Kathy Duva was recalling her frustration in the early 1990s in getting the national media to pay closer attention to Evander Holyfield, then the God-fearing, clean-living heavyweight contender who was being described, if he was being described at all, as the anti-Tyson.

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If it had involved marginal baseball or football players, the announcement probably would have only made the transactions listings of a newspaper’s agate page, and read something like this:

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Perhaps it is selfishness, but members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only NFL team ever to win every game in a season, get together every year to toast themselves whenever the last remaining undefeated team in the league loses.

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“Potential means you ain’t done it yet,” former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal said of one of his teams that was highly rated heading into the season but had yet to play a game. Or perhaps it was Duffy Daugherty, Bear Bryant or Vince Lombardi who first uttered the now-famous phrase; all of those legendary coaches at various times have been credited with authoring the snappy line which places into context the relatively small value of unfulfilled ability when measured against actual accomplishment.

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The International Boxing Hall of Fame’s Class of 2007 won’t be announced until January or inducted until June, but, hey, it never hurts to start banging the drums early for a worthy candidate.

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They called it “conspicuous consumption” in the 1980s during the heyday of the Reagan Administration, and it was a term meant to reflect the wealth and prosperity that an increasing number of Americans enjoyed. To wit: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

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There are valuable life lessons to be gleaned from Aesop’s Fables, cloaked though they may be in the guise of children’s stories. Take, for instance, the distance race which pitted Slow and Steady, the tortoise, against the speedy hare. The hare, of course, got off to a blazing start and, overconfident, took a nap somewhere along the course only to awaken and find that the plodding but relentless tortoise was about to cross the finish line.

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Chris Byrd is downsizing.

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If I had only known then what I know now.

It was 1965, my senior year at De La Salle High in New Orleans, and I considered myself something of a travel virgin. Oh, my parents had taken me on several vacations with an uncle and his wife, but those were when I was a small child and we made the trips in clunky automobiles towing one of those even clunkier silver trailers that looks like an overturned can of Coors Light.

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It is an intriguing irony that Fernando Vargas was born on Dec. 7, 1977. Pearl Harbor Day seems especially appropriate for a fighter who has initiated so many wars, both verbal and in the ring, to come into the world, no doubt kicking and screaming all the way.
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“They Have Kept Him in Stitches,” read the Sports Illustrated headline that accompanied a tight closeup of the sweaty, oft-sutured face of Chuck Wepner, which graced the cover the week of the journeyman heavyweight’s March 24, 1975, challenge of champion Muhammad Ali.

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You’re not too bright, are you? I like that in a man.
Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat”

Just a guess, but I imagine that the manipulative Matty Walker character, in Turner’s 1981 breakthrough role, was a boxing fan. Had to be. Because Matty’s favorable impression of the simplistic male, tunnel-visioned and generally oblivious to outside influences, is a blueprint for a goodly number of the sport’s foremost achievers.

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Some things never change. Roy Jones Jr. scheduled a breakfast press conference with the media this past Saturday morning in Memphis, and he showed up 40 minutes late.

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And when I die,

And when I’m dead and gone,

There’ll be one child born,

And the world to carry on, carry on …
_ “And When I Die,” Blood, Sweat and Tears
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So now we know: Jose Luis Castillo’s secret role models are Roberto Duran, George Foreman and James Toney.

All right, so that’s a semi-cheap shot at Castillo after the Mexican failed to make weight for the second straight time in his now-infamous series with Diego Corrales. What had started out 13 months earlier, as a rivalry which could have and should have become legendary, now has become a punch line for fat jokes.
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When you are Michael Carbajal’s size, which approximates the dimensions of one of Wladimir Klitschko’s legs, your athletic options are by necessity limited. You can become a jockey and hope to get the mount on the Kentucky Derby winner, or you can take up boxing and try to punch your way into the public consciousness against similarly pugnacious Lilliputians.

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The popular consensus is that Oscar De La Hoya is boxing’s Latin lover, the most handsome man to grace the ring, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. In a sport populated primarily by guys with ski-run noses, cauliflower ears and unsightly masses of scar tissue around the eyes, designation as boxing’s No. 1 heartthrob falls to the Golden Boy almost by default. De La Hoya’s bouts always are attended by scads of screaming girls who seemingly got lost on their way to the Menudo concert.

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It could have happened this way.

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NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry is said to have such a keen shooting eye that he could detect even the slightest variance to the target. Once, upon entering a visiting arena with his San Francisco Warriors, Barry took a look at the basket and said, “It looks a little low.” A tape measure was produced and, sure enough, the rim was an eighth of an inch below specifications.

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A cynic might take it as another indictment of boxing that the James S. Farley Award, presented by the Boxing Writers Association of American for “honest and integrity,” hasn’t been presented to anyone since 1996, when the late, great Eddie Futch was honored, and that only six such awards have been distributed since Harry Markson became the inaugural recipient in 1977.

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Once, at the final press conference before the Oscar De La Hoya-Shane Mosley rematch in September 2003, promoter Bob Arum tried to convey the global significance of the confrontation which would take place three days later.

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Controversy in boxing is sort of like the congealed glop that passes for melted cheese when you go to a movie and order those overpriced concession-stand nachos. Said glop is not good for your health (neither are the nachos) and you’re virtually certain to spill some on your shirt, but, hey, you already know that for health’s sake you should order the bottled spring water to wash down the smuggled apple you could have hidden in your jacket. But guilty pleasures wouldn’t be pleasurable without the guilt, would they? So a lot of us turn off our consciences and go for the glop, the XXXL-sized soda and enough candy to induce diabetic shock.

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