazier, Liston told him and others that “he had a portion of Ali’s contract,” and that Liston “got more and more animated as they talked about the size of Ali’s paycheck.” Another friend of Liston’s said something similar, claiming that Liston said “he’d have money for the rest of his life.”
As for his own career, while Liston went on to fight many scrappers and has-beens, he never returned to his former glory as a boxer.
By the late ’60s, according to Assael, Liston was using heroin and had become an enforcer for a drug dealer named Robert Chudnick, whose own celebrity made him as surprising a dealer as Liston was a collector.
Outside of boxing, Liston was a haunted man, initiated early into a life of crime and decimated by drugs when his boxing career faltered.
The white, red-haired Chudnick was a masterful and famous jazz trumpet player known as Red Rodney. He had replaced Miles Davis in Charlie Parker’s band, sat in with Doc Severinsen’s band on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” when he was in LA and was regularly hired for sessions by the likes of Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand. Still, Chudnick, a “compulsive thief,” never hit the career heights of a Davis or Parker and distress over his life led him first to shoot heroin, then to sell it. Chudnick eventually enlisted his teenage son, Mark, to work with him, and Mark and Liston became a collections team.
In February 1969, Assael writes, Liston was present at the home of a beautician and drug dealer named Earl Cage when it was raided by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) — the precursor to the DEA — and the Las Vegas police. Everyone was arrested except for Liston, who was mysteriously released by the Vegas cops.
By 1970, Chudnick, paranoid about the arrests of colleagues, came to believe Liston was untrustworthy and told his son Mark to stop dealing with him. But while Chudnick was out of town for a gig, Liston came to his house looking for drugs. When Mark tried to turn him away, Liston barged in and searched the house, slamming the teen against the wall before leaving.
On Jan. 5, 1971, Liston’s wife, Geraldine, flew home from a New Year’s trip to find the boxer “lying bloody against the bed, blood covering an undershirt that barely covered his bloated body.” He had been dead for several days, the works he used to shoot heroin beside him.
An initial autopsy found the cause of death inconclusive, noting only that it may have been related to heroin.
In 1982, a police informant named Irwin Peters walked into a Las Vegas police station with a remarkable story to tell. He said that Larry Gandy, a retired Vegas cop revered by everyone in the department, had become a burglar and was about to pull off a heist. He also said that Gandy had killed Liston, suggesting that perhaps Resnick had hired Gandy to subject Liston to an overdose after he and the boxer battled over money.
The police sting that followed proved at least some of Peters’ information to be true — Gandy had become a thief and was caught in the act and arrested.
As it happened, the officer Peters spoke to, Gary Beckwith, had been one of the officers called to the scene after Liston died. Thinking back, he remembered seeing Gandy there as well.
But with no evidence for murder and a strong case for burglary, the police went with the case they had. Gandy got 10 years but had his sentence suspended.
Peters, meanwhile, received an anonymous postcard with a picture of a desert and the threat, “This is where you’ll be.” He lived in fear for several years, until he was found dead in 1987 in his garage with his car running, his death ruled a result of a “leaky exhaust system.” Three decades later, Peters’ nephew told Assael, “Everyone in our family feels the death was suspicious.”
In 2014, Assael found Gandy on Facebook and requested an interview. Arriving at Gandy’s home, Assael was greeted by Gandy “wrapp[ing] his thick arm around me,” and before Assael could ask any questions, Gandy said, “So, you’ve come to ask me if I killed Sonny Liston.”
Gandy talked about everything from his time as one of Vegas’ toughest undercover cops to how he began stealing from drug dealers with Peters and selling their wares to “clients in the biggest casinos, most of whom were either hooked or trying to hook high rollers.” But Gandy denied killing Peters and Liston and told Assael whom he considered the prime suspect in Liston’s murder — Earl Cage, the beautician/dealer.
Gandy said when everyone at Cage’s home was arrested except for Liston, Cage — who died in 2000 — would have believed Liston set him up. He added that the officer at the raid made a mistake in letting Liston go on the spot and should have taken him in with everyone else.
Assael interviewed many associated with Liston and found disparate beliefs about how he died. Bill Alden, the BNDD agent involved in the Cage raid, believes it was murder, saying, “Knowing Las Vegas like I did, and knowing Sonny’s history, I always felt he was murdered. There was just too much there.” Craig Lovato, the agent who found Liston’s drug works when he died, believes Liston most likely overdosed on his own.
