Oh Ricky what a pity you don’t understand…

First off, yes, I called it right on the nose. All of you who won big feel free to send me a generous tithe. Myself, I didn’t win a dime, because, well, it’s a long story. I don’t gamble anymore. I’ll leave it at that.

As for the fight itself, I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a sporting event where I imagine there to be such a startling disconnect between the viewpoints of those who watched it in the arena and those who watched it on TV. This would be primarily an effect of the commentary by HBO’s three amigos, all of whom seemed very pro-Hatton and who from the beginning of the fight called it in his favor despite the evidence of what was transpiring in front of them. I suspect that part of this was in the interest of selling the bout, but the lion’s share I attribute to a phenomenon I have recently discussed elsewhere.

Harold Lederman scored two of the first three rounds for Hatton, including the first, which I thought was utterly ridiculous. And I usually agree with Harold Lederman’s perspective on fights. In his defense, and in defense of the unholy trinity, I will say this – it was a bizarre spectacle Saturday night, almost a spectacle of Orwellian unreality. John Bull’s peanut gallery with the sentimentally stupid songs (what it is about these British tough guys and their weepiness? I just don’t get it…), Hatton a veritable Tasmanian devil, charging forward with clumsy abandon and seeming like he might be doing something, while Floyd was constantly in urgent retreat and thus seemed like he might be getting the worst of the action. The whole effect at times would be enough, if you were so unschooled and inclined due to partisanship, to think that Hatton was winning.

I can’t entirely forgive the announcing team on that front, however, because they’ve been around the block and they know better. It didn’t take a tremendously skilled boxing eye to see what was happening in there for what it really was – a mismatch, a gradual slaughter. I really can’t say enough about Floyd’s performance, because as I wrote below, there was figuratively no one in his corner for this bout. There he was in Vegas and he might as well have been on a streetcorner in Manchester. Seemingly everyone in the arena desperately wanted him to lose, either for Hatton’s sake or just for the sheer spectacle of it. Then the bell rings and he’s got this frenetic little midget charging him without rhyme or reason, basically trying to take the fight into the UFC realm, any realm where Hatton perhaps thought he might have a chance at winning.

A lesser man might have lost his cool. The announcers made the point several times early on that Floyd looked very uncomfortable with Hatton’s approach, more uncomfortable than he’d ever looked before. For myself, that’s how I thought Floyd looked in the opening rounds of the De La Hoya fight, but not against Hatton. Very early on, I thought Floyd took measure of Hatton’s punches and realized that he was not in much danger. He relaxed, went to the ropes with that Mamba defense of his, and let Ricky bull away with his meaningless flurries, working incredibly hard to no avail, sapping his strength. Every so often when he saw an opening or when Hatton’s energy flagged, Floyd hammered him but good with straight right-hand leads that snapped Ricky’s neck like a bobblehead. Those shots added up quickly in there.

Dare I say it – Floyd reminded me of Ali. When a fighter like Floyd or Ali, a true boxer with preternatural speed, ages to the point that they can’t stay in perpetual motion enough to continually circle a charging opponent, they need to develop some strategy for survival with their backs against the ropes. Sadly, Ali’s strategy, the legendary rope-a-dope, basically boiled down to “suck it up.” Foreman tells this great story about having Ali up against the ropes in the Rumble (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

I would hit this man with everything I had and he just stood there and took it. One time I remember hitting him with this shot to his side, one of those perfect shots that you just feel enter the man’s body, and with my power you know, when I hit guys like that I was used to them SCREAMING in pain, and right then Ali leaned forward to me and whispered, “is that all you got George?” And I thought to myself, “uh yeah, that’s about it.”

Time and again, Ali called upon his superhuman powers of absorption (really no fighter in the history of the game could absorb big shots like Muhammad), a strategy that ended up costing him dearly.

Floyd, on the other hand – not enough has been written about this defense that he employs with his back to the ropes. In tribute to Uncle Rog, I’ve long referred to it as “the Mamba” in my mind, but I think I may be mis-attributing its origin, for I recently saw it used by junior lightweight Joan Guzman in his very impressive win over Humberto Soto, and Guzman is being trained these days by none other than Floyd Mayweather Sr.

But maybe Floyd came up with it himself and Daddy Floyd stole it from him. Whatever. The point is, the shit is incredibly effective. Since the first two cavemen decided to step in the ring, man has tried to figure out the most efficient ways to hold his hands in order to both punch quickly and defend thoroughly. People, I swear, Floyd Mayweather Jr. just may have cracked the code. Of course, this defense depends upon his superhuman reflexes, and maybe could not be used to such advantage by a lesser mortal. But still, I am amazed at what flexibility it affords him – turned to the side, left hand slung low against his ribcage, right hand (with elbow tight to his side) against his right cheek, such that his arms form a backwards L across his torso. To pick off punches, all he needs to do is shift his hands with a little wax-on, wax-off maneuver – the left up and down over his midsection, the right side to side across his face.

