Every fight needs a Kushner

Atlantic City - only when Wayne McCullough and Prince Naseem Hamed had finally been tucked into bed on Tuesday night in this, the city that has chosen to play Sodom to Las Vegas' Gomorrah, could Cedric Kushner breathe a sigh of relief.

The rotund South African-born promoter had spent the better part of two days negotiating by telephone with the US State Department, British Airways, and McCullough's Denver-based promoters, America Presents, and conceded that "to be quite honest, there were a few hours on Monday afternoon when I feared that this fight was not going to happen at all."

Told that Frank Warren, the British promoter he had replaced only days in advance of tomorrow night's WBO featherweight showdown between the Prince from Sheffield and his Belfastborn challenger, and HBO, the American cable network which is televising it on this side of the Atlantic, owed him a big favour the droll Kushner did not argue.

"I would like to think," he replied, "that they owe me two."

He weighs well over three hundred pounds, and his drooping moustache is only one facet of his walrus-like countenance. When Cedric Kushner makes his way across a casino floor, he doesn't walk, he waddles.

On one occasion we were dining at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant in the MGM Grand when a young radio reporter approached our table. He was writing a feature on female boxers, and wondered if he might record Kushner's views on the subject.

Cedric's answer was brief and to the point.

"If I had my way," he said, "women wouldn't even be allowed to watch boxing."

Not that Kushner doesn't like women. After another fight in Las Vegas several years ago, he encountered a shapely young thing who batted her eyes in his direction.

One thing led to another, and the two shortly found themselves in the promoter's suite. As Cedric mixed the drinks, this debutante produced from her purse a handful of little white tablets.

"Mint?" she offered.

That was the last thing he remembered when he awoke some 24 hours later. Kushner made his way to the Rolex store at Caesars Palace and ordered a replacement for the $10,000 watch which had gone missing.

Not six months later, under remarkably similar circumstances, he awoke from another induced nap to discover that another debutante had relieved him of another Rolex.

The son of a Jewish South African shopkeeper and a schoolteacher, Kushner shipped out as a deckhand on a West German freighter and arrived in the US in 1971 with a few hundred dollars in his pocket. After working at menial jobs for the next few years, he stumbled into his next life by promoting, on a shoestring, a 1974 rock concert by the group Steppenwolf at a tiny college in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

"I became quite friendly with the members of Fleetwood Mac," he remembers. "Once they were talking to me about promoting this series of half a dozen concerts, and they told me I could do it, but only if I'd bark like a dog. I got down on all fours and barked away. They must have liked the way I barked, because I promoted them for the next 10 years."

Shortly after he joined forces with Fleetwood Mac, the album Rumours shot to the top of the charts and stayed there long enough to become the best-selling album of all time. Kushner was shortly rolling in clover, and found himself staging concerts by Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, and Joni Mitchell.

He branched out into boxing in the early 1980s, and promoted heavyweight champion and fellow countryman Gerrie Coetzee. Don King subsequently stole Coetzee from Kushner as easily as the strumpet had stolen his watch.

It was a lesson well learned, however. While bitten by the boxing bug, Kushner recognized that if he were to survive in a world ruled by King, Bob Arum, and Dan Duva's Main Events, he needed to carve out his own niche rather than go into direct competition with the Big Three.

Forging alliances in Europe and Africa along the way, he developed a system of packaging worldwide television rights to his boxing shows.

In 1996 he promoted the Michael MoorerAxel Schulz fight in Dortmund, attended by 30,000 German boxing fans. He now numbers 10 world champions in his promotional stable, and just last week reached an agreement to promote a monthly series at Madison Square Garden.

"I no longer have to bark like a dog," was the way Kushner put it. "Now I only bark orders."

A likeable bon vivant with few natural enemies, Kushner was the obvious choice to step into the breech when the Hamed-McCullough show became imperiled last week.

The nominal promoter, Warren, faced tax problems in Britain even before the British High Court issued a ruling freezing his assets in a lawsuit brought by King, Warren's erstwhile partner. Kushner, who was already associated with the promotion, was trusted by all parties - particularly HBO, which endorsed his candidacy.

"I had no idea what I was getting into," conceded Kushner after taking over as promoter less than a week before the fight. Under the new arrangement, all of the income from the television networks, as well as the site fee from host Bally's Casino, would flow through Kushner's accounts. Assuming Warren's obligations, he in turn would pay the fighters.

First he had to placate the respective combatants. Hamed's $2 million purse had been underwritten via his HBO contract, but until the Prince was safely in New Jersey and his own $500,000 payday had been personally guaranteed by Kushner, McCullough refused to budge from his Nevada base.

The next order of business became securing Hamed a work permit which would allow him to enter the country, something Warren, for reasons best known only to himself, had failed to do.

"If I'd known there was no visa petition, there's no way I'd have taken this assignment," said Kushner. "Normally it takes three weeks to process one of those."

In a 24-hour blitzkrieg of diplomacy, Kushner managed to cut through a sea of red tape. Hamed picked up his visa at the American consulate in London on Tuesday morning and two hours later was on Concorde.

Having inherited Warren's rights as well as his obligations, we wondered, does Kushner now have a six-fight option on McCullough's services should Wayne have an upset win tomorrow night?

"That," said Kushner with a chuckle, "is a very interesting question."