Assael names several potential suspects, including Gandy, Resnick, Cage and Chudnick. All had possible motives, as did others. In the end, Assael reaches just one conclusion: Solving the death of Irwin Peters would solve Liston’s as well.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
“Styles Make Fights”
DEONTAY WILDER AND TYSON FURY. PHOTO: RYAN HAFEY / PREMIER BOXING CHAMPIONS.
The old adage “styles make fights” will be put to the test tomorrow night, when the most proficient boxer in the heavyweight division confronts its most powerful puncher, in the most eagerly anticipated rematch of recent decades.
Tyson Fury assumes the role of “boxer,” and not since Muhammad Ali has a heavyweight been so light on his feet or so elusive.
An exponent of the “sweet science,” he fights according to boxing’s original tenet: hit and don’t get hit.
Meanwhile, his opponent—Deontay Wilder, the World Boxing Council champion—has been touted as the fiercest puncher since Mike Tyson, since George Foreman, or perhaps even in the history of the sport. (A record of forty-three fights and forty-one knockouts corroborates this.
Of the two challengers who went the distance, the first, Bermane Stiverne, was knocked out in the first round of their rematch. The second opponent to hear the final bell was Fury, and he ended up on the canvas twice in their first fight.)
Observers seem to agree: Fury will either win on points, or Wilder will win by knockout.
Fury, ever the contrarian, has predicted a knockout in round two. His new trainer—if we are to believe what we have been told—has been helping him to sit down on his shots, and while it is true that Fury isn’t the hardest puncher in the division, nor is he as feather-fisted as his opponents like to make out.
Fury stands six-foot-nine and weighs in at (reportedly) somewhere around two hundred seventy pounds; it would be a mistake for Wilder to think he can walk through Fury’s punches. As they say in heavyweight boxing: if you get hit, you stay hit.
On the other side of the ledger, it’s worth noting that Wilder isn’t as flawed a boxer as his detractors like to pretend. It is true that he windmills his punches once he’s got his opponents hurt, but he has a hard, effective jab when he chooses to use it, as well as that fearsome right.
Far better “technicians” have tried to land clean on Fury and failed, though Wilder did precisely that in the first fight—not once but twice. This isn’t luck.
As Joyce Carol Oates puts it in her book On Boxing: “Life is hard in the ring, but, there, you only get what you deserve.”
Should Wilder win, it will confirm what he has told us all along: that he truly is the “baddest man on the planet.”
Should Fury win, it will cap a remarkable comeback, following, as it does, his much-publicized depression, weight gain, and years away from the ring.
There have been rumblings of some vague difficulty in the Fury camp.
Let’s hope there is no truth to this, because tomorrow we’ll see a spectacle all too rare in boxing: the best fighting the best.
—Robin Jones
Boxing's duplicity devours an honest magazine
Let’s get two things straight. One, last September I was fired from The Ring, the venerable boxing magazine, along with editor in chief Nigel Collins and most of the editorial staff. Two, I had it coming.
So I’m not as bitter about my dismissal as you might expect, even though no one from the company told me I’d been canned or even informed me that my next column and a scheduled feature were no longer welcome. As a non-employed contractor in our brave new world of semi-employed twenty-first century servitude, I had to perceive I was fired. We all know how these arrangements work. Non-employees float in an opaque legal gelatin that can wash out from under us at any time. But remember, I had it coming.
Who killed Davey Moore …
“Not me,” says the boxing writer …
No, you can’t blame me at all.
—from “Who Killed Davey Moore?” by Bob Dylan
“Not me,” says the boxing writer …
No, you can’t blame me at all.
—from “Who Killed Davey Moore?” by Bob Dylan
The brain damage detected in so many ex-fighters makes the sport basically indefensible. I didn’t wait until I was fired to say that. My Ring column pointed out for years that basic safety rules were routinely ignored without consequence to presiding officials. I issued anti-awards, called Magoos, to dangerous twits like Arthur Mercante Jr., the New York referee who stood in the ring and watched George Khalid Jones methodically beat twenty-six-year-old Beethavean Scottland to death in 2001. Mercante and others like him earned Magoos over and over. Nothing changed. Most fans get angry when a corner or a referee stops a fight. They want to see losers punched unconscious. If a guy’s eyeball is hanging from a string, heck, it’s still attached, isn’t it?
