South Africa’s Frans Botha is set to fight undisputed world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis on July 1. Gavin Evans looks at the former fireman’s checkered career
My first glimpse of Francois Botha certainly left a favourable impression – though not of Botha himself. It was the final bout of the South African amateur championships in the Johannesburg City Hall, 1987, when a 21-year-old policeman, Corrie Sanders, struck Botha with his opening hook, rendering the fireman airborne and unconscious – one of four amateur defeats by Sanders.
But Botha’s hopes did not end horizontally. Behind his fatman’s face and slow Witbank drawl (today mixed with a Texan-Californian hybrid), there is a dogged determination that has since taken him to a “world” title, to Mike Tyson’s den and on July 15 will see him going man to man with Lennox Lewis.
He chose his destiny after viewing a film of Muhammad Ali’s victory over George Foreman as an eight-year-old. “I said to me dad: ‘One day I’m going to win the heavyweight championship of the world.'” Despite losing his first five fights, he stuck with it. “I was extremely discouraged, but in my heart I never thought of giving up.”
So when Sanders turned professional in 1989, Botha stepped into the breach as national champion and team captain. His vice-captain, Jan Bergman, remembers his behaviour ranging between outbursts of temper and displays of remorseful generosity. “Once he called us ‘fucking kaffirs’ so we decided to complain, but then something funny happened. He stuck a R100 note under my door with an apology for treating the black team members badly. So we dropped it and, in fairness to him, he changed after that.”
A year later Botha launched his professional career in Johannesburg, soon followed by a spell in the United States. But he did not enjoy training and was held back by a right arm injury, sustained in fighting fires. “It was not as easy as I thought. My right arm was very painful and my hand was also numb, so I had no power in the right,” he said.
After winning a pair of dubious verdicts over local heavies Gideon Hlongwa and Siza Makhathini, he took on Ginger Tshabalala, a novice light-heavyweight who boxed rings around him. The decision was the worst I’ve ever seen, with the two white judges outvoting the one black judge. When I spoke to Tshabalala shortly before his 1995 carjacking murder, he was still seething. “I won every round by a mile, so afterwards Frans came up to me and said: ‘Sorry, you won’.”
Botha’s new promoter, former World Boxing Association heavyweight champion Gerrie Coetzee, returned him to the US, but they soon came to blows – literally. “He makes up his own mind on everything – even whether he’s going to train,” Coetzee complained.
Botha was then taken over by Texan Joe Costello, but he was restricted to the backwaters of the American West with occasional sorties abroad (Ecuador, Belfast and, once, Johannesburg). A sample was a 1992 Oklahoma adventure when he scored three first-round knockouts on the same night – one of them against a karate blackbelt. Eventually, he moved with his wife, son and daughter to Newport Beach, California, where he signed up with Don King who supplied him with a new trainer, Panama Lewis – a man previously jailed for removing the stuffing from boxing gloves, seriously injuring a young prospect.
Botha was on his way, moving through the ratings of the corrupt International Boxing Federation (IBF). Its president, Bobby Lee, was in the habit of taking backhanders from King and other promoters, whose boxers were graded accordingly. The then-IBF ratings chair, Douglas Beavers, said in evidence to the ongoing Lee corruption trial that Botha was one of these beneficiaries. Still, he played his part, adopting a new moniker, “The White Buffalo”, and, in tune to King, singing his own praises, with particular emphasis on his skin colour (while at the same time draping himself in the flag of the “new” South Africa and claiming he would win the world title “for Nelson Mandela”).
“It’s time to declare war on the heavyweight division,” he announced. “I’m white but I can fight. Anyone who wants the title will have to come through the White Buffalo. I’m the real white contender here, the others are just pretenders. The white buffalo may be extinct in today’s day and age, but there is one left.
“People all over are crying for a white heavyweight champion, including blacks as well. Even in South Africa black people are my biggest supporters.”
It was the kind of nonsense the Don loved to hear and he began to plot Botha’s world title ascent. When I asked King what Botha had done to warrant it, he beamed before replying: “You gotta give the white man a chance.” The IBF dutifully stripped George Foreman of his title and matched Botha against Germany’s Axel Schulz. Most ringside neutrals felt Schulz edged it and the Stuttgart crowd pelted Botha with bottles when he emerged with a split decision.
But the fix came unstuck. Botha tested positive for steroids, which meant he should have been immediately stripped of his title, although Lee ignored the tests until Kushner insisted on the letter of the law and the management of another contender, Michael Moorer, issued summons. The result was that the IBF was forced to strip Botha of his title with the outcome of the Schulz fight altered to “no contest”. Botha claimed he was robbed. “The traces came from a steroid medication prescribed by a doctor for my right arm injury. Look at my body. Do I look like a man who has been working out on steroids?” Well, no, but the high steroid count raised doubts, as did suspicions about Panama Lewis. Botha was damned both by science and by association.
The end, however, was far from nigh. Moorer – by then also owned by King -beat Schulz for the IBF title and in November 1996 Botha got another shot. This time he had little to offer other than courage and the odd hopeful right. Moorer opened up in the 11th round, scoring three knockdowns, and Botha was rescued in the 12th. Still, he insisted on his superiority. “Technically speaking it was a win for me. Moorer went to hospital after the fight and I was ready for a big steak, and my stock as a fighter went up.”
He applied for US citizenship, announcing he was “disillusioned” with South Africa because Mandela’s government had never been on his side. “I’m thinking of not using the South African flag anymore. I’ll use my own flag with a white buffalo emblem.” He also lost faith in King and joined British promoter Frank Warren while adopting a new image (an irony-free version of the British comedian Ali-G – scull-cap, wrap-around shades, kilos of chunky jewellery and a bleached goatee added to the moustache). Along the way his itinerant existence was replaced by more stolid California roots, consolidated by shares in a restaurant, a wine- importing concern and a champagne glass business.
His debut under the new regime came on January 16 last year against Mike Tyson, who was coming out after an enforced 19- month layoff. Botha was a revelation, for four rounds at least. He was not intimidated – not even when Tyson attempted to break his arm in a clinch – and his jab-move-clinch tactics enabled him to build up the points until he got too close and was blasted out with a solitary right hook. “I just lost concentration for a second,” he said. “I want another shot at Mike because I know I can beat him.”
His next fight, last August, shored up this opinion. The popular New Yorker Shannon Briggs was attempting to re- establish himself as a contender but Botha picked himself off the canvas in the eighth round to dominate down the stretch, battering Briggs around the ring in the final round to claim a credible draw.
Botha withdrew from a “showdown” with Sanders in January, instead stopping Steve Pannell in New Mexico – his 40th win (25 stoppages) in 44 outings.
Both Botha and Sanders were “in the frame” to fight Lewis, but it was the less dangerous, more marketable Botha who prevailed. “I’m using this fight as a stepping stone to get back at the real man, and that man is Tyson,” he cockily contended.
On the positive side, this 1,89m, 105kg 31-year-old has reached his peak under the guidance of his new trainer, Abel Sanchez. His torso has a more defined musculature, and his footwork, defence, stamina and strength have also improved, while his self-belief is hard to fault. “I think of him trying to prevent my family from eating or of him hitting my children,” he said. “That gives me the aggression I need. What gives me the confidence is the shape I’m in and the fact that I know I can fight against any kind of style since I spar against a variety of styles.” Lewis obliged by offering, rather generously, that Botha is “a quick fighter with some good moves and a lot of heart”.
I expect Botha to last no longer than he managed against Tyson but whatever the result, it’s been a great ride for the White Buffalo. Never before has a heavyweight gone so far on so little.