Golota Needs Whole Lotta Personal Help

Every fighter has some opponent who gives him fits, whom he has big trouble overcoming.

Ali had Frazier and Ken Norton, Dempsey had Tunney, Sugar Ray Robinson had Gene Fullmer.

And Andrew Golota has Andrew Golota.

You know, the first look you get at Golota, you think someone has made a terrible mistake.

I mean, this has to be an impostor, right? It’s not that he looks like a choirboy, he’s got that thick neck and big hands and all, but, you think, Hey! Shouldn’t the Golota we’ve all come to know and fear have horns growing out of his head? Shouldn’t he look like something that turns into a bat at midnight, sleeps in a coffin, or goes around London in the fog looking for girls to rip?

Golota, you see, really owes Mike Tyson a debt. If Tyson doesn’t shock the nation with his mad-dog performance in the Holyfield fight, Golota has a corner on the market as pugilism’s worst nightmare.

You will all recall Golota as the pug who had the once-undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, Riddick Bowe, at his mercy in a fight when he suddenly resorted to a spate of foul fighting that would have done credit to a Central Park mugger, hitting Bowe so many times below the belt that the referee, who already had warned him after a few such blows, had no recourse but to disqualify him.

It was, in the view of ringsiders, the only way Golota could have lost that fight. Golota lost, not to Bowe but to Golota.

Then, in a rematch, Golota was not only beating Bowe again but had floored him twice--only the second time in his career Bowe had been knocked down--when he again inexplicably let Golota take over. He let him concentrate his attack on foul territory with the same result: disqualification.

The only two fights he had ever lost as a pro, he let Golota beat him. Talk about being your own worst enemy.

The word went out that Golota was a head case.

Which is too bad because a lot of people whose opinions I respect--Larry Merchant and Budd Schulberg, to name two--assured me they viewed Golota as the best heavyweight in the world today.

Conventional wisdom in the fight game is, never match your fighter with someone who is better. Golota had no choice. The guy in the other corner is no problem. It’s the Mr. Hyde in him he has to subdue.

We’ve long since come to terms with the fact you don’t get contenders out of monasteries. Sonny Liston came out of the Missouri state pen to win the title. Tyson took his title to prison. Dempsey rode rods, Jake La Motta once threw a hatchet at a cop and a lead pipe to the head of a store owner who had the gall to bother him while he was robbing his store.

Golota seemed to be following in the grand tradition. There was this robbery rap in his native Poland and the occasional saloon fight where some guy was full enough of slivovitz to get on Golota’s nerves. Last report had it they survived. Barely.

So, a lot of us weren’t sure whether Golota would be in a cage like Hannibal Lecter when we went to interview him at an airport hotel the other day.

Actually, the real Andrew Golota looks less like a public enemy than a crew-cutted defensive tackle in the NFL. He was polite, good humored, even affable. Not even an Albert Belle. Even when someone asked (rather truculently, I thought) what he could have been thinking of when he delivered all those foul blows, Golota shrugged. “You got to remember, there was a lot of craziness.” He even suggested he “blew my cool.”

He’s no threat to David Niven but he speaks English passably. “I studied some English in Poland but you have to remember, American is different from English,” he tells you.

He came to Chicago with his wife in 1991. He was on his way to a career as a truck driver when he dropped into the local gym one day. He had been the best fighter in years in Poland with 111 amateur victories and he won the bronze medal in the ’88 Olympics in Seoul. The gym rats were expecting just another big slow European, but Golota was no Polish joke. He knocked out six of his first nine opponents in the first round.

Those are Joe Louis-type stats and he soon took aboard the master trainer, Lou Duva, who headed the Pole’s vault to leading contender.

Golota was in town with Lennox Lewis this week to beat the drums for their WBC title fight at Atlantic City on Oct. 4.

Lewis is the classy Brit who won the gold medal at Seoul in ’88 (knocking out Bowe in the process).

The fight game was never in a more parlous state. Golota is coming into the ring after two disgraceful performances in the Bowe fights. Lewis’ last two opponents had to be disqualified--Oliver McCall because he burst into tears in mid-fight and had to be led sobbing from the ring, and Henry Akinwande, who positively refused to fight and was thrown out of the ring and had his purse held up. The Tyson-Holyfield debacle made it five fights in a row to end in disqualifications.

Lewis is the stylish boxer-puncher who looks like the world’s best fighter in one fight and a candy-coated wimp in the next. But Golota has even bigger problems. He faces two opponents. Before he can get to Lewis, first he has to beat back Golota. And, if he can’t, the fight game may be on its way to its sixth consecutive disqualification. And it may have to disqualify itself.