This is a few months old but I just read it for the first time... Rumors and stories of fixed fights in boxing are hardly new or a surprise, but this was so interesting and well written that I thought I'd share...
Why I Fixed Fights
Charles Farrell
4/16/14
Why I Fixed Fights
Charles Farrell
4/16/14
I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportunities for them, deals that came undone when they lost. It wasn't as if the winners benefited in any tangible way either. At best their victories brought them smallish short-term bragging rights. Among boxing insiders they were objects of scorn for having won, as incompetent at their jobs as Green, Spinks, and I were at ours.
...
Why did I fix fights? I fixed fights because it was the smart thing to do.
So Leon Spinks got his win, and I got stuck with Leon Spinks.
I had no idea what to do with him. He couldn't fight. The only interest promoters had in him was as a small notch on some young killer's belt. Then an unlikely offer to fight Larry Holmes in China popped up. It wouldn't pay by the standards of Leon's brief heyday, but it was a hundred times more than he was getting for his current fights. I was sure I could get Holmes to listen to reason. Years earlier, in defense of his heavyweight title, he'd mercifully knocked out a much better Leon Spinks in three easy rounds.
But before the Holmes fight could be madeeven as far away as ChinaI had to put Leon back in the public eye. That meant a high-profile venue where he could conspicuously knock someone out. I landed him a main event at the Washington D.C. Convention Center.
To get Leon on the cheap, the promoters, a small group of street-smart local hustlers raising money for Marion Barry's re-election, let me bring in my own opponent. But my fall guy came up with a bad CAT scan and the D.C. commission rejected him. I was stuck scrambling for a replacement.
John Carlo had never fought before. No commission would sanction a fight between an ex-champ, however diminished, and a debuting boxer who didn't have the equivalent of an Olympic pedigree. Online records had made it impossible to invent wins and losses in any commissioned state, so I had to falsify Carlo's entire professional career by staging his "fights" in non-sanctioned states. I imagined him as a journeyman with a respectable 13-2 record. For opponents I chose the names of real fighters, habitual losers who often fought in unregulated states. Even they wouldn't remember whether or not they'd lost to a John Carlo. But after these elaborate maneuvers to provide Spinks with a foolproof opponent, I failed to take the one step needed to guarantee the result: I didn't fix the fight.
John himself brought it up. A couple of days before the fight, he asked, "What happens if I win?"
We both laughed about that.
"If you can beat him, beat him. If Leon can't handle a guy who's never been in the ring before, he has no business being there. You'd be doing him a favor."
A few seconds after the bell rang, Leon extended a brotherly right hand to John Carlo, intending to touch gloves. But Carlointense fear producing the effect opposite of what I'd expectedwas not in a collegial mood, first feinting and soon following through with a viciously professional left hook that felled the former champ as if he'd been nailed by a 10-pound mallet. Spinks dropped straight back, his head bouncing audibly off the canvas. He barely beat a very slow count, and Carlo was on him in a delirium, dropping him again. A minute later the fight was over. So were any thoughts of Larry Holmes, China, or the $175,000 Spinks would have made fighting someone skillful enough not to hurt him.
The most responsible way to develop a new fighter is to combine easily winnable fightsalbeit ones that require some of his attention and skillwith fixed fights that will move him quickly up the ratings. The goal is to earn a fighter as much money as possible without incurring unnecessary wear and tear. He'll have to be in enough tough fights when the time comes.
Fight fixing is such an accepted part of the boxing business that there's a standard way to do it. You call up or visit the gym of any trainer who represents "opponents," and have the following exchange:
"I've got a middleweight who could use a little work." [Read: His fight shouldn't be more than a brisk sparring session.]
"I got a good kid. But he ain't been in the gym much lately." [He's out of shape.]
"That's OK. I'm not looking for my guy to go too long." [It's got to be a knockout win.]
"My kid can give him maybe three good rounds."
And that's it. Your fighter's next bout will go into the record books as a third-round knockout victory.
