The Hard Way to Easy Money : Many Say Lou Duva Deserves the Rewards After Growing Up in Tough Times, in Tough Game

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. —  Reading Lou Duva’s face, you can still see the hard times that long ago tried the soul of the patriarch of professional boxing’s most powerful family.

Lou Duva’s face looks like a California mudslide. Everything begins to sag just below the eyes. From there, the lines run long and deep, down to magnificent jowls. Even when he smiles, you still read tough times.

And Lou Duva smiles a lot these days. His fighter, Evander Holyfield, is going to make $20 million Friday night.

Yet, to look at Duva, a onetime dead-end kid from Paterson, N.J., you would think he had spent his 50-odd years in boxing without so much as a decent $200 semi-main welterweight.

But this 5-foot-7 man with the Buddha-like belly heads a family that controls not only the most valuable prize in sports, the undisputed heavyweight championship, but also boxing’s only other undisputed champion, lightweight Pernell Whitaker.

Another million-dollar fighter in the Duva stable is Meldrick Taylor, undefeated until beaten by Julio Cesar Chavez last year.

When Lou Duva, 68, remembers his boxing roots, he sometimes finds it difficult to grasp how far he and his sons, Dan and Dino, and his daughter-in-law, Kathy, have come in the business.

In the late 1960s, Lou Duva was promoting club fights in small New Jersey towns, hoping to clear a couple of hundred dollars. Friday night, when Holyfield makes the first defense of his championship against George Foreman, promoters say the fight could gross $80-100 million.

Dan Duva, 40, remembers: “Dad used to send me all over these little towns to hang up fight posters, to set up the folding chairs at the shows, put up the ring, write and deliver the press releases to newspapers and sell tickets.”

At about that time, Lou figured out a way to get ahead. He sent Dan to law school. Today, lawyer Dan Duva runs the family firm, Main Events, out of its West Paterson, N.J., offices. Lou has remained true to his first love, smelly boxing gyms and training fighters.

On the administrative end, Dan is assisted by Dino Duva, 32, and Dan’s wife, Kathy, contact person for the media.

It all started during the Depression, on the streets of Paterson, where pugnacious Lou Duva was a frequent and eager street fighter. He became a pro featherweight of mixed success. He had an 18-6 record.

“All the losses were on cuts,” he said. “I wasn’t a bad fighter, but I got cut almost every time.

“Actually, it was tough to be an athlete during the Depression. Everyone had to work, kids included. I got kicked out of Paterson Central High School when I was 15 for sleeping. I had to work nights setting pins in a bowling alley and selling newspapers. I’d come to class and fall asleep.”

Duva, who speaks Italian, is the son of immigrant parents from Foggia, Italy. “It was tough for all of us,” he said. “Dad was a chef at times and also a dye worker in a textile plant.

“After I got kicked out of school, I forged my birth certificate and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. That’s where I learned how to drive trucks and shoot craps.”

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Duva was out of the CCC and driving trucks in Paterson.

“Four friends of mine talked it over, and we went to the Post Office to enlist in the Navy,” he said. “They took all four of my friends but rejected me because I had false teeth to replace the ones that got knocked out in fights.”

All four of Duva’s friends who signed up that day were killed in Pacific combat.

The Army took Duva and his dentures and assigned him to a base in Jackson, Miss. It was a town from which he was banned for 90 days because of a racial incident.

“I was riding a base bus with a bunch of pals from New Jersey into Jackson on leave,” Duva said.

“The bus made a stop on the way into town for three elderly black ladies, who got on. The seats were all filled, so my pals and I got up and gave them ours. Well, this here redneck bus driver sees this and stops the bus.

“He starts lecturing me about how that sort of thing wasn’t done in Mississippi, and I start barking back at him. I’m telling him where I come from, you give a lady your seat. Next thing I know, my pals and I are dropped off at the MP office, and a redneck, 30-day-wonder lieutenant is yelling at me.

“He shoved me, so I decked him. I wound up in the stockade for three days and banned from Jackson for three months.”

By the 1950s, Duva was a prominent East Coast boxing trainer/manager, handling marquee names such as onetime middleweight champion Joey Giardello, welterweight Stephan Redl and heavyweight Lee Savold.

He also had 30 trucks in his growing hauling business.

By the time Duva’s son Dan was on board, Main Events began making bigger waves. The family was promoting fight shows at Ice World in Totowa, N.J., where it televised monthly cards featuring Bobby Czyz, Vinny Pazienza, Livingstone Bramble, Johnny Bumphus and Pinklon Thomas.