From his post-fight press conference, Hatton clearly was baffled and more than a little annoyed with this defense. “Fiddle-faddle” he called it, and in his tone implied that it was less than manly. As Mrs. Large pointed out, he seemed to be saying that Floyd had won by using nothing more than a bunch of tricks. All I can say on that score is that, yes, Floyd did indeed win by resorting to tricks, tricks that for most of us go by the more familiar name of “boxing.”

He also won by punching the shit out of Hatton’s sheet-pale face. I haven’t seen Floyd throwing such hard, effective bombs since the Gatti fight, and though I think part of the reason for that was how easy it was to hit Hatton, I was interested to hear him say after the fight that he had undergone therapy on his hands (shown in one episode of 24/7) with a direct eye towards scoring a knockout. One has to suspect that even then, he knew that he was going to be hammering the Hit Man.

I’m not sure, though, that even he could have predicted such a satisfying knockout. We’re going to have to do some investigating into this “check hook” business, because Manny Steward named Floyd’s first knockdown blow, and then after the fight Floyd himself reiterated the point – “it was a check hook,” he said, something from the gyms in Michigan. Anybody have any insight on that one?

Whatever it was, it was a thing of beauty, and it seemed to literally electrocute Hatton. A shudder went through his entire body, he briefly looked to be almost levitated, and then the life was completely gone form his legs. I do give him a world of credit for standing up, because he was no longer of this world when he climbed to his feet. The end was imminent, and the stoppage I think was just. Floyd finished him with two clean shots, and referee Joe Cortez grabbed what could have been a very nasty third right before Hatton collapsed again.

Later on, I will be discussing the fight with Franchise over at jarrypark.com and in that interview I will give some more of my thoughts on the fight, with an emphasis of what I make of Floyd’s retirement assertions. Also, we are now clear to begin the debate for our official No Mas Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year. As you may recall, I gave Franchise my interpretation of these awards in our Jarry Park Boxing Awards interview, but here on No Mas, the year-end awards are not a dictatorship. I’ll post a bunch of candidates for Fight and Fighter of the Year and then based on your votes, comments and feedback, we (I-berg and me) will declare the winners, whether we necessarily agree with them or not. Given the way the year has gone, I think there are some obvious candidates, but if you have any offbeat selections that you think we might miss, feel free to write them in as a comment here or send them to me by email – large@nomas-nyc.com. I’ll probably list the candidates in a post next week.

I’ve come to feel that Floyd right now occupies about the same place in the boxing universe that Ali did in the 60′s, pre-Vietnam period (keeping in mind that the boxing universe today occupies a considerably diminished space of the cultural stratosphere at large). In this analogy, 50 Cent is Floyd’s Malcolm X, which I don’t think is a stretch at all. For middle-class white America, hip hop today represents pretty much what the Nation of Islam did in the 60′s – black, dangerous, violent, anarchic, contemptuous at every turn of white bourgeois values and proud of that contempt. In fact, hip hop is probably more loathsome and terrifying to the white middle-class now than the Nation was back in the 60′s. The Nation was a small fringe movement with little real cultural capital other than its capacity to shock whenever the media gave it a platform, which was rarely. Today, hip hop permeates the bourgeoisie and has become the veritable religion of its children.

We must remember that before Vietnam, Ali’s only political stance was to associate himself with the Nation, and if we are going to celebrate him solely for that, we are going pretty damn far down the “all things black and militant are cool” hipster road, because the ideology of the Nation makes Mormonism seem like the work of John Locke. I also don’t believe that Ali was tremendously concerned with aligning himself with the struggle of his black brothers and sisters – if the man was anything, he was a raving megalomaniac, and the only struggle on his mind was his own. What black nationalism really seemed to provide Ali at a crucial moment of his mega-stardom, and what in retrospect seems brave about his decision to ally with the Nation despite their legitimate nuthood, was a way to signal with extreme authority to the white media and the white fanbase they represented that he would never take instruction from them, that he would never play by their racist rules – that he was his own proud, powerful black man who would never be their “boy.” For years after he took his Muslim name, most of the media continued to refer to Ali as “Clay” and the significance of that was plain. Oh no you don’t. We won’t let you.

Of course, there always was something comic and unsettling about Ali’s revolutionary self-creation, because that revolution was indeed televised. No other athlete ever has so thrived on, so craved, and so brilliantly manipulated the media’s attention. Outside of the Nation conversion and the name-change, the main thing Ali was known for in his prime was talking ridiculous amounts of smack about himself in a manic, clownish fashion, ridiculing his opponents with a genuine sense of humor and theater but also with a pointed cruelty rarely seen before or since, and for calling the rounds in which he would score knockouts and then frequently delivering on his promises. In short, Ali didn’t even need the Nation to make him a villain because he was already White America’s Darth Vader, the boastful black man that nobody could shut up – in essence The Black Man You Love to Hate. He rode an entire country’s outrage straight to the bank, laughing all the way.

