Most of the 14,136 fans who piled into Madison Square Garden on June 22, 1979, had come to watch Roberto Duran, already a legend, take on Carlos Palomino in Duran’s first major fight at 147 pounds.

By all accounts, few were there to watch Larry Holmes defend the world heavyweight title against unknown Mike “Hercules” Weaver in the show’s main event. Indeed, so little was thought of the challenger that for the first time in three years, the three major television networks had passed on a heavyweight title fight.

And now, precisely 30 years later, Holmes’ 12th-round kayo win is recalled as one of the best heavyweight slugfests of the era and the fight that established Holmes as a gritty, resourceful, and unusually stubborn champion who would sooner saw off a limb than relinquish the title.

Contrasted against today’s monumentally soulless heavyweight division, the fight seems not only distant, but downright novel. Magical almost. The heavyweight title and its attendant spoils was something for which grown men with families were willing to die. If it sounds melodramatic, maybe it is, but it’s the truth.

At the time, few believed Holmes would so much as break a sweat. Weaver, though on a five-fight winning streak, had accrued eight losses over the course of his seven-year-old career, and held the dubious distinction of having lost to both Rodney and Duane Bobick, a pair of fighting brothers who in retrospect make the Klitschkos look like towering icons of pugilistic perfection.

That was before Weaver figured out that one’s success in the ring was almost entirely dependent on how hard one worked in the gym and during early morning runs. By his own admission, he had long been the kind of fighter who would run half a mile then turn around and walk home. That had changed.

Still, he was supposed to be nothing more than a tune-up for Holmes going into his rematch with top-ranked Earnie Shavers. On the record at least, Holmes took him seriously.

“They all act as if Weaver was going to walk into the ring and drop dead,” Holmes said the week of the fight. “Hell, he's a fighter. He's going to throw everything he has at me because he has nothing to lose. He wants my title and for him it's the chance of a lifetime. And I'll kill him before I let him take it from me.”

It might be that Holmes, who was making his third defense of the title he won in a thriller against Ken Norton, took Weaver seriously because he claims to have known something no one else did: he’d contracted the flu in the middle of training camp. He recently told RingTV.com that his condition affected his performance, but not his attitude.

“He didn’t fight a 100-percent Larry Holmes but I did what I had to do,” Holmes said from his office in Easton, Penn. “But I didn’t have any doubt in myself or my punches. I wasn’t able to put 100-percent into training because of my sickness, but I was ready to do what I had to do.

“I didn’t tell anyone I had the flu and felt confident going into it anyway. I didn’t realize my timing would be off like it was but I was able to do what I had to do. I knew the boy could fight and it was going to be a hard fight but I felt I would be able to get him in the later rounds, which I eventually did.”

It didn’t come easy. Holmes won the first three rounds with the jab. Weaver won the next two. By the fight’s midway point the crowd was solidly in the underdog’s corner.

As Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times, “As soon as Mike Weaver landed one of those big right hands, the people in the rafters started chanting ‘WeaVER, WeaVER’ for a heavyweight most of them had never heard of until the match was made.”

Back and forth it went over the middle rounds, not always pretty, but damned compelling. Holmes jabbed and tried to land rights. Weaver bombed him back with right hands and left hooks. Holmes claimed later not to be bothered by the crowd.

“I heard them yelling for him but it didn't mean anything. At the time, he was beating the hell out of me. So they yelled for him. When I was beating the hell out of him, they was yelling for me,” he said.

The two pounded away at one another in the eighth and ninth rounds. At the start of the 10th, Holmes told Weaver, “I'm the champion. There's no way you're gonna beat me.”

Weaver replied: “I'm gonna try.”

They slugged away through the 10th and deep into the 11th. Both men were hurt more than once. With 12 seconds left in the 11th, Holmes willed everything he had left into a right uppercut that caught Weaver clean and dropped him hard.

The rest between rounds wasn’t enough. At the start of the 12th Holmes pinned Weaver against the ropes and pummeled him until referee Harold Valan stopped it. Finally it was over.

Holmes told Sport Illustrated’s Pat Putnam that he had a moment of clarity after the ninth round.

“I thought about my title,” he said. “And I thought about this guy trying to take it from me. I knew I had made a lot of mistakes: that I had taken him too lightly, that I should have trained a lot harder. I decided to suck it up. If I was going to be a champion, then, damn it, I was gonna fight like a champion. He was gonna have to kill me to take my title.”

Thirty years later, it looks better than ever.

Epilogue:

It wouldn’t be the last time Holmes had to dig deep. He did it over and over on the way to tallying 20 title defenses over a seven-year reign, second only to Joe Louis among all heavyweight champions.

Weaver rebounded to win the WBA title with an eye-popping, one-punch, 15th-round knockout of Big John Tate in Tennessee in 1980 and managed two defenses before losing the title to Michael Dokes and then slowly slipping back into obscurity.

Holmes and Weaver met in a rematch 21 years later in Biloxi, Mississippi. Holmes, still given to a kind of prickliness that might be better characterized as careless honesty, explained why.

“He always complained that the referee stopped the fight too early so I said, ‘We’re not champions anymore, why don’t we do it again? Here’s some money, if you want to take it, why don’t we go do it?’ He accepted it and we went out and did it.”

Holmes was 51, Weaver softer but still muscular at 49. Holmes controlled with his jab and Weaver, a maddeningly reluctant puncher even in his prime, was even worse 20 years past it. He barely threw a punch and Holmes stopped him in the sixth.

“The difference was, I didn’t lose much at all,” Holmes told me. “He did.”

Some random observations from last week:

That was the best Ruslan Chagaev could do? He didn’t win a round. Or even part of a round. He should change his nickname from “The White Tyson” to “The White Rahman.” I haven’t felt so disillusioned since I saw those pictures of Megan Fox’s toe thumbsÔǪ

Seriously, Wladimir Klitschko looked positively impenetrable. As dull as he is, you must respect this: everyone knows he’s going to come out and jab you to death and then come over with the right. Everybody knows it. They prepare for it. They train for it. They plan for it. And he’s able to do it anyway. That’s no accidentÔǪ

Kudos to Jean Pascal and Adrian Diaconu for putting on a heck of a fight Friday night, but mostly to Pascal for showing us how a Diaconu-Chad Dawson fight would have gone. And also for saving us from the indignity of having a guy named “Adrian” continue to hold a title belt, even an alphabet versionÔǪ

Laila Ali, whose ego dwarfs her famous father’s, is hugging some mongrel on this month’s cover of “Healthy Pet” magazine. It’s nice to see she’s finally hit the big timeÔǪ

Hey, everyone, Vivian Harris is a free agent!

I can’t talk to Holmes about the old days without recalling his mega fight with Gerry Cooney and one of the more poignant scenes in modern sports history that occurred afterward when Cooney grabbed the ring microphone and apologized to his fans for losing. He clearly had done nothing that necessitated an apology, but he apologized anyway. And you thought only David Letterman did thatÔǪ

For the record, I agree completely with THE RING demoting Miguel Cotto in its pound-for-pound ranking. Sure he showed guts and grit overcoming a nasty gash. Big deal. Arturo Gatti made a career of it. It didn’t make him a great fighter.

Bill Dettloff can be contacted at [email protected]