Chips Off The Old Mills?
By Bernard Fernandez (March 2, 2007)
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Everybody knows that fighters traditionally have come from the wrong side of the tracks. Theirs is a tough, hard sport that offered tough, hard men – disenfranchised immigrants and desperate souls trapped within the barless prisons of ghettos and barrios – a way out and into a better life. If only you had iron in your fists and fire in your belly, boxing presented an escape route from the mines and the factories and the squalor that were the dead-end fate for so many when this nation was being forged in large part by other countries’ tired, poor, huddled masses that came here yearning to breathe free.
And then there is Mills B. Lane III, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and chose to spit it out to follow a different path. When you stop to think about it, perhaps his is the most unlikely success story of all, because the instant dispenser of justice who disqualified Mike Tyson for chewing off a part of Evander Holyfield’s ear started out at the top and went on to scale other mountains. His own mountains.
“When my dad made his decision to leave and do his thing, I know his father, my grandfather, was not happy about that,” said Terry Lane, 23-year-old son of the renowned referee and jurist. “But it when it eventually became apparent that my dad was destined to achieve great things anyway, I think that made his family proud.”
Mills B. Lane III, 69, the patrician scion of a Southern dynasty, is still as pugnacious and contrary as ever, despite a debilitating stroke suffered in 2002 that resulted in the cancellation of his television show and rendered him, for all intents and purposes, speechless. But Terry and his younger brother Tommy, 19, have given voice to their father’s latest project, the reconstituted Let’s Get It On Promotions, so named for Mills Lane’s signature catchphrase.
“The company originally was a partnership between my dad and Tony Holden, a promoter and family friend from Oklahoma,” Terry said. “When my dad had his stroke, everything in his life, including the company, was sort of halted.
“We’ve exhausted everything we could in terms of his treatment and therapy, but his mind is as sharp as ever. No, he cannot speak in terms of carrying on a regular conversation, but he is still capable of advising my brother and me. He is a full and active participant in the new Let’s Get It On Promotions.
“My dad actually wanted Tommy and me to be a part of the company when it started, but we were probably too young then. When I graduated from college (The New School in New York City last May), Tommy and I set up the infrastructure to bring it back. Right now we’re a small operation in Reno, but we want to help return boxing to its former prominence in northern Nevada. Right now we’re looking to do our first show in July. We have signed a top-rated middleweight, Derek Hinkey, a Native American kid from McDermott, Nev., who’ll be making his pro debut as a super middleweight (tomorrow) night on a card promoted by Joey Gilbert in Lake Tahoe. We’re also looking at other young fighters to add to our stable.
“We’re starting small, but we hope to grow in the next few years. I think we can do some good. I’ve been around boxing my whole life. My brother and I want to be ambassadors of the sport. We are young, but the good news is that time is on our side.”
But perhaps the best thing Terry and Tommy have going for them is their lineage, and they still have their old man around to advise them. You almost might say that they, too, are starting out at the top. Now it’s up to the Lane boys to make their mark, in their own way, just as their father did.
Had everything gone as planned a half-century ago, Mills B. Lane III – you didn’t know he was Roman-numeraled, like a Super Bowl, did you? – would have followed an extremely comfortable destiny that had been plotted for him since birth. He hailed from a prominent Georgia banking family that also had extensive plantation holdings in that state and in South Carolina.
How wealthy were the Lanes? Well, the Mills B. Lane House in historic downtown Savannah, Ga., is presently on the market for $7.6 million. Completed in 1907, this “jewel of the antebellum South,” according to the real-estate company overseeing its sale, “serves as a testament to the perfect combination of properly preserving the past and living grandly in the present.” That seems to adequately describe a mansion that would have impressed even Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, one which boasts a marble entrance, Corinthian columns, parquet floors, 29 handcrafted canvas murals, nine fireplaces, five bedrooms, eight full baths, three half-baths and a large, in-ground pool.
Those to the manor born almost always take the course of least resistance and readily accept the trappings of wealth and privilege as their due. Mills Lane’s father went so far as to have already paid his son’s tuition at a prestigious Midwestern university, where the young man was to study agriculture, the better to prepare him for instructing field hands on the proper way to eradicate those pesky boll weevils.
