THE FIGHT THE WORLD FORGOTBy Trevor Sacks

In 1979, Muhammad Ali retires and a white South African fights a black American to succeed him as heavyweight champion of the world

I’m six years old and this is a special occasion: my mother is letting me stay up after midnight to watch a fight on TV. It’s all everyone has been talking about for weeks: white South Africa’s golden boy, Gerrie Coetzee – The Bionic Hand – versus America’s Neon Leon Spinks.

We aren’t the kind of family to follow boxing but this is different. So my older brothers, my mother and I are all sitting on the couch looking at our boy Gerrie in Monte Carlo, a place so glamorous it can surely only exist in cinema cigarette ads.

The papers have been full of the fight. The Americans hardly give Gerrie a chance, even though they can’t leave Leon alone about his excesses: the jewellery, mink coats, drink and drugs.

Back in SA we can talk about Gerrie all day long. He’s twenty-four and born to box, born in Boksburg, no less. He’s an ex-dental technician and the joke goes he used to fix teeth for a living, now he knocks ‘em out.

Gerrie’s a simple guy, he’ll have you believe, who speaks in a high drone and once broke both hands on Mike ‘The Tank’ Schutte in the dirtiest fight of the century. Doctors put pins in the right hand and now the bones have fused into a permanent fist. The bionic hand. South Africa’s never had a superhero so Gerrie’s as close as we come.

Up on our TV screen we can see the stadium set up in the square below the Prince’s Palace in Monte Carlo. They’re saying that among the thousands in the crowd, there are 320 South Africans, and the Crown Prince himself.

It’s not live, though. No, the fight’s already over in Europe. But South Africa only got TV last year and the government still isn’t quite sure that the medium isn’t somehow evil. In any case, it’s Sunday, the Sabbath, and it’s a sin to show sport on a Sunday. And that’s why we’re all waiting till a minute after midnight to see our national hero fight.

Gerrie Coetzee stands calm and proud in his orange-and-blue shorts, the white of his skin making up the final colour of the old South African flag. His moustache is in superb shape.

Spinks is at ease, jiggling up and down in that manner of sportsmen trying to get loose before the event.

“Who wants coffee?” asks my mother. Well, we all do, so Ma rushes to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. My brothers and I don’t take our eyes off the bright colours of our man in Monte Carlo. They’re announcing the names and I can hear South African voices cheering for Gerrie.

The bell goes for the first round. Leon Spinks doesn’t waste any time. He comes out charging, leading with the afro and swinging at Gerrie like an angry man.

“Ma!” calls my brother. “It’s starting!”“Coming!” shouts Ma from the kitchen.There’s no getting-to-know-you in the fight. Spinks is throwing punches all over

Gerrie’s head and body, going for the KO. Gerrie spends the first thirty seconds bouncing off the ropes. He hardly has the chance to steady himself and begin boxing.

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I glance at my brothers. We’re all a little uncomfortable at the start Gerrie’s making. I hope to myself it’s like the wrestling: the good guy always loses in the beginning, but he comes back and wins at the end – right?

“Come on, Gerrie!” says my middle brother.“Spinks beat Ali once,” says our eldest brother. He has a silver poster of The Greatest

up in his bedroom. We’re no boxing family but who doesn’t love Ali?Gerrie’s concentrating hard, collecting those punches, getting himself driven into the

corner. Finally he turns and works his way out, hopping backwards. But now he’s taking punches up against the ropes on the other side of the ring.

They clinch, thank God, and there’s a pause before the ref breaks it up. Finally Gerrie attacks. His swings are wild and hopeful and Spinks ducks one and pulls back from another like he knows they’re coming before Gerrie does. Are my friends’ fathers wrong about Gerrie Coetzee? Is it possible he’s not the best in the world?

Gerrie’s calmer now, at least. He lands two straight lefts and a quick right hook to Leon’s head. It makes Leon crazy. Gerrie pulls back from Leon’s wild punches and moves around him, then goes in with thumping blows from both hands. “Yes, Gerrie!” says my brother.

From the kitchen we hear the kettle nearing crescendo while Ma clinks the mugs. “Come on, Gerrie!” I yell. The South Africans on TV sound like they’re barking at him. The boxers trade blows from a more upright, defensive position and then Leon goes for the big uppercut. Gerrie steps back, and Leon’s glove whistles past him.

Gerrie taps Leon’s head with his outstretched left glove, leaving the hand out there while Leon bobs and weaves around it. Gerrie taps again with that lingering left and swings a sharp right.

And from this angle it doesn’t even look hard, barely a punch. But it must be hard because Leon’s legs buckle under him like that plastic toy dog of mine with the elastic legs: you press the bottom in and it falls down like Leon.

