The cover of Sports Illustrated once shrieked ?Madman!? with a photograph of Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield during their June 28, 1997, heavyweight championship fight in Las Vegas.
Tyson?s license to box was revoked, he was reviled by the media and his career seemed in tatters.
Sound familiar?
Antonio Margarito was caught with a hardened knuckle pad in his hand wraps containing two of the elements that make plaster of Paris before a Jan. 24, 2009, welterweight title fight against Shane Mosley in Los Angeles.
Margarito?s license to box was revoked, he was reviled by the media and his career seemed in tatters.
But just a few weeks shy of five years to the day after Tyson bit off the top of Holyfield?s ear and spit it onto the canvas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, Tyson was the headliner in what to that point would be the richest boxing match in history. His June 8, 2002, championship bout with Lennox Lewis at The Pyramid in Memphis, Tenn., generated $110 million in gross revenue and two million pay-per-view sales, both records at the time.
Margarito only can hope to be so lucky on Saturday, when he meets Manny Pacquiao for the World Boxing Council super welterweight title before a crowd that could swell to 70,000 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Many Mexican and Mexican-American fans adore Margarito, perhaps like never before, but he is perceived as little more than a cheating, conniving scoundrel by pretty much everyone else.
He isn?t going to be named Man of the Year by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and his misdeed ? should it be his alleged misdeed? ? isn?t going to be forgiven as easily as Tyson?s ear bite. There isn?t a worse crime in boxing than trying to load one?s gloves.
Margarito is adamant that he knew nothing of the illegal pad being slipped into his wraps by then-trainer Javier Capetillo. It seems difficult to believe that a boxer whose livelihood depends on his hands wouldn?t know what was on them. Nearly every boxer who has offered an opinion, including Pacquiao, agrees that Margarito had to know. But to give Margarito every benefit of the doubt, remember that it is often extremely chaotic in the locker room before the match and a fighter is girding for battle as his hands are being wrapped.
It?s not inconceivable, though it is unl
