His Fistful of Dollars May Help

If ever a sport appeared in need of a Messianic intervention, or even a knight on a white horse, boxing is that sport.

Historically, it has been a happy hunting ground of rogues and rascals, con men and double-dealers, guys with their own decks, double-entry bookkeepers and sleight-of-hand paymasters. Its coat-of-arms should be the double-cross rampant on a field of broken promises. As the late Red Smith used to remind me, “There are very few archbishops in boxing.”

The game itself is a miasma of conflicting authorities, sub-atomic weight divisions, a rainbow of championships created by offshore island jurisdictions and available usually to the highest bidder. You want your fight to be for a title? Fine. They’ll create one for you. How would you like a junior-super-light-cruiserweight North American and Caribbean championship complete with gold belt? Send check.

Bill Daniels is the latest entrepreneur to come riding into the midst of this anarchy on the white horse of business probity.

Daniels is, of all things, a fight fan. He is also one of the world’s richest men.

The two are connected. Years ago, when Daniels wanted to see a televised prize fight, he had to drive 300 miles from his native Wyoming to Denver, where they had the magic box. This gave Bill the idea of piping in television to the wind-swept mesas of Casper, Laramie, Cody and points west.

The next thing you knew, he was in L.A. setting up a cable network, Prime Ticket, to telecast, among other things, Laker games, hockey games--and fights. He acquired an interest in the Lakers in the process.

He sold Prime Ticket for $200 million and plunged into the high-rolling world of cable TV and corporate mergers with total values of $4.9 billion.

Everything he touched turned to money. He dabbled in sports promotion like every other nouveau riche of the time, buying the Los Angeles Express in the U.S. Football League--but selling out to Bill Oldenburg when he heard that Donald Trump had violated a league agreement and gave millions to one player, Herschel Walker.

He bought the Utah Stars in the short-lived American Basketball Assn., which perished 16 games into the 1975-76 season.

You know all you need to about Daniels when I tell you that, when his grand-nephew enrolled at Harvard Business School, he urged that his classes include one on business ethics. “Uncle, they don’t have one,” the grand-nephew, Mat Tinley, told him. Neither, Daniels found out, did Stanford, Brown nor any other outstanding business training ground.

This bothered him to the extent he promptly gave the University of Denver $20 million on condition they include a course on ethics and integrity in the curriculum.

Four years after the Utah Stars went into bankruptcy, Daniels returned to Salt Lake to pay off every season-ticket holder, every vendor and every creditor who had been left holding the bag.

But can he return boxing to its once-proud role in the pantheon of modern sports?

Daniels thinks so. With Tinley, he is throwing his deep pockets into the fray with a pledge, not to make boxing an archbishopric but a place where the gladiator gets a fair shake and the payoff specialists get shown the door.

It’s a noble crusade. But it has been tried before. In the ‘60s, a business school graduate named Bill Rosensohn left his brokerage firm for the more subtle transactions of pugilism.

In a short time, to his bewilderment, he found himself getting his picture in the paper alongside the likes of “Fat Tony” Salerno and various suspects in the Anastasia barber chair rubout. Guys whose office is a pay phone have more to say about this business than guys with their corporate jets and bottom lines.

Daniels is not worried. A Navy flier who got his wings one month before Pearl Harbor and who flew in two wars (World War II and Korea), he has told his grand-nephew, “Mat, when you have come in at 10,000 feet with a shell coming at you at the speed of sound, a guy with a diamond ring and a cigar isn’t going to scare you.”

Why doesn’t he just buy the Dodgers?, he is asked. “Last year, $700 million was spent on pay-per-view boxing,” he says. “Of the top 50 pay-per-view events, 27 were boxing. And, of the $700 million, $360 million was kept by the cable operators and the rest went to the promoters.”

That, of course, is serious money. And Daniels and Tinley hope it can be handled by their “America Presents” fight promotion so that the proceeds don’t fall into the pockets of a broken-nosed guy in Jersey whose chief business expense has been flowers for bereaved widows whose husbands he rubbed out.

But Daniels is not exactly a novice to the raffish halls of fistiana. He once bankrolled the Denver heavyweight, Ron Lyle, who fought Muhammad Ali and George Foreman for the title. Lyle went to prison for murder. Twice.

The fight game is the only interstate commerce that manages to escape federal regulation. But, maybe it doesn’t need it. Many years ago, when the reformers were after the sport, proposing a national commissioner, they brought their proposal to promoter Jimmy Johnson, better known as “The Boy Bandit.”

Johnston frowned. “A boxing commissioner?” he said. “They already got one!” Who?, they wanted to know. “Al Capone,” Johnston told them. With a little help from Owney Madden. And Machine Gun Kelly.