Hype

At the start of P.T. Barnum's career as a showman, he encountered rival 19th-century hypemaster Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who took note, admiringly, of the way Barnum was able to help promote his attractions by obtaining free publicity. "I see that you understand the press," Maelzel told Barnum, "and that is the great thing. Nothing helps the showman like the types and the ink."

No one has ever worked the ink-stained wretches of the sporting press better than Irving Rudd, who, at 71, is one of the few characters left in the publicity dodge who can accurately be described as Runyonesque. Rudd—also known by his nom de plug, Unswerving Irving—believes there's no substitute for a good hype job. "Nothing sells itself," Rudd says. "Even the Bible had to have a p.r. man."

He learned his craft in small fight clubs like the Coney Island Velodrome and then became a publicist for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were owned by Walter O'Malley, a man Rudd recalls as having "deep pockets and short arms." After O'Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958, Rudd went to work at Yonkers Raceway, a thriving harness track just outside New York City. While driving up to the track one day, he noticed that workmen were hanging giant lettering on the side of the new clubhouse. It's not known if the force of inspiration caused Irving to swerve, but he certainly rushed to the foreman of the work crew and issued new instructions. The two men argued briefly, and then the sign was hung, per Rudd's orders, so that in letters 3½ feet high, stretching 84 feet, it read YONKERS RACEWYA. Rudd was ecstatic, and when the track's switchboard nearly exploded with calls pointing out the error, he grew happier still. Within days, virtually every newspaper in New York City had run a picture of this supposed blunder, and wire service shots of the sign eventually appeared in newspapers across the country. It was as pure a piece of malarkey as Rudd had ever put over on an unsuspecting public.

Rudd learned early on that if he could somehow create news—or at least something that passed for it—he could reach far more people than he could by paying for an ad. "Advertising can be very effective, but it's still only an ad," Rudd says. "If a guy picks up a newspaper and reads a story about a boxer with a bionic fist, it becomes a real situation in his mind." The Bionic Fist was in fact—or, more accurately, in fantasy—another of Rudd's inventions, something he dreamed up to help sell tickets to the 1979 WBA heavyweight championship bout in Pretoria between John Tate of the U.S. and Gerrie Coetzee of South Africa. After reading that Coetzee had undergone an operation on his right hand, during which eight steel pins had been implanted and smashed bones had been fused, Rudd persuaded Tate's manager to register a protest and demand a pre-fight examination of Coetzee's "bionic fist." The story of the protest was reported without question or qualification in newspapers all over the world. "The protest went nowhere," says Rudd, "but it made the papers, it said Tate-Coetzee, and it gave the date of the fight. As long as these things are somewhat tongue in cheek, and there's some relevancy to reason and reality, where's the harm?"

No other sport gives Rudd the freedom to simply make up the rules as he goes along the way boxing does. "Boxing is the last of your freebooting, buccaneering sports," he says. "Unlike baseball or football, boxing has no continuity. Any guy off the street with a Q-tip in his shirt pocket can call himself a manager." To become a boxing promoter you don't even have to pass the Q-tip test. After carefully studying the record of one of his fighters, Don Elbaum, a promoter in Akron, Ohio, once sold advertising for an Italian restaurant on the soles of the pug's shoes. The theory was that the tomato can's number—and the sponsor's name—would come up at some point during the fight. This technique never caught on, raising, as it did, troubling practical and esthetic questions about which way the punched-out billboard might fall.

Much as he loves a good plug, Rudd has never taken much joy in hyping the heavyweight division's seemingly endless succession of not-so-great white hopes, the most recent example of whom was Gerry Cooney. "He can't fight to keep warm," Rudd says of Cooney (who, incidentally, was never his client), "but he's a nice kid." The essence of boxing hype, though, is trying to sell the members of the public the notion that they're seeing mythic masters of the ring, when in reality they are seeing pugs like Cooney—who earned an estimated $18 million in the ring despite the fact that he didn't really like to box and never beat anybody of consequence except Ken Norton. "Sometimes it's a sore and trying thing," says Rudd. "You try to put the best face on it you possibly can."

Surprisingly, these face jobs often work. "Boxing panders to the worst instincts in us," says Los Angeles Times sports editor Bill Dwyre. "We deal in serious issues, and we want people to take us seriously. If we cross that line and allow ourselves to willingly be had, if we buy into the myths knowing they're myths, then we're really in trouble."

GREAT MOMENTS IN HYPE #2: In addition to inventing the Bionic Fist, Rudd brought in two witch doctors to help promote the Tate-Coetzee fight. So when he brought in only one witch doctor to hype a fight in which Ayub Kalule, a native of Uganda, would defend his WBA junior middleweight title against Sugar Ray Leonard in 1981, it actually appeared that Rudd was cutting back. "I called the Ugandan mission and asked if they had any witch doctors," he says. The mission sent Ben Mugimba, whom Rudd identified for the press as a medicine man from Uganda. "This guy from Uganda was the goods," insists Rudd, who does concede that to help make ends meet during the slack season for medicine men, Mugimba "ran a Gulf station in Kinshasa." Which is in Zaire, by the way.

Rudd dressed Mugimba up in a ceremonial headdress and robe for what would be his first news conference, if you didn't count interviews after the occasional filling station holdup. Mugimba rattled bones. Mugimba chanted. Mugimba swung a chicken over his head. Mugimba was hexing away with impressive verve when a radio reporter named Rock Newman jumped to his feet and stormed angrily out of the room, dismissing the demonstration as a farce that promoted racism. On the way back to his hotel room, Newman was attacked by a huge crow that pecked violently at his head. To escape the crazed bird, he was finally forced to leap, fully clothed, into the hotel swimming pool.

"Everybody likes hype, but it's tough to live up to every night," says Magic Johnson, whose very name is a hype. "Some of it's real, a lot of it's not, but you try to use it all to your advantage."