Mccall Gets Clearance To Resume Ring Career

Oliver McCall was cleared Tuesday to fight again while the courts spar over his $3 million purse that has been withheld since his tearful breakdown in the ring with Lennox Lewis.

Nevada boxing regulators voted unanimously to drop their temporary suspension of McCall, making him eligible to fight in any state that will approve his comeback.

“He will be looking for an opponent and a place to fight,” McCall’s lawyer, Oscar Goodman said. “He wants to fight and he needs the money. That’s what he does to earn a living.”

McCall wasn’t expected to be allowed to fight again until at least next February, under a conditional settlement that called for him to be suspended for a year and fined $250,000 for his bizarre actions during his Feb. 7 heavyweight title loss to Lewis.

But with McCall’s purse tied up by a New Jersey federal judge who claimed jurisdiction in the dispute, the Nevada State Athletic Commission decided to drop the temporary suspension and withhold final disciplinary action until the case is ultimately decided in the courts.

“We do not believe he should be penalized because of this jurisdictional struggle,” said commission attorney Donald Haight.

Mitch Green’s mother wept as she testified that her son felt cheated after a 1986 prize fight he lost to Mike Tyson and looked “grotesque” after Tyson gave him another beating on a Harlem street.

Charlene Green, a city finance department secretary for the past 29 years, said she was at work on Aug. 23, 1988, when a friend told her that her son and Tyson had fought early that morning.

She said she raced to her home in Jamaica, Queens, and found several television trucks parked in front. She eventually found her son.

“I saw his face,” Charlene Green said. “It was horrid. He had a cut right here (putting her finger between her eyes). His eye was swollen. His face was grotesque. Oh, my God, he looked bad.”

That beating, in front of a Harlem leather goods store on 125th Street at 4 a.m., is the subject of Green’s $25 million suit against Tyson.