Wounded King counts cost

IT WAS a good weekend for boxing. Nobody died. Everywhere you looked there were winners. By the end of the longest Saturday night, Las Vegas had witnessed an upset big enough to prove on its own that the whole business is not, after all, worked out in advance.

The fights are not fixed, in other words. Not, at least, once the guys are in the ring. How they get there is another matter.

Perhaps the best thing about Evander Holyfield's astonishing win over Mike Tyson was the fact that it appeared to upset Don King's carefully laid plans. The worst thing was the sound of King reassuring reporters straight afterwards that, yes indeed, Holyfield's immediate future was in his hands. "It's the American way," King crowed into the nearest available microphone while simultaneously figuring out the value of a Holyfield Tyson rematch.

The next worst thing was the subdued glee that greeted Tyson's downfall, the venomous chorus of good riddances from commentators who took an obvious pleasure in the prolonged and conclusive defeat of a man they had once proclaimed invincible.

Among the reasons for this was surely a sense of personal grievance against Tyson, whose failure had proved the worthlessness of their own predictions. There was a measure of vengefulness in the dismissive accounts of his downfall, and it could also be detected in the rush to claim for Holyfield not just a place among the very greatest exponents of his art but also a kind of sainthood.

Myself, I'm not so happy to see Tyson fall victim to the revisionists who are now claiming that he only ever fought two men who weren't scared of him, and lost to both. He was a great champion whose later career was compromised by greedy management which failed to provide him with decent technical guidance, kept him away from plausible challengers, Holyfield excepted, and surrounded him with an atmosphere of unhealthy self delusion.

And yet, in the end, nothing became Tyson like his manner in defeat. Did I dream it, or did he really shake Holyfield's hand and thank him for the fight, just like a tennis player at a Home Counties house party? I can't remember the last time I heard a pro sportsman utter such words, even with his PR man's hand up the back of his sweater. "I did my best," Tyson told the man who had just vanquished him. "You did better."

Earlier that same night we heard the sound of a braggart on the way up. Don King has a piece of Naseem Hamed, too, and after listening to Hamed's boasts in the hours before his fight against Remigio Molina I found myself fervently hoping that the Argentinian boxer would find a way of depositing the Sheffield man on his leopardskin bottom.

There is nothing exclusive about finding that the combination of Hamed's unstoppable self aggrandisement and his calculated belittling of opponents tends to obliterate a proper admiration of his technique. When I heard him predict that he would stop Molina after two minutes of the second round, I found myself asking why it is that a claim which seemed inspiringly brash when issued by Muhammad Ali should seem crudely brattish when it comes from Hamed. Why could Ali taunt a beaten opponent without losing our affection, but not the Naz?

Ali invented sound bite boasting, the belittling of opponents, the heightening of personal antagonism that now fuels practically all sport. But his identity was bound up in a wider destiny. In the 1960s he belonged to a generation, a prizefighter who was a symbol not of physical or financial conquest but, unbelievable as it may seem now, of raised consciousness.

Hamed has no such excuse. He has no broader social purpose. He exists only to enrich himself, Don King and Rupert Murdoch. Where Ali stood for togetherness and tolerance, Hamed unwittingly embodies selfishness and arrogance, the qualities imbued by a lifetime's exposure to the toxins of Thatcherism. Which means that he probably speaks as directly to his generation as Ali did to mine.

But that, I suppose, is beside the point. On Saturday night Hamed did exactly what he promised he would do, to the very minute. And those of us who happen to dislike his manners are left, like Tyson and Molina, without a leg to stand on.