An Ex-Champion Takes Last Bow on His Back : As He Had Done for Ali, Holmes Gets a Courtesy Fight--and Frightful Lesson

ATLANTIC CITY — Many observed a savage but necessary symmetry in the Friday night fight. Sad to see the once-invincible Larry Holmes, now a 38-year-old grandfather, tip over like a board. Three times in the fourth round. Sad, but altogether within the tradition and demands of boxing. Part of the deal, actually.

Boxing, after all, is not for the squeamish, and Mike Tyson’s four-round walkover made a mockery, as usual, of the purists’ insistence on the sweet science.

It’s an elemental enterprise, conducted according to its own brutal code. To see Holmes collapsed with such awful finality--his last knockdown--that the scurry was not to surround Tyson but to identify Holmes’ degree of consciousness, well, that was scary, of course. But it was every fighter’s prophecy fulfilled, the code upheld.

Holmes surely recognized as much. Nearly eight years ago, in the midst of his seven-year rule of the championship division, he reluctantly dispatched the shell of Muhammad Ali, then 38 himself. Holmes didn’t much like it but he was the required accomplice in boxing’s grand scheme. Fighters need to go out fighting, not retired on decisions or other technicalities.

Just as Holmes allowed Ali the champion’s exemption, so did 21-year-old Tyson suffer Holmes’ challenge. There may be no fighter on earth who can still Tyson’s fury in the ring. Certainly, Holmes, after a 21-month layoff and an uncertain training regimen, was not that man. But a former champion is a piece of unfinished business until he is categorically destroyed.

Holmes is now finished business. Afterward, he characteristically demeaned his own purpose by turning the talk to his $3-million purse. “I’m laughing all the way the Lafayette National Bank,” he told HBO’s Sugar Ray Leonard. But money can’t buy the effort, however misguided, in that fourth round. There was something more at work, a fighter defining himself by his acts.

It was awful to see, however. Though Tyson bragged of spotting the usual Holmes’ opening--”He always held his left low”--there was nothing strategic about it. Holmes’ left hand was actually held ear-high. But Tyson, held at bay by Holmes’ long left through three rounds, simply overpowered Holmes, hitting him high above the ear.

In the two minutes or more until the fight was over, Holmes never really regained consciousness. He reeled from corner to corner, but fighting back all the while. He never once clinched; the fighter’s instinct to move forward, always forward, betrayed him. Twice more, he absorbed right hands for knockdowns.

That he got up, or tried to get up, even impressed Tyson. “He wasn’t going out like a dog,” Tyson said. “He was very courageous. Even the last time, he was ready to get up.”

He could not, of course. He was eventually situated on a stool and even wobbled there. He had not done just what he could; he had done all he could.

If you accept the basic premise of boxing, then you must be satisfied with the fight, however mismatched it seemed. Holmes satisfied what nagging doubts remained after two close losses to Michael Spinks. For the beating he took, he was given a calm for his old age. Tyson really is better, is the deserving champion. Well, now he knows, too. “Better than I thought,” he said, without his usual rancor.

Tyson, fortified by his youth, meanwhile moves on, unmindful of mortality or any similar concerns. It’s so simple when you’re young.

“I can’t be beat, I refuse to be beat, I refuse to lose,” he said afterward, explaining his native confidence. He has no reason to believe he ever will be beat; nor do we. His feral ferocity forbids all thought of true contention in the ring.

Holmes nodded at the thought. Perhaps he thought so of himself once. “But as we all go along, there’s always somebody out there,” he said.

Tyson is so unmindful of the future that he scarcely considers what he does as a career. He is so of the moment that he pretends neither to examine his history or future. In a single breath Friday night, he said he would not review the Holmes’ tape nor that of a future opponent, “someone” being the best he could identify him as. “I’m going to Japan to fight someone,” was how he put it.

It doesn’t always happen, the example of undefeated Rocky Marciano looms large in boxing lore, but perhaps Tyson is only just embarking on what boxing analyst Larry Merchant calls the “boxer’s life cycle.” Some day, he’ll come back, maybe at the age of 38 in the interests of ridiculous symmetry, to yield his career to another younger fighter. That would be fair.

And perhaps someday he will hear that awful cheer that comes when some ring announcer, cutting through the crowd’s anxiety, breathlessly announces (as he did Friday night for Holmes): “Ladies and gentlemen, he is on his feet.”