It's Coming Back to Me Now!

By John Skow

Who's heavyweight champ?

Dunno. Muhammad Ali. Aren't the Celts on TV?

O.K., a hint: not Spinks.

Not which Spinks? There was Leon and there was Michael. How about Women's Full Contact Pro Beach Volleyball?

No, look. There's a war; the sentry asks you a question to prove you're American. Who's heavyweight champ?

Right. I got it, Mark Tyson.

It's Mike, and no. Bang, you're dead.

Nah, it's boxing that's dead, has been since Primo Carnera retired. It's a sham and a shuck, lacking the je ne sais quoi of monster-truck racing and the visual appeal of a carton of eggs falling off the kitchen counter. Nobody cares except a couple dozen middle-aged sports editors. If those guys would unplug the publicity tubes . . .

Hey, check this out. Here's a guy, Evander Holyfield, nice fellow, good manners, says he's heavyweight champion.

What's he look like?

Like he delivers for Federal Express. No one believes he's a killer, El Supremo, Dr. Death. So this week Holyfield, who's 28, is going to bop this 42- year-old fat guy, George Foreman, on the beezer in Atlantic City. When Holyfield was in fourth grade, Foreman was heavyweight champ.

What's the problem?

Well, Foreman won his title by flattening Joe Frazier, who was no joke. 'Course that was back in '73, and the next year Foreman lost to Ali in Zaire. Then he lost to Jimmy Young, who wasn't a joke but wasn't Godzilla either. Foreman quit fighting for 10 years and took up preaching. And eating. But then four years ago, he started fighting again. He beat 24 stiffs in a row, 23 by knockouts.

So you're saying . . .?

The fat old guy could win.

Sure. So could George McGovern in the '92 presidential election. How about a two-George parlay? Giggles or not, jiggles or not, a lot of comebacking is being attempted at the world-class level in sports. A reasonable citizen may wonder what Foreman, Bjorn Borg, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Nancy Lieberman Cline, John McEnroe, Jim Palmer, Mark Spitz and Jill Sterkel have in common. A reasonable answer might be they're nuts. They're all trying, or trying to try, or have recently tried, comebacks, holding high the torch for middle-aged wheezers everywhere.

Doubters generally mention money in a disparaging way when the comeback phenomenon is discussed. Certainly there was a Dead Whale on a Flatcar quality when lardy ex-champ Larry Holmes, 41, TKOed unranked opponent Tim ("Doc") Anderson a couple of weeks ago in Florida. Later that night, perhaps to demonstrate unchainable ferocity, Holmes scuffled with fighter Trevor Berbick in a hotel driveway. Cameras running, of course. He got a scrawny $150,000 for the evening and bellyached about it.

Foreman has no reason to grumble. He will get $12.5 million in pay-TV loot. It will take Roger Clemens, the mannerly Red Sox pitcher who is baseball's highest-paid player, more than two years in the whirlpool to earn that much. But Foreman gives funnier interviews. He claims to have three sons, or five sons, named George Foreman, which is not just funny. It's eerie.

Not everyone agrees that money is dominant in the comeback phenomenon. Sugar Ray Leonard, 34, the gifted middleweight who lost badly to Terry Norris last February at the end of his third comeback, said flatly, "I needed the arena." Not the money. What he describes is not just being recognized by headwaiters. It is the sense of being regarded with awe, almost as a messiah figure. Missing that feeling during three years out of the ring was what led him to recently revealed excesses with drugs and booze. No more. Now, "I'm ready for middle age."

Not everyone is. Mark Spitz, 41, now a businessman in Beverly Hills, is the marvelous sprint swimmer who at the '72 Olympics in Munich won seven gold medals in world-record time. Spitz had a world-class mustache and was smashingly handsome. The only knock against him was that he projected the personality of a 22-year-old who had spent a lot of time in swimming pools.

Spitz retired, posed for a poster and got on with his life. He seldom swam the length of a pool. Then a couple of years ago, he began to toy with a goofy idea: that he could make the U.S. Olympic team next year and win a medal in his best event, the 100-m butterfly. It is the one men's event in which times haven't dropped dramatically. Pablo Morales, now retired, holds the record of 52.84 sec., and Spitz's '72 time of 54.27 sec. would have put him seventh at the Seoul Olympics. To make the team next year, Spitz figures, he'll have to swim in the low 53s. He seems keyed up, and, he says, one reason he decided to come back was that "I missed the feeling of being nervous, of having to go out there and perform." At week's end, in a $30,000 match race in the 50-m fly, he lost to freestyle sprinter Tom Jager at Mission Viejo, Calif., 24.92 sec. to 26.70 sec.

Tennis players compete nearly every day and wear out early, but here is Bjorn Borg, 34, the five-time Wimbledon champ, beginning a comeback. There seems to be no physiological reason that Borg, a burnout case at 26, couldn't rank in the Top 10 again. Tennis is much faster now, mostly because of big, composite rackets, and so far Borg intends to use his old wooden relics. But doubters may recall that he re-made his game once before, when he added a big serve in 1978 after he had won Wimbledon a couple of times. Tennis comebacks aren't unknown; John McEnroe, 32, who was one of the reasons Borg burned out, took a furlough from the game for several months in '86, came back, left again in '87, came back once more, and last fall reached the semi-finals of the U.S. Open.

