Boxing: Tyson watchdogs must wrestle with their consciences

Bob Arum, the boxing promoter, was educated at the Harvard law school and was once a key member of Robert F Kennedy's anti-mob legal team. You might think that would have made him a fierce guardian of the truth, but you would be wrong. Once, when challenged over a statement that seemed to flatly contradict one he had made 24 hours earlier, he shot back at his interrogator: "I was lying yesterday."

An assertion he made a few years ago was, however, a lot harder to dispute. Holding court in Las Vegas, he told a bunch of out-of-town reporters, who were quizzing him on the likely outcome of a Nevada State Athletic Commission meeting: "Read Royce Feour – he sends up the most reliable smoke signals west of the Mississippi."

Feour is the boxing columnist of the Las Vegas Review Journal, an assignment so prone to moral compromise that to do it decently, to keep the respect of both your readers and the people with whom you have to deal with professionally on a daily basis, is a feat of both personality and conscience that he has been performing formidably for many years now.

But this may be his finest week. At a time when his city is besieged by the need to generate new revenue, when even the executive director of the Athletic Commission agrees that it would be naïve to separate totally the moral issues involved in today's meeting to consider the licencing of Mike Tyson to fight Lennox Lewis on 6 April from the hugely beneficial effect the affair would have on the local economy, has made his position as clear as the desert air.

In all the debate, Feour's smoke signal is about as ambiguous as an unsheathed tomahawk.

In his Sunday column he wrote that it was time for Tyson to be told that boxing professionally was his privilege, not his right. He then listed Tyson's abuses of privilege since the Commission voted, with just one nay, to re-licence him after his 12-month suspension – and $3m (£2.1m) fine – for biting the ears of Evander Holyfield.

There was the time he admitted to attempting to break the arm of his opponent Frans Botha in the ring. There was the punching of Orlin Norris after the bell. There was the attack on Lou Savarese at the end of their fight in Scotland. There was his refusal to submit to a drug test before the fight with Andrew Golota in Detroit. There was the disastrous publicity which came in a trip to Cuba which may have broken federal law, in that US citizens are obliged to seek special permission to visit Castro's island. Then, finally, there was the unbridled mayhem and obscenity in the Hudson Theatre in Manhattan last week.

After a series of interviews with all five members of the commission, Feour believes today's vote cannot be confidently called. Luther Mack, the chairman, a hamburger millionaire, believes "the biggest key" is the Clark County district attorney Stewart Bell's decision on whether to indict Tyson, as he is being urged to by the local police department, for the rape of a local woman. Another member, John Bailey, a lawyer, is worried that the commission may vote itself a "cop-out" by saying that any re-licencing of Tyson is conditional on the DA's decision. Bailey says that he would have a problem with such a compromise because it could impinge on Tyson's right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Mrs Amy Ayoub is concerned about the Cuban episode. The two other members, doctors Tony Alamo and Flip Homansky, say they are wrestling with their decisions.

In all this agonising, Feour might have been tempted to say that the smoke was getting in his eyes. Instead, he marched to his computer in the Review Journal's sportsroom and wrote a first sentence both splendidly brief and unequivocal. It said, "Enough is enough." The headline over his column was equally emphatic. "Time," it said, "for the Commission to knock out Tyson."

If Arum is right, later today Lewis-Tyson, potentially the richest fight in boxing history, will be looking for a new home. It will probably not be too hard to find. In New York Madison Square Garden has already made one record site fee offer of $12m, and some feel that Donald Trump – strangely quiet on the issue so far – could well see the Tyson circus as one way of re-charging his currently slack Atlantic City casinos.

None of this, of course, is the concern of the man who says it is time for boxing to call a halt to Tyson. In the small hours of this morning the fighter was scheduled to appear on the coast-to-coast Larry King Show, from which no doubt an entirely different smoke signal will rise. Unlike the one in Las Vegas, it will probably have truth and decency once again blowing in the wind.