In honor of Tony Eveready’s current state of incarceration we go back to this moment in porn time:

Porn Valley- The “champeenship” fight went off yesterday [March 31, 1999] as scheduled. Rob Black vs. Tony Eveready. Considering Black’s golden glove pedigree, it would have been pure folly and nonsense to have had money on Eveready. Then, again, Eveready’s always capable of pulling out a gun and shooting someone, so who knows?

As you might have expected, given the slight disparity of weight – Black’s built like Sammy the bull Gravano, Eveready, like Sammy Davis Jr. – Black left Tony stretched out on the canvas from a combination of sheer exhaustion and a right cross to the head that had Eveready’s eyes blowing bubbles.

Van Gogh couldn’t have painted a still life any better on canvas. Though Black was the victor in a fight that has as vague an origin as the Vietnam war, the big question of the day was never answered. Is there one or two “r”s in Eveready?

The action went down at Brother’s Gym in the Valley – a place even the U.S. Postal Service might have trouble finding. The gym is tucked way back behind a residential home. No neon signs or boxing gloves pointing you in the right direction. And one could have missed the placed entirely had it not been for the fact that the Matt Zane entourage pulled up at a convenient moment. Either there was going to be a chop-sockey porno shoot, or a fight.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for an entire month,” Matt says. Zane, whose hair is as black as Shinola, also said he wouldn’t have found the place, either, had it not been for the fact that he trained here one time to get in shape for a porn feature titled Sunset Incorporated.

Matt Zane’s the only guy in porn who trains for a video which probably makes him more like the Sylvester Stallone of porn than Jackie Chan whom he sometimes compares himself to in press releases.

Some guy named Hector got Zane in shape. Hector, I’m told, is a very big name in the kickboxing [and regular boxing] game. [Here, I always thought it was Jean Claude Van Damme.]

Being more up on Vince McMahon than kickboxing, I ask Hector his last name.

“The Aztec Warrior,” he replies. Which must look pretty funny on his driver’s license. Hector’s a very polite man but obviously lethal. I’m told he holds something like 11 world title belts in various weight categories and sanctioned bodies, and has something of the fighter’s schnozzola to prove it. Hector goes into the mathematical complications of how you can win all these belts. Given that, I mention to Hector that he can probably kick the piss of pretty much anybody.

“It’s something I wouldn’t do,” he says quietly.

Brother’s Gym is a boxer’s dream, a place that could give Burgess Meredith’s character in Rocky a hard on. It shits thunder and pees lightning with a gallery of 8 by 10 glossies of the likes of Carmen Basilio and other boxers from another era – all with swollen noses.

It’s also poster collector’s dream come true. All the big fights of the last 20 to 30 years. Caricature statues of Muhammad Ali, a picture of DeNiro from Raging Bull, a Leroy Neiman portrait of Stallone as Rocky, and enough free weights and machines to turn a 95 pound weakling into Stallone. And the ring itself where the fight will take place.

“Sunset Incorporated was like the third or fourth action flick I did,” Matt Zane is explaining to me.

“Hector said to me, do you want some help? I said I’d love it. I’d be honored. If you’re in the martial arts world, you know who Hector is. So I just thought we’d get together. I already was in pretty good shape and thought we’d just like choreograph some fights. But Hector says, ‘No, no, no. You have to come down to the gym.’

“So he brought me down here. The first day he just put me right in the ring. He said get warmed up. He actually trained me for a couple of weeks. It was brutal.”

During the course of his training, Zane broke a toe, and he was passing out and losing weight. Zane dropped something like 10 pounds that first week.

“Then, like the last day, we choreographed the fight,” he says.

“We went in and did it. Actually, it came out so well, that Karate International, which is a karate magazine, decided to run an article about it in their May issue. If you want to see a crazy-assed fight scene, get that movie [Sunset Incorporated].

“Just fast-forward to the fight scene between him and me. It’s crazy. At the end of the movie, I do this kick where I kick him in the neck and he falls down, and I jump off his back onto a sledge through a window. I use him as a ladder. It’s a pretty good scene. It’s intense. “

Zane mentions that he and Rob Black are cousins.

“We grew up together,” says Zane. “I used to go see him fight. It was a thrill for me, being a kid. When he was younger he used to go to these boxing matches and fight. This is going to be exciting. I like Tony Eveready too. I’m just here for the sport of it. I really like live fighting. I don’t train as much as I used to in martial arts because of the music-thing and the porno-thing, but I still enjoy watching stuff. He was one tough guy, Rob. Really tough. He could take punches you wouldn’t believe.”

