AMERICA AT LARGE: Veteran Arthur Mercante knew the best referee is seldom seen, heard or remembered, writes GEORGE KIMBALL
ARTHUR MERCANTE had been a professional referee for only half-a-dozen years when he was appointed to work his first world title fight – the 1960 rematch between Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson, who the Swede had dethroned a year earlier to become heavyweight champion of the world.
The return bout, contested before 32,000 at the old Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, had been largely unremarkable before the fifth round, when Patterson unloaded a massive left hook that had separated Johansson from his senses even before he crashed to the canvas. The Swede’s left leg briefly twitched, and then he became quite still.
Patterson had become the first heavyweight champion to regain his title, but at that moment the concern was for Johansson. As Mercante recalled in his 2006 memoir Inside the Ropes, “I looked on helplessly, dreadfully worried about Johansson’s condition and thinking how ironic it would be if I finally got my turn in the national spotlight only to have a guy get killed on my watch. Suddenly, as only he could do, broadcaster Howard Cosell insinuated himself in the middle of the maelstrom.
“ ‘Is he dead? Is he dead, Whitey?’ Cosell hollered at Whitey Bimstein.”
Bimstein, the Runyonesque New York cornerman AJ Liebling lauded as one of his “explainers”, had been brought in to supplant Johansson’s Swedish trainer, Nils Blomberg. From the ring he turned and bellowed back to Cosell: “No, but he oughta be. I told him to watch out for the left hook.”
That Mercante, who died at 90 last Saturday, was fond of recounting that story, in which he was neither the author nor the target of the punch-line, typified as well his presence in the ring, in which he understood that the work of the best referee is seldom seen, heard or remembered.
“Know when to stop the fight, stay out of the picture, but be there when you have to be there,” he explained.
His obituary in Sunday’s New York Times described him as “boxing’s most prominent referee of the past half-century”. His most high-profile assignment came in 1971, when he was the third man in the ring for the “Fight of the Century” – the epic first bout inaugurating the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier trilogy. Frazier won that one, but two years later in Kingston, Jamaica, George Foreman pounded him to the canvas six times in less than six minutes. Cosell’s animated refrain from that night – “Down goes Frazier! Down Goes Frazier!” – is embedded in the memory of even the most casual fan. Hardly anyone remembers that Mercante was the referee.
He had been a successful amateur boxer in his youth, and during his Second World War navy hitch served as a boxing instructor and referee as part of a physical fitness programme established and supervised by former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was active in amateur programmes until 1954, when he received his first professional licence.
In all, he worked 147 world title bouts, including Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s second fight with Mustafa Hamsho in 1984 (which shared the Madison Square Garden bill with Mike McCallum- Seán Mannion), and Steve Collins’ 1992 majority decision loss to Reggie Johnson at the Meadowlands in New Jersey.
The result of that bout hinged on a single point deducted by Mercante after the Irishman attempted to retaliate against Johnson’s repeated use of elbows and forearms by clumsily throwing one of his own.
Collins, to his credit, didn’t blame Mercante for taking the critical point for the foul.
“(Johnson) has obviously had a lot more practice at it than I have,” he wryly noted.
Although he is remembered as a lifelong New Yorker, Mercante was actually born in Brockton, Massachusetts – the same city fellow Hall of Fame members Hagler and Rocky Marciano called home. I hadn’t been aware of this connection until Mercante apprised me over breakfast a few days before the Hagler-Hamsho fight. (Suffice it to say, Hamsho’s handler, Al Braverman, didn’t know about it either; he’d have raised holy hell if he had.)
Although Mercante’s courtly, dignified manner and elegant speech suggested a privileged upbringing, his father, like Marciano’s, had been a Brockton shoe-factory worker. Arthur, who held Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from New York University, had been the first college graduate in his family.
In conversation he sounded more like a tenured professor than an authority in the school of broken noses.
He was also a physical fitness buff. At Tuesday night’s wake on Long Island, Benn Schulberg recalled that when his father, Budd, introduced him to Mercante, the referee offered up his abdomen and invited him to throw his best punch.
“I was 10 years old then, and every time I saw him after that he did the same thing,” recalled Schulberg fils. “The last time he challenged me to hit him in the stomach, I was 25 – and he was 85!”
Mercante, who had been in ill health for the past few years, expired peacefully on Saturday.
That night, just before the Andre Berto-Carlos Quintana welterweight title fight at the Bank Atlantic Center outside Fort Lauderdale, ring announcer Michael Buffer revealed his death on HBO’s national telecast, and called for a moment of silence while the ring bell tolled a final 10-count.
He was buried yesterday following Mass at St Joseph’s Church in Garden City.
Perhaps as a result of his devotion to fitness, Mercante remained active as a referee into the present millennium; he oversaw several world title fights after his 80th birthday, and was still working as a ringside judge at 85.
By that time he had been followed into the family business by his son Arthur Jr, who took charge of the 1999 Lennox Lewis-Evander Holyfield fight at the Garden.
A few years ago, the younger Mercante recalled, he was appointed to referee a fight at one of the Connecticut Tribal casinos, and his father tagged along for company. They shared a room that night, and around dawn Arthur Jr was awakened by what sounded like an ominous thump from across the room.
“I was afraid my dad had fallen out of bed, so, expecting the worst, I switched on the light to check on him,” he said.
What he discovered instead was 87-year-old Arthur Mercante doing his morning push-ups on the floor of the hotel room.
