Pining for old days as David no Goliath

Nothing else would have mattered.

YOU may want to plan your next few days carefully if you’re a sports fan.

There are Champions League games, with Man United trying to regain the initiative from Bayern Munich and Arsenal facing the might of Barcelona in the Camp Nou.

There are Heineken Cup quarter-finals, with Munster looking for form against Northampton and Leinster taking on their new coach’s current club, Clermont Auvergne.

The Masters is on the horizon, which means Tiger Woods’ return.

The Grand National takes place next Saturday.

The Premiership is still going on. The National Leagues in the GAA are getting spicy.

Here’s a question, however: what’s the event that overshadows all of the above?

Over the weekend David Haye beat John Ruiz to retain the world heavyweight boxing title in Manchester. There was a time well within living memory that such a contest would have dominated discussions for weeks beforehand – and afterwards. Nothing else would have mattered.

That was in the days when kids were roused in the middle of the night to listen to crackling radio transmissions from New York, when the heavyweight champion was de facto one of the most famous men in the world and one of the most influential; when Archie Moore floored Rocky Marciano in a heavyweight title fight his immediate thought was of the potential platform he would have to spread his ideas.

With respect, do you think you could identify David Haye without prompting?

So where did it all go wrong for heavyweight boxing? There are any number of explanations. One clue is the location of Haye’s weekend victory. Manchester is not where the heavyweight crown should be decided. Neither, with all due respect, is Las Vegas.

The only place the title should be laid on the line is New York City, and Madison Square Garden in particular. Those of us who drooled over Kevin Mitchell’s ‘Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing’ on the golden age of boxing in the Big Apple remain forever in thrall to the notion of jamming on a snap-brim fedora before catching the El to the Garden and swapping wisecracks with Damon Runyon and AJ Leibling, then heading on to Toots Shor’s for a late supper and a lengthy dissection of the new southpaw’s chances of a shot at the big time.

Caesar’s Palace? Las Vegas? As Whitey Bimstein, one of New York’s legendary trainers once said: “The country’s fine. I like to visit from time to time.” When the big fights left the Garden, the decline was confirmed.

Another problem for boxing is the lack of good writing about the sport – or rather, the lack of great writing. Where are the men to write sentences like these: “The heavyweight champion must live in a world where proportions are gone. He is conceivably the most frightening unarmed killer alive. With his hands he could slay 50 men before he would become too tired to kill any more. Or is the number closer to a hundred?”

Norman Mailer wrote that in the run-up to the Rumble in the Jungle between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

And George is another problem, or part of the same problem: a glowering monster in the early 70s, he reinvented himself as an avuncular grandpa over 20 years later – and regained the title at 45.

The irony is that George Mark II, the puffing wobbler of 1994, would have been minced in seconds by George Mark I, a man who knocked Joe Frazier off his feet with a punch in 1973.

Another problem is the alphabet soup of boxing associations. So is the lack of charismatic figures. So is Don King, of whom ‘Tex’ Cobb once said, “Hog, dog, or frog, it don’t matter to Don. If you got a quarter, he wants the first 26 cents.” (Though we confess a sneaking admiration for Don ever since his cameo in ‘Devil’s Advocate’ as an old friend of Satan himself, played by Al Pacino).

If you’ve got the answer, we’ll give you an ear.

In the meantime, enjoy the week of sport you’re facing into – the hype of the build-up, the thrill of the occasion, the satisfaction, or otherwise, of the analysis.

Just to chill your cornflakes, however, consider this: if you went back to the great days of the early 70s, of Ali-Frazier-Foreman, and told people that a couple of decades later that a heavyweight title fight would cause barely a ripple, they’d laugh at you.

Is anything taking place this week that might suffer the same fate?

* Contact: [e-mail]; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx