ANDRZEJ GOLOTA stands accused and, sadly, celebrated this morning as the biggest ogre in professional boxing, a mantle first worn by John L Sullivan and inherited now from Mike Tyson. It is not likely the big, lonely Pole will be any the happier for it either, although," given the business's charitable accommodation of villainy in the pursuit of wealth, he should be adequately compensated.
Golota lost again to Riddick Bowe on Saturday night - again on disqualification. But the decisions hardly matters, a disturbing pattern is in place and will duly be exploited.
Bowe, meanwhile, can hardly celebrate, despite the courageous manner of his going; he was so badly butchered in victory that any thoughts of carrying on should invite wholesale derision. Some chance.
Boxing was briefly returned to mainstream respectability when Evander Holyfield put down his Bible long enough to dispatch ex-con Tyson in Las Vegas last month and, almost without pause, it can now turn to the dyslexic misfit rebuilding his life in Chicago as the most marketable man in the opposite corner.
Golota, abandoned at birth, up the predictably rowdy charge of a foster mother who could not keep him off the streets of Warsaw long enough to wipe his nose. He is due to return there next month to answer charges of armed robbery. He will at least have enough zlotys to pay for good lawyers.
At the Convention Centre in Atlantic City Golota had put a few more dollars in the bank before being sent out two seconds from the end of the ninth round when he pole-axed, for want of a better pun, Bowe with three clearly intentional blows to his vitals. The disqualification came with Golota comfortably ahead on all three cards after he had administered two knockdowns, as well as a mugging, almost from the first bell. He went down himself, briefly, and the exchanges rarely rose above the level of a pub brawl, but Bowe was a survivor rather than equal partner in mayhem.
Given that Golota's final sin merely replicated several similar infringements this time, as well as those in their first meeting at Madison Square Garden in July, when an unholy riot afterwards only tarnished an already tatty evening, his disqualification was as inevitable as it was distressing. This is a man for whom the word discipline is not so much a foreign language as an alien concept.
Again, Lennox Lewis (whose WBC fight with Oliver McCall in Las Vegas on February seventh is no certainty might find his commercial clout superseded by an interloper. Holyfield is resting, contemplating retirement, a rematch with Tyson, a fight with Lewis or, now, a match against Golota. A bout between two boxers so oblivious to the immediate and long-term consequences of pain and punishment does not bear thinking about and you can bet that is exactly what boxing's deal-makers are doing right now.
That said, Golota's was a chilling performance, even against a patently fading former champion who aged dramatically beyond his 29 years before the fixed stares of the 12,000 customers.
Not since the Cuban Jose Luis Gonzales kept the brave Renaldo Snipes on the end of his cruel jab for nine rounds in Las Vegas a few years ago can a fighter have handed out such a malevolent beating. Golota must have sent a chill down the spine of any ranked heavyweight worth the description. And he did its in the most appalling pain.
As Golota lay in a New Jersey hospital last night with a broken jaw, a deeply-slit eyebrow and a tattered reputation, the man he had been beating up with almost unnatural cruelty for nearly half an hour gave voice to the delusions of a tired and spent fighter. "It was only a matter of time before I rallied a comeback," Bowe mumbled through swollen lips. "I had him in trouble."
The Only trouble Golota had was in deciding which part of Bowe's anatomy to punish. At the end, lying in the arms of his worried trainers for several minutes, Bowe looked as old as Dennis Andries and who knows how close to 50 that figure is?
At the Ponds Forge International Centre in Sheffield a few hours earlier, the Hackney fighter was another bystander in one-way traffic, pounded with precision and little mercy by the 29-year-old Johnny Nelson for seven rounds.
Nelson, who hopes to use the British cruiser-weight title as a launching pad for bigger things, said later: "In the fight I told him "Come on cowboy show me what you've got. I had to break his mind."