Your guarantee that you'll get the result you want is simple: Guys who deliver opponents have to earn a living. If their fighters win, they won't be able to do that. On occasions when an opponent realizes victory is within his grasp, his trainer reminds him that getting fresh will prevent him from being paid. If this doesn't work, the trainer stops the fight in the corner after the agreed-upon round. "I have to watch out for my kid," he laments. "He was taking too much punishment" or "His leg cramped up" or "Jeez, I can't explain it. The kid just quit on me. And he was doin' so good." He shakes his head sadly.
I've arranged for countless such endings. I've bought off referees and commissioners. I've simultaneously managed fighters from both corners. I've picked up the tab for entire fight cards, effectively guaranteeing that the judges were in my pocket. While standing a foot from ringside, I've had kayoed opponents wink at me as they were being counted out.
As a rule, you don't tell the intended winner of a fixed fight that the outcome is rigged. It causes him to fight unnaturally, and the fix is easier to spot. But Booze was an old pro; I felt OK telling him to go easy. And I liked Machain. Durable as he was, I didn't want him to have to take too much of a pounding for his thousand dollars.
Two years later McNeeley would last 89 seconds against Mike Tyson in what was then the largest grossing event in sports history. The fight ended when Vecchione nonchalantly slipped between the ropes to save his still-standing fighter.
...
But Peter McNeeley, if not expertly maneuvered, would never have gotten nearly as far in boxing as he did. Vin earned McNeeley a $700,000 payday, pushing the figure to over a million by parlaying the fight's weird conclusion into two lucrative TV commercials and keeping the door open for Peter's ongoing viability as a high-priced opponent.
Granted, Vecchione wasn't thinking only of his fighter's welfare. Vin's payoff wasn't limited to the fight purse. The real money was in knowing exactly how Peter McNeeley would do fighting Mike Tyson. And Vin knew down to the second how Peter McNeeley would do.
The night before Tyson-McNeeley, someone in Las Vegas placed a million-dollar bet on the fight not going a full 90 seconds. When Vecchione, seemingly unhurried, stepped between the ropes to force an automatic disqualification, 89 seconds had elapsed.
...
Vecchione knew that for all its posturing the Nevada State Commission would have to pay him: Tyson was the biggest cash cow in the state's history, and any problem with the fight's outcome would gum up a billion dollars in future casino business. Vin had the state of Nevada, the casinos, the commission, pay-per-view boxing, and Don King by the balls, and he knew it.
A heroic narrative painted Tyson as a savage warrior from the mean streets of Brownsville and McNeeley as a soft white boy from suburban Medfield, Mass., who hadn't earned his shot. But Tyson had been a multimillionaire for his entire adult life. McNeeley and Vecchione were a couple of hungry motherfuckers who didn't have a dime between them.
For managers, boxing is a business. The meter is running from the moment a fighter's contract is signed, if not sooner. Bankrolling a stable of winning fighters takes deep pockets. The sparring partners, as well as the winners, need to eat. They all need places to live, have families to care for and bills to paywhether or not they have promising futures.
...
Boxing is a business for boxers too.
Boxers are born poor and they usually die poor. For their short spell in the business, they inhabit a place in its professional hierarchy that all but guarantees they'll remain poor even during their active careers. Boxers often can't negotiate or even understand their own contracts. Of course, most contracts are unintelligible except to lawyers, but boxers typically have little education and are often functionally illiterate. Many fighters turn over the exclusive rights to sign their contracts to their managers. I'd never have managed a fighter whose contracts I couldn't sign or whose purse checks couldn't be made out to me.
All in all, it isn't surprising that boxers operate under a different system from the people who make money off of them or who watch and write about them. In the real world, boxers and their managers pre-arranging the outcome of fights, working collusively against a hostile system, makes sense. Fixing fights, even at the expense of the public, isn't just good business. It's a survival strategy for the disenfranchised class in boxing: the fighters themselves.
I got out of the business in the latter part of the 1990s. It would be a good story to say that I had a moral epiphany that lifted the veil from my eyes. That wouldn't be true, though. I got involved with some dangerous people, and some bad things happened. So I left. Over time, I've come to see boxing differently than when I earned my living from it. I've learned that, in boxing, damage isn't just possible or likely; it is nearly inevitable. I continue to love the art of boxing itself. But, nearly 20 years removed from it, I still find the works of the businessthe larceny and the bullshit and the wheeling and dealingthe most difficult and absorbing thing I've done in my life.
