Score One For The Creator

A few months ago, Muhammad Ali, who claimed he didn't want to fight anymore anyway, peddled his World Boxing Association heavyweight championship for $400,000 and slipped into early retirement. Promoter Bob Arum made the payment to Ali for a reason: the champion's delay in picking an opponent for his next fight was costing the promoter a chance for some lucrative bouts in South Africa, which was impatient to have one of its white hopes, Kallie Knoetze or Gerrie Coetzee, emerge as The Great One's successor.

That was an appealing idea—if you happened to be a white South African isolated from reality. There were a few built-in problems. The largest, at 240 pounds, was, of course, John Tate, a nice fellow who operates like a bulldozer. Big John doesn't move very fast but he knocks down a lot of trees.

Tate's sledgehammer fists chased Knoetze from the title scheme with an eighth-round knockout last June in Bophuthatswana. Then last Saturday night, beneath a coal black South African sky dimpled by a single dim star, Tate dismantled Coetzee in Pretoria, winning a 15-round decision and the WBA title Ali vacated.

The nearly all-white crowd of 89,000 in Loftus Versfeld Stadium, the hallowed, velvet-turfed bastion of South African rugby, sat in silence as the verdict was announced. No one protested, not even the drunks. South Africans are hungry for a champion, but they can honestly assay a homemade hero soundly whipped, even after paying $3.2 million to watch the whipping.

In a seeming burst of generosity the officials, by their scoring, made it appear to be more of a contest than it actually was. Carlos Martinez Casas of Argentina had it 148-145 for the 24-year-old Tate; Referee Carlos Berrocal of Panama, 147-144; and Ken Morita of Japan, 147-142. Many experienced ringsiders had it more like 148-141.

No matter. If Coetzee lost, South Africa still won. Or so some South Africans would have you believe. See, they say, we are letting a black man fight a white man. We are letting black people sit with whites inside our most sacred sports temple. We have changed; we are changing. We are being misjudged.

Had the fight actually been evidence of a change? Yes, a cosmetic change. "What does it really mean," said one black fan, "if for one night I can sit next to a white man when, after the event, he can go home to wherever he wants while I must go home to Soweto?"

Soweto is a 35-square-mile ghetto, the home of some 1.5 million blacks, who live there not by choice but by law. They are not citizens. They can never own one square inch of land. White children go to school free, blacks must pay. One of the country's largest power plants is in Soweto, but most of the power goes to Johannesburg, which is 13 miles away. Fewer than 25% of the homes in Soweto have electricity. Even fewer have indoor plumbing.

The township is a malignancy neatly laid out in tidy rows of little brick houses. A few roads are paved, but most of them are dirt. At night a pall of coal smoke from cook stoves settles heavily over Soweto, symbolic of the prevailing aura of despair.

Protest in South Africa has a high price tag. Dr. Nthato Motlana, a Soweto physician who is an influential black leader, continues to ignore the laws against speaking out, and he has paid dearly. He has been in Modderbee Prison and expects it to be only a matter of time before he goes back. He is "monitored" by the police constantly.