As if to celebrate Playboy?s newfound seriousness it ran an article titled ?Who Is Al Haymon, and What Has He Done to Boxing??
?Life is too short to be living somebody else?s dream.??Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953. In defiance of the blue-noses, whose offspring are with us today, he created a magazine deemed inappropriate for the button-down 1950s.
As he wrote in his first editor?s letter, ?We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d?oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex …?
Many a randy lad dreamed of stewardesses hopping in and out of bed between their inexorable flights to nowhere, talking dreamily of Les Demoiselles d?Avignon and Beyond Good and Evil while Chet Baker was spinning on the turntable.
But Playboy wasn?t just about art and philosophy and trumpeters hooked on heroin. Its main feature, and the reason Playboy was so scurrilous, were the nudes, the centerfolds, the fetching Playmates of the Month.
Heffner, a good Methodist boy at heart, understood, as he exposed and airbrushed and dutifully screwed scores of stacked young women, that the girl next door wasn?t a Mamie Eisenhower clone in waiting, and the smells coming from her oven weren?t tollhouse cookies.
Times changed and Playboy changed with them. Hi-fi and smoking jackets may have gone out of fashion, but sex is eternal and was as indispensable to Playboy?s vision as Donald Trump?s hair is to his profundity.
The Viagra-popping Hefner is now 89 and he has ceded responsibility for running the magazine to a younger generation sensitive to market trends. After much arm-twisting Hef agreed that Playboy would cease featuring nude women. As Scott Flanders, the company?s chief executive, pointed out, ?That battle has been fought and won. You?re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it?s just pass? at this juncture.?
Hustler?s Larry Flynt, talking to CNN from the solid gold wheelchair where he?s been stranded since catching a puritanical assassin?s bullet, said, ?Hefner is 90 now. I knew he was getting old. I didn?t know he lost his mind. How can you take the most important feature in the magazine and drop it?what it became notorious for? I think it was a silly move. They needed to change their financial blueprint. They have always approached Playboy from an artistic point of view because Hefner?s background is as an artist. But you have to run a magazine like a business. When you lose revenue you?ve got to cut your fixed costs. I make a profit whereas he loses money every month. Nobody can deny this guy paved the way for the sexual revolution, but he will not be remembered for his business acumen.?
As if to celebrate Playboy?s newfound seriousness (it was always serious if one could tear oneself away from the T&A), the magazine recently published an article by Tim Struby titled ?Who Is Al Haymon, and What Has He Done to Boxing??
We know who Al Haymon is. We also know he has revitalized boxing. So those questions have already been answered. But Struby isn?t writing for a boxing audience. He?s writing for a nudie magazine that no longer features nudes, and he treats Haymon less like the Holy Grail or boxing?s version of Greta Garbo than as a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
Scouring God knows what internet sites the author writes that Haymon ?has been referred to as the Phantom, the Wizard of Oz, the new Don King, Keyser S?ze, the Rasputin of Boxing and the most powerful man in sports.?
Traveling to Tampa in hopes of spotting Al Haymon, who avoids the press like the plague and who can blame him, Struby tromps over well traveled paths in a torturous attempt to reveal the man behind the mask. He details his early years in Cleveland and his connections to R&B, and the many fighters who treat him like a ?deity,? but the real purpose of the article appears to be a hatchet job on the man ?who shuns publicity and attention like a vampire avoids sunlight.?
The allusions are many and are not limited to Bela Lugosi and his blood-sucking ilk.
I?m not sure whose bidding the author is doing, but it?s not boxing?s, nor is it mine.
The complete Playboy article can be read here: http://www.playboy.com/articles/who-is-al-haymon-and-what-has-he-done-to-boxing
Now that that?s out of the way, let?s get back to something important, like the mysterious case of Hugh Hefner?s vanishing nudes.