As I’ve written before, this is why I’m so offended now by the media’s creation of the mute, Parkinsonian Ali as The Black Man We Love to Love. It seems like an almost Soviet-level of historical revisionism, and in my mind it takes considerable edge off of what Ali actually did, what he dared to do, because it makes it seem like we were all behind him all along, rather than telling the truth, which is that most of us (and with “us” here I figuratively address my own demographic – white sports fans, white media) were passionately against him.

Most people, I think, are going to be offended that I even begin to compare Floyd to Ali, and on one score I agree that offense is warranted – Floyd’s self-creation is in no way as brave or bold as Ali’s was, because Ali paved the way before him (and then if you really want to talk bold, there’s Jack Johnson… but I digress). But the fact remains that Floyd is a trash-talking egomaniacal loudmouth genius of a boxer defiantly aligned with hip hop and all the dangerous blackness that it represents. The money-flinging, the conspicuous-blinging, and the endless bringing of rhythmic disses and self-mythologizing and preposterous nicknames – to me it is hilarious, playful, pure promotional perpetration that at its best is worthy of The Greatest himself, and yet the media and the fans and just about everybody around seem to revile the guy and all that he represents. There is a wellspring of love out there for “rap,” the so-called Ali edition, circa 1963. But in 2007 it’s pretty much the same old story when a black athlete takes this guise – how dare he?

Watching the fight last night, I felt some shame on this count. Floyd seemed like the loneliest man in the world walking into that ring, and I couldn’t help but feel it was simply because, to paraphrase Larry Holmes, he just didn’t have the complexion to make the connection. Money May now reigns as The Black Boxer We Love to Hate and I think the word “Black” in that title tells much more of the story than anyone would ever care to admit. If Floyd were white and that were the only difference in this fight, if all the hype was the same, 24/7, etc. – I have no doubt that the terms of the contest and the tenor of the coverage would have been considerably different. There would have been a thunderous uproar of flag-waving fervor when he walked into the ring to “Born in the U.S.A.” There would have been violence in the crowd when Hatton’s throng of British louts had the predictable class to boo the American national anthem, because the British louts wouldn’t have ruled the arena. If Floyd were white, there would have been an overwhelming angle of national conflict to the portrayal of the bout and some genuine national pride in his victory. This would have happened whether he played up that angle or not, and the fact is, he did play up that angle, he did try to identify as an American in the build-up to this fight and did it often. But it didn’t take. I wonder why. Back in 1963, Americans hated Cassius Clay so much that they universally rooted for Sonny Liston to defeat him, one of the most genuinely evil human beings prizefighting has ever known. A bad black man, but a quietly bad one, one who seemed to know his place in the world. Somewhere in the distance, Little Johnny Cougar sings “this is our country…”

(Thanks to everyone who commented or wrote emails to congratulate me on my successful prognostification. I will sing my own praises a little bit and give a full re-cap of my thoughts on the fight tomorrow – L)

“You got a guy who’s flamboyant and you got a guy who’s a tough club fighter… this right here is just like Sylvester Stallone and Apollo Creed. The reason why he was able to make Rocky one, two, three, four, five, AND fucking six… the only reason he was able to make them kind of movies is because people believe that bullshit. See… this ain’t gonna be that Rocky Seven movie because the real motherfucker’s gonna win for real… the real guy who’s supposed to win is GONNA win. – Roger Mayweather

As I listened to Uncle Rog voice the above words of wisdom last night, I nodded my head in solemn recognition, never more aware of how great minds think alike. I myself voiced much the same sentiment to Franchise on Wednesday over at his site, jarrypark.com. People love to think that boxing is a contest of wills and a contest of wills alone. This is largely what motivates Hollywood’s love affair with the sweet science, the cinematic idea that a fight is entirely a measure of what’s inside a man’s heart. This rah-rah bit of nonsense ignores the fact that at the highest skill levels boxing is primarily an athletic contest where will is indeed a factor (as it is in all sports of pain and endurance) but a factor that only comes into play when you have the speed and reflexes and vision, when you have the God-given ability to level the playing field.

My example to Franchise on this score was that you could have the will of an elephant, of a hundred elephants, but if you happen to be a so-so tennis player with a weak serve you are NEVER going to beat Roger Federer in a thousand tries. Of course, boxing is very different than tennis – there is the fabled “puncher’s chance.” Now and then in the squared circle, a man who is completely outclassed on all fronts manages to land that one magic punch that turns the tide in his favor. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, what a thrill it is. It speaks to all of us supremely untalented gobs out here walking around wondering if we’ll ever land the big one.

For an example, I turn to Lennox Lewis, who was certainly vulnerable to the magic punch of lesser mortals in his time, ate two of them in fact, one from Hasim Rahman and one from Oliver McCall. The knockout McCall laid on him was really in my mind the epitome of the puncher’s chance, a wild right thrown with eyes completely closed that happened, almost as if guided by some force not his own, to find its mark and fell his man.