In June 2009, after five and a half savage rounds, Victor Ortiz had been knocked down twice and Marcos Maidana three times. Maidana, a junior welterweight out of Argentina, employed his usual kamikaze strategy, charging through hails of fire with his devastating punch and iron will. Ortiz, twenty-two, a craftier tactician, was wobbly, his face a mask of cuts and bruises, including a huge Technicolor bulge under his left eye and a gash over his right eye. Were he out on the street, someone would have called an ambulance. After getting up from his second knockdown he turned away, shaking his head to signal he’d had enough. After the fight, HBO analyst Max Kellerman stuck a microphone in his face. “I’m young, but I don’t think I deserve to be, you know, getting beat up like this,” said Ortiz, who as a child had been deserted in a Kansas trailer, first by his mother and later by his father. Kellerman, decent and polite off camera, a history major out of Columbia University, characterized Ortiz’s statement as “shocking” and questioned whether he should continue his boxing career with a crummy attitude like that. As I wrote at the time in The Ring, like so many fans, Kellerman had confused a spectacle created for our entertainment with real life, with something worth dying for.
Terry Norris was the first fighter I ever interviewed for The Ring—a handsome young man of twenty-six who had a slick, Sugar Ray Robinson style. That was back in 1993. When I saw him six or seven years later, retired, he already had the telltale slurred speech of an ex-fighter. I had witnessed the circle.
I’d always told myself that if I ever sat ringside at a fight in which a boxer was actually killed, I’d quit. Then one night in Carson, California, I watched Victor Burgos, a mediocre but game junior flyweight out of Mexico, get hammered into a coma by the freakishly hard-hitting Vic Darchinyan. Burgos lasted into the twelfth round before collapsing. He survived a coma and brain surgery. Weeks later he left the hospital and melted into a barrio across the border. His promoter was Don King, and King’s spokesman at the time told me that King had paid Burgos’s hospital bills. Perhaps he provided for him in other ways as well. Perhaps not. The fight was in 2007. About a year ago I spoke with a bantamweight who had run into Burgos down in Tijuana. I asked how he was doing, hoping for a fairy-tale answer. The bantam just shook his head. Well, I still hadn’t seen a fighter die in the flesh. Not exactly.
My former colleague William Dettloff used to argue that by enticing high-risk youths off the streets and into gyms the sport does more good than harm. He’s got a point. Amateur programs are mostly positive experiences for the athletes. But when they graduate to the pros, using smaller gloves, removing headgear, and competing in additional rounds, it becomes a battleground. In fact, luring kids into the pros is remarkably similar to recruiting high school seniors to fight unending wars for vague purposes. In both cases you scoop up inexperienced youngsters from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.
Fighters as a rule are the nicest, most personable professional athletes around. The impossibly rigorous training regimen usually drains them of the anger that got them into boxing in the first place. And there’s a measure of grace and purity in what they do. What we refer to as the sweet science, when it’s done right, is like Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins dazzling us by turns, feeling their way through a composition right on stage. Buddha, thousands of years ago, elaborated on the suffering of change. Nothing you touch will stay the same. It will deteriorate and die unless you do first. But that doesn’t stop you from clinging to it. Eventually you might hang on to a dream or idea that’s imperceptibly replaced a greater purpose, as when Colonel Nicholson’s determination to build a bridge on the River Kwai supersedes his objective of defeating the Japanese Empire.
There’s much to love about a sport packed with colorful, fascinating characters. The late cutman Chuck Bodak, for instance. If you watched boxing even a little back in the nineties you’ll remember Bodak, a gnome-like character who on fight night taped little photos all around his bald skull to inspire his fighters. Chuck was witty, interesting, and an inspired eccentric. He lived simply and gave away much of the money that came his way. Shooting the breeze with Bodak was light years more fun than covering sewer commission meetings for The Washington Post, a job I held in another lifetime.