“Yes!” we all shout in the living room.“What?” shouts Ma from the kitchen.“Come quick!” we say. “Spinks is down!”Spinks looks funny to me now. He’s wobbly as he gets up onto his knees and then

stands. Leon punches his gloves together while he waits for the ref to count to eight.Gerrie must hear those South Africans in Monte Carlo barking for him to kill. He

comes back in fast, like Spinks started. Leon tries to duck the bionic right hand but it finds his head like a guided missile.

Gerrie’s only using the right now, again and again. He slips out of a hold in the corner and pounds Leon on the ear. Spinks falls again, his head against the corner post.

“Ma!” we all shout. The kettle’s finally subsided.The ref counts to seven and sends Leon back in. He doesn’t know what to do. He tries

a straight punch with his left but it’s way too slow and Gerrie gives him a right that rattles his head.

Gerrie gets in close with second, a left to the head. Leon might already be going down by the time Gerrie’s third punch comes in. It smacks him on the back of the head and sends him halfway across the ring and into the ropes.

Leon hangs there for a second from the crook of his elbow before he slumps to the ground.

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My brothers are jumping up and shouting, so I do, too. The ref is signalling it’s over and the dog is looking up at us in the living room, confused. “What’s happening?” asks Ma, coming in with a tray of coffee.

“Technical Knock Out,” says my brother. “Spinks went down three times.”All in the first round, all in the time it takes a kettle to boil.The commentator is wailing hysterically. The TV is blaring white noise from those

white South Africans in Monte Carlo. Riot police have to stop them from invading the ring. They’re so happy – happy that someone would play with us in the middle of a sports boycott, happy that we proved to the whole world how good we are at sports.

I’m happy, too, till my mother sends me to bed.

If you’re South African and you remember Gerrie Coetzee’s career at all, this is most likely the fight you remember (even though scores miss it, like my mother, fetching coffees, beers and brandies-and-cokes). But this is not the match that makes Gerrie the first African to fight for the world heavyweight crown, the title left open by Muhammad Ali.

No, before that, there’s a fight between a white killer cop and black Tennessee hillbilly, millions of dollars in profits, international outrage, racism, apartheid intrigue, apathy, disgrace, heroics, cowardice, and an interracial sex scandal.

1979It seems like the whole world is waiting for a new champ. Muhammad Ali has just retired, leaving the WBA (World Boxing Association) heavyweight title vacant.

Not everyone thinks so highly of the WBA, though. They say it stinks, bought by South Africans and stacked with their own people. They say it’s Larry Homes who’s the real champion. The guys will go on to have a record-smashing career, it’s true, but in 1979 any champion is in the shadow of The Greatest.

Point is, Ali leaves the WBA open and the vacuum sucks in the contenders: two black Americans, John Tate and Leon Spinks (I mention their blackness for contrast only) and two white South Africans, Gerrie Coetzee and Kallie Knoetze.

Jesus. We’re in the middle of a sports boycott and all of a sudden South Africa has a shot – two shots – at the world heavyweight title.

Thinking back on 1979, Gerrie says, “South Africa is the other end of the world from America, the bottom of Africa, right in the corner of the world. I didn’t read newspapers; I thought South Africa was the biggest country in the world, with the biggest army.”

White South Africans don’t like to mix their sport and politics. All my teachers and my friends’ fathers say the boycott’s unfair. Leave sport out of it, for chrissakes. We love sports, and we’re damn good at it, too. Just give us a chance and we’ll show you. You only have to look at our Springboks and our Jody Sheckter and our Gary Player.

Politics and sport don’t mix. It leaves a sour taste in the mouths of these sports-fans. No-one calls it ‘human rights’. It’s ‘politics’ that’s the matter with sports these days.

Back in 1973 we have our first interracial boxing match between Pierre Fourie of Malvern, Johannesburg and Bob Foster of Albuquerque, USA. At the same time that tennis giant and bloody troublemaker, Arthur Ashe, comes to the country to play in the SA Open and see apartheid for himself.

What does Arthur see? Well, while the whiteys are running after balls, the blacks are mowing the lawn, mining the gold, washing the toilets and picking up the whites’ sweaty

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socks. There’s no TV in the country until 1978, so what does a white South African have to do but play sport? (Oh, ja, we also have the highest divorce rate in the world, so there’s that.)

Ashe says sport is the “Achilles’ heel of South Africa.” The dark-skinned agitator starts agitating for a sports boycott. After the 1976 youth uprising in Soweto things aren’t looking good for our chances to play with anyone else in the world.

They kick us out of international soccer, tennis, cricket – hell, they even kick us out of netball. No more Olympics either. The few rugby games the Springboks play are ruined by angry protests in the UK and New Zealand.

By 1979 boxing is fully integrated in South Africa, so what’s all the fuss about? OK, so the sports facilities aren’t equal, and neither is housing, sanitation, education and employment, now that you mention it.

But it still seems unfair to my friends’ fathers. We just want to play, goddamit. At least boxing is different. Because, you see, boxing is ruled by money and in 1979 we have plenty of it. We’re hauling out gold like there’s no tomorrow and the rand is worth more than dollar.

