Perhaps Nevada officials should have feared the worst the moment they spotted Mike Tyson escorting Zab Judah into the MGM Grand Garden last Saturday night.
This was the same ring, after all, in which Tyson once attempted to make a meal of Evander Holyfield's ears.
Judah is, or was, the International Boxing Federation light welterweight champion, and last weekend he faced Kostya Tszyu, who held the World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council (WBc) versions of the same title, for undisputed supremacy at the 10-stone weight.
The participants in the championship bout represented a virtual smorgasbord of nationalities and persuasions. Tszyu, though one-quarter Korean, is a Russian national who has fought out of Australia since defecting after the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
Judah, though African-American, is a professed Israeli who wears the Star of David on his trunks. (And Tyson, of course, is a Muslim. He and Judah hail from the same Brooklyn neighbourhood; Judah's manager Shelly Finkel is also Tyson's "adviser".) Undefeated going into the fight, Judah was a 5 to 2 favourite over the once-beaten Tszyu, a status he did little to diminish with his showing in the first round, which he dominated with superior quickness.
Late in the second round, however, Tszyu rocked Judah with a solid right that knocked him on the seat of his pants. Although Judah bounced up almost immediately, he stumbled across the ring and fell down again. Without bothering to consult the clock - one second remained in the round - referee Jay Nady immediately halted the bout, awarding the technical knock-out win to Tszyu, at which point all hell broke loose.
Charging the referee, Judah twice shoved his gloved hand under Nady's chin. The melΘe rapidly escalated as Judah retreated to his corner in search of further ammunition and heaved the ring stool at the referee just before his father and cornerman Yoel Judah managed to restrain him.
A Las Vegas Metropolitan police officer caught the stool in mid-flight, an action which may have saved Judah from adding an assault charge to his rap sheet, but it probably won't save his licence.
The Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) will meet next week, a few days before the Hasim Rahman-Lennox Lewis heavyweight championship fight, and will consider what action to take. A suspension, at least, seems likely.
"I'm in a world title fight and I got hit with a good shot," protested Judah. "I went down, but, for sure, I was up. I just feel I was never given a chance for a count. He (Nady) just walked up to me and said, 'It's over'."
"Look at his eyes," Tszyu pointed out as he watched the tape of the crucial moment. "The referee made the right decision to stop the fight, otherwise, he would have been really, really hurt, and that is not necessary."
As for Nady, the referee told commentators from the televising Showtime network that Judah appeared to be out on his feet and that he feared "second-concussion syndrome" when Judah's head hit the canvas. All right, so Nady is better at refereeing than he is at explaining himself.
The WBC, in any case, circulated a communiquΘ on Tuesday absolving the referee: "The World Boxing Council conveys its wholehearted congratulations to referee Jay Nady of Las Vegas, who very opportunely stopped the fight last Saturday between Konstantin Tzsyu and Zab Judah before another blow could cause 'second-concussion syndrome', which can be fatal," noted the dispatch from the organisation's Mexico City-based president Jose Sulaiman. "Nady acted in absolute respect to the safety measures that are designed to protect the boxer, adhered exactly to the rules, and performed like the good referee that he is, knowing what to do at the right time."
If the denouement was aesthetically unsatisfying to everyone else, it goes without saying that Showtime loved it. Not only did it make for great theatre, but it can only whet the appetite for a rematch - if and when Judah is allowed to box again. "Right now we are looking at a terrific rematch that is now a mega fight," said the network's executive producer, Jay Larkin. "It has the making of a classic fight."
While the NSAC considers whether to ban Judah, his promoter, Gary Shaw of Main Events, says he will protest the decision on the grounds Judah was never given a count, even though he was literally just a second away from a one-minute rest period which would have allowed him time to recover.
Although it depends on the locale, virtually every jurisdiction has a mechanism in place to alert the referee to the impending end of a round. In some states the timekeeper pounds on the canvas, in others on the ringside table. In Nevada, red lights even go on in the corners when five seconds remain in the round.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened in Las Vegas, of course. A decade ago, with three seconds left in the round, Richard Steele awarded a technical knock-out to Julio Cesar Chavez over Meldrick Taylor when the latter was well ahead on points in a fight for the same title that was at stake last weekend. In 1979, Carlos Padilla stopped a welterweight title fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Wilfred Benitez after the five-second light had been illuminated in the 15th round. While that intervention didn't affect the outcome, it certainly raised eyebrows, since it allowed gamblers who had bet the knock-out to cash their tickets.
Left unspoken is the fact that when the commission convenes next week the ghost of the late Mitch Halpern will once again hover over the proceedings. Halpern's suicide in August of last year, coupled with the retirements of Mills Lane and Richard Steele, severely depleted the talent pool of Nevada officials, allowing Nady to somewhat prematurely leapfrog his way up the food chain.
Whether Halpern (or even Lane, who disqualified Tyson for practicing cannibalism on Holyfield) would have stopped Judah with one second left in the round might be a question which can never be answered, but that doesn't mean it won't be asked.
