COMMENTARY : This Is the Real Stuff: It’s Stupidity

This is a really great time in boxing, maybe the best ever. This is the real stuff.

And nobody should enjoy it more than us abolitionists.

This is the Marx Brothers, the Smothers Brothers, The Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, Stiller and Meara, Harold Lloyd, Marty Allen, Jonathan Winters, George Steinbrenner and Mr. Dithers. This is Alex Karras knocking out the horse with one punch in “Blazing Saddles.” This is Ghostbusters and Dustbusters. This is Don King.

This is boxing at its finest.

Never mind for just a minute that by now we should have evolved beyond an event in which two people try to kill each other for the sake of entertainment. That is the intention of the game: kill your opponent or knock his brain into oblivion and you win a lot of money.

Our society says you’re not allowed to do that with dogs or chickens who have been bred to kill. You’re not allowed to put a man and a bull in the ring and have them fight it out. That’s wrong. Some day we may get around to outgrowing aspects of football, but injury is not the expressed intent of that game.

We can decry the ease and comfort with which people kill and maim and hurt other people in our cities, and wring our hands that it marks the downfall of our civilization. But then we make fistic heroes of thugs like King and Mike Tyson and the line of others who would be mugging people in parking lots or doing knees for crack dealers if boxing didn’t legalize their taste for mayhem. Tyson is a brutal person with a sweetheart’s voice.

My feeling was profoundly influenced one evening in a bar in Baltimore when some patron said something to a waitress and the bartender went over the top of the bar for him. I’ll never forget the sound of the bartender’s fists on the man’s face. Some people liken that to the sound of the crack of the bat on the ball. Look and listen to the bloodlust at ringside.

There is nothing sweet in the “sweet science” and never was. There’s more reality in the current film “Triumph of the Spirit,” in which an Olympic boxer, a Greek Jew, is forced by the Germans to fight in a concentration camp -- winner gets to live and feed his family and loser goes to the gas chamber.

For some reason, boxing captured the imagination of some of our gifted writers and made them feel there was something noble and romantic about it. Hemingway felt it. Liebling felt it. These big lugs, they said, these noble savages were going out there into the squared circle to suffer and endure and display their courage because that’s what they were good for. That smacks of racism without racial distinction.

But this current affair goes a delicious step further. This is stupidity.

Think of the details that surrounded Buster battering Tyson in Tokyo. It was one of the shockingly great upsets in all of sports history, which explains the great appeal of sports on TV. It’s the last real suspense.

But isn’t it wrong when Buster Douglas, in order to get his shot at the champion, had to cede promotional rights to his next three fights to King? So, in effect, King held promotion ties to both sides in Tokyo and to the inevitable rematch. Would it be wrong if a tennis player had to change agents in order to play Wimbledon?

Since there is no structure of league standings, three different groups can have separate champions of the world and New Jersey. Championship playoffs are made for the money potential -- either right now or in protecting the future. And then, of course, the promoter lies like anything.

Like Tuesday, King, hair and his face straight, said he never tried to overturn the decision. Can you imagine any other sport in which the owner of one side -- or both -- can closet two commissioners after the contest and not open the door until they decide like Larry, Moe and Curly, there can be no champion before they hold a meeting a week later.

All King said he wanted was a rematch for his fighter. The rules of the alphabet organizations say immediate rematches are prohibited. But if the commissioners could be made to doubt what they had seen with their own eyes, then they could justify setting aside the rules for King’s big-bucks rematch.

When the closet door opened in Tokyo, referee Octavio Meyran pleaded guilty for giving Buster the benefit of the long count. “I’d like to recognize my mistake,” he said, for not having picked up the count from the timekeeper at ringside. Is there something wrong with a sport that stages its showcase event and then questions the competence of the person it has chosen to be the referee?

Tuesday, the alphabet groups recognized Buster as the new champion and King plaintively appealed for the justice of a rematch. Is there any doubt he’ll get it?

But first, basics. Look at the scorecards of the three judges at the time Tyson was counted out. The American judge had Buster considerably ahead, as did most of the media witnesses. One of the Japanese judges had Tyson ahead and the other had the score tied.

Isn’t that silly. Imagine the Lakers playing the Knicks for the championship without a scoreboard: Nobody knows who’s in front until the buzzer has sounded and the referee has added up the ones, twos and treys. There could be no four-corners offense to kill time, no hurry-up offense to close the gap.

But then with boxing’s secret ballot, neither the crowd nor players can see if the judges are calling the fight or jumping to Don King’s service. Remember the travesty of the Olympic boxing in Korea. This is the real stuff.

Liebling told of Pierce Egan, who wrote in the 1820s of “pageant scenes of trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers ... setting off for some great public, illegal prize fight.” And of the painter Rowlandson’s print of the 1811 fight between Tom Cribb, the champion, and Tom Molyneaux, “an American Negro ... In the foreground of the picture, there is a whore sitting on her gentleman’s shoulders, the better to see the fight, while a pickpocket lifts the gentleman’s reader (watch). Cribb has just hit Molyneaux the floorer ...”

Listen, do you smell Las Vegas or Atlantic City?