But being a banker and/or gentleman farmer didn’t especially appeal to young Mills, who did not want to float through life sipping mint juleps and benefiting from a name that carried so much economic and social clout. He apparently believed that rich kids could be rebels, too, and not just because their male ancestors once had worn plumed hats as Confederate officers.
So Mills B. Lane III chucked it all in 1956 to enlist in the Marines. He took up boxing while in service to his country, becoming All-Far East welterweight champion. And when his hitch was up, he took off for Reno, where, he had read in a magazine, the local university had a boxing team of some repute.
Lane won an NCAA boxing championship while at Nevada-Reno and, after turning pro, posted an 11-1 record. But his accomplishments in the ring represented only some of the steps taken during his remarkable journey of self-discovery. He graduated from UNR with a law degree in 1963, did post-grad work at the University of Utah and from there slid seamlessly into multiple vocations in boxing and law enforcement as a referee, deputy sheriff, district attorney of Washoe (Nev.) County and as a municipal court judge, where his penchant for handing out stiff sentences to felonious offenders earned him the sobriquet of “Maximum Mills.”
Somewhere along the way Lane became perhaps the best-known referee of his era, a no-nonsense arbiter who earned respect for being tough but fair. He worked his first world championship bout in 1979 (middleweight king Vito Antuofermo’s title-retaining draw with Marvin Hagler) and 101 in all, but his greatest fame came the night of June 28, 1997, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, when in the third round he stared down an enraged Tyson, who had just turned Holyfield’s ear into a chew toy.
“We have so many clips of fights that my dad refereed,” Terry Lane said. “But one of my favorites is immediately after the first time Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear. Tyson looked at my dad with a straight face and said that (the bleeding ear) was from a punch. My dad looked Tyson and said, `That’s bulls---!’
“I don’t know how many people would have gotten right up in Mike Tyson’s face and said, `Bulls---, you’re lying to me,’ but my dad did. Dad is all about honesty, hard work and determination. He attributes most of his success to what he learned in the Marines, but I believe he probably had a lot of that in him anyway.”
There are those – and this is a minority view – who believe that Lane actually was tardy in slapping down Tyson, who, after all, twice chomped on Holyfield before he was disqualified.
One email response I received following a story on the comeback of Tommy Morrison, in which I mentioned Lane’s handling of Tyson-Holyfield II, came from a reader named Gary. “I lost a lot of respect for Mills Lane that night,” Gary wrote. “The ironic aspect of Lane and the Tyson `Bite Fight’ is that Lane became a celebrity. What a joke. He should have been held to the first for not having had the balls to stop it after Tyson bit Holyfield the first time.”
Marc Ratner, then the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, said Lane handled an unusual and highly volatile situation with his standard grace and aplomb.
“Mills called me into the ring after the first bite by Tyson and said, `Marc, I’m going to disqualify him. He bit Holyfield,’” recalled Ratner, now an executive with Ultimate Fighting Championship. “I said, `What do you mean?’ because I couldn’t tell what had happened from my vantage point.
“I asked Mills if he was sure he wanted to disqualify Tyson at that point and he said, `Let me talk to Dr. Homansky (ring physician Flip Homansky). Flip told him that Evander still could fight and still wanted to fight. So Mills let it continue until the second bite, when he really had no choice (but to DQ Tyson).
“In retrospect, Mills did exactly what he should have done. But then he always did. Mills Lane is one of the finest persons I have ever known, and he was a great referee. He never backed down in any situation. I don’t think there’s any doubt he was one of the best referees boxing has ever had.”
Reader Gary is correct about one thing, though; Lane became a national figure following Holyfield-Tyson II, so much so that TV producers, now aware of his hanging-judge reputation while on the Nevada bench, asked him to settle claims for a syndicated courtroom show originating in New York. “Judge Mills Lane” aired nationally from 1998 to 2001 and the black-robed authority figure with the raspy voice proved just as feisty with miscreants in that arena as he did in the ring. He often had litigants escorted backstage by security personnel when they spoke out of turn or exhibited disrespect for his authority.
“I’m old, I’m bald and I’m short, not only in stature, but also in patience with those unwilling to give their best effort,” he said during the show’s run. “And I’m not talking about boxing. Life’s nothing but one continuous battle from start to finish. Every now and then some people deserve to get their butts chewed. Every now and then some people a pat on the back. What I try to do is compliment folks who deserve a compliment, and chew folks out who deserve to be chewed out.”