We must remember, however, that there were some important preconditions that went into creating this situation:

1. Lennox was undertrained, overconfident and downright lazy in the ring.
2. For as great as he was, Lennox was never known for having a great beard.
3. Though an utter disaster as a fighter on almost every front, McCall had legitimate power.

Which brings me to Mayweather/Hatton. As I’ve said, I am in complete agreement with Uncle Rog that Ricky Hatton is a glorified club fighter, a genuine Rocky in the flesh, and out here in the real world, Rocky always loses. Everything, every single factor, is in Floyd’s favor – he’s faster, he’s bigger, he’s on his home turf, he has more experience in big situations, he’s clearly much more relaxed, and what’s more, watching 24/7 has led me to believe that he has infinitely more skilled trainers and handlers guiding his progress. One of the most telling exchanges in the whole 24/7 series was Hatton’s ridiculing of Floyd’s pad-regimen with Rog, the oft-showed sequences where Floyd, while looking at the camera, goes through his breakneck rhythmic flurries of punches and feints.

Obviously I’m not in Hatton’s camp and all I see is what the camera shows me, which is quite probably far from the whole story. Nevertheless, what I see of Floyd’s training is a regular and almost unimaginable display of the kind of speed and reflexes that wins fights. What I see of Hatton’s training is him lunging around the ring after his broken-down lout of a trainer wearing a big belly pad that you couldn’t miss if you threw an anvil at it. In the gym, Hatton strikes me as a man who’s trying to convince himself of the soundness of his own fury, of the enormity of his will to prevail in the face of an overwhelming deficit in skill.

It’s not on mate, it’s just not on. The only chance in hell that Ricky Hatton has of winning tomorrow night is the puncher’s chance, and of the three preconditions that I mentioned before in relationship to Lennox, only one is even possibly at play with Mayweather. Floyd is a perfectly conditioned athlete who, because of his healthy regard for his own safety, never underestimates his man. Also, Ricky Hatton is not a puncher of note – he’s small and his shots are wide and unbalanced. The only thing that one can wonder about is Floyd’s chin, for though he has stood up to loads of punishment in his career and taken it with aplomb, we have never seen him walk one single step down queer street, and so we have no idea how he would cope should he ever find himself on that lonely avenue.

But then, the fact that Floyd has never been seriously shaken in a fight is telling in and of itself, for he has certainly faced a number of opponents with the firepower to shake a man – Manfredy, Chico, Jesus Chavez, Gatti, Oscar. I remember reading about this conversation that Floyd had with some R&B chick in a rap magazine somewhere, where she said to him, “I don’t like boxing… I don’t like watching people get hit,” and he instantly replied, “well you should come see my fights then cause I don’t get hit.”

Indeed he don’t. As I’ve made clear time and time again, I prognosticate an easy victory for Floyd, and I feel very confident about that prognostification. Plus, I have to add that the last episode of 24/7 has me thinking that it will be a stoppage. Hatton looks doubtful to me and I think he may well be about to meet the same fate as Arturo at the hands of Money May. So here it is people, take it to the bank – Floyd TKO 10.

‘Steve, the U.S. Davis Cup win was impressive, but I was surprised by how civilized it was. I remember Davis Cup being pretty volatile and political back in the day. Take us back, if you will, to some of the crazier shit that went down…”

You’re right on both counts. The atmosphere for last weekend’s U.S.-Russia Cup final was completely apolitical. Andy Roddick said the only thing he remembered about the Cold War was Rocky vs. Drago, and when Dmitry Tursunov, a Russian who lives in California, was asked what the two countries had in common, he said they both ‘have owned Alaska.” What you probably remember were the Davis Cup’s angry glory years of the early 80s, when little Johnny McEnroe, just out of his teens, was providing the thrills and chills. He led the U.S. to the title in ’81 and ’82 while almost being defaulted by his own captain, Arthur Ashe, for his behavior during a doubles match in ’81 (at the same stadium where the U.S. beat Russia last weekend, Portland’s Memorial Coliseum).

Those were wild times, but you wouldn’t say Mac was a political figure, exactly, unless you count the time he yelled at a linesman during a home tie, ‘Are you an American!!!???” It was in the years just before his arrival, the early-to-mid 1970s, when Davis Cup, like a lot of other sporting events, went current events on us. The background was the Cold War, but the far-reaching nature of the Cup,every tie is played on one country’s home soil; there are no neutral sites,put it in the crosshairs of local conflicts around the globe.

At the start of the 70s, the Cup’s format was also changing. For decades, the champion received a de facto bye into the following year’s final, called the Challenge Round. This helped the U.S. and Australia, the world’s two tennis super-powers, maintain a choke hold on the event (the two still own far more titles than any other nation). With the advent of Open tennis and the game’s continued spread to non-Anglo corners of the world, the champs’ free ride to the Challenge Round was abolished and pros were grudgingly allowed to participate, though not fully until 1973. (Davis Cup is run by tennis’ old-guard, amateur-era ruling body, the International Tennis Federation, which as of 1977 was still known as the International Lawn Tennis Association. A musty, traditional quality clings to the Cup even now,each round is known as a ‘tie” and individual matches are ‘rubbers”; the matches that don’t count end up with the coolest name of all: ‘dead rubbers.”)

