Boxing: Harrison's honeymoon with BBC is over but Olympic fight goes on

Audley Harrison has come out fighting this past week, without actually lacing up a glove. Apart from some tetchy verbal sparring with his paymasters, the BBC, he has also been aggressively championing the cause of the London Olympic bid, threatening to lead a demo on Downing Street if it is eventually KO'd.

First the battle with the Beeb. Next Saturday night the Olympic super-heavyweight champion engages in his ninth professional bout under their banner at the Fountain Leisure Centre, Brentford. Spectators might need a map to find it, and viewers will need to be insomniacs to catch it, as the first bell won't ding until well gone 11pm.

But it is not the TV timing that bothers Audley. It is the fact that the BBC suggested he should play second fiddle to the British heavyweight champion Danny Williams, whose challenge for the European title against the Turkish holder Samil Sam is being beamed from Berlin on the same night.

Originally Harrison had wanted his scrap with American Rob Calloway to take place considerably earlier in the evening and be shown as a delayed telecast during the BBC's allotted slot. Fine, said the Beeb, but it would have to go out after they had shown the Williams fight, which would be considered the major attraction.

Despite his earlier assertions that he would never object to fighting on an undercard Harrison demurred. The only way his fight could be given top billing, he was told, was if it was shown live. So live it is.

As it happens this is Harrison's penultimate fight before his BBC contract is re-negotiated and the word is that they are talking tough, demanding more quality control of future opposition and want him to be challenging for the British title by his 13th fight. The honeymoon is over.

The BBC's boxing programme is much stronger now than when it was re-launched on the back of Harrison' s £1m 10-fight deal two years ago. "If Audley broke a leg tomorrow it doesn't mean we would be out of boxing," said an insider. "We have screened some good fights lately and more are in the pipeline."

While he may need to box clever with the Beeb, Harrison has no intention of pulling punches over the Olympics. His letter to the PM is sufficiently belligerent to suggest that, if, against current exprectations, he finally decided that it is not a goer, Tony Blair might find a very tall, dark, dreadlocked gentleman standing on the doorstep of Number 10 inviting him to step outside and say that.

"The Government should not underestimate the anger of sports people in this country if we do not bid," warns Big Audley.

Street-smart and educated to degree level, he seems ideally cut out for some sort of sports political leadership as well as TV stardom once he has finished putting bums on their seats. Celebrity boxers are the current BBC fad, and in Harrison they have a ready-made one who can actually fight. But is he more celebrity than boxer?

His renowned telegenic charm even had Anne Robinson all of a quiver on last week's sporting version of The Weakest Link. "Is everything big about you," she murmured almost demurely, transfixed by his size 17 feet. Harrison replied that as the programme was going out before the watershed hour of 9pm, he had better not answer.

You have to query whether he actually needs boxing now. Might he be risking his small screen future as well as his ring reputation should he end up getting his nose flattened by some ostensibly hand-picked pug who turns out to have more ambition than his lack of pedigree suggests?

Whether Calloway comes into that category is doubtful, though Saturday's late-night extra, which runs until 1.05am, presents the perfect opportunity to measure the potential of the British rivals.

At 33, Calloway is a year older than Harrison, but three inches shorter and several stones lighter. He holds the World Boxing Federation (WBF) Inter-Continental title, which is about as meaningful as one of those US university degrees purchased by mail order, and in 10 years has lost only three times in 47 bouts. But he is more has-been than aspirant, otherwise he would not have got the call for what is nominally Harrison's first eight-rounder.

By dint of his status as European champion, Sam, a Turkish immigrant now based in Germany, should provide a stiffer test for Williams who, at 29, needs to manoeuvre himself towards a world-title situation fairly soon after a brief and unproductive liaison with Don King.

Williams is one of the nicest young men you will encounter in boxing (too nice, say some of the cauliflower-ear cognoscenti) and he can certainly punch, particularly with a piercing left hook off the jab. But he can also be a bit of a plodder at times. "There's no science to what he does," argues Harrison. "Study how he throws his crosses and how I throw mine. Danny might just as well be trying to chop down a tree."

Coming from someone who has so far practised his technique on the fistic equivalent of deadwood, that seems a bit rich. The violence due to be witnessed in Brentford and Berlin may be well beyond TV's watershed hour, but more significantly it is also the beginning of a watershed year for the pair of them.