When will Golota just go away?

When Micky Ward compares his late friend and rival Arturo Gatti to Jason Voorhees, as he does almost every time anyone interviews him, he means it as a compliment. No matter what Ward hit him with, Gatti just wouldn't stay down. All that "Thunder" was missing was the goalie's mask.

Another pugilistic "A.G." from the same era, Andrew Golota, could also conjure up images of Jason Voorhees, but in his case, there's nothing flattering about the comparison. Golota is more like the Friday The 13th movies themselves than the lead antagonist. We enjoyed his first couple of incarnations, but before long we couldn't believe they were still cranking out these sequels and we especially couldn't believe the public still supported them. With the movies, the question was, "How many hundreds of horny teenagers do they have to butcher before moviegoers lose interest?" With Golota, the question was, "How many times does he have to come unglued in the ring before promoters stop trying to bring him back?"

In February 2009, yet another Friday The 13th movie was released. This weekend, yet another Golota resurrection takes place. And it's not some insignificant comeback fight, like what we tend to see with Oliver McCall or Henry Akinwande or any of the other 1990s heavyweight misfits who won't go away. Golota keeps getting reasonably meaningful opportunities -- in this case, a fight against the cruiserweight champion of the world, Tomasz Adamek.

Nobody's saying Golota, who's a few months shy of his 42nd birthday, should be forced to retire. If he can pass the physicals, he has a right to fight. But a trip down meltdown-memory lane with him makes you wonder how a guy who has seemingly committed career suicide so many times keeps getting offered real money for real fights against live opponents.

Here are the lows, in case you've forgotten: two consecutive disqualification losses to Riddick Bowe in 1996, fights Golota was well on his way to winning if his self-destruction instinct hadn't kicked in; a 95-second pummeling at the hands of Lennox Lewis in 1997; a 10th-round quit-job against Michael Grant in 1999 in another fight Golota was winning handily on points; a surprisingly quick surrender against Mike Tyson in 2000, complete with Golota refusing to unclench his jaw and receive the mouthpiece, a fan pelting him with fruit punch and Showtime boss Jay Larkin famously tearing him a new orifice in the locker room afterward; a first-round blast out at the hands of Lamon Brewster in 2005, right after Golota had restored some public confidence with near misses in alphabet title tries against Chris Byrd and John Ruiz; and, just less than a year ago, a first-round TKO loss against the exceedingly ordinary Ray Austin, the result of tendon tears near Golota's left biceps muscle.

Let's add it up: seven defeats, only one coming by decision; zero wins over heavyweights rated by THE RING at the time Golota fought them; four alphabet title shots. It just doesn't compute. And here Golota is, coming off a three-minute loss to Austin and a layoff of 50 weeks, being given an opportunity to fight RING champion Adamek (albeit in an over-the-weight non-title fight) in what shapes up as the biggest fight ever held in Poland.

"If somebody asks me to dance, I never say no, and this was Adamek's idea, not mine," Golota said recently. "So I said, 'Why not?'"

So we have Adamek to blame, eh? Actually, we have Polish fight fans to blame, as they've continued to support Golota with their wallets and keep him in a situation where it means something in the motherland for Adamek to beat him. Promoter Don King compared the interest in Poland to the Super Bowl in America. And even if that's a case of hyperbole from a man who's been known to exaggerate from time to time, the reality is that Golota is still revered in Poland and it would be a career boost there for Adamek to defeat him.

"The general public doesn't care about Golota anymore. I think that ship has sailed," said Donald Tremblay, who worked with Golota for several years as the public relations director for promotional company Main Events. "For a while, there was a curiosity factor, but probably what changed that was the Tyson fight. He had so many people upset after that fight. Effectively, that was the end of what the average person wanted to see from him. But I think the big reason why Golota still gets fights is because the Polish people are very supportive of their own, and they don't have many fighters out there that they can really throw their weight behind. If he wasn't selling any tickets, chances are you wouldn't see him again. But because the Polish people support their own the way they do, you keep seeing him out there, because promoters know you can have a relatively successful promotion with him."