The WBA dispenses with the niggly boycott and declares the best heavyweights in the world are Leon Spinks, John Tate, Gerrie Coetzee and Kallie Knoetze. Two black Americans and two white South Africans. Let ‘em fight it out without the interference of ‘politics’ and we’ll find out who’s the best in the world.

Kallie vs Big JohnThree weeks before Gerrie knocks out Spinks, Big John Tate comes out in the afternoon sun in Mmabatho, Bophuthatswana, to face Kallie Knoetze. Big John’s smiling all the while and waving two little American flags in his gloves. Black fans in the Bantustan’s overcrowded concrete stadium whistle and cheer for the visitor.

Kallie stomps into the ring, walks up to Big John and rips one of the flags out of his glove, throwing it to the ground with a snarl.

“Knoetze represents the very worst in the South African racial condition.” That’s what that other agitator, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, has to say about Kallie. He’s talking about the time Kallie shot and maimed a black teenager in a protest in Atteridgeville, when Kallie was still a policeman.

The story is repeated so many times when Kallie visits America to fight Bill Sharkey that people think his name is Kallie ‘The South African Ex-Cop Who Shot A Black Teenager’ Knoetze. Actually, his nickname is Die Bek van Boomstraat – the Mouth from Boom Street.

Kallie’s hero (like everyone else) is the man they once called The Louisville Lip, Muhammad Ali. So Kallie takes pleasure in bellowing about the shooting, telling the press, “He was lucky because I’m a good shot. A very good shot. If I had wanted to I could have killed him on the spot.”

The teenager, Stanley Ndlovu, has to have a leg amputated as a result of Kallie’s excellent aim. During the trial, Stanley tells the court the shooting was unprovoked and that, as he lay bleeding on the ground, he asked for some water; the cops told him to drink his own blood. What a mouth he’s got, that Kallie.

But that’s in the past and it’s a lovely day in Mmabatho as Sol Kerzner looks over the 51 000 people stuffed into the 40 000-capacity stadium. His Sun City hotel and casino

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complex is still being built so Sol has pulled things together with connections in Bop and secured the stadium.

$250 000 is what he reckons he’ll lose on the event but, hey, it’s worth it to put that tongue-twister, Bophuthatswana, on the map, if not if in the actual mouths of millions of Americans. Luckily CBS doesn’t think much of the sports boycott and they’re showing the fight to their viewers back in the USA.

Every white newspaper in South Africa, meanwhile, backs our boy Kallie all the way. It’s only The Post, the black-run Johannesburg newspaper they’ll ban the following year, that gets behind Tate. Thousands of black Johannesburgers travel to Mmabatho to support him.

There are whites there, too, because we’re not getting much international sport these days so we’d better make the most of it. Whites have to sit next to blacks in Mmabatho since – at least in law – there’s no segregation in the Bantustans.

With the stars-and-stripes lying on the canvas, Big John Tate drops his smile and glares at Kallie. “I’m gonna kick your butt!” he says to the ex-cop.

“Don’t get all fired up,” says one of Big John’s trainers. “Remember the battle plan.”“I haven’t forgotten,” says Big John. “I just want to let him know how it’s going to

end.”It’s about the toughest thing Big John’s said up until now. In interviews he’s gentle

and polite, no rabid killer, and no ‘mouth’. It sure looks like his mama raised him right, because certainly his daddy wasn’t around.

His life is like a retread Hollywood script. John Tate is born in West Memphis, Arkansas, the second of seven children. He doesn’t get much from school – not reading or writing, and not anything that’ll help him feed his family.

So little John Tate leaves school at twelve or thirteen and goes to work picking cotton and fruit, loading cattle feed in the mills and so on. When he’s fourteen, he finds a job in a lumber yard, stacking wood from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon. Sometimes the weather’s so cold his hands freeze. “You can’t work with gloves if you can’t afford gloves,” says John Tate.

He gets himself into a street fight which a minister of the church has to break up. The minister recognises something special in the kid, tells him that if he wants to learn to fight, to go see a man in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ace Miller takes on Tate and turns the kid into a good enough boxer to go to Montreal with the US Olympic team in 1976. Here John Tate wins a bronze, losing only to the Cuban, Teófilo Stevenson.

Teófilo is a legend, winner of the gold at the ’72 Olympics and the ’74 World Amateur Boxing Championships. Foreman says, in his estimation, the Cuban could whip him and Ali, both. When they offer Teófilo a multi-million dollar contract to turn pro and fight Ali, Teófilo says, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?”

Although Big John is the sweetest, politest young man you’ll meet, and he’s quite happy living the simple life in the backwoods of Tennessee, huntin’, fishin’, choppin’ wood, he has no such qualms about making money. He’s in the Bantustan for one reason: to take home $350 000.

At six-foot four and weighing 105kg, they don’t call him ‘Big’ John for nothing. The bell sounds and he gets to work on the battle plan in the ring under the winter sun of Bophuthatswana.