Rob Black pulls up several minutes later with HIS entourage. Black was asked if he had any pre-fight commentary to offer.

“No. I’m like Lennox Lewis,” he says. “We’ll just watch, wait and see. I had a good sparring session with Hector. My face is a little sore. Other than that….”

Ashlyn Gere’s husband, Marshal, is wielding a digital camera. Black was asked which of his movies all this footage is going into.

“I don’t know,” Black says. “We haven’t figured it out yet. I guess we’ll have to figure it out.”

He’s next asked what precipitated this grudge match.

“I don’t know,” Black shrugs. “I guess he said I disrespected him, like months ago. We talked. He kept postponing the fight. I told him to come down to the office, and we’ll fight in the warehouse. He said, no, because I’ll have people there, and they can jump in. He goes, ‘I’ll fight you anywhere, anytime. We’ll wrestle, we’ll arm wrestle, we’ll box.’

“I said, okay, we’ll box and go from there. I don’t care what we do…sling shots, pillow fights…very rarely does an executive in a major company do this type of shit.”

The rules stipulate that Black and Eveready use 10 oz. gloves.

“You can still feel good knuckle with tens,” Black observes.

Other interesting fight game characters start arriving. T.T. Boy shows up. T.T. tells me the gym is his turf and that Mark Davis was totally “disrespected” in this year’s balloting for Male Performer of the Year. T.T. said he didn’t care about himself, personally, but that AVN blew it, big time, on the Davis thing.

Rob Spallone, who arrives with Jim DiGiorgio, is looking for some gambling action. Jim Powers says Tony Eveready started out being the odds-on favorite, but things have changed.

“I hope they’re not wearing no headgear,” says Spallone.

Spallone, who relates stories as though they were John Gotti episodes, tells Jim Powers about a blackjack incident at Sneaky Pete’s, a casino outside of Vegas. Spallone relates how he’s got 500 bucks on the table and doubles-down holding a 12 against a 4. Spallone’s asked by the house why he did that.

“Balls,” he tells them.

Speaking of which, Spallone relates another story where he visited a video company several weeks prior carrying a golf club. It wasn’t for the purposes of playing 18 holes. Spallone sold the company a blowjob tape for $2600. $600 down, and the company, presumably, took a lifetime to pay the balance.

“They asked me why I had a golf club. I told ’em I forgot my baseball bat.”

Spallone’s been shooting two gonzos-at-a-time for Russ Hampshire and VCA. He just finished up his fifth and is halfway through the sixth. He says he’ll be doing a feature next.

“Russ’ word is good,” Spallone reflects. “He gave me a shot. The girl who does the paperwork sent me a letter saying, ‘Your paperwork’s so beautiful, you should see what we’ve been getting.’ It was nice, she didn’t have to do that – pat me on the back like that. Russ’ money is unbelievable. He ain’t like anybody else. Everybody else lies.”

Bukkake night, according to Powers, has been moved to Wednesday, from Friday nights. Powers has been running ads in the LA Weekly looking for guys.

“For a lot of guys Friday is tough because they’re jacking off first before they go out on their dates,” Powers says. “Now we actually have a set place. There’s Club Bukkake, every Wednesday night. I’ll have a little sign out front and everything.”

Eveready shows up about an hour late. He, too, has an entourage – lots of guys with pants falling off their asses – and the wait’s now for Eveready to get his act together. The referee’s named Vinny. It figures.

Black, wearing an Extreme Championship Wrestling shirt, which is the name of his wrestling company, paces in the ring. Black starts doing the Stallone hand-foot choreography from Rocky III. Adam Film World’s Jeremy Stone comments that Black should have waxed his back.

A ring official explains that the fight will consist of three, two-minute rounds with a one minute rest period, but the distinction becomes amazingly blurred when Black comes out flailing like a jazzed-up windmill in a miniature golf course. Black’s girlfriend, Lizzy Borden, and Eveready’s squeeze, Porsche, begin mixing it up on the sidelines and have to be pulled apart.

Someone comments that this might be the start of Internet grudge battles in the industry.

During the course of the actual fight, Eveready goes down on one knee four separate occasions, including the time he slips. You can see where Black, time and again, tries to set Eveready up for one big right to the face for a knockout.