Out With The Old, In With The …?

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.

For many educated people, boxing is something of a guilty pleasure, a chance to walk on the wild side, if only vicariously, with dangerous dudes they’d rather not meet up with in a dark alley.

Heavyweight prospect Chazz Witherspoon, who graduated from Philadelphia’s prestigious Saint Joseph’s University with a 3.8 cumulative grade-point average (out of a possible 4.0), clearly is too intellectual and of too varied interests to project the proper air of menace. For whatever reason, the public wants its boxing big men to slug opponents harder than they hit the books, to earn advanced degrees in the sweet science rather than diplomas in such academic disciplines as pharmaceutical marketing.

When Witherspoon, the second cousin of two-time former heavyweight titlist Tim Witherspoon, speaks, it sounds less like another variation of “I’ll moider da bum” than a clinical treatise on qualitative research.

“Chazz wants to learn everything, and he wants to learn it now,” said Tim Witherspoon, 48, who has taken on an increased training role with his 24-year-old relative. “Anything you tell him, he picks up fast. Sometimes you have to try to slow him down.”

The 6-4, 228-pound Chazz Witherspoon (12-0, 7 KOs) takes on Mike Alexander (11-0, 8 KOs) in the 10-round main of a ShoBox card from Manistee, Mich., which is unique in its premise: Five of the featured fighters are the sons or nephew of former world champions.
In addition to Chazz Witherspoon, other next-generation performers on the card include middleweights Ronald Hearns (8-0, 6 KOs), James McGirt Jr. (11-0, 7 KOs), Stephan Pryor (10-1, 7 KOs) and lightweight Jorge Paez Jr. (9-0, 7 KOs).

“Being related to somebody great in the boxing game is a gift, and it’s a curse,” Chazz Witherspoon said. “You’re held to a higher standard of scrutiny because you have some big shoes to fill.

“The media attention helps, but when you’re still in the learning process, as I am, you’re under a microscope. Somebody without a famous last name can fly under the radar until they become great.”

Flying under the radar is even more difficult for the younger Witherspoon, if only because he is related, if not by blood, to the rare deep thinkers in a sport whose attraction always has been more based in visceral reaction than contemplative analysis. It’s OK in boxing, even praiseworthy in some instances, to be perceived as an unthinking destructive force so long as you deliver the knockouts.

From Jack Dempsey to Sonny Liston to George Foreman (the pre-grilled version, at least) to Mike Tyson, some of the fight game’s most celebrated performers have projected a brute strength and hint of cruelty which appeals to many Americans’ more primal instincts. And if an interest in boxing doesn’t draw out the beast in your average certified public accountant, the bespectacled guy who hasn’t ridden a bike since that red Schwinn when he was 12, maybe some logo clothing from the Harley-Davidson merchandise outlet will. You don’t have to be an actual chopper jockey these days to dress the part of convention-flouting rebel on weekends.

Oh, some boxing aficionados appreciate guile and artistry, of the sort which Bernard Hopkins demonstrated a couple of weeks ago with his clinically precise thumping of Antonio Tarver. But perhaps that appreciation is heightened by the realization that Hopkins, as was the case with Willie Pep, Pernell Whitaker and others, relied more on street smarts than formal education to rise to the top of their profession.

It’s not necessarily that we prefer our athletes to be a bit thick, but violence and academia make for an uneasy mix. Remember what former quarterback-turned-NFL-analyst Joe Theismann blurted when asked about the brainpower of some supposedly high-IQ head coaches? “A genius, to me, is somebody like Norman Einstein,” said Theismann, whose undergraduate days at Notre Dame apparently were not spent in the study of the theory of relativity.

Gene Tunney was a Marine, but a poetry-reading one whose scholarly demeanor often seemed at odds with his brutal job description. Isn’t the heavyweight champion of the world supposed to be the baddest man on the planet? Someone who could walk into any saloon and loudly announce, as John L. Sullivan frequently did, that he could whip any SOB in the house?

Even with two victories over the fearsome Dempsey, Tunney usually has been relegated to a lesser rank in boxing history than the “Manassas Mauler,” perhaps because anyone who deigned to author a text on his craft probably came across as being too scholarly.
In more recent years, James Smith obfuscated the fact that he had earned a college degree from Shaw University by adopting the spine-tingling name of “Bonecrusher,” which is more suggestive of a boa constrictor than a bookworm.

The American heavyweight most often depicted as this country’s brightest hope in the division, Calvin Brock, also has his sheepskin, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. But Brock’s unanimous decision over Timur Ibragimov last weekend during an HBO Boxing After Dark telecast failed to raise his profile or excitement quotient among thrill-seeking spectators who care less for drab technical proficiency than for flourishes of unvarnished power.

The Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, also boast college degrees – from the University of Kiev, of all places – and they are furthermore burdened by social consciences which serve to set them apart. If being a world champion is not the end-all, be-all of a fighter’s existence, to which purpose does it serve to be endowed with a pulverizing right cross? In boxing, strength and courage are often perceived as virtues unto themselves, not to be diluted by issues that extend beyond the ring or which require serious thought.

And could it be that Lennox Lewis’ failure to fire the global imagination of fight fans, at least in comparison to the conflagration sparked by Tyson, owed in part to his quiet dignity and interest in chess

Chazz Witherspoon might be the one to certify that boxing finally is as open to crossover acts as music lovers are to Linda Ronstadt’s career forays into rock, torch standards and Mexican-flavored mariachi.

One press release describes the newer ’Spoon as “intelligent, polite, articulate, level-headed, modest and mature,” real-world assets which count for only so much in the fight game unless they are accompanied by the ability to leave a discombobulated opponent stretched on the canvas, wondering what that ringing in his ears is.

An alternate to the 2004 Athens Olympics, Chazz won a national Golden Gloves championship by winning all five of his bouts by knockout.

It’s still very early, but a buzz is starting to rise above a kid who earned a full academic scholarship to St. Joe’s and can recite all the atomic weights on the periodic table. Maybe a high SAT and a high kayo ratio aren’t so incompatible, after all.
What will they think of next?