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Kallie’s not dainty, either. He’s 102kg, although shorter than Tate, but beefy enough to win the Currie Cup with Northern Transvaal as flanker in 1974. While Tate is keeping things slow and contained, Kallie is lashing out with his fists.

Big John circles, dodging all of Kallie’s wild efforts, hardly throwing a punch himself. The whites in the crowd bay for Kallie to smash Tate.

In South Africa, you’re either a Kallie man or a Gerrie man. It’s a bitter rivalry, and over the years they’ve fought each other six times as amateurs, each winning three. The only time they fight professionally, Gerrie wins on points but only just, and it could easily go the other way. Kallie’s fans feel cheated forevermore.

Kallie and Big John finish round one and nobody’s so much as bruised. You have to admire Kallie’s consistency at least, because in Round Two he continues applying those frenzied punches to the air around John Tate. He can’t help feeling that if he can just land one or two meaty blows he’ll put that American in his place.

Big John shows patience, avoiding Kallie’s punches and applying one or two measured jabs and the occasional right hand. Kallie’s getting frustrated already.

The bell goes and the two men return to their corners. Sitting on his stool, Big John looks over at Kallie and gives a little chuckle. Big John’s Knoxville Hillbillies shout his name and let him know he’s the best.

The self-titled Hillbillies are John Tate’s entourage. When the crew arrives in Johannesburg with their champ, they all check in to the Landdrost Hotel. It’s the premier ‘international’ hotel of its day, which means it allows black foreigners to stay in it.

Pat Putnam, the Sport Illustrated journalist, observes Tate on his training runs through Joubert Park. He says black Johannesburgers call Big John variously ‘big mountain on the plain’, ‘father of all, with the courage of a lion’ and ‘god’. Now, we can’t be sure how faithfully these epithets are translated by Putnam but we can say that a six-foot four black heavyweight contender in a white-run country makes a damn fine symbol of power for a downtrodden people.

Big John doesn’t talk about what he observes on his runs, though. “I’m not bothered by the black man’s burden here,” he says. “But I wish they’d stop calling me ‘god’.”

In Round Three in Mmabatho, Big John lets loose a mighty right counter that connects with Kallie’s left eye, raising a bump. And as quickly as that happens, he finds himself in trouble. Big John has a bad habit of crossing his feet when moving backwards and Kallie takes advantage of his mistake, swinging with a heavy right.

The blow makes Big John stagger backwards. It looks like he’s been hurt and Kallie bursts forward with flurry of wild swipes again. The whites in the crowd turn up the volume.

But nothing after that first punch even touches Tate. So Kallie launches an arcing right hand; it sails so wide it drags the ex-cop along with it, almost clear out of the ring.

Kallie’s out of breath, out of punches, too. He needs a moment to recover himself.“Are you through?” asks Tate in the pause.Kallie doesn’t take anyone talking to him like this. It sets him off with another

whirlwind of punches, none hitting their mark. Big John, choosing his moment, moves in close and releases a great hook to Kallie’s head. Then there’s a blow to Kallie’s stomach and another tight, curling hook to the head.

The bell sounds and each man goes to his corner, the gap between them widening. White faces in the crowd carry worried looks.

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For the next four rounds Kallie endures a pummelling that drains all strength from him and all enthusiasm from the white fans in Mmabatho. In Round Eight, Kallie is cut under both eyes and bleeding from the nose.

Big John is through waiting. He turns it up a notch in this late round, engaging a reserve of energy; if he’s a long-distance runner, he’s sprinting the last lap. Big John, that polite kid from Knoxville, is merciless with his punches, and Kallie has nothing left.

An overhand right from Big John collides with Kallie’s head and sends him spinning into the ropes. It knocks all sense out of the South African.

For a moment Kallie pauses there, facing the crowd with a wide, silly grin on his bloody face. It’s pitiful. He saunters back into the ring and his arms are down by his sides. With eight seconds before the end of the round, the referee dashes between the men and ends the fight.

There are no hard feelings afterwards. Forget the flag-stomping, forget Kallie’s thoroughly mangled face. The ex-cop goes to Tate’s trailer, first to check on one of the Hillbillies who’s suffered a diabetic attack, and then to shake hands with his opponent.

“I’m so sore I can’t walk,” says Kallie between swollen lips.“You hit pretty good yourself,” says Big John. “You want a rematch? You can have

one.”“No, I don’t want any part of you anymore,” says Kallie. He walks off into the sunset.“Well,” says Big John, “I never imagined he was as bad as he was made out to be.”The headline in the Sunday edition of The Post: ‘Hoorah!’ Tired of being asked to comment on the politics of the fight, Big John says, “I’m

number one. That’s my comment.”

Back in Knoville, 2 500 supporters come out to welcome Big John but he still manages to feel lonesome. “I’ve never had that good feeling that Knoxville loves me as much as I love it. I’ve had some in Knoxville say I can’t fight, that I lost in the Olympics. I guess they’ll never forget that.”

