This Beast Has Beauty of a Punch

LAS VEGAS —  There once was a famous New Yorker cartoon depicting a fight signing in which one of the pugs, a worried look on his face, is seen whispering to his manager, who tells the promoter, “My boy says he won’t sign till he finds out precisely why they call him the Bushwick Assassin.”

Another similar one showed a fighter in his corner staring in horror at an opponent who looked like something they pulled off the Empire State Building, and his manager was saying to the ref, “My boy says he don’t fight till he hears it talk!”

If I were Marvelous Marvin Hagler today, I might be tempted to take a leaf from the cartoonist’s work and, before I stepped in the ring at Caesars Palace Monday night, find out precisely why John Paul Mugabi is called the Beast.

And, since the Beast seems to speak a language others do not know, or seems not to talk at all, I might not go through with this fight until I at least heard him say, “See Spot run,” or two words from a written language.

Marvin is a pretty forbidding specimen himself. He looks like the guy in the movie who might say, “You want I should snap his head off first, boss?”

He has that shaved crown and the wary look of the cornered animal. But Mugabi’s record is one you might expect to be shared only by the occasional man-eating lion or the head of the secret police in some Central American country.

They call John Paul the Beast for the very good reason that everyone he has fought professionally had to be carried out. The good news is, he didn’t eat any of them.

Mugabi’s record is 26-0. That would be good if he was only fighting his chauffeur, but this Beast has flattened guys from Kiel, West Germany, to Maracaibo, Venezuela, with such nonchalant ease that his 26 fights have gone only 73 rounds, total. That earned him his sobriquet because the last creature to post that kind of record had stripes and claws.

Mugabi wasn’t signed, he was treed. The first time they saw him in a gym, most people wondered how they got the fur off him.

Mugabi had 110 fights before he turned pro and won 106 of them. The prevailing opinion was that the only opponents he lost to had spots on them, except for the final of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, where he “lost” to a Cuban.

All a Cuban had to do to win in Moscow in 1980 was be alive at the finish. In fact, the only thing harder than beating a Cuban in Moscow would be beating a shark in water. The Cuban fought him at such long range, he doesn’t know to this day what color Mugabi is.

Calling him simply a Beast may be euphemistic, like calling a lion a cat or Moby Dick a sea creature.

The best way to fight John Mugabi may be with a whip and chair. The next-best way may be by phone.

Morris (Mickey) Duff is an English manager-promoter who has handled 14 world champions in his day. “John Mugabi is the best puncher I have ever been associated with,” Duff said. “In fact, I am not sure he’s not the best puncher I’ve ever seen.”

Duff stumbled over the awesome Mugabi as he was half-heartedly watching the Moscow Olympics on the BBC in 1980. He became aware of this Ugandan welterweight who seemed to be scattering his opposition before him like something with a horn on its nose charging a Land Rover.

“He knocked out the first guy in 1 minute 22 seconds,” Duff said.

The second guy was much better. He lasted almost two minutes. The third guy barely got his robe off.

Duff got on the phone to Uganda to sign up Mugabi before he went back to chasing zebras, and you could only see him if you rented a room in a tree house in Kenya.

Mickey had to take his place in line. A German industrialist had spotted the same feral intensity in Mugabi’s style, and four of the Beast’s first six fights were in West Germany, where they hadn’t seen anything that one-sided since Himmler died.

Mugabi knocked out no fewer than 10 opponents in the first round, six in the second and all but three by the fifth. The only fighter to hit double figures, Hard Rock Green, went 10 before being flattened because, according to Duff, “he turned (Mugabi’s) eye 90 degrees in its socket by hitting him after the bell.”

As soon as Mugabi figured out which of the two images to hit, he knocked Hard Rock out, too.

Any resemblance between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Mugabi’s 26 other opponents, of course, is purely superficial. The nickname is not expected to deter Marvelous Marvin, who has demolished the likes of Caveman Lee and Hit Man Hearns.

Still, he should be relieved to know that this Beast can talk all right and that his nickname was pinned on him by a sportswriter and not a zoologist.

For his part, the Beast is totally unable to understand Hagler’s foolhardiness in coming face to face with him. Zebras should have sense enough to run.