People's Republic takes on King

In the course of his whirlwind Asian tour, the US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Beijing last Saturday, and while the American government had earlier negotiated the return of the US spy plane and its crew, Powell was evidently unable to arrange for the release of another prominent hostage, the boxing promoter Don King.

One suspects he didn't try very hard.

I had just been issued my Chinese visa and was supposed to land in Beijing myself yesterday morning, and I suppose I should count myself fortunate that I didn't get on the plane. Six days after the John Ruiz-Evander Holyfield fight, scheduled for August 5th, was called off (sorry, "postponed"), King is still there, and while The World's Greatest Promoter denies that he is being held for ransom, there seems little doubt that the Chinese are looking for $2 million or so before they'll allow him to leave the country.

Yesterday King's matchmaker Bobby Goodman told American boxing scribe Michael (Wolf Man) Katz that the frazzle-haired promoter was still in China because "he likes it here", but there were also unconfirmed reports of fractious shouting matches between King and his Chinese partners from Great Wall International Sports Media.

For official consumption, the World Boxing Association heavyweight championship bout was scratched when Ruiz, the Boston-based champion, sustained a neck injury that left him, in King's words, "almost paralysed."

Three doctors - one of them Australian, the other two Chinese - were trotted out to attest to Ruiz's infirmity, one we'd find a bit more credible had we not been forewarned two days ahead of the announcement that the China card was in serious financial difficulty and that one of the participants would imminently come down with "a bad back".

It is possible, of course, that all of this was a timely coincidence, that Ruiz is genuinely injured, and that King and the Chinese actually plan to go through with their new rescheduled date of October 6th, but even King spokesman Alan Hopper warned that this was only "a working date".

Generally speaking, "working date" is a boxing code word meaning that one has no confirmed date, no site, and no television deal. (Even the Chinese promoters conceded that the 18,000-seat Capital Gymnasium would probably not be the venue for the rescheduled match.)

Since the Beijing fight was first proposed back in March it had been widely accepted that the Chinese government, after decades of banning boxing in any form, had suddenly become enthusiastic about staging a heavyweight championship fight because they thought it would boost their chances of landing the 2008 Olympics, and had originally asked for Ruiz-Holyfield to take place in June. Once the Olympic bid was rendered fait accompli, the government's ardour cooled noticeably.

In fact, the day after the "postponement" announcement, the state-backed People's Daily voiced scepticism over the entire affair, and on ESPN's weekly "Friday Night Fights" show last week, analyst Teddy Atlas suggested that Great Wall may have attempted to renege on as much as $10 million of the $17 million site fee it had promised King.

One could also, one supposes, look at it from the perspective of the Great Wall people. King had promised that this glorious championship fight - actually, the third instalment of a comparatively tedious trilogy between the two - would bring worldwide boxing fans and media flocking to Beijing. In reality, while the tickets had sold well, most of them were purchased by curious locals. Only a few hundred Americans had committed to make the journey, and most of those were blue-collar boxing fans, as opposed to the high-rolling Vegas crowd the Chinese expected.

After Ruiz-Holyfield III had been spurned by both HBO and Showtime, King had planed to produce the pay-per-view telecast himself. We have no way of knowing what the advance sale for the pay-per-view telecast, but we can probably surmise that it was also underwhelming.

When Ruiz knocked down Holyfield on the way to an upset decision in Las Vegas last March, Great Wall chairman Niu Lixin was waiting in the wings, and appeared at King's breathless post-fight announcement that the rematch would take place in China.

It was apparent from their enthusiasm as the Chinese kept babbling about Holyfield that they were only dimly aware that he'd lost his title that night. Only over the next few months did it begin to dawn on them that they'd been sold a bill of goods, that Ruiz, not Holyfield, was the now WBA champion, and that, moreover, while his WBA belt was genuine enough, most of the boxing world continued to regard the other two-thirds of the title (held by Lennox Lewis and then, shortly thereafter, by Hasim Rahman) as substantially more consequential.

King attempted to mollify the Chinese, first by purloining Rahman away from rival promoter Cedric Kushner, and then by announcing that Rahman would also appear on the Beijing card, but he was stripped of that trump card when an American court ruled that Rahman's first title defence had to be a rematch with Lewis.

It had been an open secret that advertising sales for the fight were nearly as slow as the pay-per-view buys. Last week a Beijing-based Western producer, speaking under cloak of anonymity, told London's Independent that Chinese executives had informed him the show was in trouble, and that Great Wall may have "overcommitted itself" in the generous terms of its arrangement with King.

Great Wall apparently now wants King to post a $2 million bond to cover what it has already laid out in airfares and promotional expenses before he is allowed to leave the country.

It could be that we've got it all wrong, but one day after the postponement was announced, the Peoples Daily suggested that financial problems on the part of the Chinese promoters meant that "the fight might not take place at all".

If that indeed proves to be the case, you can look for the "Free Don King!" rallies to commence in Tiananmen Square any day now.