The Duvas’ debut at the megafight level was the 1981 Sugar Ray Leonard-Thomas Hearns bout at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Their stable of world-class fighters was enhanced considerably after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when they recruited Holyfield, Taylor, Whitaker, Mark Breland and Tyrell Biggs.

Duva and everyone else in pro boxing saw in Holyfield raw materials that could be developed into those of a top-notch pro. The only question was, could the light-heavyweight who was kicked out of the Olympics on a controversial foul grow into a heavyweight?

“(When he was) an amateur, I liked everything about Evander,” Lou Duva said. “First, he had a great attitude. He wanted to be a champion and knew how much work would be involved. Whatever price he had to pay in the gym, he’d pay it. He was an outstanding athlete, and he was bright--a fast learner.

“But at 6-1, we weren’t sure he could be a heavyweight. So we brought in nutrition and physical training people who slowly added weight and strength to him.”

Holyfield, at 208 pounds, knocked out Buster Douglas with one punch last fall to take the heavyweight title. Friday night, Holyfield will earn a minimum of $20 million, and his purse could swell to $25 million if pay-per-view sales go through the roof, as co-promoter Bob Arum says they are.

And if Holyfield beats Foreman, he stands to make another $20 million in a showdown with former champion Mike Tyson.

None of this would have happened had Holyfield remained a light-heavyweight or a cruiserweight. His ’84 Olympic teammate, Virgil Hill, is still unbeaten and still a light-heavyweight. On June 3, he will appear in his first million-dollar fight, against Hearns.

Duva co-trains Holyfield, Whitaker and Taylor with 1950s middleweight George Benton. Breland and Biggs, disappointing as pros, have departed.

Duva said the game plan for Friday night in Atlantic City Convention Hall calls for Holyfield to deny Foreman not only opportunity, but luck.

“We want Evander to take away George’s leverage, stay away from his right hand, take away his rhythm . . . and avoid getting himself in situations where George could get lucky.”

To simulate the 250-pound Foreman in training, Duva hired as sparring partners tall, cetacean-like boxers: Stan Ward, 245 pounds; Tracy Thomas, 255; Mike Bardwell, 255; and Eddie Richardson, 240.

Foreman’s much talked-about punching power prompted this question for Duva Tuesday: Does Foreman hit significantly harder than another big hitter, Michael Dokes, who in 10 rounds in 1989 was unable to even wobble Holyfield?

“Yes,” Duva said. “Foreman hits you with heavy, thunderous punches. Dokes is a different kind of puncher. He hits you more often, and his punches have a lot of snap, like Joe Louis’. Getting hit by Foreman is like getting hit with a sledgehammer. And we don’t want Evander ‘trying on George for size’ either. In a couple of fights, we’ve seen Evander let himself get hit early in a fight because he wanted to see just how hard the other guy could hit. You don’t do that against Foreman.”

Team Duva doesn’t claim promotional genius for building up a fight that Dan Duva believes will gross a minimum of $60 million in pay-per-view receipts alone. He is projecting that at least 1.5 million homes will purchase the Friday cable telecast at an average price of $40, which comes to $60 million.

If 2 million homes buy the fight, the pay-per-view gross would grow to $80 million. Add $10 million from the live gate at Convention Hall--where 20,000 seats are priced from $1,000 to $100--plus $5 million from foreign TV and $5 million from closed circuit and you have a $100-million show.

Nearly everyone in boxing says Lou Duva deserves it, and he can thank the real promoter of the fight: George Foreman.

“America has fallen in love with the guy,” Dan Duva said. “He’s sensational at the press conferences, the talk shows, in interviews. . . . He’s carrying everyone along with him in this thing. Right now, he’s the No. 1 guy in sports. He’s captured the public.”

And maybe he has fooled the public, some conclude. Foreman, the heavyweight champion in the mid-1970s until Muhammad Ali exposed him as a three-round fighter in Zaire in 1974, had been retired for eight days shy of 10 years when, in 1987, he launched an improbable comeback.

Foreman weighed 315 pounds when he went into training. In his comeback, he has knocked over 24 of 24 mediocre opponents.

And so Foreman, 42 and carrying what looks like about 250 pounds--the eagerly anticipated weigh-in is Thursday night--has sold the notion that he can defeat an undefeated heavyweight champion in his prime.

And America has bought it, big time.

For the Duvas, all their promotions should be this easy.