Morrison is taking his right to the wrong place

George Kimball/America at Large: Top Rank chairman Bob Arum was all smiles when he arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that October evening 10 years ago.

He had just negotiated an agreement for his white heavyweight Tommy Morrison to fight Riddick Bowe for the championship of the world two months later. All Morrison had to do was get past an English-born journeyman named Michael Bentt that night and the multi-million dollar deal was done.

Boxing folk have learned to expect the unexpected, but few could have been prepared for what happened that night. Bentt pole-axed Morrison, knocking him out in the first round.

Arum had another show featuring light-flyweight champion Michael Carbajal and up-and-comer Oscar De La Hoya in Phoenix the following evening, and had chartered a private airplane to take him from Oklahoma to Arizona after the fight. In the midst of a bumpy flight Mike Malitz, then Top Rank's president, found himself obliged to heed the call of nature.

A few minutes later Maltiz's voice could be heard behind the paper-thin walls separating the small cabin from the even smaller toilet.

"Dammit!" "What's the matter?" asked Arum.

"No toilet paper," replied Malitz.

Barely missing a beat, Arum fished around in his briefcase.

"Here," he said glumly as he passed the pages of the already obsolete Bowe-Morrison contract into the stall.

With the possible exception of a chin, Tommy Morrison seemed to have it all. A distant relative of the late John Wayne (whose nickname, Duke, he adopted as his nom de guerre), he co-starred with Sylvester Stallone in Rocky V, defeated some of the best heavyweights of his day, including George Foreman, Razor Ruddock, Pinklon Thomas, and Joe Hipp, and even briefly held the fringe World Boxing Organization title.

Then, hours before he was scheduled to fight in Las Vegas in February of 1996, Morrison's whole world came crashing down. The Nevada Commission had just begun testing boxers for HIV, and Morrison's sample came up positive.

Needless to say, Lennox Lewis was almost as nervous over this news as was Morrison. A few months earlier Lewis had stopped Morrison in the fifth-round of a blood-spattered bout in Atlantic City. Lennox wasted little time in getting himself tested. He came up clean.

Morrison was a devout heterosexual and had not at the time used injectable drugs, but acknowledged having prodigiously engaged in unprotected sex.

"Wilt Chamberlain (the late basketball great who boasted of having slept with 20,000 women) had nothing on me," said Morrison in an admission which was undoubtedly of small comfort to his recent partners.

Morrison fought once more. In October of 1996 he managed to find the combination of a rogue commission (in Japan) and a willing opponent (Marcus Rhode), allowing him to collect one last payday in the ring, but his world continued to crumble.

Neither his boxing nor his Hollywood "friends" would return his phone calls. When he returned to his home in Jay, Oklahoma, the signs proclaiming the sleepy little town the "Home of Tommy Morrison" had all been torn down. His marriage ended.

"My best friends," he recalled, "wouldn't even wave at me." Already on probation for more minor transgressions, he was arrested on drugs and weapons charges. He eventually plea-bargained his way to a two-year sentence and spent the next two Christmases behind bars.

He and his wife, Dawn, had one child by artificial insemination. Now, having discovered a scientific process which will allegedly "wash" his sperm, the couple are expecting another child.

And, oh yes, Tommy wants to box again.

As absurd as it seems, Morrison recently floated the idea on his website.

"I think it's completely possible for me to fight again," wrote The Duke. "I've been encouraged by several political friends of mine that I should reapply for a boxing license and when, not if, I'm turned down that I should sue the Athletic Commission under the American Disabilities Act for discrimination."

Although he has evinced no movement toward full-blown Aids, Morrison's HIV-positive status bars him from boxing in the United States and in most recognized jurisdictions elsewhere in the world. And though he's been away from the ring for seven years now, he's still only 34 - younger than Lewis and Mike Tyson, and only two weeks older than Roy Jones Jr.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was used by, among others, the golfer Casey Martin, who successfully sued to be allowed to use a golf cart in professional events. It was under threat of an ADA suit that, two years ago, Marvelous Marvin Hagler's erstwhile attorney Stephen Wainwright managed to procure a Massachusetts boxing license for Tim Welch, a boxer with an artificial leg. (It was something of a pyrrhic victory; the $30,000 prosthesis shattered in Welch's first pro bout.) But that it could serve as the basis for licensing an HIV-positive boxer seems unlikely.

If boxers who are brain-damaged (or, for that matter, pregnant) can be denied licenses, how could anyone reasonably countenance licensing a man who could endanger an opponent in a sport in which blood often flows copiously? "The fact that there's never been a single documented case in the history of this planet of anyone ever contracting HIV in the ring seems to me like a leg perfectly strong enough to stand on in terms of a lawsuit," Morrison answers on his web page.

That HIV-positive boxers aren't allowed to compete in the first place would be a pretty good explanation for that bit of fuzzy logic.

We're all for protecting the rights of the downtrodden, but this is a bad idea whose time has not come.