Maybe a shot at the heavyweight title will help them forget, Big John.

Jesse Jackson vs John Tate vs Gerrie CoetzeeThe bumper stickers are everywhere. I have a clutch of them myself – the moustachioed face of Gerrie Coetzee over the orange, white and blue, and the be-afro-ed head of Big John Tate over the stars and stripes.

While every one of my friends’ fathers is behind Gerrie all the way, I just can’t help this wholesome feeling of goodwill I have for Big John Tate. It’s nothing to do with a precocious sensitivity for racial inequality in my six-year old being; no, this had to do with my love for America.

Everything of the best is what America means for me at six years old: American movies, American music, Superman, and the Sea Monkeys, the Bionic Man toys and the Twinkies ads in Archie comics – American things I want and can’t have.

It all feeds neatly into that inferiority complex South Africans have, too. How can a South African be the best in the world at anything? No wonder the adults are going more mental than usual.

After seeing the berserk South African fans at ringside in Monte Carlo, John Tate’s camp is pushing heavily for the Coetzee-Tate fight to take place in the USA. But money

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rules boxing and there’s more of it to be made in South Africa, at least on a fight no-one else will touch.

The showdown is scheduled for the 20th of October, 1979 at Loftus Versfeld, the sanctum sanctorum of white sport in Pretoria. The promoters insist that seating will be open to all races but Jesse Jackson sniffs a manipulative tactic and says, “The world won’t know it’s for one night only.”

In July of that year, that troublemaker Jesse Jackson comes to South Africa on a fact-finding mission. How the hell he gets a visa is a mystery. He talks to a packed house at the Regina Mundi church in Soweto, to workers in the car factories and the unemployed in squatter camps.

He even meets Sol Kerzner to try to convince the hotel and casino king to call off the fight but Kerzner (with great charm, I’m sure) declines.

Jesse Jackson is a scourge, the country’s arch-enemy and a radical, says the white press, but the factory workers and destitute in the informal settlements sure dig his black pride sermons.

It’s only the really heavy right-wingers who are working the angle that Tate vs Coetzee is a fight for racial superiority (or at the least, a chance to klap a black man) and only the odd American paper is billing it as ‘the biggest black-white confrontation since Joe Louis and Max Schmeling’.

My friends’ fathers shake their heads for other reasons. It’s unfair what that Jesse Jackson’s trying to do, they say. This is a fantastic opportunity for South Africa to show the world what a beautiful country we’ve got, and he’s spoiling it.

We have the best of everything here – nice hotels, world-class stadiums, super nightlife, braaivleis, beer, girls… and things work here, maybe not as fast as in Europe or America, but they work, as long as the blacks don’t make trouble or break something.

And as for the blacks, things are getting better for them, too. Come see for yourself. Just don’t send that Jesse Jackson again.

Jesse goes back to the USA and stirs up enough trouble back there, in the press and with protest marches, for Big John Tate and his Hillbillies to leave town eleven weeks before the fight.

Loftus VersfeldPW Botha juts out his bottom lip and swivels his head round to scan the crowd of 81 000 spectators in Loftus Versfeld. It’s the biggest crowd for a boxing match, worldwide, for over fifty years. For white South Africa, it’s the biggest thing since the Great Trek.

Next to the Prime Minister is his entire cabinet and members of the government of the short-lived state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Besides them, there are a few other guests of significance here tonight: it’s the first time black South Africans have been allowed into Loftus for anything other than tending the grass.

PW beams proudly from under his homburg, reflecting on the opportunity this event is giving his government to show the world what ‘great strides’ they are making towards reform. What can the world say now of the inequalities of apartheid when they see white and black sitting side by side in front of this global spectacle?

But the few black South Africans in the stands surely know that come the end of the fight – whatever the outcome – nothing will have changed. They’ll go back to the

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beleaguered townships while the whites in the seats next to them will return to the comfort of their suburbs.

The Group Areas Act doesn’t touch Big John Tate, though. He and his Hillbillies arrive in the stadium direct from their white stucco mansion in the white stuck-up suburb of Bryanston.

Gerrie Coetzee doesn’t need any fancy house. No, he’s been living and training in the Bedfordview firehouse near his East Rand roots. They’re saying how much like Ali he is in all our papers and even Wendy, his cocker spaniel, gets more press than PW.

Every white in the country is behind our Gerrie. But not me. I’m thinking Twinkies and Archie comics, Superman and Big John Tate from Knoxville, Tennessee.

And it’s complicated for black South Africans, too. Gerrie Coetzee has to go and muddle things by saying that if he wins he’ll use the position of heavyweight champ to work for racial equality. What kind of an enemy of the oppressed is that?

Hell, even at a school visit in Soweto the kids – black kids – go on strike because the headmaster only invites Tate to speak and not Gerrie.

