Sport on TV: Long and short of a free-fall free-for-all

RIDDICK BOWE and Evander Holyfield were midway through the seventh round when that stray parachutist blew in, tangled himself on the ropes and tumbled backwards into a spectator's lap. And, if you stayed awake into the early hours last Sunday, there it was on Big Fight Live (ITV) - the moment when the chute hit the fan. 'Only in America,' said an exasperated Reg Gutteridge, commentating ringside. Indeed, America: the home of the brave and the land of the free-faller.

Somehow you suspect Las Vegas is not Reg Gutteridge's kind of town. As the fighters made their way through the crowd to the ring, he noted 'plenty of posers, plenty of golden oldies with gold chains and girls on their arms. It's an unreal place.' And it was about to get really unreal. Gutteridge and his sidesman, Jim Watt, had sounded disgruntled enough about a chilly ringside temperature of 48 degrees. Thirty minutes in, they were having to worry about the additional threat of low-flying spectators. 'I'm glad he didn't land on us, Jim,' said Gutteridge.

There can be few commentators who could talk through a freak event like this without something in their tone betraying that, while the whole business was clearly reckless, irresponsible and not by any means to be encouraged, it was also fantastic television. And Gutteridge and Watt are those few commentators. Heroically fixated on the fight in hand, they were genuinely irritated by the hold-up. It might have looked good on the telly, but for them, the invader was, first and foremost, a spoilsport. 'I do not believe this clown,' said Gutteridge. 'What was he doing parachuting at night, Reg?' 'Exactly.'

At home, with the clock approaching 5.00am, much of what was heard and seen in the ensuing 20 minutes came over like an hallucination brought on by acute tiredness. The intruder lay helpless in his harness, thumped and pummelled by spectators and security guards, who were clearly less than pleased to have him drop in. The MC struggled to restore order, issuing a series of commands to the spectators, the general drift of which was, 'You can't fight in here - this is a boxing ring.' 'The parachutist came in, bounced off the ropes and landed on the knee of Jesse Jackson's wife,' explained our on-the-spot reporter Gary Newbon. It was a sentence you never expected to hear in any circumstances, in any context, with the possible exception of an adult telephone chatline.

Even without flying objects, it's getting harder to tell where boxing ends and Sunday Night at the London Palladium begins. The pre-fight build-up last weekend included an interview with the boxer Thomas Hearns, who looked meaningfully into the camera and confided that he was hoping to get over to London as soon as possible to 'do a show for you', as if he was Tony Bennett rather than a top-ranking cruiserweight.

Hearns's fight with Andrew Maynard was shown before the big bout. Hearns finished the job in the first round, which was a bit of a bore for the all-night team back in the studio in London. Jim Rosenthal reached under the desk and brought out a brown paper bag. 'We'd got the old doggy bags out, the bacon sandwiches, and we had to put them away pretty quick.' 'He knackered our coffee break,' added Barry McGuigan.

Still, they had the commercials to snack in, which were plentiful, though, at this time of the morning, inevitably stocked with plugs for obscure phone- order products - a boxed set of four Compact Discs containing 'all the best singles you've never bought' and a foam for getting stubborn stains out of the carpet. By the end of the programme, we were right down to public information films, alerting us to the virtues of regular eye-testing and the dangers of smoking in bed (though nothing, sadly, about the perils of parascending into major sporting events).

More conventional advertising took place in the ring. Ahead of the bout, our MC, primped and powdered like a poodle at Crufts, ran through the list of sponsors, complete with jingles: 'Budweiser - proud to be your Bud'. And then he introduced the physicians, the judges, the referee, the time-keeper, the time-keeper's assistant, the woman in the hot-dog kiosk by Entrance D, and anyone else who knew him.

And finally the fight got under way. 'It's the oldest axiom in the game, Jim,' said Reg. 'The good big'un will always beat the good little'un.' So much for that. Bowe had the bigger reach, the bigger body and by far the bigger pair of shorts. (They were shorts on him: they would have been trousers on most of us.) And Holyfield tired him out.

But the memory of the fight may fade faster than the image of that voluminous silk parachute, snagged on the lighting gantry. In the week since, we've heard all manner of notions about the flying intruder and his motives - that he was a publicity-seeker, a fight saboteur, a Seles-style sicko. But no one has yet considered the theory that he was, in all innocence, delivering a fresh pair of trunks for Riddick Bowe.