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.
Boxing is full of overconfident hares who are convinced that their natural gifts will always carry them to victory. But their professional lives are too often sprints, and talent alone is not enough to sustain a fighter if he hopes to extend his career into a marathon of productivity.
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics are emblematic of Aesop’s cautionary tale. Thanks in no small part to a boycott by Cuba and most of the Soviet Bloc nations, the United States steamrolled to nine gold medals, an epic haul which would have reached double digits had not a Bulgarian referee erred in disqualifying Evander Holyfield during his light heavyweight semifinal match.
You want hares? How about light flyweight gold medalist Paul Gonzales, who won the Val Barker Cup as the most outstanding boxer in those ’84 Games? The can’t-miss kid from East Los Angeles never won a world title as a pro, lost three of his final five bouts and was out of the sport by 1991. Featherweight gold medalist Meldrick Taylor, who had maybe the fastest hands ever seen in any ring? Only 17 when he took top honors in L.A., Taylor essentially had the prime beaten out of him in a controversial, 12th-round technical knockout by Julio Cesar Chavez in their 1990 junior welterweight unification showdown. Although he later won a welterweight world title, Taylor’s brilliant luminescence had lost almost all of its glow by the time he was brutally dethroned by Crisanto Espana in 1992.
As for most of the other ’84 U.S. Olympic medalists, it’s a mixed bag. After winning world titles in four different weight classes and being acclaimed for a time as pound-for-pound best, Pernell Whitaker is an almost-certain first-ballot inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame next year. Holyfield regrouped from his Olympic disappointment to become a four-time heavyweight champion. Mark Breland and Frank Tate won world titles, but their reigns were short-lived and unremarkable. Steve McCrory, Jerry Page, Henry Tillman and Tyrell Biggs experienced varying degrees of success, but never really came close to scaling the summit.
Which brings us to the misnomered Virgil “Quicksilver” Hill, the middleweight silver medalist in Los Angeles who set his own pace and eventually overtook most of his more celebrated Olympic teammates. Never a superstar, Hill won world championships as a light heavyweight and cruiserweight and for the most part he held them for lengthy stretches, chugging along as the hares who had sped ahead tired or prematurely depleted their energy.
Hill, now 42, ostensibly still holds a title, the result of his unanimous, 12-round decision over Russia’s Valery Brudov on Jan. 28 in Atlantic City. All right, so that belt was for the WBA’s “regular” cruiserweight crown, which is virtually worthless since it represents nothing more than a blatant grab on the WBA’s part for more sanctioning fees. O’Neil Bell’s WBA cruiser title takes precedence to Hill’s (Are you confused about the concept of recognition of two champions in the same weight class by the same organization? You ought to be; I am) since he also holds the WBC belt and thus is regarded as a unified, or “super” champ by the Venezuela-based WBA.
But a world title is a world title, however devalued, and Hill seemingly has sat on his various thrones as long as Queen Elizabeth II.
“I just refuse to give up,” says Hill of his dogged persistence. “I have bad days and good days just like everybody else. (Boxing) is just a job for me now. But I come from North Dakota, and we don’t quit when the going is tough.”
If all goes according to plan, Hill (50-5, 23 KOs) will fight one last time, in January, against another tortoise, fellow 42-year-old Henry Maske (30-1, 11 KOs), although the German southpaw — a former IBF cruiser champ — might also be considered a hare in that he took a 10-year sabbatical after losing his title on a split decision to Hill on Nov. 23, 1996, in Olympiahalle in Munich.
“There is going to be one single fight against world champion Virgil Hill, who I lost against in 1996 in my last fight,” Maske told the German mass daily Bild. “Now I have a chance to face up to Hill one more time.”
The second pairing of Hill and Maske is interesting, if for no other reason than seeing where it lands. Of Maske’s 31 pro bouts, 27 have been in his home country of Germany, where he is considered something of a national hero. Hill, on the other hand, has long been the main attraction in North Dakota, staging 25 of his 55 bouts there – 15 in his adopted hometown of Bismarck, three apiece in Fargo, Grand Forks and Minot, and one in Williston.
That Hill is saying his goodbye to boxing against a German also is noteworthy, given Bismarck’s history. Until the 1870s, the place was known as Edwinton, but a rumor spread that German chancellor Otto von Bismarck was contemplating buying an American railroad. The prospect of foreign investment in a frontier town was so enticing to local politicians that they immediately changed the name from Edwinton to Bismarck. Neither von Bismarck or his money, alas, ever arrived, but nobody bothered to change the name back.
Regardless of what you call it, Bismarck – and the rest of North Dakota – long ago went ga-ga over native son Hill, who was born in Clinton, Mo., but spent his formative years in Grand Forks and Williston. He now lives in Las Vegas, but apparently the plain folk of the plains have forgiven him for that.
“Virgil Hill is our franchise, our professional franchise,” former Bismarck mayor Bill Sorenson, who also manages Hill, said before his guy defended his WBA light heavyweight title against Philadelphia’s Tyrone Frazier on July 7, 1990. “He’s the only show in town.”