At the same time, international politics was increasingly visible on the sports landscape. The most famous example was the kidnapping of Israeli weightlifters by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics in 1972, but tennis wasn’t far behind. A month later, the same terrorist group, Black September, issued death threats against two Jewish members of the U.S. Davis Cup team, Brian Gottfried and Harold Solomon, as they were getting ready to go to Romania to play the final. Gottfried (pictured right) said no one was overly bothered by it; the team had ‘played the whole year surrounded by guys in raincoats with machine guns.”

He was probably referring to a tie that the U.S. had played earlier that season in socialist Chile, a hotbed of anti-Americanism at the time. There the team’s captain, Dennis Ralston, had received his own death threat. A year later the U.S. government helped engineer the successful Pinochet coup in Chile, which brought a whole new round of political protests to the sports world. These peaked in Davis Cup three years later when Sweden, led by 19-year-old Bjorn Borg, hosted the Chileans in Bastad. Swedes protesting the Pinochet regime promised to disrupt the tie and even threatened to kill Jaime Fillol, a Chilean player. (Who knew the Swedes had it in them?) Chile tried to get the tie moved to a neutral site. They were denied and the tie was played ‘almost in private and under heavy guard on a court besieged by protesters,” as DC historian Alan Trengove put it. ‘Armed boats patrolled the harbor, aircraft hovered overhead, and huge nets around the stadium protected the players from projectiles hurled by demonstrators.” A thousand policeman were called in for protection.

There were many incidents in this vein around the world in Davis Cup. But it was South Africa and its apartheid government that would prove to be the most long-lasting problem, and lead to a particularly low moment for the competition. The country had been part of the Anglo tennis establishment for decades. They didn’t produce a dynasty, but they gave tennis one of its finest doubles teams, Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan,they won a career Grand Slam together,as well as one of its quintessential characters, Cliff Drysdale (pictured left). But at the start of the 70s, South Africa’s inclusion in both the new men’s tour and the Davis Cup were controversial. Arthur Ashe protested at a tour meeting, but Drysdale, the ATP’s founder, said that his tennis federation shouldn’t be lumped in with his government. As for Davis Cup, the ITF had banned South Africa in 1970. Three years later, Ashe was invited to play a tournament in Johannesburg, in part because the country wanted to be considered for re-inclusion in the Cup. Ashe famously accepted and reached the final.

South Africa was readmitted to Davis Cup the following year; the ITF saw the country’s tennis federation as a separate entity from its government. The sport’s officials were trying, in their way, to keep politics out of the game. But they only succeeded in tying the two closer together, with dire consequences for the Davis Cup.

First, Argentina refused to play South Africa in the opening round in 1974 and defaulted. Then the Chileans wouldn’t play them on their home soil, forcing the tie to be moved to Colombia. South Africa, anchored by Drysdale and Hewitt and McMillan, won there and at home against Italy. Suddenly, the world pariah was in the Davis Cup final, where they were scheduled to play India, led by Vijay Amritraj.

Except that the Indian government refused to let its team play. The South Africans had the home-court advantage but were willing to go anywhere. India’s tennis federation wanted to play, but the government, which said that an Indian ethnic minority was being oppressed in South Africa, was having none of it. So, as it says in the record books today, the 1974 Davis Cup champion was South Africa, in a walkover.

Bizarrely enough, the country remained in the competition until 1978. In ’75, Colombia and Mexico defaulted to them; the next year Mexico did the same again; and in 1977, a protester in California got into a violent on-court confrontation with U.S. captain Tony Trabert during a tie between the Americans and South Africans (the U.S. won 4-1). By the middle of ’77, 15 countries had withdrawn from the competition in protest. Finally, in 1979, as the DC was reconsolidating itself into the World Group format that it uses today, South Africa was banished once again, this time until 1992 and the demise of apartheid.

Sports have their share of plagues now: steroids, potential match-fixing, multi-million dollar player salaries, and media overexposure, among others. You could say putting politics into the mix just made sports in the 70s even uglier, but it also made the games more honest,they couldn’t hide behind the ‘entertainment” façade. Looking back, the disruptions of Davis Cup in the 70s seem shockingly, even satisfyingly, weighty compared to the issues we blather on about today.
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Steve Tignor is the executive editor of Tennis magazine and we’re lucky to have him as a regular contributor here at No Mas. For more of his writing, check out his weekly column, The Wrap, on the Tennis website.

Remember Ricardo Mayorga’s logic before his bout with De La Hoya as to why he was certain to beat The Golden Boy? Shane Mosley, Mayorga reasoned, beat Oscar twice. And Vernon Forrest beat Sugar Shane twice. And I, proclaimed Ricardo, beat Forrest twice! You see? It’s simple mathematics, man! By this rationale, the Matador would have had us believe that not only was he going to beat Oscar, but he would beat him again in the rematch.

