Controversy seems to find Mills Lane wherever he goes. The 61-year-old Nevada referee was the man who disqualified Mike Tyson (belatedly, some would say) the night he tried to make a dinner out of Evander Holyfield's ears. He was also the referee the night the `Fan Man' interrupted Holyfield's 1993 fight against Riddick Bowe by parachuting into the ring in the seventh round, and it was Lane who disqualified Oliver McCall last year when the former WBC champion suffered an apparent breakdown and began sobbing uncontrollably in the fourth round of his title fight against Lennox Lewis.
Lane may have outstripped his own legend last Friday night at the Las Vegas Hilton. Working the IBF middleweight title fight between Bernard (The Executioner) Hopkins and challenger Robert Allen, the referee attempted to break a protracted clinch and accidentally shoved Hopkins right out of the ring in the process.
Stumbling backwards, Hopkins tumbled through the ropes and inelegantly landed in the midst of ringside spectators, injuring himself seriously enough that the fight was stopped on the spot. Hopkins, who had entered the ring shrouded in a black executioner's cowl, left it on a stretcher.
The ringside physician, Dr Flip Homansky, initially feared that Hopkins's ankle had been broken in the fall. It wasn't, but he did sustain torn ligaments and has already been scratched from a lucrative October 24th television date. Mills Lane had scored his first professional knockout.
The outcome, which actually went into the books as a `no contest,' will not go down as one of Lane's finest moments, but it will probably do wonders for the ratings of his new syndicated television programme, Judge Mills Lane: America's Judge. While refereeing nearly 100 world title fights, Lane served the public in other roles. For several years he was a tough-minded prosecutor as Reno's district attorney before winning a seat on the bench as a Nevada District Court judge. In both capacities, the one-time amateur boxer and US Marine's gritty law-and-order approach and steely countenance won him the nickname "Maximum Mills."
Lane retired from the bench this May. Shortly thereafter followed the publication of a ghost-written book (Let's Get It On: Tough Talk From Boxing's Top Ref And Nevada's Most Out- spoken Judge) and a few weeks ago came the premiere of his TV show, the latest spin-off of a popular formula in which real-life litigants agree to drop their formal charges in order to have their cases adjudicated before the television cameras.
Despite his no-nonsense demeanour in the ring and on the bench, Mills Lane is not without a sense of humour. Ten years ago he was the referee for a light-welterweight title bout between Roger Mayweather and Vinny Pazienza. A light skirmish which broke out at the final bell brought cornermen an entourages swarming into the ring, and for several minutes pandemonium reigned.
Although I was seated no more than 10 feet from the ring, the swarm of bodies precluded a clear view. Once police and Caesars Palace security troops eventually restored order, I saw that Lou Duva, Pazienza's septuagenarian trainer, was profusely bleeding from a cut, and that he was angrily gesturing toward Mayweather.
In an effort to sort out what had transpired, I buttonholed Lane as he climbed down from the ring.
"Mills," I asked, "did Mayweather actually HIT Lou?"
"Well, yeah, he did," replied Lane in his pronounced Western twang. "But it was the last round. He didn't have much left."
Although he enjoyed a reputation as one of the world's top referees before June of 1997, Lane himself concedes that his role in last year's Holyfield-Tyson `bite fight' was responsible for his new-found mainstream celebrity.
"There's no question it put me where I am now," he admits.
Ironically, Lane wasn't supposed to be the referee for Holyfield-Tyson II. The Nevada commission had initially appointed a younger referee, Mitch Halpern, to that duty, but Tyson's entourage protested so vehemently that Halpern (who had been the referee for their earlier meeting, in which Holyfield had upset Tyson) withdrew, paving the way for Lane to work the bout.
Whether Halpern would have meted out the same justice Lane did that night remains unlearned. As it was, Lane himself wondered if he waited too long to disqualify Tyson, whom he could reasonably have DQ'd after the FIRST bite.
"You can make a hell of a case for that," says Lane. "There are people who said I should have stopped it then. I can't say they're wrong."
The Hopkins-Allen fight was the co-feature of last Friday night's card. Most of the audience had actually come to witness the swan song of the legendary Roberto Duran, who at 47 succumbed to the onslaught of WBA champion William Joppy and, after three rounds, finally said "no mas" for good.
Lane found himself presiding over a match marked by a lot of holding and clinching and very little fighting. As the audience grew restive he waded in to break a mutual death-grip in the fourth. Lane recalled that Allen had Hopkins in a headlock when he intervened and tried to break them. Allen shoved Hopkins at the same time the referee did, and, said a rueful Hopkins, "I'm not a wrestler. I don't know how to fall."
"What can I say? It was just one of those things that happens," said Maximum Mills. "The momentum of everyone caused him to fall out of the ring. I thought I'd seen everything in boxing, but not this."
