True Tough Guys Won’t Be in Ring

Next week in Las Vegas, Sugar Ray Leonard will fight Roberto Duran, and we sports writers will pull out all the stops. Words such as courage , valor , toughness , daring , willingness to suffer and ability to take it will dot the prose.

Okay, Roberto Duran is tough. But does he have horns? He’ll try to left-hook you. But with a fist, not an antler. He can hit you. But he can’t gore you.

Sugar Ray Leonard is fast? Well, sure. But he only has two legs. How’d he like to run down something that has four?

One of the fighters might have a slight pull in the weights--a pound or two. But it won’t be 1,500 pounds. What if you had an opponent who had a ton edge on the scales? And four legs? And horns?

Duran is mean. But he won’t bite you. He won’t try to stomp you to death. At least, I hope he won’t.

Mike Tyson is fierce. He takes people out in 91 seconds. But how would you like an opponent so tough that if you last eight seconds with him, you win?

Listen! You think the 1927 Yankees’ lineup was Murderers’ Row? I’d like to show you the real article--a lineup that would make the Capone gang look like vicars.

You get in the ring with Duran, you get the Marquess of Queensberry rules: No gouging, head-butting, kicking, biting, hitting a man when he’s down. This bunch knows no rules. There are no offsides, interference calls, holding penalties. No timeouts. No play ruled dead. When the play’s over, you run like hell. Or you’ll be called dead.

You’ve heard of the football team so tough it was responsible for “six nosebleeds, five broken teeth, four limp-offs--and three positively-refused-to-return-to-play”? That wouldn’t even be a good night for this bunch.

You think hockey is violent? Hah!

Sports teams get called the Bulls, Broncos, Steers, Longhorns, Mavericks, Mustangs, Colts. But this bunch is the real article.

Football coaches have been accused of getting their lineups out of the bushes in Central Park, mob hideouts and post office walls. Well, this lineup is as hand-picked for runaway malice as the crew of a pirate ship or the Dillinger Gang. The Gestapo would run.

Tackling Bo Jackson is a minuet compared to taking on this bunch.

What we have reference to is the cast of characters who will line up against the real cowboys, not the 1-11 football team, all next week in Las Vegas.

While Leonard-Duran will be settling their championship at the Mirage, the cowboys will be settling theirs across town at the Thomas & Mack Arena in the National Finals Rodeo, the World Series of cowboying, the last stand of the Old West in our time. It is where they crown their bull-riding, bronc-riding, steer-wrestling and calf-roping champions of the year.

They are in tougher than Duran or Leonard. You remember the old fight cartoon where one pug looks across the ring and sees this hairy sub-human with the invisible brow, drooling in the other corner, and his manager says to the referee, “My boy says he don’t fight till he hears it talk”? Well, the cowboys’ opponents can’t talk or think very much; they’re pretty much impervious to pain and they have no conscience. And there’s no referee to stop it. All they know is, they want to get these guys off their backs and drop-kick them to the moon if possible.

They’re hungry, homicidal, irritable, trigger-tempered.

In most sporting events, you are not required to make your opponent any madder than he already is. You don’t have to lean across the line of scrimmage to Lawrence Taylor and suggest his birth was an accident or spit in his eye or insult his sister. But you are expected to rowel an angry bull or a frenzied pony if he starts to show compassion. The last thing a cowboy wants is for an animal to hit the tanbark and just stand there.

There’s little likelihood of that. A cowboy would carry a rattlesnake if he thought it would make the horse buck more. But rodeo stock is rounded up for its antisocial quotient. These guys would all be in the Mafia if they were human. Or they’d be serial killers.

They don’t fear man, just hate him. They have names like Midnight and Terminator and Geronimo. The bulls are called Cyclone, Twister, Tailspin, Bullet and even Mack the Knife. Sometimes, they just have a number. Usually 221 or 288, but it probably should be 1375286990132 Attica. Last year’s Bull of the Year was a double-rank, dagger-horned, four-footed sociopath named Skoal’s Pacific Bell.

“That’s because he likes to reach out and touch someone,” drawls his owner, Dan Russell. He put more people in traction than the Hollywood Freeway.

These cowboys are really America’s Team. Eighty John Waynes. Against the baddest cast of characters west of the Pecos. And they don’t get helmets and face masks and shoulder pads, just a ten-gallon hat and a short rope. They are the first guys since the early Christians who have to fight wild animals for a living.

Roberto Duran might get knocked out. But a whole bunch of clowns don’t have to jump in the ring in fright wigs and rubber barrels to coax Sugar Ray Leonard out of stomping him to death or sinking a horn in his groin. Also, Roberto should know another thing: You can’t say,” No mas! “ to a Brahma bull.