Sure, there’s going to be some kind of stark graphic justice if black Tate thumps white Gerrie, a symbol of victory for the oppressed. But Tate isn’t living up to it, either. He doesn’t want to talk about race. “All those people who say ‘don’t go to Africa’,” he said of those people like Jesse Jackson, “do they say they’ll get me a title fight somewhere else?”

I guess not, Big John. That’s why 81 000 are gathered here in the Afrikaner laager of sport, on the edge of their seats. And who’s that coming onto the canvas? No-one we know, but Big John sure does – it’s Con Hunley the country singer, world famous in Knoxville, Tennessee, come to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for y’all. Watch you don’t slip on that wet patch on the canvas, Con – it rained a little earlier here in Pretoria.

Con sings a mighty pretty rendition for the 81 000 spectators, the 1 200 police officers, the 100 police dogs, the 200 sharpshooters. A beautiful voice he has. They hear it over the airwaves on NBC in the USA, too, and to coincide with the start of this auspicious broadcast a tiny picket sings a song outside NBC’s New York offices. “NBC, you can't hide, we know you're on apartheid's side,” is how it goes, but it ain’t as pretty Con’s sweet tones and the fight must go on. There’s money to be made, goddamit.

Back home, we hear it on the radio because the SABC decides it’s better not to back down on its policy of not paying for TV rights for sports events than to show a match of national importance live. So, you can either wait till Wednesday to watch it or hop the border to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia or Rhodesia-Zimbabwe (whichever you prefer) where they’ll have it on their TV screens.

Right, finally there are some boxers on the damn canvas. Every whitey’s second-favourite heavyweight, Kallie Knoetze, arrives to face another black American, Randy Stephens, in the ring.

It’s all very nice, the crowd is thinking, but we’re waiting for the main act here and the beer and brandy is starting to wear off. Ah, Jesus, Kallie – be careful man. He stumbles in the second round and people can’t look. No-one wants a bad omen like this to jinx the main event.

The third round is looking better for Kallie. A right hits the side of Stephens’s head and the left hook sends him through the ropes. Thank God for that. And that’s exactly who Kallie calls on.

He grabs the microphone when they confirm he’s the winner and he says, “I ask you to help me pray that Gerrie Coetzee becomes world heavyweight champion.”

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Yussie, Kallie. And to think, during the week Gerrie called you a pig. It must have been those rumours that you were passing on tips to Big John to help him win – that’s why he said it.

Hey, if praying is what it takes, then let’s do it happy-clappy-style to make our boy heavyweight champion of the world, by all means. (Not me, of course, I’m for Tate, remember?)

They’re praying hard by the time Gerrie comes into the ring, weighing an even 100kg, 5kg heavier than he’d been for Spinks. At the medical examination, Gerrie’s people say he’s running the 400-metres in 50 seconds flat. Ja, right.

At the medical, Gerrie looks heavy, alright. Heavy with depression or something. And Tate comes in smiling that backwoods smile, laughing and snatching the belt from Gerrie in the photo shoot and holding it over his head. Gerrie looks at his shoes. What’s wrong with him, man?

It’s that damn manager of his, Hal Tucker. The man goes running to the WBA executive because he hears Tate’s going to put a chemical on his gloves that’s going to blind Gerrie; then he bans a newspaper; then he bans Gerrie from eating the hotel food because he says somebody threatened to spike it. Talk about paranoid.

Big John is even bigger now. Still six-foot-four, of course, but weighing 9kg more than Coetzee. And so relaxed, his manager must be worrying he’s going to fall asleep in the ring. Hell, with all the training he’s been doing in the blue marquee he’s set up behind the house in Bryanston, he’s peaked too soon.

And here we go, Loftus. The bell dings. It’s our one shot at a South African heavyweight champion. The ref starts things and Big John does look a bit sleepy. Gerrie looks aggro, though, fast, like a world champion. He’s talking to Tate. What’s he saying?

“I’m going to hit you, man.” No shit, Gerrie.Everyone’s thinking of Monte Carlo right now. No-one would even care that they

spent all that money on a ticket just to see one round – if we have a champ of our own, it’ll be worth it.

Big John circles and dances away. Gerrie is mean and he lets Tate know it. “I’m going to kill you,” he says in that high-

pitched monotone. “I’m coming.” Just like the boogieman.The round ends and everyone is holding back. So victory hasn’t come like it did in

Monaco. But Gerrie looks bright and quick. Round Two starts and Big John is finally awake. He’s punching now, at least. “You can’t hit,” says Gerrie to him.

Come on, Big John! For America! I’m saying in my six-year old brain. Ace Miller is rooting for him, too, only he’s leaning in, shouting instructions without a break.

Tate listens to whatever Ace is yelling and let’s go a series of combinations that finally shows us what he can do. Maybe he can hit, Gerrie – he’s opened up a cut over your left eye, pal.