That explains why Golota continues to receive unearned opportunities. But it doesn't explain the career of a fighter such as John Ruiz. One-time Golota opponent Ruiz has, in his own way, been every bit the blight on boxing that Golota has been and, like Golota, just won't go away. Ruiz is a 230-pound cockroach, and we just can't seen to squash him. And there are plenty of other heavyweights who've worn out their welcome but keep getting decent opportunities whenever they launch a comeback, guys like James Toney and Shannon Briggs.

There are also some non-heavyweights we'd like to see disappear who keep hanging around, including two fighters named Hector Camacho.

But most of the fighters we're frustrated not to be able to get rid of are heavyweights, and there's little doubt why that is.

"The heavyweight division is so bad that I don't know if any heavyweight ever need retire," Tremblay observed. "There are so few good heavyweights out there, so if someone like Golota wants to just hang around on the fringes and get a payday every six months to a year by fighting somebody as a stepping stone, he can do that for years. And he might fight one of these supposed up-and-comers and occasionally wind up winning."

Is the Adamek fight one of those that Golota might win? On the one hand, Golota will outweigh the cruiserweight champ by about 30 pounds. On the other hand -- he's Andrew Golota. He's old, he's slow, he's had assorted injury problems, and he isn't the type to persevere if things aren't going his way. Golota will probably lose to Adamek, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to see him get stopped.

If that happens, is that the end of Golota at long last? Will he finally be shamed into retiring for good if he loses to a cruiserweight? Or will he at least be unmarketable enough and embarrassed enough in front of the Polish fans to lose his status as a ticket seller?

Maybe Adamek will be the one to finally end the long, strange boxing odyssey of Andrew Golota, by taking forcefully from him the mantle of Poland's biggest boxing star. If Adamek batters Golota, maybe "The Foul Pole" will finally quit the sport.

And wouldn't that be something -- for once, Golota would be quitting and nobody would be upset about it.

RASKIN'S RANTS

- Tremblay made an excellent comparison with the Adamek-Golota fight, likening it to Michael Spinks-Gerry Cooney. Sounds about right to me. In case you've forgotten, Spinks, outweighed by 30 pounds, won that fight by fifth-round stoppage.

- My hatred for Oprah Winfrey as a talk-show host is well-documented in my household (where my wife insists on keeping her on DVR Season Pass), but I put my intolerance for Oprah aside long enough to watch last Friday's interview with Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. Two thoughts: First, I'm tired of everyone trying to provoke tears out of Tyson and if I never hear him get choked up again, it'll be too soon; and second, both Tyson and Holyfield showed tremendous restraint not to beg Oprah for money on the air, since she makes enough in an hour to clear all of their debts.

- What's harder to believe: reports that Winky Wright is a big attraction in Puerto Rico, or the fact that Scorpions got the nod for Arthur Abraham's ring walk performance over The Hoff?

- Reason number 7,261 to love the Super Six tournament: In the last couple of rounds of Abraham vs. Jermain Taylor, the extra point for a knockout lent some drama to a fight where we already knew who the winner was going to be. Hopefully, this is the last we'll see of Taylor in the tournament, because I suspect after three knockout losses in a little over two years, he'll be an automatic three points for any opponent -- which is unfair to the two guys who aren't scheduled to fight him, Carl Froch and Andre Dirrell.

- Speaking of Froch and Dirrell, three observations: (1) Gus Johnson, a popular broadcaster in other sports, continues to leave me unimpressed as a boxing blow-by-blow man, particularly when he called Froch "a modern-day Robin Hood" just because of the Nottingham connection. That was as lazy and contrived a line as I've ever heard. (2) There was a subtly great moment after the fight but before the decision was read, when Dirrell was shaking hands with Team Froch and one of the cornermen said dismissively, "You survived him." Dirrell calmly responded, "No, I won." (3) Thank you, Antonio Tarver. From here on out, I will exclusively refer to the victor in this fight as "Carl Crotch."

- Make sure to check back on RingTV.com later this week for the debut of Ring Theory, the new twice-a-month audio show (I'd call it a Podcast, but it won't be available for portable download right off the bat) that I'm co-hosting with Bill Dettloff. Expect fireworks on par with your average Ukrainian city council session attended by Vitali Klitschko.


Eric Raskin can be reached at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com