Still, are most comebacks simply arena addiction? Not in Borg's case. He seems to be back now because he needs the money. But the others? Publicity is, of course, a renewable resource, but did Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer really gain any bankable ink this spring by trying a comeback with the Baltimore Orioles at age 45? Palmer made the right jokes but not the right pitches. He was stopped almost instantly by a torn hamstring. Doesn't he look a little silly?

Or could it be that Palmer, Spitz and the others aren't being unrealistic? "We've always had this dogma that the human body peaks at age 26 to 28 and then goes into a slow decline," says Rick Sharp, a professor of exercise physiology at Iowa State University. "But in fact, what we were seeing was not the effects of aging per se, but of increasingly sedentary life-styles." When 50-year-old men and women began running marathons in times that once would have been records, experts began to rethink old ideas about middle age.

According to Dr. Robert Cantu, a Concord, Mass., sports-medicine specialist, athletic ability consists of three elements. Endurance generally peaks in the late 20s and is sustainable into the mid-30s, then deteriorates slowly, at about 1% a year. Strength peaks later, perhaps not until the 40s, then deteriorates even more slowly. Coordination, including reflexes, can be maintained at nearly 100% capability until 50.

Not all the news is good. Recovery time lengthens as the metabolism slows. Arthritic changes wear at joints. Loss of conditioning because of injury or off-seasons creates bigger setbacks for older athletes. Nolan Ryan, the 44- year-old flamethrowing pitcher for the Texas Rangers, doesn't allow himself an off-season, and is said to have perfect mechanics, meaning not just that his arm leverage lets him throw smoke but that his joints don't grind themselves to powder. This makes Ryan, who shows no sign of retiring, an unlikely prospect for a comeback, but never say never.

Women athletes are no less susceptible to ego and endorphins than men, though their comebacks tend to be no-bucks, low-publicity events. But Nancy Lieberman Cline, 32, arguably the best woman basketball player ever, is working out several hours a day to make her third Olympic team, and sprint swimmer Jill Sterkel, 29, hopes to make her fifth. Why do it? Says Lieberman Cline: "As world-class athletes, we are treated special. Since the first moment anyone recognized we had an ounce of talent, we've been stroked. We're spoiled."

Is George Foreman spoiled? No, folks, just nicely ripened. He is a huge man, 6 ft. 4 in. and something like 250 lbs., with a shiny, shaved skull and a neck wider than his head, including his ears. He says coming into the ring too slim would be a mistake. He's teasing. He does that a lot, making it easy for reporters to laugh. Call him a fatted calf, call him a freak show, and he chuckles. "I like being me," he says now. "I have gotten rid of all problems like leaves hanging off a tree. If an old man like me can come back from the dead, then that is a victory for mankind."

He trains hard. Former light-heavyweight Archie Moore, the old mongoose, who fought his own last pro fight in 1965 at 52, helps inspire him to do it. Foreman straps himself into a harness and pulls a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle around while a trainer steers. He jogs behind a flatbed truck, whacking at a heavy punching bag tied to the back. More impressively, Foreman spars with four partners in succession for 21 consecutive minutes, pushing, slogging that thunderous right hand, crowding.

He is transforming himself. He's done it before. As a teenager in Houston he was a strong-arm street thug. Then he stumbled into a Job Corps program and turned into a wholehearted achiever. Two years later, at 19, he bludgeoned a Soviet heavyweight for an Olympic gold medal at Mexico City and waved an American flag joyously. He was an oak of a man, with a knee-weakening scowl, when he brutalized Joe Frazier in 1973, and an oak-and-a-half when he lost to Ali in Zaire, 19 months later. He spent money crazily, gave it away, acting the fool, the ex-champ. Then he lost to Jimmy Young in 1977, found God in a haze of heat prostration, and retired.

If Foreman escapes the Parkinson's syndrome that afflicts Ali and some other old fighters, it may be because for 10 years thereafter nobody punched him in the head. In a rough Marshall, Texas, neighborhood of open drainage ditches and rusted trucks up on cinder blocks, he built an eight-pew, corrugated-steel church and a youth center. He turned to fighting again to keep both running.

Angelo Dundee, Ali's old trainer, predicts that Foreman will win. "Before, he was a tough guy. Now, he's a sweet individual. So it'll be a good fight. You always gotta have a mean guy and a sweet guy."

The designated mean guy is Holyfield, 6 ft. 2 1/2 in., lean and quick at about 210 lbs. Holyfield doesn't say much. He's a boxer, not a slugger, a patient man. He won the title from Buster Douglas, who took it from Tyson when Tyson was thinking about something else. The new champ has seen the film of Ali dancing, clinching, ducking in Zaire, letting the 25-year-old, 220-lb. Foreman punch himself out. He's no Ali, but he has trained aerobically and anaerobically, as modern fighters do. As he punches, an aide with a computer tallies each jab and uppercut. The computer appears to be well-conditioned, and lightning fast.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: THE BODY'S PEAK PERFORMANCE

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los Angeles, Joseph J. Kane/Marshall and David E. Thigpen/New York