I have an excellent book about opera called , which was written by the critic Peter Conrad. In the preface, he tries to define what opera is. ?It is the song of our irrationality,? he writes. ?The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law? people sing what they feel? This is a realm of emotional atavism.?

That?s certainly true of opera. Stretch the point a little and you might think it is true of the strange world of comic books as well ? Superman, Judge Dredd, Batman and Robin and the crew of comic villains, the Joker, the Riddler and the others. This week, it occurs to me that it is also true of the bizarre world of boxing, especially of that strange man, Don King, whose wild hair and larger-than-life presence puts him right up there with the Joker and the Riddler. I guess he?d be called the Promoter.

He?s been promoting a card at Madison Square Garden in New York that features Andrew Golota, fighting Chris Byrd for the International Boxing Federation?s title of heavyweight champ. As I write this, that fight is going to take place in the evening of the day after tomorrow. As you read it, it will have happened the night before last.

From here, odds are that Golota will win. Byrd was described by one sportswriter as ?bigger than Fred Astaire, but no more dangerous?. Golota shouldn?t be fighting at all. He retired three years ago. He hasn?t beaten a top ten heavyweight in the last nine years. He was disqualified twice for fouling Riddick Bowe, once persisting in hitting him below the belt despite repeated warnings, and despite dominating the match with perfectly legal punches.

Lennox Lewis knocked him out in the first round of their fight in 1997. He quit in a fight against Michael Grant, and quit in another against Mike Tyson. It?s a disgraceful record. (I might also mention, although it doesn?t count directly against Golota, that his trainer, Lou Duva, once said of him that: ?He?s a guy who gets up at six o?clock in the morning, regardless of what time it is.?)

So what?s Golota doing in a championship fight? Well you may ask. He wasn?t even ranked until he signed a promotional contract with the Promoter earlier this year. He got the rating on the strength of a couple of fights against men at the very end of their careers. Stiffs, some uncharitable commentators called them. Legendary New York reporter Jack Newfield explained in the New York Sun this week that, ?King is using him because he is white, and King loves huckstering black-white fights, often mismatches like Ali-Wepner, Holmes-Cooney and Tyson-McNeely.?

Like many people, Newfield has a passion for boxing. He says: ?Boxing is my guilty pleasure. I love it and I hate it. I appreciate it, but I?m also the first one to yell ?Stop the fight? when it becomes an unequal beating rather than a competitive sport.?

He?s not the only writer with such a passion. Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, James Elroy and a host of others have been inspired by the sport which, at its best, can be a noble contest of strength and guile. But at its worst ? well, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon described it, 50 years ago, as the red light district of sports.

Estes Kefauver, the American politician who headed the 1950/51 US Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organised Crime in Interstate Commerce, known as the Kefauver hearings, concluded, in effect, that the only way to get rid of corruption in boxing was to get rid of boxing. Boxing was so corrupt in those days that at a meeting of mob bosses and boxing managers in 1957, a Mafioso called Blinky Palermo was taped complaining that ?legitimate businessmen are starting to horn in on it?. The sport has its ups and its downs, but it does seem to have touched some kind of bottom in the last few years. Scandals have been blooming like wildflowers in spring.

There are now four rating organisations - the World Boxing Association, the World Boxing Organisation, the International Boxing Federation and the World Boxing Council. That?s great for promoters, but it can?t be good for the sport. Boxing is the sport of the underclass. The fighters fight for the money. For most of them, it?s a ticket out of poverty. But the vast majority don?t end up with a lot of money sticking to their bank accounts, even though the purses these days sound huge.

A fighter?s got fees to pay, handlers and trainers and bodyguards to pay, outstretched palms to cross with silver. There?s no pension, no union, no health insurance for boxers. For every George Foreman who is sensible enough to hang on to the money he makes, there are a thousand others who end up with no money, bruised brains and slurred speech.

Boxing is like no other sport. There is no national commissioner of boxing to set standards and to see that people measure up to them. There are no leagues, no schedules. The boxing ratings are at best guesswork and, at worst, up for sale. The sanctioning bodies force fighters to pay huge fees for the right to defend their titles. They manipulate the ratings, they assign incompetent people to be judges.

They allow conflicts of interest that would never be tolerated in other sports. Once the fight is over, unless someone is killed, they are not interested in why one fighter won and the other didn?t. The Promoter, Don King, is the dominant figure in boxing. He is said to have accumulated a fortune of something like $200 million dollars in his career.

It?s no wonder I associate him with the Riddler and the Joker. King?s first career was in the illegal numbers business in Cleveland. He shot and killed a man in 1954, but the death was declared a justifiable homicide. Some 12 years later, he beat a man who owed him money to death on the streets of Cleveland. He was convicted of second-degree murder, but the trial judge, for reasons best known to himself, reduced the conviction from murder to manslaughter. Not only did King serve only three-and-a-half years, but Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes later pardoned him.

He has been sued a lot. Mike Tyson, who is known to be pretty broke, is currently after him for $100 million, out of which he claims to have been cheated. One of the few who ever won a case against him was the heavyweight champion, Tim Witherspoon, who was awarded $900,000. Word is he hasn?t seen much of it.

Muhammad Ali sued him after his 1980 fight with Larry Holmes, claiming King short-changed him by $1.2 million. He settled for $50,000. In 1998, prosecutors charged that King had defrauded Lloyd?s of London out of $350,000 in training expenses for a fight involving Julio Cesar Chavez. He was acquitted, and took members of the jury and their families to the Bahamas, where he reportedly gave them envelopes of money to spend on shopping, and then to Atlanta to watch the Holyfield-Bean fight. He did the same sort of thing with a jury that acquitted him of tax fraud and conspiracy in 1984. He took them on an all expenses-paid trip to London to see Frank Bruno fight Tim Witherspoon.

When Mike Tyson was upset by Buster Douglas in Tokyo in 1990, King reportedly tried to get World Boxing Council president Jose Suliaman to overturn the result, claiming the referee long-counted Douglas when Tyson put him down early in the fight. In 2000, International Boxing Federation founder Robert W Lee went on trial on 33 counts of bribery, conspiracy, fraud and other charges related to a federal investigation that uncovered payoffs for ranking fighters. King was an unindicted co-conspirator.

Lee was acquitted on all but six charges, making it impossible for prosecutors to go after King, but two other promoters, Cedric Kushner and Bob Arum were fined and suspended from being involved in boxing in several states. No question. Boxing is in a mess.

But there is a little good news. On March 31, the US Senate passed Republican Senator John McCain?s proposed legislation to create a national commission to regulate boxing, and to enforce national health and safety standards. The bill would create a centralised medical registry that local commissions would use to license or suspend boxers.

Quoted in Jack Newfield?s piece in the New York Sun, McCain said: ?I have derived great pleasure from boxing over the years, but I continue to be disgusted by the recurring scandals and corruption. Boxing desperately needs strict regulation.? The reference to recurring scandals was an allusion to ?an on-going federal investigation of Bob Arum?s Top Rank Company?s role,? Newfield wrote, ?in fixing fights and doctoring medical records to get licences for boxers with eye or brain injuries.?

It is expected that this investigation may yield a dozen or more indictments on charges of fight-fixing. Will McCain?s legislation work? I wouldn?t bet on it. It?s like the man said, the only way to eliminate the fix in boxing is to eliminate boxing. Nobody wants to do that.

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