World's Greatest Promoter at it again

America at Large: Johnny Ruiz might have felt Hasim Rahman was hitting below the belt when he brandished his right fist and said, "If you think your divorce was tough, just wait till I hit you with this," but, conceded the former World Boxing Association heavyweight champion, the remark paled in comparison to some of the bombs the other participants on Don King's "Back to Back to Back" extravaganza lobbed from the dais, writes George Kimball.

At a New York press conference last month, undisputed middleweight king Bernard Hopkins ripped a microphone from William Joppy's hand and suggested that his foe update his life insurance policy.

And Ricardo Mayorga, the Nicaraguan who holds the WBA and WBC welterweight titles, further pushed the bounds of good taste when he eyeballed IBF champion Cory Spinks and promised to kill him "so you can join your dead Momma". (The latter threat was uttered in Spanish; we thought at first it might have been mistranslated, but Ruiz confirmed it was exactly what Mayorga had said.) "That," said Ruiz, "was pretty cold."

Opponent-baiting, of course, is hardly new to the fight game, and no one was better at it than Muhammad Ali. When he travelled to Zaire to fight George Foreman, for instance, he warned Foreman that "my African brothers might put you in a pot and eat you". In the current issue of Esquire, Foreman recalls to interviewer Cal Fussman another bit of gamesmanship employed by Ali against arch-rival Joe Frazier.

"Joe told me why he had that hate for Ali. Muhammad was calling him an Uncle Tom. Kids would go to school and taunt his children, and they'd come home and his wife would hear about it," said Foreman.

"What bothered Joe was that every morning he'd get up really early, when it was dark, to get the roadwork in. He always wore this big hood over his head when he ran. And he said, 'Man, I don't want my wife thinking I'm peeping into people's windows'. The point is, at the time, Joe didn't get what an 'Uncle Tom' was. He hated Muhammad because he thought Ali was calling him a Peepin' Tom. If someone would have explained to Joe what an Uncle Tom was, he might not have ever hated Ali."

Ruiz, in any case, says if he can't beat Rahman on Saturday night he may have to look for a new line of work. His longtime manager, Norman Stone, does not disagree. "The loser of this fight becomes an 'opponent'," Stone conceded to us a few days ago. "There's no getting around that. You either do it or you go to McDonald's and get a job. At best the loser becomes a building block for somebody else."

Although several years have elapsed since either Ruiz or Rahman fought for less than a million dollars, they will be splitting just half a million between them this weekend, but Stone maintains the money isn't the important issue.

"(Rahman's people) think this is a cakewalk because Johnny's despondent," said Stone. "But I always wanted to fight this prick."

Ruiz-Rahman may represent the first time in history that a world heavyweight title fight received third billing on a card, but then the eight-ringed circus Don King will stage in Atlantic City two nights from now is unprecedented in itself.

Hopkins' defence against Joppy is the headline act, but, says Hopkins, "there are eight main events on this show".

Some of the eight world title bouts on tap at Boardwalk Hall loom more significant than others. Undisputed world championships will be at stake in both Hopkins-Joppy and the welterweight title unification between Mayorga and Spinks, while Ruiz and Rahman, former champions both, will be fighting for something the WBA calls the "interim" title, interim in this case meaning until Roy Jones Jr decides whether he wants to fight Mike Tyson at heavyweight or remain at light-heavyweight to defend the 175 lb championship he re-acquired from Antonio Tarver last month.

In addition to the aforementioned trio of title bouts, Zab Judah will defend his World Boxing Organization 10-stone championship against Jaime Rangel and Alejandro Terra Garcia his WBA 11-stone title on King's blockbuster telecast. Three other world title fights - a light-flyweight championship unification between Victor Burgos and Rosendo Alvarez, Luis Perez's IBF junior bantamweight defence against Felix Machado, and Guyanan Wayne Braithwaite's defence against Luis Pineda - won't even be televised.

Foreman, by the way, won't be working this weekend's telecast. The two-time heavyweight champion informed us via email last week he intended to end his 12-year association with HBO in order to spend more time with his family, and he put the network on notice a day later that he would be "retiring" as of the first of the New Year. As it turned out, strictly speaking, HBO won't be televising the last big fight show of 2003 anyway.

Although the network is handling the pay-per-view distribution of Saturday night's card, the show represents another first in that the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Promoter (through his wholly-owned subsidiary, KingVision) has assembled his own, hand-picked broadcast team of King loyalists, and retained the television rights for himself. You might suppose that this bold step was undertaken for economic reasons, but you'd be wrong.

Two months ago, when the move was first being contemplated, a top executive of Don King Productions complained that "HBO orders its people not to allow Don's face to appear on camera. That isn't right."

Since he's footing the bill, then, rest assured that Don King will get a lot of face time on this telecast.