The Way It’s Going, Fans Will Thumb Their Noses
You can thumb a ride.
You can vote thumbs up or thumbs down.
You can, according to rhyme, stick in a thumb and pull out a plum.
You can, if you already possess four championship rings, crow that now you want one for the thumb.
But of all the many and varied acts it is possible to perform with that stubby little digit living in the shadow of your index finger, none has ever cost so many so much as the fractured right thumb of Mike Tyson.
It has cost the MGM Grand, for whom Tyson is the house fighter, tens of millions of dollars - all the money that won’t be dumped on the green felt gambling tables this weekend now that the high rollers have no fight to lure them there.
It is costing the Fox television network revenue and ratings and face. Fox, after a barrage of noisy and shamelessly obsequious promotions, now will have to fill Saturday night with reruns. Fox, fuming, says it got outfoxed, the implication being that Tyson’s thumb wouldn’t have been broken if ticket sales had been brisker for his scheduled walkover against Buster Mathis, Jr.
And boxing being the garbage dump that it is, most of us assumed that another convenient “injury” had occurred at the most opportune moment, just in time to allow the foxes to get out of the hen house ahead of the buckshot.
Of all the statements, none struck me as more hilarious than that of an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Gerald Higgins, who sought to assure everyone that the fracture was legitimate by saying, “We feel in all morality that he can’t participate in this fight.”
“Morality?”
Boxing and morality in the same sentence?
They haven’t been even nodding acquaintances for centuries.
Yet, having said all that, I believe the thumb is broken. I don’t think this is another scam, even though Tyson and his promoter, the manipulative Don King, have artfully pulled off several.
Tyson simply has too much to lose and nothing at all to gain from faking this.
And, in the words of Ricky Watters: For who? For what?Tyson gets nothing out of this except grief.
He loses money, he loses time, he loses standing and status, he loses business good will. And he loses another chunk of his reputation.
And he automatically enhances the position of his two strongest competitors. Because now all the attention is where it should have been in the first place, on the other fight, the one just down the street, the one Saturday night between Riddick Bowe and Evander Holyfield.
Even though there is no official title at stake, the winner will be accepted as the true heavyweight champion. And should be, and never mind the criminally clumsy ratings done by the corrupt and duplicitous alphabet-soup sanctioning organizations that despoil the sport.
Holyfield and Bowe are as honorable and as gentlemanly as this sport gets, and now one of them is going to emerge with considerable leverage, in effect take the place of power that Tyson held even when he was in jail.
I like Bowe to win this fight, on a TKO late, along about the ninth round.
Plans are for Bowe, or Holyfield, to next fight Lennox Lewis in March, and an official title will be at stake.
Tyson, meanwhile, is left to languish by the wayside. His camp talks vaguely of rescheduling the Mathis fight, but I’ll bet that never happens, and poor Buster, a nice fellow who offends no one and can’t punch even a little, is out 800 grand.
No, the Tyson people will probably push for a fight with Frank Bruno, who also holds a title belt.
Frankly, my response to this is: So what?
This year will end with Tyson, sprung from the joint, having fought exactly 89 seconds and succeeding only in launching the pizza-sales career of Peter McNeeley and, oh yes, bilking several million gullible pay-per-viewers out of serious money.
Tyson’s thumb is broken. You can be sure of that. Because the essence of him is machismo. He glories in the image of indestructibility.
But at this rate, he only slips further from the public consciousness. Pretty soon, no one will care.
And that would hurt him more than any broken bone.