Well, we all know how that worked out. Math, as one would imagine it so often has in the past, failed Ricardo Mayorga once again. But my point here is not to discuss the Matador – it’s to illustrate that by the boxing theorem he advocated, one Ricky Hatton already has defeated a Mayweather in the ring by the commutative property. As most fans of the Fat Man know, Ricky won his first meaningful belt, and the lion’s share of his respect in the fight world, in his 2005 defeat of the great Kos Tszyu, an upset that made Hatton the Ring fighter of the year.

Ten years prior, Tszyu defeated a 34-year-old journeyman with a 54-11 record going into the fight. About the only thing this pug had going for him was his nickname, a doozy – “The Black Mamba.” It was Roger Mayweather, Uncle Rog, now trainer of his philthy rich nephew, the universally regarded Money Money May.

As you’ll see below, despite the fact that he was 34 and out of gas and had legs skinnier than a turkey’s, Uncle Rog still had some tricks up his sleeve for Tszyu. Headbuttin. Grabbin and wrasslin. Groin-punchin. Ole Rog was a veritable treasure trove of squared circle illegality, and people, I ask you – would you expect anything less?

On this night 52 years ago, Dr. Joyce Brothers became an enormous national celebrity, setting herself up for a career as a television and radio personality, a career that lasts until this day.

So what did she do? Well, she answered the $64,00 question. Her area of expertise? Boxing, of course.

The infamous mega-hit quiz show of the 50′s made many a future star – Patty Duke, Barbara Feldon, and yes, Joyce Brothers. Until her appearance on the show, Brothers was a housewife with a doctorate in psychology. She tried out for the quiz show in the hopes of earning some money and was initially turned away. Here’s what former host, Sonny Fox, had to say about Brothers:

She went down originally and presented herself as a psychologist, and she had an expertise in something and, I’m not sure I remember what it was, but it certainly wasn’t boxing. And they said to her, “Well you’re wonderful as a personality but we’re looking for those dramatic juxtapositions.” The marine officer who is an expert cook. The shoemaker who knows about opera. Those kinds of anomalies. That’s what we’re looking for. For instance, if you knew about boxing we’d love you!”

Joyce herself readily admits that this was the case. She knew nothing about boxing prior to her first audition, but when producer Mert Koplin suggested that becoming a boxing expert was what would get her on the air, well, she went home and became a boxing expert. A few weeks later she went back and said, I’m ready, I’m a boxing expert. They tested her and she passed and that was that. She was on.

Of course, we all know today that The $64,000 Question was completely rigged. In her early appearances on the show, Brothers was given easy boxing questions and she answered them, making it through to the $16,000 stage without difficulty. Evidently, at that point the producers of the show decided that they would knock Brothers off the program, because she wasn’t testing well with the audience, which was the whole essence of the enterprise and the ultimate source of the scandal. Contestants that the audience seemed to like were given the answers and kept on the air, while contestants the audience didn’t seem to like were knocked off with impossible questions.

So Joyce was expected to be shot down with her $16,000 question, which was…

“Who refereed the most heavyweight title bouts?”

The architects of her demise must have figured that no matter how much she was studying the sweet science at home, she couldn’t possibly know trivia about boxing referees. And yet she nailed the question (the answer was “Arthur Donovan”) and all of the rest of the impossibly arcane questions they would throw at her all the way up to the multi-part $64,000 question, all because, unbeknownst to the powers that were, she had an ace up her sleeve.

The subsequent scandal surrounding this show would mar the reputations of almost everyone involved with it, contestants, hosts and producers alike. And yet Brothers emerged with her reputation intact, largely because she was the only person who ever succeeded on the show who the producers actively tried to defeat. But despite the fact that they weren’t feeding her the answers, there’s a very good chance (through pure chance itself) that she was getting the answers anyway. The venerable Nat Fleischer (pictured right), publisher of The Ring magazine and encyclopedia, grandfather of boxing journalists and historians, had been employed by The $64,000 Question to draw up the show’s boxing questions. As it turned out, Fleischer also was a good friend of Joyce Brothers’ father and was coaching her on the side in her march towards boxing expertise.

Brothers always denied any cheating during her participation on the show, and that story wasn’t probed very deeply, because, as I mentioned, she wasn’t implicated in the larger scandal because she was never fed any answers by the producers of the show. But the fact of the matter remains that even for someone who claimed to be memorizing as many boxing facts as she could, it’s almost impossible to imagine that a neophyte to the sport could have known the answers to the questions they hit her with unless she had some idea they were coming. Even she seemed to intuit that some further explanation was necessary, and told investigators that one of her prime sources for studying for the show was Nat Fleischer’s book, Ring Facts.

