Columnist Ron Kantowski: Tyson may be losing his touch at ticket window

Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1999 | 10:22 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's notes column appears Tuesday. Reach him at ron@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

Ask somebody at the MGM Grand about the number of tickets sold/available for Saturday's Mike Tyson comeback fight against Frans Botha, and you'll get a response bordering on Marcel Marceau. With laryngitis.

It's been mime your own business, as phone calls and queries about ticket sales generally have gone unreturned and unanswered.

But in its current issue, the Sports Business Journal published by Street and Smith's says ticket sales have been a huge disappointment.

Don Welsh, vice president of marketing and sales for the MGM, said as of last week, only 9,000 of the 15,000-plus available tickets had been spoken for.

That's spoken for, not sold. According to SBJ, only 1,000 tickets have been sold to the general public. The other 8,000 went to the MGM, Showtime and various Las Vegas hotel-casinos, to use as they see fit.

While those numbers are at least a week old, they are as close as anybody has to an actual figure at this late date, due to the MGM's reticence.

"Did Tyson fights sell faster in the past?" Welsh is quoted. "Yes. They have sold out in as quick as hours."

Welsh said the late start in advertising the bout -- Dec. 27, according to his figures -- is to blame for the apparent lack of interest in the Tyson fight, at least from a live gate standpoint.

"If we talk next week and we have only 2,000 tickets sold, it's a different situation," Welsh said to SBJ, adding that he expected a late rush for Tyson tickets.

"(But) if we find out tickets are still available and have not moved, we have to assume there may be damage (to Tyson's ability to move tickets) in the marketplace."

* JUST ADD PUNCH: Saturday night's HBO fight card in Pensacola, Fla., should have billed as a tribute to just-elected baseball Hall-of-Famer Nolan Ryan, because it featured a pair of no-hitters.

Rick Frazier, a 17-year member of the New York Police Department, will never be accused of police brutality -- not after landing a grand total of four punches against Roy Jones Jr., in their WBC light heavyweight title bout that was stopped with one second remaining in the second round. But that was a slugfest compared to the sixth round of an undercard bout pitting IBF lightweight champion Shane Mosley against Golden Johnson.

During those three minutes, Johnson failed to land a single punch. It was only the second time in the 15-year history of CompuBox, which tracks the number of punches landed, that a fighter went an entire round without so much as grazing his opponent.

So when does Truman Capote get his title shot?

* AROUND THE HORN: The three-game cup of coffee that the Thunder's Patrice Lefebvre recently had with the Washington Capitals couldn't have had anything to do with the Thunder providing ice time for the NHL club during a recent Las Vegas layover, could it? ... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but if I were single, I wouldn't want the person(s) responsible for nominating the Thunder's angry polar bear crest as one of pro hockey's most attractive logos to fix me up on a blind date. The design is busier than the guy who was passing out those escort handbills at last week's CES show. ... Taylor Burke, assistant GM for the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes, said Las Vegas' coach Bob Bourne's negative comments about Coyote farmhands Andrei Vasilyev and J.M. Jomphe weren't the only reason the NHL club severed its affiliation with the Thunder. "We felt in order to have an affiliation there, we needed our players part of a winning environment and part of a healthy environment," Burke said. At an IHL-worst 9-24-5 and rumored

to be leaving town, the Thunder provides neither. ...

According to a report in the current issue of Sports Business Journal, 25 percent of all Division I men's football and basketball players gamble on college sports, and 4 percent say they wager on games in which they participate. Even more worrisome is that 3 of the 648 athletes who responded stated they "changed the outcome" of those games for betting purposes. ... Spotted on the Strip last Tuesday: Dozens of orange-clad Tennessee fans who had moved their NCAA national championship celebration up the road from Tempe, Ariz. ... North Carolina's Brian Schmitz was named to Sports Illustrated's all-bowl team for averaging 44 yards on five punts, four of which were downed inside San Diego State's 11-yard line on a blustery day featuring 60-mph winds during the Las Vegas Bowl. Had Dennis Conner handled the wind as well as Schmitz, he'd probably still be our Amer ica's Cup skipper. ... I've got a new favorite Mexican League baseball team: The Culiacan Tomato Growers. ... Final score from the Yogi Berra Invitational

in Eugene, Ore: Southern Cal 86, Oregon 85. The Trojans trailed by five points with just 2.8 seconds to play but won the game on a pair of 3-pointers by Adam Spanich -- the second from beyond the half-court stripe -- proving once and for all that it's never over until it's over. ... Sun correspondent Peter Benton reports that in New Zealand, from which he hails, golfers are on the honor system. They are asked to deposit $5 in a slot on the first tee box in lieu of greens fees. There is a similar system in place at many Las Vegas-area courses. Only you have to leave your first-born child instead of a fin. ...

And finally, UNLV was scheduled to kick off the face lift of Sam Boyd Stadium today by imploding the press box. All it should take is a nice breeze and three guys with hay fever.