End of the round. The crowd is holding back still. It’s only ever this calm in Loftus between Northern Transvaal rugby matches. It’s like they’re all in the doctor’s waiting room, uncomfortable and subdued.

Round Three. Gerrie’s still fully-charged and wants Big John to feel it. Tate prances away from him, though, and then he connects with Gerrie’s jaw. Three times he gets in there. They’re light blows but they’re blows.

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Big John’s still prancing a lot for a big man, away from Gerrie, and he slips. He’s almost on his knees! Just there in that wet patch in the corner Con Hunley the country singer had to negotiate a while earlier.

Gerrie charges in while Loftus finally roars, and what a release after three rounds of tip-toeing. Gerrie swings with a combination of heavy punches and Big John bounces into the ropes. The bell saves him.

Round Four. Gerrie puts that bionic right hand to work on Tate’s head – the same hand that floored Spinks three times in Monte Carlo. But Big John doesn’t go down like that mink-coat-wearing, gap-tooth-grinning Neon Leon. No, Tate comes back with these left jabs, one following another, shifting Gerrie into the ropes.

It’s Gerrie who’s going backwards now, fighting Big John off. We wait for the bell.Round Five. Both of the men in the ring are a little more cautious now. Gerrie must

still be ahead on points and there’s another ten rounds to go. There’s no need for anything silly, now.

Things seem to have evened out and it’s not good for all that adrenalin that’s been building up in the crowd at Loftus. Those people are running on empty with no booze left and just the quiet thump of gloves on skin.

Somewhere around the sixth or seventh round a straight right comes in and snaps Gerrie’s head back. A neck’s not supposed to bend like that. If we had a TV to see that in slo-mo we’d be wincing because something got crushed for sure.

Why are Gerrie’s arms suddenly so pap? In the eighth round, Big John’s pushing Gerrie around the ring like it’s a sokkiejol and he’s leading. Gerrie’s putting up his hands, only defending, while Tate puts together some solid left jabs and right hooks.

By Round Ten, Gerrie’s running from Big John. He can’t get away from those swift, choppy right hands of Tate. Gerrie’s not saying anything to Big John anymore. Maybe he tries to but before he can get the words out, Tate smashes him in the mouth with a straight right that sends Gerrie into the corner.

Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen go even better for Big John. Although I was all for my American hero, I can’t help feeling sorry for Gerrie. Isn’t that always the way with boxing? You end up rooting for the loser.

Gerrie looks over to his corner – nobody has a clue what to do now. In Round Fourteen Gerrie stumbles six metres across the canvas, tottering like an off-balance ballerina.

Thank God it’s only fifteen rounds because we can’t take any more of this. We’re tired, we’re strained, we’ve even started to think about our lives after this damn fight.

After the final bell, the judges count up their tallies and it doesn’t take a Fields Medal to know that it’s unanimous. Big John Tate is the WBA heavyweight champion of the world, and successor to Muhammad Ali.

Gerrie Coetzee, until now undefeated, has just lost in front of the Prime Minister, the cabinet and 81 000 fans who saw him as their national hero.

“Hey, man, I did it!” says Tate lifting the solid gold Old Buck Gin belt but by now everyone’s checking their watches and yawning.

Gerrie’s sister Gerda’s face is twisted with emotion and wet with tears. She runs up to Kallie Knoetze, who led the stadium in prayer not so long ago, and starts yelling, “It’s your fault Gerrie lost!”

But Gerrie’s calm. “Maybe the Lord just didn’t want me to be champion.”

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They say that in Soweto they’re celebrating tonight. Those who aren’t already in the street are coaxed out with the shouting and car horns, and the party goes on into the early hours. Gerrie’s a local boy and he’s made some anti-apartheid statements but a black man beating a white South African is too potent to resist a celebration.

Big John doesn’t join them, though. He goes back to Bryanston with his Knoxville Hillbillies.

Poor Gerrie. I was secretly cheering for John Tate but now I feel sorry for the boy from Boksburg. Everyone I know was sure he was going to be the next world champion. The pressure must’ve been enormous.

“I was robbed,” says Gerrie later. He says the judges had it wrong in the last five rounds. Leave it alone, Gerrie, leave it alone.

The next day at the press conference, Big John looks fresh. He wants to fight Holmes, the WBC champ, and fight promoter Bob Arum reckons John Tate can beat Holmes. Meanwhile, Arum’s rival, Don King, calls John Tate “a figment of Bob Arum’s imagination”.

When they tell Tate about the celebrations in Soweto, he claps his hands with delight. But still he doesn’t visit. ‘Improper security measures’ is what they call it, that sorry excuse to rush to the airport.

And then, right there in Jan Smuts airport, Tate talks to a reporter about the one thing he’d pushed aside the entire trip. “I held it all in – but the hurt was deep,” he says. “Do you think I don’t care when I saw black kids who didn’t have food? When I got up and ran in the morning and saw all the blacks going to work and not even a handful of whites?”

