Televised Shame The Hype And The Cynicism Have Turned The Sport Of Boxing Into A Sorry Spectacle

You must be Elmo, because I know I’m Patsy.

Yes, with a capital P. We’re not talking about an everyday patsy here. Like everyone else who paid for the Mike Tyson boxing debacle Saturday night, I belong in the All-Day Sucker Hall of Fame.

Put me in a glass booth next to that clothes-conscious emperor. Right down the hall from tourists who accept strangers’ help with their airport lockers. In the wing with football fans who think preseason games are important. Not far from the people who think, if they watch just one more time, “Saturday Night Live” will be funny again.

Saps one and all. Don King knows it. Mike Tyson knows it. Your cable system knows it. Warner Cable in Akron, Ohio, even paid tribute to fight fans when it followed the pay-per-view telecast with a show for the same audience: “Dumb and Dumber.”

No excuses here. No hiding behind a mealy-mouthed claim that my job required that I watch the fight. Less than an hour before the telecast began, curiosity simply got the better of me.

Part of it was a post-Buster Douglas spasm of doubt about whether Tyson would beat carefully chosen challenger Peter McNeeley. But even stronger was the sense that this might be another of those historic, devastating Tyson knockouts that are the more potent for being seen live. I’ve watched Tyson’s fights on TV since early in his career and would hate to miss a highlight moment. In the great scheme of things, wasn’t that worth $45.95?

Which, as it turned out, worked out to about $30 a minute. Suck-ehhhhhhh.

By now you know that the fight ran a scant 89 seconds, courtesy of McNeeley’s trainer, who stepped into the ring and stopped the fight rather than grant his young charge the honor of hitting the canvas a third and final time.

You’ve heard the jokes that the national anthem lasted longer than the fight. You may even have figured out that, in the four-hour telecast, the entire main event could have been shown more than 160 times.

But in focusing on Tyson-McNeeley, audiences miss the depth of cynicism around the show. There were three other fights filling the program, one shown after the Tyson bout, two before, all likely greeted by the bulk of viewers with cries of “Who ARE these guys?”

A lightweight named Lamar Murphy seemed to take the measure of Miguel Angel Gonzalez in the first fight on the program. But despite repeated fouls by Gonzalez, who holds a championship title, and Murphy’s strong performance, the TV announcing team was never willing to say Murphy might actually win the fight.

“This is Las Vegas,” they kept saying, the smirk implicit, the message clear that pugilism is not the only thing that goes onto scorecards. And sure enough, after a suspiciously long wait at fight’s end, Gonzalez was declared the winner. Then came a second duel, where a titular heavyweight champion named Bruce Seldon performed surgery on the eye of one Joe Hipp, a tub of guts who allowed himself to be battered and bloodied for almost 10 rounds before being sent on his way.

This was your garden-variety boxing manipulation: poorly matched opponents, dubious decisions. But it was a warning to all watching that boxing has become a sorry spectacle, and what followed in the Tyson fight merely offered an artistic variation - a bizarre twist guaranteed to keep people talking where a simple mismatch would have been old news by now.

The whole evening was a nationally televised embarrassment of what has been at times a remarkable sport. And cable companies showed their own brand of cynicism in charging a very high price for such a shoddy display.

But I know why they did it. Because for all the sleaze surrounding big-money boxing, despite the high price, despite all the warnings that this was not even remotely a serious fight, people paid to see it. Heck, I paid to see it - and even after Saturday’s nonsense there’s a chance I’d pay to see Tyson fight again. Who can blame the entrepreneurs for lining up when there’s such easy money to be had?