A handsome man of French, Canadian, Norwegian, German and Native American (Cherokee) ancestry, Hill seemed a natural fit for local idolization. Sure, North Dakota had produced its share of pro sports stars – the New York Yankees’ Roger Maris snatched the single-season home run record from Babe Ruth in 1961 and Phil Jackson was on the roster of two NBA championship teams with the New York Knicks before going on to win nine league titles as a coach with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers – but only Hill elected to keep coming back.
Bismarck Tribune sports editor Abe Winter told me in 1990 that the only thing he could compare to the frenzy of a Hill bout was the three-year championship run of the Bismarck High Demons, who won state titles from 1957 through ’59.
“But nobody outside of North Dakota knew or cared about that,” Winter said. “Virgil is a world champion, so he’s a star everywhere. It’s just that, well, he’s a bigger star here.”
Funny, but in all likelihood Hill would have preferred to blaze his trail the more standard way, through big cities with rich boxing traditions. His pro debut, a second-round stoppage of Arthur Wright on Nov. 15, 1984, came on that most hallowed of stages, Madison Square Garden, with HBO televising. But Hill served as sort of a set-up man during the “Night of the Olympians,” with more attention focused on fellow first-timers Whitaker, Taylor, Breland, Biggs and Holyfield.
The knock on Hill, one that he never has been able to completely erase, was that he was a one-handed fighter whose strong jab, serviceable hook and competent ring generalship never would overcome a mostly ornamental right hand, stolid style and lack of punching power.
Hill was 11-0 and not drawing much attention when he went back to his childhood home of Williston to knock out Wayne Caplette in one round on Oct. 4, 1986. And just like that, a cottage industry sprang up.
Well, maybe not quite just like that. Hill wrested the WBA 175-pound title from Leslie Stewart on a fourth-round TKO on Sept. 5, 1987, at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, but his second defense came against Jean-Marie Emebe in Bismarck before a packed house of 8,400. For much of the rest of his career, and for as long as he held the title and the leverage, the world would have to come to Hill, and to North Dakota.
But Bismarck is not Vegas or Atlantic City, as I discovered when I traveled there to cover Hill’s fight against Frazier. Sure, there was legalized gambling in the downtown Sheraton Galleria, but the tiny casino had only three blackjack tables and a betting limit of $5 per hand. Low-rollers heaven.
No wonder promoter Bob Arum declared Hill would have to take his act on the road if he wanted to mix it up with a real superstar, like Thomas Hearns.
Hill’s June 3, 1991, defense against the 32-year-old and supposedly past his prime Hearns was staged amid the neon glitz of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, for which Hill was paid a career-high $1.4 million, far surpassing his previous top payday of $300,000. But in what would become a regular occurrence whenever he attempted to step way up in class, Hill, a 3-1 favorite, lost a unanimous decision to the aging “Hit Man.”
“I really didn’t fight the fight I wanted to,” Hill said afterward. “I waited too long to get off. I don’t know … maybe it was the hype. Tommy’s more used to big fights like this.”
On Sept. 29, 1992, Hill reclaimed the WBA light heavyweight title that Hearns had vacated by outpointing his old Olympic teammate, Tate, and he settled in for another long meal of home cooking.
His close points nod over Maske on German soil proved to be Hill’s last hurrah at light heavyweight. He lost his title to in a unification bout with Dariusz Michalczewski seven months later, and on April 25, 1998, his shortcomings were exposed as never before in a fourth-round knockout by Roy Jones Jr. in Biloxi, Miss. Jones’ right hand to the body that sent Hill crashing to the canvas was described HBO’s Jim Lampley as the sound of “somebody slapping a saddle,” whereupon analyst Larry Merchant chimed in, “Or a whip cracking against a piece of leather.”
But as is the case with most determined tortoises, that was not the end of Virgil Hill. He won the WBA cruiserweight championship by shocking France’s Fabrice Tiozzo on a rare first-round stoppage on Dec. 9, 2000, relinquished it in the first of his two losses to Mormeck, and has hung on the periphery of contention since, until his conquest of Brudov.
Critics, and there are plenty of them, dismiss the quality of opposition during Hill’s various reigns. And it’s true that no one will confuse Emebe, Ramzi Hassan, Willie Featherstone, Mike Peak, Sergio Daniel Merani, Saul Montana, Guy Waters, Crawford Ashley and Drake Thadzi with a Who’s Who of boxing greats. But Hill did defeat “Prince” Charles Williams, Bobby Czyz, Lou Del Valle, Tiozzo and Maske, all of whom were former or current world champs, and, as Frazier so succinctly noted, “As soon as I tried to gasp for air, Virgil stuck a jab in my mouth. I never saw a jab like that before.”
So now it’s one more time around with Maske, whereupon the five-year countdown on a possible call from Canastota begins. Hill probably won’t be a first-ballot inductee; he might have to wait for years if he makes it at all.
Then again, Aesop wouldn’t have it any other way