As we now are well aware, Brothers used the celebrity she gained from becoming only the second woman to go all the way on The $64,000 Question to start a successful career as a syndicated columnist and pop psychologist. All because she knew the answers to the questions below. How many of them do you know? My feeling is that no man, woman or child alive knows the answers to all of these questions, not even Bert Sugar himself. I’ll print the answers tomorrow:

• “Who was the referee in the Dempsey-Tunney “long-count” fight?
• “What man refereed the comeback attempt of an ex-champ against Jack Johnson at Reno, Nevada.”
• “What was the glove that gladiators wore in ancient Rome?”
• “Who was the first scientific boxer to become champion of England? When?”
• “Who was the English champion who taught Lord Byron how to box?”
• “Who wrote the essay ‘The Fight’?”
• “Who defeated whom in the fight that essay is about?”
• “When was that fight?”
• “What was the nickname of the loser of that fight?”
• “What was the full name of the Marquis of Queensbury?”
• “Whom did Primo Carnera fight in his 1933 heavyweight title defense? Where?”
• “How many times did Jack Dempsey knock down Luis Firpo?”
• “And how long was their fight?”

I did my regular interview with Franchise today over at his site, jarry park.com. Predictably, we spent most of our time talking about Mayweather/Hatton, and predictably, I gave my prediction. Usually, I wouldn’t be so cavalier about giving the scoop of my prognostification to another site (much as I love the Chise) but in that I think most No Mas readers are well aware of my feelings on this one, I thought it wasn’t a problem to voice them on the Jarry Park airwaves. So if you really can’t wait for my regular prognostification post on Friday, listen to this interview and you’ll get the lion’s share of my thoughts on the matter.

(They are probably as apocryphal as Abner Doubleday, but nevertheless, the reputed last words of Shoeless Joe Jackson sum up the Christian ideal of God in such stark, ball-playing terms, one imagines that even if he didn’t say them, he must have been thinking them. Here’s our post from one year ago today on the anniversary of Jackson’s death – L.)

On December 5th, 1951, Shoeless Joe Jackson died of a heart attack at his home in Greenville, South Carolina. Sixty-three years old, one of the greatest baseball players who’d ever lived, he’d been banned from the national pastime for 31 years.

Jackson maintained his innocence in the Black Sox scandal to the very end, but by all accounts, he didn’t let the issue ruin his life. He played in semi-pro leagues and for barnstorming teams after his banishment, and then he moved to Greenville with his wife and started a successful dry-cleaning business. Every now and then, he would break out his famous bat, “Black Betsy,” and take a few swings with the locals in a sandlot game. He was a beloved figure in Greenville at the time of his death.

Still, he was clearly haunted. His last words are reputed to have been, “I’m about to face the greatest umpire of all and He knows I am innocent.”

It was awfully Manichean of Joe to view the Lord as The Big Ump in the Sky. No nambi pambi nonsense, no purgatorial bullpens or multi-lifetime bans, just Safe or Out on the final slide into home. He makes you no promises, The Big Ump. He just calls it like He sees it.

(The shot below is of Joe Jackson with his nephew in a liquor store he owned in Greenville – the picture was taken not long before his death.)

Twenty-seven years ago today, the Polish-born former Olympic gold medalist Stanisława Walasiewicz, known here in the States as Stella Walsh, was killed as an innocent bystander to a robbery attempt in Cleveland. She was 69 years old. It was a tragic death, and one that led to a most bizarre discovery.

Walasiewicz’s family emigrated to the U.S. when she was an infant. Ineligible for the U.S. Olympic team due to her lack of citizenship, she started running and training in Poland in the 20′s, where she became an international star. Her crowning glory came at the 1932 Summer Games in L.A., where she won the gold medal in the women’s 100 meters, tying the world record in the process. At the 1936 Games, she won the silver in the 100m, coming in second behind Helen Stephens of the U.S. In the charged climate of the Nazi Olympics, Stephens was accused of being a man, a charge that ironically Walasiewicz seconded. Stephens was forced to submit to genital inspection to prove her gender, and she came out with flying colors – all woman. (In the picture above on the left, Stephens (left) and Walasiewicz (right) shake hands.)

Walasiewicz continued her career on the track until the 1950′s, even winning a U.S. national title in 1951, when she was 40 years old. In 1975, she was inducted in the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame. At that point, she was an active leader of all sorts of Polish-American youth and sporting associations, endeavors that she continued until her untimely death in 1980.

During a routine autopsy of Walasiewicz’s body, it was discovered that she possessed male genitalia. A more detailed investigation also revealed that she possessed the male XY chromosome. Based on these facts, she would have been ruled ineligible to compete in women’s events, and there was brief but spirited debate in the IOC about the possibility of posthumously rescinding her medals before the matter was dropped altogether.

Gender tests became mandatory in the Olympics starting in 1968, spurred by the discovery at the 1967 European Championships that another Polish sprinter, Ewa Klobukowska, possessed the male chromosome. Klobukowska was subsequently stripped of the gold and bronze medal that she won at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Sadly, this was a heinous injustice – tests ultimately proved that Klobukowska’s chromosome was not the male XY but in fact a genetic mutation, XXY, that in no way affected her gender or sex organs. Olympic gender testing was halted at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 due to pressure from the athletes, and now at the Games you are taken on your word as to your gender unless suspicions are aroused otherwise. In this day and age, it seems like the Olympic detectives have their hands full anyway with far more pressing matters.