In boxing journalism I’d found a refuge from tedium and the nagging suspicion back at the Post, surrounded by Ivy Leaguers and such, that I was an imposter. Violent though it may be, the boxing world is welcoming. Amateurs, hobbyists, and world-class pros train under the same roof. Anyone can enter a gym, walk up to a champion fighter or trainer and start a conversation. The fight game attracts interesting people. Even Joyce Carol Oates, not to mention Hemingway and Mailer. Because of that, Nigel Collins was able to acquire a classier stable of writers for The Ring than a magazine paying such awful fees could ordinarily expect.
Bodak, a few years before he died in 2009, told me he was fired from the corner of crossover superstar Oscar De La Hoya. Chuck said he never forgave him for delegating a flunky to break the news. De La Hoya is president and principal owner of Golden Boy Enterprises, the outfit that owns The Ring. So you could say he fired both of us.
Golden Boy, one of the biggest boxing promoters in the world, purchased The Ring in 2007, perhaps unaware that magazine readers and boxing fans are two distinct groups that rarely intersect. Add an $8.95 cover price to help cover the cost of the full-color glossy presentation and the balance sheet is already on the ropes, especially since it’s practically impossible to sell ads. That’s because Ring readers, though tenaciously loyal, tend to be middle-aged males with an alarming paucity of disposable income. The young spenders that advertisers crave are more attuned to mixed martial arts contests, which more accurately point to where our civilization is headed, and it’s not to higher ground. The owner of the media outlet that bills itself as “The Bible of Boxing” must think less about profits and more about maintaining a tradition that goes back to 1922. It’s like owning a floundering but storied ball club.
Of course, Golden Boy’s purchase posed an immediate conflict of interest. It was like CBS or Fox buying TV Guide. De La Hoya addressed the issue the day he announced the deal, pledging the magazine would “be held in an editorial trust” and operate “totally independent of any influence from me or others from the Golden Boy Companies as it relates to editorial direction or content.”
Added CEO Richard Schaefer: “If we do something wrong, we destroy The Ring value and the brand, and that means we made a pretty poor investment.”
Flash-forward to September 2011, when after four years of tension, the company broke off its tempestuous relationship with The Ring’s crew of editors and writers, sacking most of them, including the freelancers. It moved what’s left of the operation from the Philadelphia suburb of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, to its corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. Henceforth Michael Rosenthal and Douglass Fischer, who’d been running its website, an unabashed Golden Boy propaganda sheet, would also direct the magazine.
Schaefer, a former Swiss banker from a family of Swiss bankers, had apparently grown tired of dueling with the writers and editors he’d inherited with the magazine, writers and editors who dared to treat his promises as sincere. My very last column in the November 2011 issue disparaged not one but two upcoming Golden Boy fights. (Both cards did indeed stink.) I never specifically mentioned that these were Golden Boy events, but everyone knew.
The signs of this crack-up were there all along. When a publication wins a Pulitzer, owners bust buttons and champagne is served. Yet when our people won prizes in the annual Boxing Writers Association of America competition—our esoteric version of the Pulitzers—we never heard a thing from management. The pressure was always to sell the product, and the product wasn’t just the magazine. It was the whole company.
When I called Schaefer’s office for this article I was referred to Jeff Schowalter, Golden Boy’s vice president of finance. He insisted that all decisions about The Ring were made by The Ring, so he had nothing to tell me. I pointed out that editor Collins didn’t fire himself, and it must have been Golden Boy that moved magazine headquarters to Los Angeles since these things don’t happen by themselves. “What you have told me now is completely incorrect,” he responded. “Not factually correct. And that’s all I’m gong to say.” So according to him, much, if not everything you read in this piece is a fabrication.
The other major promoters, without exception, never believed Golden Boy would keep its word and play it straight, and their behavior toward us changed when the sale was announced. But even hard-boiled journalists can suspend their bullshit detectors when they hear something they want to believe, and in the beginning we believed the pledges of editorial independence. “It was a bad marriage from the start,” Collins said after the carnage. “Based on my experience, I have very serious doubts that a partnership between a legitimate journalistic enterprise and a promotional company could ever work.”
The other major promoters, without exception, never believed Golden Boy would keep its word and play it straight, and their behavior toward us changed when the sale was announced. But even hard-boiled journalists can suspend their bullshit detectors when they hear something they want to believe, and in the beginning we believed the pledges of editorial independence. “It was a bad marriage from the start,” Collins said after the carnage. “Based on my experience, I have very serious doubts that a partnership between a legitimate journalistic enterprise and a promotional company could ever work.”
