norman mailer

This article originally appeared in the September 1988 issue of SPIN As an arena for boxing, the Convention Hall at Atlantic City is not one of the happier architectural palaces of the world. It drops the kind of pall an audience that would come from witnessing a cockfight in a bank. Lyndon Johnson was nominated there in 1964 with two identical sixty-foot close-up photographs of himself on either side of the podium. The Hall looked on that occasion like a coronation chamber for a dictator. Now on the night of June 27, 1988, thousands of seats were laid out on the great flat floor and people in the seventeenth ringside were paying $1,500 a ticket to see Tyson-Spinks heavyweight championship. Since the gala glitz of Trump Plaza was but a connecting corridor away from Convention Hall, the Tru...