Large and Mrs. Large were at the Raiders/Broncos game in Oakland yesterday. The tickets were a gift from my father-in-law, part of his long-term project to convert me into a Raiders fan, which, of course, is never going to happen (dah, SBXV? Jim Plunkett? Rod Freakin Martin? fugheddaboudit…).

But I’m certainly not above going to see the Silver and Black, particularly when it involves the historic first snaps of what Raiders’ fans everywhere are hoping will be the long reign of JaMarcus (it’s impossible to tell, but the picture over there on the right is the huddle before Ja Rule’s first play – I know I know, Neil Leifer I am not). The crowd went berserk when Russell entered the game in the second quarter, although I must say, “berserk” in California barely registers with I consider civilized applause at a preseason game at the Linc. It’s just the facts of life out here – the sun is always shining, the produce is always ripe and luscious, the air is sweet with the fragrance of persimmons. In such a setting, what happens on the field is simply not a matter of life and death.

But getting back to the field – my first observation of Ja Rule is that the kid is gigantic. I get the same feeling looking at him that I got when I first took a look at his Raider teammate Daunte Culpepper in a Vikings uniform – it’s just hard to believe that he’s a quarterback. He looks like he could more than handle himself on the d-line. And yet there he is, running like a gazelle and hurling bullets. He drops back comfortably, he moves beautifully, and he throws effortlessly. In his second series, he whipped off an 18-yarder to Ronald Curry that really opened my eyes. It looked like he flicked it, like it was a pitch pass in the flat. Jerry Porter was quoted after the game as saying that Russell’s ball is smoking, and believe me, that much was clear all the way up in the nosebleeds.

Leading up to the game, while the rumors were flying everywhere that Russell would see action on Sunday, he made it clear that he has very high expectations of himself, citing crosstown hero Joe Montana’s first season with the 49ers as his blueprint – ironically, Montana saw his first significant action in the Niners’ twelfth game of the ’79 season against the Broncos.

I was impressed that he happened to know that much about Montana, but myself, I’m thinking that if JaMarcus wants to start making historical comparisons, he should consider this fact: Only three former first-pick-overall quarterbacks are currently enshrined in Canton – Terry Bradshaw, John Elway and Troy Aikman. And we might as well add another name to that list right now – a certain Chunky Soup enthusiast over in Indianapolis.

Looking at those names, one thing immediately jumps out at you – not a one of them had an incubation period in the NFL. It was baptism under fire for all four with the hopes of their respective franchises lying in the balance. Bradshaw was one of the most ballyhooed players to come out of college in the history of the league, and he made his debut as a starter in the Steelers’ first game of 1970 against the Oilers. He went 4-16 and generally looked completely incompetent before Chuck Noll lifted him in the third quarter for a much less ballyhooed Terry, Terry Hanratty. Over the next six games, Bradshaw would throw 12 interceptions against only two TD’s, at which point Noll had mercy and made Hanratty the starter. Terry was a national joke by then, and it’s a real credit to the man that the experience of his first season didn’t break him.

Elway’s rookie campaign wasn’t quite so miserable, although it wasn’t exactly a lovefest either. Fourteen picks versus seven TD’s – a completion percentage under fifty percent. In his first game, Broncos/Steelers 1983 at Three Rivers, he did little of note other than get massively sacked by the legendary goon Jack Lambert. Elway would later say of Lambert and that game, “He had no teeth and he was slobbering all over. I’m thinking, `You can have your money back, just get me out of here, let me go be an accountant.’ I can’t even tell you how badly I wanted out of there.”

Most of us No Masians probably remember the inaugural campaign of the Aikman era in Dallas. 1989, what a year to enjoy for Cowboys-haters everywhere, although even then you had a definite feeling in your stomach that they were going to have the last laugh. The Cowboys first game of ’89 was historical for all sorts of reasons – Jimmy Johnson wearing Tom Landry’s headset and Troy Aikman taking snaps as the first rookie quarterback to start for Dallas since Roger Staubach in 1969. The game went as the rest of the season would for the ‘Boys – the Saints crushed them 28-0 and Aikman threw two picks in a horrendous outing. It was the first of 15 losses he would endure as a rookie.

Even Peyton Manning, who had far and away the most successful first year of this distinguished crew, had a difficult day of it in his pro debut, throwing three picks and zero TD’s as the Colts lost the first game of ’98 to Dan Marino’s Dolphins, 24-15. Placed against that lot of misery and deflated hopes, the first day of Ja(Marcus) Rule seems nine holes at the country club. Two series, a few lasers on down-and-outs and a fumbled snap, hit the showers kid we love you. Christ they even won the game! It almost makes you wonder if the stars are realigning over Raider Nation.