Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing by Donald McRae

Author:Donald McRae [McRae, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation, Non-Fiction, Boxing
ISBN: 9781949590050
Google: 8wmjAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1949590054
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

18 August 1995

Tyson was paid $25,000,000 to fight Peter McNeeley, a boxing bum whose fight statistics were so contrived they bordered on the criminal. Apart from the fact that he was a big white Irish-American who was certain to lose, McNeeley had been chosen as Tyson’s first opponent because of his record. Thirty-eight fights, thirty-seven wins with twenty of them coming in the first round. Don King loved that kind of CV. It helped him sell the fight to his potential ‘two billion’ pay-per-view watchers around the world.

King once said that, in boxing, ‘everything you hear is a lie’; and so it was with Peter McNeeley’s credentials as a boxer. Although it was true to say that he had beaten thirty-seven men in the ring, it was more pertinent to know that fourteen of McNeeley’s victims had never won a fight between them. As Boxing News revealed a week before the fight, his opponents’ combined record consisted of 168 wins, 366 defeats and 15 draws – a success rate of 30 per cent. Most of the pugs were total unknowns. The few familiar names were of the ilk of Ron Drinkwater who had been retired for fifteen years before he was exhumed by the McNeeley camp in 1993. The grey and sadly parched Drinkwater was knocked back inside a minute.

McNeeley was sufficiently encouraged to turn to Tyson at the final press conference and warn him that ‘I’m going to wrap you in a cocoon of horror.’ It was a great line, which even Tyson loved; but, ultimately, it only helped whip Don King into a state of near-hysterical excitement. ‘People all over the world, from Ireland’s Belfast to New York and Chicago, will be decked out in green,’ he promised. ‘The leprechauns will be dancing from glen to glen, the chaps will be singing Irish lullabies and the shamrocks will be shining!’

Turning to laud each fighter, while a dejected Tyson mouthed ‘bullshit’, King hit more ecstatic heights. Of Peter McNeeley he said, ‘few boxers have fought lesser opponents with greater skill’; while ‘thanks to Mike Tyson I have been resurrected. I was dead in the media cave, but I came back to life and rolled away the boulder. This is going to be the biggest event in the history of sport! That is a fact. This is not a fight, this is a global happening! Call your cable operator now! Hurry! For the first time ever two billion people will watch on pay-per-view these two great gladiators get it on in the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena! That is a fact!’ Less a fact than a mildly massaged statistic; and yet Tyson-McNeeley was set to shatter all pay-per-view records despite the fact that it would cost most Americans almost $50 to watch the carnage on TV.

Boxing Illustrated’s editor, Herbert G. Goldman, was more laconic than King in assessing the fight’s historical significance to the rest of us: ‘Well, if you’re the type who watches every minute of the O.

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