By Brent Matteo Alderson
1991 was the year that James "Lights Out" Toney burst upon the boxing landscape by upsetting the previously undefeated Michael Nunn in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa and then successfully defending against Reggie Johnson six weeks later and earning a draw with Mike McCallum in a bout many observers thought he won. And those performances garnered the then 22 year-old Ring Magazine’s 1991 fighter of the year award and had numerous insiders saying that Toney was going to be “the Hagler of the 90’s.”
Then in the February of 1992 James decided to take a tune-up fight on ABC against the unheralded Dave Tiberi. The bout was viewed as no more than a show-case bout for Toney and his vivacious personality, but Toney’s problems at the scale which would plague him throughout his career were evident early on and James used diuretics to make weight for the bout that left him physically depleted.
Toney’s manager at the time, Jackie Kallen, commented, “He tried to take a short cut in weight loss. He thought he could bluff his way through the fight, but he dehydrated himself.”
Realizing that his physical state was weakened James went for the early knock out and stunned Tiberi in the first, but was unable to put the light-punching Delaware native away and Tiberi went on to dominate and outwork Toney the remainder of the bout.
A Tiberi win seemed clear cut, but in one of the worst decisions in boxing history, two judges that were unlicensed in the state of New Jersey gave the decision to Toney and the boxing world was stunned. Donald Trump who owned the Taj Mahal, the venue where the fight took place commented, “I’ve watched a lot of bad decisions over the years, but this one was the worst.”
On camera, ABC commentator Alex Wallau stated that the verdict “was a cruel and disgusting decision” and Senator William Roth of Tiberi’s home state of Delaware started a senate investigation into the sport which culminated with FBI informant and former wise guy Sammy “The Bull” Gravano testifying at senate hearings that the mafia was involved in professional boxing and had been connected to Buddy McGirt in a sworn statement so fictitious that the only thing accurate about it was its untruthfulness.
Even though the hearings didn’t lead to immediate regulation, they did serve as a catalyst for change and helped pave the way for Senator John McCain's Professional Boxing Safety Act in 1997 and the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act.
Being the warrior that he is, in the months after the fight Toney insisted on a rematch and his team offered Tiberi a lucrative return bout on HBO, but Dave rejected the offer with a stipulation that before he would sign for the fight that he either “wanted to be awarded the IBF title or wanted a national commission established to monitor the sport and help fighters.”
Toney’s team would never concede to vacating the IBF title and to this day a national commission hasn’t been established despite the support of some of the nation’s most powerful politicians.
After realizing he was going to get a return match, James commented, “Tiberi doesn’t want the fight, he knows he’ll get hurt if he fights me when I’m in shape and that’s why he doesn’t want the fight, he’s chicken sh*t.”
So the fight never came off because the split decision loss devastated Tiberi who sacrificed so much to give the type of performance he presented on ABC that Saturday afternoon, “My manager tells me to take the rematch, but he doesn’t understand how I feel. He wasn’t destroyed like I was by what happened.”
Tiberi ended becoming a local personality in his home state of Delaware and Toney eventually erased the stigma of that performance a year later when he moved up to 168 pounds and impressively stopped Iran Barkley for the IBF Super Middleweight title.
The controversial win seemed to be forgotten in the annals of boxing history until a recent interview when James was discussing Holyfield’s loss to Valuev, “That’s how it goes in this sport, sometimes they take it away from you and things don’t go your way, they took the Samuel Peter fight from me and the Montell Griffin fights, both of them.”
Upon hearing Toney’s statement, BoxingScene.com reminded Toney that he had been the beneficiary of a couple of dubious decisions in his wins over Reggie Johnson and Dave Tiberi and Toney responded “I lost that fight with Tiberi, he should have gotten the decision in that fight, but I beat Reggie Johnson.”
BoxingScene.com recently informed Dave Tiberi of Toney’s comments and spoke with the former middleweight contender at length via telephone. And in an exclusive interviewed to be published here on BoxingScene.com in the coming days, Tiberi speaks about his life after the fight with Toney, his experiences sparring and training with Bernard Hopkins for a five year period, his feeling towards Toney, and his thoughts about the sport in general.
Notes:
After knocking Ray Lampkin unconscious for 30 minutes in a defense of the world lightweight title, Roberto Duran commented, “If I had been in shape, they wouldn’t have taken him to the hospital, they would have taken him to the morgue.”
Chris Arreola owns three bulldogs and noted that he “named one of them Pavlik because he’s really white like Kelly Pavlik and one of them Holmes because he has a big d*ck like John Holmes. “
I hate to say it, because I think Duran is one of the five greatest fighters in the history of the sport, but because of styles I think Sweet Pea circa 1991 would have beaten a lightweight Duran, but I don’t think Whitaker could have gone 15 rounds with Marvin Hagler or beaten Iran Barkley.
And I think Duran was even too macho for even the great Julio Cesar Chavez and could have won that fight in the trenches or from the outside.
Brent Matteo Alderson, a graduate of UCLA, has been part of the staff at BoxingScene.com since 2004. Alderson's published work has appeared in publications such as Ring Magazine, KO, World Boxing, Boxing 2008, and Latin Boxing Magazine. Alderson has also been featured on the ESPN Classic television program “Who’s Number One?” Please e-mail any comments to BoxingAficionado@aol.com