A year after taking over the magazine, Golden Boy brought in its own people, working out of Los Angeles, to direct The Ring’s Internet presence, which was placed outside control of the magazine’s editors. A peculiar setup. Very possibly the company saw the website as a prototype of where it planned to take the magazine all along. On the site, fights and fighters promoted by Golden Boy bask in an eternal spring under the well-known Ring logo. If you click on “Fight Night Club,” a tab that’s part of the editorial content, a page provides information on Golden Boy fight cards at Club Nokia in Los Angeles. It’s not labeled as an ad. The site also streams live telecasts of Golden Boy fights, with a site writer doing commentary.
When De La Hoya discussed the sport’s future in a Broadcasting & Cable magazine interview published in September 2010, he sounded like a cross between John D. Rockefeller and the little chicken hawk that’s always angling to barbecue the mildly concerned Foghorn Leghorn. Golden Boy, he said, should “sign all the talent and get all the TV dates…. When you have five or six promoters, it’s very difficult.” Using a cliché to urge the pursuit of original ideas, he said it’s time to think outside the box and let his company do it all. Rival promoter Bob Arum responded with typical fight biz diplomacy: “I mean, this guy is really so dumb.” But that doesn’t explain Oscar, at least not entirely.
De La Hoya, who turned pro after winning gold in the 1992 Olympics, was a gifted lightweight and junior welterweight, lightning quick, courageous, and tough. When his body forced him to campaign at higher weights he lost effectiveness but remained boxing’s own Elvis. Young women threw him their underpants. He earned the biggest purse ever paid in boxing when he fought Floyd Mayweather, who beat him, but just barely. After all receipts were in, his take was around $50 million. A poor kid from East LA, he used to carry around a food stamp salvaged from his youth. He showed it to me years ago. “I don’t ever want to forget where I came from,” he said. When I first started covering boxing an old-timer told me, “There’s no middle class in boxing.” Either you travel to a fight in a private jet or an old Toyota. Oscar made it onto the jet.
When Vittorio Parisi, a Renaissance man from (where else?) Italy, learned of the coup at Ring he e-mailed his resignation from its ratings board in protest. (His name is still listed on the board’s roster, but Parisi says this is against his wishes.) He sent me a copy of the e-mail, and with the permission of Parisi, a symphony orchestra conductor who operates his own boxing website in Italian, I sent it around to others in the boxing world. Among the responses was one from Debbie Caplan, a contracted publicist for Golden Boy, who copied in all forty-two respondents: “I for one am glad to know that Ring will be in the most capable hands of Mike Rosenthal. The Journalists [sic] that will be joining the effort are true professionals and boxing experts.” This, by the way, is the same Debbie Caplan who’d insisted that a sensational series of photos depicting De La Hoya in drag were Photoshopped. When they first raged across the Internet in 2007, she told the New York Daily News, “They’re not real. His head’s too small and it doesn’t even look like his body.” Four years later, after coming out of rehab for cocaine and alcohol, Oscar, to his credit, admitted that was him in the fishnets and lipstick.
The Ring, like so many enterprises in the global economy, ended up a small piece of a much larger business network, and it wasn’t terribly important to the owners who controlled its destiny. It was “old” media that could be picked up cheaply—for less than seven figures, bragged Schaefer—by elements of the industry it covers. It’s as though General Dynamics bought Newsweek, which then pumped out prose favoring bigger Pentagon contracts. Not hard to imagine in a world where lifelong Republican fixer Roger Ailes runs a “fair and balanced” twenty-four-hour propaganda network. Maybe the rest of the world is just catching up to boxing, which was corrupt and brutal from the start, but at least entertaining.
Ring provided me with a forum to raise intractable issues I couldn’t personally resolve. By the time it snatched my years-long refuge, the magazine embodied much that was loathsome about the fight game. I’d already said just about everything I wanted to say about boxing in my 2009 novel The Barfighter. Golden Boy, for all the wrong reasons, tore me away from the sport at last. I didn’t have the strength to do it myself, but the parting was inevitable and overdue. Now I try to mimic the attitude of ex-fighters. Invariably broke six months after retirement, they voice no regrets.
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