The stroke that slurred Lane’s speech and paralyzed his right side served to nudge him out of public view for the first time in decades, but it couldn’t defeat him. He traveled four times to Ukraine to receive stromal stem cell injections, a form of treatment unavailable in the United States.
Lane has come to accept his physical limitations, but the honors continue to roll in even as his personal fight continues. On Dec. 27, 2004, Lane made his first public appearance in years at “Mills Lane Day” in Reno, during which the Mills B. Lane Justice Center was dedicated.
Now the countdown is on until another producer, the Hollywood variety, comes calling with an offer to make Mills B. Lane, the motion picture.
“My dad is one of those people who, if you were to write his life story in a movie script, no one would accept it as realistic,” Terry Lane said. “The emotional outpouring from people whose lives he’s touched doesn’t surprise me, but maybe that’s because he’s my dad.
“When I was growing up, I thought everybody was like him. Obviously, I’m still learning that everybody isn’t as special as he is. There’s really only one Mills Lane.”
Even if he’s Mills B. Lane III.
THE OLD LEFT HOOKER
(Sunday marks the 13th anniversary of the death of my father. The following are elements of a column I wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News that appeared on April 6, 1999.)
I never saw my favorite fighter in action. His last professional fight took place before I was born. There are no videotapes of him boring in, springing from a crouch and landing his trademark left hook. All that remains of his boxing legacy are a few yellowed newspaper clippings, the memories of a diminishing number of elderly friends and family members and, oh, yes, a framed poster from Aug. 18, 1944, that lists his name as an undercard performer for a show headlined by the great Archie Moore. The Mongoose fought Jimmie Hayden; my favorite fighter fought Jimmy Hatmaker.
By all accounts, Bernard “Jack” Fernandez Sr. –- whose nickname was conferred by someone long, long ago because his boxing style supposedly was reminiscent of Jack Dempsey’s – was no one’s idea of a great fighter. Boxing did not bring him wealth and fame, only a few trophies from his amateur days in New Orleans and a love of the sport he passed on to his only son. But the old clippings, and the enthusiastic recollections of those who saw him fight, are enough to make me think that he must have been entertaining to watch. The word – confirmed by the somewhat unnatural configuration of his nose and ears – is that my favorite fighter, a scrappy welterweight, always came to fight, always gave as good as he got. Those who knew him then told me of his willingness to take one – or two, or three – to connect with one of his own.
One clipping, previewing Archie Moore’s 10-round main event with Amado Rodriguez in San Diego, described my favorite fighter thusly: “The opener matches Jack Fernandez, a wild-hooking slugger, against a good shock absorber, Mike Pacheco.”
Another, in the New Orleans Item, was a personal note from Art Burke, a fellow New Orleanian who later served as the newspaper’s executive sports editor, to then-sports editor Harry Martinez, who reprinted the letter in his column.
“We had a monthly `smoker’ here at the gymnasium Wednesday night (which opened with the returns of the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight) and one of our New Orleans Reservists, Jack Fernandez, fought on the eight-bout boxing program and scored the only clean-cut knockout of the night,” Burke, a member of the U.S. Naval Reserves then serving in San Diego as was my father, wrote to Martinez. “You may remember this boy since he reached the semifinals of the Sugar Bowl boxing tournament in 1940. His victory was all the more thrilling by the fact that the boy he kayoed in the second round was Utah state 145-pound boxing champion for three straight years and had not been knocked out in 75 fights.”
For nearly seven years after I succeeded Elmer Smith on the Philadelphia Daily News boxing beat in October 1987, my dad was my primary sounding board. He watched on TV most of the fights I covered and, those few he didn’t, I sent tapes for his review. He’d make observations, again giving me the benefit of his wisdom and insight. We’d speak at least once a week, and the conversation often turned to boxing. It was not nearly our only common bond, but it was a shared passion.
My father passed away on March 4, 1994, after suffering a heart attack. He was 74. I flew to New Orleans and made it in time to be with him in what proved to be the final hour of his life. The fighter in him, I’m convinced, wouldn’t allow him to take the 10-count until I arrived.
Those who love you never really leave, and the old left hooker has never left me. Not then, not now, not ever.
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