BOXING / EARL GUSTKEY : At 42, He Knows How to Handle Tension

It was late at night in Atlantic City, N.J., four days before the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman fight. A couple of boxing reporters did double-takes as they walked across the lobby of the Regency Hotel, next door to Atlantic City Convention Hall.

Hey, look: The big guy, leaning on the railing over there by the gift shop. Isn’t that--yep, it’s George.

Foreman likes hotel lobbies, likes schmoozing with folks, unless he draws too big a crowd. But because the fight’s host hotel, the Trump Plaza, has no lobby, he walked down the Boardwalk to the Regency, where most of the boxing writers were lodged.

It was a remarkable scene. Here was a guy about to earn $12.5 million for a fight. This close to a bout, boxers are supposed to be snarling in a suite, punching walls.

But here was Foreman, posing for photographs, talking animatedly about his prospects in the big fight and, most of all, seeming to enjoy immensely the startled looks on the faces of passers-by. He wouldn’t, however, sign autographs--attracts too big a crowd, he said--or shake hands--too risky for a fighter, he said.

Foreman wound up talking about one of his first sparring partners, and he did so with surprising affection. The old sparring partner was Charles (Sonny) Liston.

“Sonny was the only man who ever stood up to me in the gym, sparring,” said Foreman, 42, recalling his first days in boxing as an 18-year-old.

“Everyone I ever sparred (with), I could back ‘em up, knock ‘em down, move ‘em around . . . never Sonny.

“This was before the (1968) Olympics, when Dick Sadler was teaching me how to box in Oakland, and when Sonny was trying to make a comeback. I was just a big, strong, wild kid. Sonny was every bit as strong as me, and he knew all the tricks.

“And he was really a nice guy. We got along great. He never had much to say to anybody, but I could tell he liked me.”

Foreman was asked how Liston’s punches compared to those of such hard hitters as Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Ron Lyle and Ken Norton.

“I never really found out, because he was too nice a guy,” Foreman said.

“Sonny would sock me, see . . . and then he wouldn’t follow up on me. It was like he didn’t want to hurt me, didn’t want me to get discouraged.”

Foreman recalled an incident with Liston, then 36, in the back seat of a car, when Sadler was driving Foreman and Liston to dinner.

“I was reading horoscopes in the newspaper, out loud, and when I read Sonny’s to him, he growled and looked out the window,” Foreman said.

“I said: ‘No, look--it says so right here, look. . . .’

“As I tried to show it to Sonny, Sadler reached back and grabbed the paper, yanked it away from me and told me to knock it off, that all that stuff was nonsense. I couldn’t figure out why he got so mad.

“Later, he took me aside and said: ‘Don’t do that anymore. The big fella can’t read.’ ”

Liston was found dead in his Las Vegas home two years later. The cause of his death was never fully explained, but police reports suggested involvement with drugs.

“I was in Minneapolis when I heard he died,” Foreman said. “I felt really bad. He was a nice man.”

Now we know why rail-thin, 5-foot-11 Raul Perez, the former bantamweight champion from Tijuana, was able to make the 118-pound limit all those years without difficulty.

Tapeworms.

Perez, 24, who lost his title to Greg Richardson at the Forum on Feb. 25, hadn’t looked quite right in his previous fight in Tijuana, according to his manager, Romulo Quirarte. And he seemed to tire quickly in the gym during the weeks leading up to the Richardson fight, Quirarte said. Then, he wasn’t much against Richardson.

After that bout, Perez went to a doctor for a checkup. His intestines, Quirarte said, were full of tapeworms.

Medication killed the parasites, Quirarte said. So now we can expect Perez to move up to his natural division, middleweight, right?

“He’s still at 118, and we think he can stay there,” Quirarte said.

The Holyfield-Foreman bout might prove to be the last major fight in Atlantic City for a long time.

The meltdown of Donald Trump’s financial empire, most boxing observers say, will preclude his paying out any more seven- or eight-digit site fees. Las Vegas will become boxing’s home court.

Trump, whose opulent Taj Mahal isn’t taking in as much cash as anticipated, owns four Atlantic City properties--the Taj, the Trump Plaza (host hotel for his major fights), the Trump Castle and the Trump Regency.

Trump originally signed to pay Holyfield-Foreman promoters Bob Arum and Dan Duva an $11-million site fee. According to Arum, the sum was later negotiated down to $1 million, with the promoters getting all the tickets.

The fight did not sell out. There were several thousand empty seats. And at $100 to $1,000 each, small wonder.

Hired to sell blocks of tickets to other Atlantic City casinos, Frank Gelb sold only $2-million worth.

“All of the casinos here should bless Donald Trump for what he has done in the past,” Gelb told the Atlantic City Press. “And now that he is having his problems and might not be willing to foot the bill for big fights in the future, the rest of the casino industry should carry the ball.”

Foreman said throughout the promotional buildup to his match with Holyfield that he wanted people to use words like “promise” and “potential” when talking about him, not “fat” and “old.”

Doug Fenske, 42, says he thinks the same way. The heavyweight is three months older than Foreman, and he hasn’t even turned pro yet.

Fenske, of Santa Barbara, is one of 12 Los Angeles and San Diego area boxers who will meet a Northern California team in the annual State Golden Gloves Championships tonight at Lincoln Park Recreation Center, 3501 Valley Blvd., starting at 7:30.

Fenske won the Southern California title on an injury walkover two weekends ago. Tonight, with another victory, he can go to the national finals in two weeks at Des Moines, Iowa.

A former high school boxer from Michigan, Fenske had to secure a court order to be admitted to the tournament because of his age.

Boxing Notes

Early returns from the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman bout indicate it earned $75 million, $53.5 million of it from home pay-per-view. The previous record was the $38.6 million for the Holyfield-Buster Douglas bout last October. . . . The Forum’s hoped-for Tony Tucker-Tim Witherspoon heavyweight match on its June 3 Virgil Hill-Thomas Hearns show at Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace is off. Witherspoon told the Forum boxing staff he has a bad back, but the rumor is that he might soon settle his five-year-old suit against promoter Don King. In 1986, King signed Witherspoon to fight Frank Bruno in London. Witherspoon, who won, later said he had signed for $1.1 million but wound up with $93,000 instead.

Unbeaten featherweight Rafael Ruelas might be close to a title fight against WBA champion Park Yung-Kyun in Seoul this summer. . . . A Sherman Oaks film company, Way Out Pictures, is developing a film project on the life of Sonny Liston.

HBO’s Seth Abraham, chief of the network’s pay-per-view division, isn’t so sure a Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight would outgross Holyfield-Foreman, as many think. Abraham: “Holyfield-Tyson is a purist’s fight, one boxing fans will get excited about, but Foreman’s appeal was to the whole country.” . . . Julio Cesar Chavez, the Mexican champion who accepted a $300,000 bonus when he signed a $15-million, six-fight deal with Bob Arum in December, then returned the money when he decided to rejoin Don King, sued Arum in New York this week for “fraudulently inducing” him to sign the contract.

Donald Trump’s press kit for the Holyfield-Foreman bout had a line claiming that his Trump Plaza hotel casino had been the host for 26 championship fights, “more than any other venue.” Wrong. The Forum stopped counting at 50. Caesars Palace has had 62. . . . The Tony Lopez-Brian Mitchell II match will be in Sacramento, not South Africa. Lopez’s promoter, Don Chargin, said Lopez passed up a potential $750,000 payday to fight Mitchell in South Africa. The two fought to a draw last month in Sacramento. The rematch will be in August on pay-per-view.