Now, Big John? Now you talk about it?

The Kornfeld AffairBut that isn’t the last of it, folks. We thought it was only bitterness and humiliation John Tate left behind for us by plonking our national hero in his place like that. No, no – he left a nice big, fat, juicy scandal!

It was in all the papers, man. Mercedes Kornfeld, a white, Austrian-born model living in Johannesburg, says she spent a “night of passion” with Big John after his victory against Gerrie Coetzee.

“The vibes between us were perfect,” says Mercedes. “He reminded me of King Kong. So big and strong and yet so helpless.” King Kong, Mercedes? You sure? Anyway, the Sunday papers are full of her glowing account of Tate as the best lover she’s ever known.

Big John! First you beat up our national hero, then you fuck our women! We have laws against that kind of thing, don’t you know? Poor, lovely, 24-year old Mercedes Kornfeld, the highest paid model in the land, is arrested under the Immorality Act.

Conservatives are so mad they don’t know where to start first – love across the colour bar, sex out of marriage, or the sensational press coverage. Piet Koornhof, the Minister for Cooperation and Development (boy, those apartheid boys could think up some creepy names, hey?) says his Sunday was ruined. All thanks to what the Sunday papers print about Tate and Kornfeld. Sies! (Yes, this is the same Koornhof who marries a coloured woman sixteen years later.)

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Not all the papers are so low as to print that sordid stuff, though. The Volksblad, at least, has the decency to call the affair ‘bestial, deviant and perverse’.

But you can’t trust those overseas rags. They think it’s hilarious and want everyone to know all the disgusting details of it. Alwyn Schlebusch, our Minister of Justice, can’t hold back and calls those reports as he sees them: an “intentional plot… wantonly and wilfully” designed to embarrass South Africa over the Immorality Act.

At least they release Mercedes Kornfeld. After the Minister of Police, Louis le Grange, assures us all that they questioned her over her “morals”.

AftermathOutside of South Africa, the world seems to have missed John Tate’s succession to Ali’s throne. Perhaps they were tuned to another channel. Maybe if the fight had taken place in the USA, they’d have watched.

I guess they’ve all had their eyes on Larry Holmes, holder of the WBC belt. Well, the logical thing to do is to let them fight it out. But then Ali has to complicate things by coming out of retirement. Again.

Before Holmes can step out of Muhammad Ali’s shadow or Tate can step out of Holmes’s, though, there’s some business to take care of. On the 31st of March, 1980 Larry Holmes must fight Leroy Jones and John Tate goes up against Mike Weaver.

It’s a tune-up fight for Tate on the way to the big, million-dollar matches against Holmes and Ali. Weaver’s record: 20 wins, 9 defeats. Tate’s: 20 fights and no losses.

For fifteen rounds, Tate is easily ahead. But with just 45 seconds remaining in the final round, Weaver connects with a left hook. It sends Big John down to the canvas, out cold, blood oozing from his left ear. When they put together those lists of ‘Top Ten Surprise Last-Minute Comebacks of All Time’, this fight’s up there.

Big John is world champion for five months and no longer. He loses it in his very first defence in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. They never let him forget it.

It’s not his last fight but it may as well be. He lives up to his name more and more every day, ballooning to 180kg. In the eighties, Big John gets into cocaine heavily and one time he hands over an $18 000 dollar Rolex watch to a dealer. Then he ends up in prison for assault after someone steals his wallet.

A man remembers being introduced to Big John Tate on Monday the 6th of April, 1998. “He looked worn down, very overweight, and destitute.” Big John asks the man’s friend, a bar owner in Knoxville, whether he wants his lawn mowed. He just needs a few dollars for petrol and a Coke. It’s a long way down from world champion.

Four days later, John Tate suffers a stroke and crashes his pickup truck into a utility pole.

In 1983, Gerrie Coetzee, wins the WBA World Heavyweight title, knocking out Michael Dokes. It’s Ring Magazine’s Upset of the Year. Not that it matters to anyone, but he’s the first white man to win the title since Ingemar Johansson in 1959.

Just like Big John, Gerrie loses his title in his first defence, which takes place at Sol Kerzner’s Sun City in December, 1984.

He adopts a coloured kid at the height of apartheid and voices his opposition to the policy frequently. In an interview in 1986 in London he says he always calls a spade a spade, missing entirely the slang meaning of the word.

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Gerrie retires from boxing in 1997, runs a trucking business and works as a motivational speaker.

Leon Spinks’s drug and alcohol problems haunt him the rest of his career. He retires at the age of 42, without a single mink coat left in his wardrobe. Currently, Leon works as a janitor at the YMCA in Columbus, Nebraska.

Kallie Knoetze appears in four movies between 1979 and 1991. One of these is the 1982 Bud Spencer hit ‘Bomber’, where Kallie plays the baddie, a corrupt boxer-turned-military-sergeant. In early 2000, the ex-cop makes a public announcement that he’s joining the ANC.

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