By Bob Markus



It is one of the most famous sports photographs of all-time, right up there with the rear view image of a dying Babe Ruth, wearing his No.3 Yankee pinstripes and leaning on his bat as if it were a cane, in his farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium; right up there with the shot of New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, battered and bleeding, on his knees after a Giants' defeat in his final NFL season. It shows a foggy-eyed Gene Tunney, his gloved left hand grasping the lower strand of rope, trying to get up while, immediately behind him, referee Dave Barry is trying to get Jack Dempsey to go to a neutral corner. It is, of course, the quintessential image of the famous "long count" fight in Chicago's Soldier Field and I used to look at it every day on a wall in the sports department of the ChicagoTribune.

What brings it to mind is an almost serendipitous congruence of events over the last week. On Monday of last week, after playing golf, I stopped at the local library to pick up a book my wife had reserved. As it happens, the book wasn't there, but I took a few minutes to browse through the stacks and discovered a book Called "Tunney" with the subtitle "Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey." Being a boxing fan, but knowing little about Tunney other than that he was a great boxer who actually read books, I checked it out.

I started reading it almost immediately, but somehow by Saturday had not gotten even halfway through it. I sometimes say, only half in jest, that since my retirement a dozen years ago I often wonder how I ever found time to work. When I was writing sports for The Tribune I usually read at least one book a week and once read two complete novels in one day (I admit that neither was "War and Peace" or even "Rabbit Run.") Now I sometimes go for days without reading anything but newspapers and magazines. Don't ask me where the time goes because I don't know, although I suspect the time spent on the computer may have something to do with it.

Any way, by Saturday night I had just gotten to the part where Tunney is about to get his clock cleaned by Harry Greb while Dempsey is still in damage control mode over his failure to go into military service in World War I. Although I like to keep autumn Saturdays free for college football, I had allowed myself to be coerced into playing bridge in the couples group my wife founded. That took care of all but the first half of the early games and the late afternoon games were a total washout. We did get home in time for me to watch Missouri, my alma mater, blow out Colorado and after that I switched back and forth between Penn State-Ohio State and the World Series. When the Series game ended, somewhere around midnight, I discovered there was a boxing match on Showtime.

I hadn't a clue as to who the fighters were but I could see that I had gotten in on the start of a 12-round fight. After watching the first two rounds I asked myself if I really wanted to stay up past 1 a.m. to watch the conclusion and decided in the negative. So I went to bed, but a strange thing happened. Well, maybe not so strange. Somewhere around 3 a.m. I woke up for the reason that men of a certain age often do, but unlike most nights, I couldn't get back to sleep. So I slipped out of bed and went to the living room and turned on the TV. There on the screen was the same fight I had been watching three hours before, but now it was in the 11th round (obviously, it was a taped second screening of the original live bout).

The announcers quickly caught me up on the fact that I was watching the end of an IBF super middleweight championship bout from Montreal and that the champion, French Canadian Lucian Bute, had won all 11 rounds thus far over his American challenger, Librado Andrade. Bute, who had entered the bout with a 22-0 professional record, seemed certain of remaining unbeaten--until Andrade finally started to find the range. Before long, Bute was in real trouble. With less than a minute to go in the fight, he was despertely holding on. Twice he reeled backwards from one corner to the opposite corner without being hit. Finally, Andrade caught up to him and hit him with everything but the ring post. With 3 seconds to go, Bute hit the canvas. By rule, he could not be saved by the bell. So one thing was clear--he would have to regain his feet within 10 seconds.

But that was the only thing that was clear. Because referee Marion Wright, after reaching the count of five, stopped counting and ordered Andrade to a neutral corner. He might have taken an additional five or six seconds before picking up the count at six. Bute, by this time, was standing, although he didn't appear in any shape to continue fighting. But, since the bell, presumably, had sounded, he didn't need to be able to continue. All he needed to do was stand up and he actually appeared to have accomplished that in seven or eight seconds. Bute was awarded the unanimous decision amid a great deal of tumult. Both ring announcers began screaming about a long count and both Andrade's manager and the fighter himself said the fight had been stolen from them. Even referee Wright seemed a bit confused. He said that Andrade had "cost himself the fight" by not going to a neutral corner. "If he'd gone to a neutral corner he'd have won the fight," Wright said. But the referee had turned away from Bute in order to remonstrate with Andrade and thus did not see the champion pop to his feet well inside the limit.

The similarities between the two "long count" fights are evident. The winners in both lost only one round, the one in which they were knocked down. In both fights the losers cried "We wuz robbed." In both fights no one knew for sure if the champion could have survived without the extra time. Tunney always claimed he could have gotten up at any time after the count reached two, but stayed down to rest. Bute said he was more tired than hurt. There is one huge difference, however. The Dempsey-Tunney fight was seen by 104,000 people in Soldier field and heard by 50 million fight fans worldwide. It dominated the newspapers for days afterward. It is still talked about today, more than 80 years later.

The Bute-Andrade fight? I'll bet this is the first you've heard about it.

Blogger's note: Next Tuesday I'll be an election worker. No time for bloggin'. See you Nov. 11