I last saw Mitch Halpern eight days before he died, moments after he had disqualified Rosendo Alvarez in his WBA light-flyweight championship fight against Beibis Mendoza. It had not been - and I'm sure Halpern would have admitted as much - one of his better nights in the ring.
As a rule, the best referees are the ones you don't notice much, but on this particular evening Mitch repeatedly insinuated himself into the action. Although both contestants seemed eager to mix it up on the inside, Halpern had repeatedly stepped in to warn Alvarez for what he perceived to be low blows, even though none of them seemed to bother Mendoza much. Finally, after twice ordering a point deducted from the Nicaraguan's scorecard, Halpern stepped in midway through the sixth round and awarded the fight - and the title - to Mendoza.
The disqualification had seemed dubious, if not unwarranted, and Halpern seemed, well, agitated as he defended it.
"We have rules and regulations here in Nevada," he said. "How many times am I supposed to warn him?"
That was on August 12th. Last Sunday evening, in his home in Las Vegas, Mitch Halpern took a gun and put a bullet through his brain. His friends and colleagues have been trying to make sense of it ever since. Halpern was 33 and widely regarded as one of the more promising referees around. He had already surpassed Richard Steele, his mentor, and appeared to have been designated the heir to the retired Mills Lane as Nevada's top referee.
Steele recalled that the young Halpern had approached him one night as he stepped out of the ring and informed him that he, too, would like to become a boxing referee.
"I told him to meet me at the gym the next Monday," recalled Steele after the death of the man he described as his "son".
"I've had plenty of guys say the same thing, and most of them never show up," said Steele. "Mitch was there on Monday. He worked harder at it than anyone I've ever known. He wanted to be the best, and he was. He took everything I knew and added his own natural ability."
Halpern had worked 87 world title fights, including the first Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight, the second Lennox Lewis-Holyfield bout, and last year's Felix Trinidad-Oscar De La Hoya welterweight unification fight. But he was perhaps better known for one at which he did not officiate.
He had been named to work the 1997 Holyfield-Tyson rematch at the MGM Grand. At a rules meeting two nights before the fight, Tyson's camp - the boxer did not attend, but his hangers-on were present en masse - vehemently protested, claiming that Halpern's failure to control Holyfield's roughhouse tactics in the earlier meeting was indicative of a bias toward their man. They even claimed that if Halpern weren't replaced, Tyson might not show up.
The Nevada Commissioners remained adamant, and were prepared to call Team Tyson's bluff, but Halpern, in an effort to defuse the controversy, asked to have his name withdrawn from nomination 24 hours before the fight. The commission seemed relieved, and the bout went on with the veteran Lane, a tough, nononsense, law-'n'-order ex-Marine and former prosecutor, in charge.
That turned out to be the night Tyson tried to devour Holyfield's ears. I have often wondered - and I can't be alone in my curiosity - whether, under the circumstances, the younger referee would have had the stones to disqualify Tyson that night as quickly as did Lane. (And even Lane, it might be noted, didn't disqualify Tyson immediately after he bit Holyfield for the second time. He only did it after the round - when he looked up and saw the televised replay of the incident.)
In any case, Lane retired, both from the ring and from the bench, to life as a television judge after that fight, and, more or less by acclamation, Halpern inherited his role as Nevada's top referee.
The Mendoza-Alvarez fight which proved to be Halpern's last was hardly a plum assignment. It was for a vacant title recently lifted from Thailand's Pitchnoi Siriwat, and was originally slated to take place the evening before, on the undercard of the Tim Austin-Arthur Johnson bantamweight title bout at the Paris. It was moved to promoter Don King's Holyfield-John Ruiz card only when WBA welterweight champion James Page failed to show up for his scheduled defence against Andrew (Six Heads) Lewis, and Showtime needed a co-feature to fill that evening's telecast.
Everyone is entitled to an off-night, but in retrospect, Halpern's performance that evening was so uncharacteristically bad that, well before the disqualification, I turned to my friend Mike Katz at ringside and said, "It looks like Mitch is so pissed off that he didn't get the heavyweight fight that he's determined to put his stamp on this one".
Katz pointed out, correctly, that this hypothesis would be more persuasive had the Holyfield-Ruiz assignment gone to anyone but Steele, Halpern's guru.
Eight nights later Halpern killed himself.
"It was an obvious suicide," Metro Las Vegas homicide lieutenant Wayne Peterson said. "He died of an obvious, self-inflicted gunshot wound."
Nearly two decades ago, another prominent Las Vegas referee, Richard Greene, committed suicide under similar circumstances.
Greene had been the third man in the ring for the Ray Mancini-Duk Koo Kim lightweight title fight, in which Kim had absorbed such a beating that he was carried from the ring unconscious and died some days later. Speculation had it that Greene was distraught over his perceived shortcomings in failing to stop the bout earlier, and felt that he might have saved the Korean if he had.
Halpern's work in Mendoza-Alvarez was bad, but it wasn't that bad.
He had a chance, said Steele, "to be the best referee of all time". Who knows what demons lurk in the minds of men? Halpern was divorced, but had a four-year-old daughter and a fiancee. He had a promising future.
But don't they all?
