A bad, sad idea whose time was yesterday
Your 2020 sports calendar withstood a major alteration this week when one particularly alarming event got bumped from Sept. 12 to Nov. 28, giving former champions Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. an additional 11 weeks to come to their senses.
Don’t hold your breath.
Jones has voiced some disappointment with the date change, but his frustrations don’t project as a deal breaker for the moment.
As of Friday morning then, two boxing legends with a combined age of 105 remained intent on climbing into a ring against each other for an eight-round exhibition at
Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, Calif., still semi-famous around here as the place where third-string quarterback Duck Hodges led the Steelers past the essentially homeless Los Angeles Chargers in October 2019.
That was a much better
fight than Tyson-Jones figures to be, but don’t let that stop you from forking out way too much money for the pay-per-view, the details on which I don’t have right now but you might start by visiting www.IWillWatchAnything.com.
“People will pay,” said Mike McSorley, who trains and promotes fighters out of Pittsburgh’s Conn-Greb Boxing Club and remains a worthy boxing historian. “I want to say it’s good for boxing because it draws people to the sport, but some people were asking me if Tyson could beat anyone among the top 10 heavyweights today. I said I don’t think he could beat a top 30 guy.
“Seems like this happens way too often.”
Too true, because it’s not just Tyson and Jones. Oscar de la Hoya, now 47 and 12 years idle since the night Manny Pacquiao brutalized him into a well-earned retirement, reportedly is looking for an opponent, and Sergio Martinez, 45-year-old former WBC middleweight champ, was spotted fisticuffing it up in Spain just last weekend. Off for six years, Martinez worked through a seventh-round TKO of Jose Miguel Fandino.
“Martinez is 45, but he didn’t really start until he was 21,” McSorley said of the revered Argentine. “He only had about 30 amateur fights. He wasn’t in his prime until 35, 37. There’s no one size fits all on this. It depends on the fighter and how much abuse they’ve taken.”
So McSorley and I kicked that concept around a little, that it’s possible, given the right genetics with minimal erosion, to fight at some advanced age (see George Foreman), but we agreed that the one size that might fit all would be age 50. I even came up with a pretty handy rule of thumb, if I do say so myself: If your age and the total number of years you have been out of the ring exceeds 65, well then ... no.
Tyson’s at 69 in that calculation (54 plus 15), and even though he remains the most electrifying athlete I’ve ever covered, I don’t want Nov. 28 to find him and the great Roy Jones (now 51) anywhere more physically challenging than a shuffleboard court.
Let’s get ready to Stumble!
The story of the great fighter who persists too long at his own destruction is a familiar sports narrative
that often haunts the fighter and the sport’s fan base for generations to come. Thus even Muhammad Ali, once perhaps the greatest living example of all that could be accomplished inspirationally through sport, was soon enough emblematic of the fight game’s often ridiculous physical price.
But there’s a story line even darker than that, and it’s the spectacle of the great fighter who is not only well past his prime, but well past his career, trying to ignite the past from a diminished present, potentially further compromising what is too often a grim future.
For McSorley, the image of Sugar Ray Leonard trying it against Hector “Macho” Camacho is burned into his memory.
“Leonard really got embarrassed in that fight,” McSorley said. “In his prime, he was levels above Camacho, who was not in the same class. Even then, Camacho was 34, past his prime.”
Leonard was 40 and hadn’t fought in six years. He was bloodied in the early rounds and got tagged with consecutive uppercuts in the fifth that put him on the floor. He got to his feet, only to be pummeled again, and that comeback, hyped as “Defying the Odds,” was mercifully stopped. The odds won big.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, even the successful Foreman gave up his heavyweight title rather than defend it at the recordbreaking age of 46, one year after reclaiming a share of it by shocking then 26-yearold Michael Moorer of Monessen.
Foreman staged some wildly entertaining fights during his comeback, but even as he smiled and joked his way through the obligatory hype process, he knew that at some point, time was coming for him.
Asked by a talk show host of that era if his next opponent was a good fighter, Foreman said famously, “I hope not.”