Holyfield-Botha bout shows someone needs head examined

You'll notice ticket sales are slow for Saturday's geriatric wrestling match between Evander Holyfield and Frans Botha.

Through midweek, fewer than 1,000 had been sold. Local radio stations are giving away fistfuls of passes for the event scheduled for the Thomas & Mack Center. By the time the match begins, don't be surprised if the spectacle's pay-to-gawk producers are handing out television sets to encourage viewership.

Holyfield is 47 years old. Botha is 41.

It's not a fight card. It's an AARP card.

Who's on the undercard, Cain and Abel?

Perhaps the fight's promoters should consider moving the main event to 4:30 p.m. and call it the "Early Bird Special."

Concessions figure to be slow -- hot dogs give the elderly indigestion -- but Metamucil sales could set records.

Forget the pre-fight physicals. Just have these two fossils carbon dated.

For those who say I'm making too much of their 88 years of experience, we're not talking about knuckleball pitchers. Professional boxers -- especially the heavyweights who have experienced the kind of ring wars Holyfield and Botha have endured -- don't age like regular people. The brain can only take so much cannon fire.

Others will point to the entertaining comeback of former heavyweight champ George Foreman as a sign stranger things have happened in boxing.

Forget that Foreman was a far greater ring strategist than either of Saturday's combatants.

Once a big swinger, Foreman changed his style to a chopping, defensive posture that maximized his undeniable weight advantage and minimized the risk to his head. Not so Holyfield and Botha. They figure to go at it like a couple of 'roidheads in a biker bar.

Call it entertainment if you'd like. I call it inviting trouble.

Holyfield turned pro during the first half of the Reagan era. He has traded shots with some of the biggest names in the division -- from the previous generation. He lost two bouts overseas in 2008 to guys named Ibragimov and Valuev, but was undefeated in 2009. (He didn't fight.)

Botha's career has been consistent: Always game, never gifted. The last great fighter he took on was Lennox Lewis, who won by technical knockout in two rounds. If you've forgotten the fight, it's understandable. It was a decade ago.

Mike Tyson once bit Holyfield's ear. The worst Botha can do is give it a good gumming.

But in this bout, Botha enters the ring as the World Boxing Foundation champion. I'd never heard of it, either, but the "WBF" was "founded" in 2004 in Australia -- presumably by a guy with a sense of humor.

Holyfield and Botha aren't the only ones who should have their heads examined before this fight.

Members of the Nevada Athletic Commission should receive MRIs as well. Something has severely impaired their judgment.

I suspect they were motivated by the potential to hear a cash register ring in a community that has struggled mightily during the recession. Trouble is, their logic is flawed. Whether the fight is entertaining or a slow dance by circus bears is beside the point.

A Holyfield-Botha as a major main event dumps a spit bucket on the commission's credibility, and it's awful for our heavily self-promoted image as the "Boxing Capital of the World."

The fight is the marketing equivalent of signing Wayne Newton to four-wall the Trop. It's designed for curiosity-seekers, fan clubs and nostalgia buffs, not for high rollers, hipsters and aficionados.

I'm not sure what the lack of interest in this fight says about the state of the Las Vegas economy, but I suspect it means the boxing public has better sense and ethics than the Nevada Athletic Commission.

ON THE BOULEVARD: Check my blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/smith for this week's Boulevard notes.

Have an item for the Bard of the Boulevard? E-mail comments and contributions to Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.