Clash of the palookas; More on leadership

Pardon me, but I don't think I have anything nice to write about that so-called Clash of the Titans last Sunday. It was hilarious opera bouffe between world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis and challenger Michael Grant. And at the end -- 5 minutes and 53 seconds after -- the Madison Square Garden crowd was jobbed in a holdup worse than the Great Train Robbery. Lewis stood 6-5 in his stockinged feet, Grant 6-7. Indeed fistic history had never witnessed two battlers that tall, that big and heavy, that formidably fleshed.

We awaited a classic. After all, the prize money was $10 million for Lewis, $4 million for Grant. Even the very rich kill for that kind of money.

What evolved, gents and mesdames, was an operetta in two short acts, dedicated more to Phineas Taylor Barnum than to Thor, the god of thunder. Barnum specialized in freak shows, stunned and vastly amused the world with his famous dwarf "General Tom Thumb" and the clowns who brought the gallery down with rollicking laughter. Of course, you all remember Barnum and Bailey, the greatest circus extravaganza of all time.

Tom Thumb would have disappeared in the cavernous palms of Lewis and Grant. But, his very diminutiveness wowed the crowds, his wit was splendid and even kings and queens sought his acquaintanceship. But Lewis and Grant? They exhibited fist-fighting at its very worst, and whoever arranged that match should be fed to the lions. The only one who really fought was Lewis. But even at his very best, the world's heavyweight champion could never hold a candle to Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, John Sullivan. Not even to Archie Moore.

I have always maintained Lennox Lewis did not win that fight with Evander Holyfield. He lost and the best he deserved was a draw. Which means that the world's heavyweight division today is in a rut. Its last spectacular performer was Mike Tyson, who could have been one of the greatest except that he loved women too much, raped them, beat them up when he was in heat, the kind of animal rage he displayed when he bit off the ear of Holyfield. And Iron Mike often was a slouch, never trained to perfection.

Back to the, pardon me, Clash of the Titans. If ever a man came up the ring to be slaughtered, it was Michael Grant. He was all dangling arms with the body of a sperm whale in heat, his jaw in perpetual protrusion he virtually begged you to hit it. And so Lewis had his fill. He sent the American challenger reeling to the ropes, mouth wide open, his face twisted and funny with the punishment. Then Grant went down as a left and a right landed on his kisser. Lying down, he looked like a big fish belly up. He should have stayed down.

In the second round, Grant came out of his corner, ambled out is the better expression. Ah, that word again. Grant was the quintessential lalapaloosa, swinging wildly as though he held a banjo in each arm. This time, he came close virtually in a clinch. Which was just right for Lennox Lewis. His left arm perched on Grant's head, Lewis used his right like a rocket booster -- an uppercut that virtually broke Grant's jaw. This time, the challenger did not have to be counted out.

This palooka didn't deserve to climb the ring that night. For that matter, he does not belong to the trade at all. You could see right away as the first round opened, that he was an oaf, with the stride of a desert camel. He had a wide open stance that could have admitted the entry of Orson Welles. Lewis should be ashamed pocketing $10 million for the fight, virtually $2 million per minute.

As for Grant, the only way he could have prevailed was to bring a bazooka. Giving him $4 million was outright burglary of the public till. That guy does not know how to fight at all. We are all being cheated by the fight mob, rather the hoods who control the boxing industry. And I can tell you, we are all being set up for the biggest kill of all, Lennox Lewis versus Mike Tyson some time, you bet. And you know what? I think Mike Tyson will take the measure of Lennox Lewis. So long as Tyson does not go into a gorilla rage and bite off the nose of Lennox.

Tyson can get into Lewis' defense, something Evander Holyfield was hard put to do. Or didn't do. Mike Tyson likes them big and tall. For his missilery is surface-to-air. They can run but they can't hide, as Jack Dempsey, the Manasa Mauler used to say. And that was why the galleries bulged with people each time Dempsey fought. He was the great attraction of his era as Muhammad Ali became for the post-World War II period.

That's what's missing in Lennox Lewis. His is the torpid honk of a cargo truck, and he can never capture public imagination.

I read somewhere yesterday an illustrated front-page item that there is now a new President Joseph Estrada who "amazes media." We were prepared to accept the story that the president went through a Holy Week trance after undergoing transorbital lobotomy. Well, as usual the broadsheet that published the story never threaded the needle. The new Erap was "new" simply because he showed up for his speaking engagements.

So, flummoxed again, we go back to what leadership is, what being president of 75 million Filipinos is all about, particularly at this time when the Philippines is pointed to anew as the economic basket case of Asia, and war in Mindanao threatens to blow the nation to kingdom come. We continue with John W. Gardner and this time he hits another nail on the barrelhead. Here he is about the Individual and Group:

"Because leadership requires working with shared values and goals, the task grows difficult -- eventually impossible -- as shared values disintegrate. Leaders seek to bring about group action, and that can occur only when individual members are willing to lend themselves to common purposes. . . People talk of the legendary leader 'you would follow over a cliff', not mentioning that it happens only when those doing the following are deeply committed to something the leader symbolizes."

Ah, there's the rub. We don't have the symbols and the leader who embodies these symbols. Now, look at what is happening to our economy, the war in Mindanao and read this:

"Human beings have a strong need to stabilize their environment. They do not like unpredictability, insecurity or disorder. They create communities with a framework of rules to keep at bay the lawless element that exists in every community (and in the hearts and minds of all of us). When order is destroyed and elements of savagery re-emerge, the community embraces and empowers almost any regime that promises to end the chaos and reimpose order. No one understood that better than Hitler.'

We are not yet there. But are we coming close? If all of Mindanao should rage and it could because our president has declared "total war" on the Muslim rebellion, will the republic come apart? Will the war spread to other parts of the country, some urban centers, for example? Will we then seek in our misery and despair the florid promises of those -- like Ferdinand Marcos -- who pledge that, under him, the Philippines "will be great again."

Some more, some more of Gardner because he is so apropos, and it is as if he were writing about the Philippines.

"In any functioning society," he writes, "everything -- leadership and everything else -- takes place within a set of shared beliefs concerning the standards of acceptable behavior that must govern individual members. One of the tasks of leadership -- at all levels -- is to revitalize those shared beliefs and values. . . . Leaders can help keep those values fresh. They can combat the hypocrisy that proclaims values at the same time that it violates them. . . Leaders must conceive and articulate goals in ways that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them toward higher goals."

And for a climb to the peak: "Leaders must not have only their own commitments, they most move the rest of us toward commitment."

We are precisely a nation uncommitted to any lofty goals at the moment because we do not see these in our leaders who use power the way Nero did with a fiddle while Rome burned. Now to the elite. The president has long waged verbal war on the elite, the middle and upper classes, the prescient, the educated, the intelligent, the intellectuals, the achievers, and he lumps media with them. Let's listen to Gardner: "In any society -- no matter how democratic, no matter how equalitarian -- there are elites in the sociological sense: intellectual, artistic, athletic, political, and so on. The marks of an open society are that elite status is generally earned, and that those who have earned it do not use their status to violate democratic norms. In our society, leaders are among the many 'performance elites.' "

Need we say more?