Long ago, in the novel The Harder They Fall, I imagined a giant heavyweight, Toro Molina, who looks as if he should be heavyweight champion of the world. Only one drawback: he can’t fight. Big muscles, broad shoulders, no skills, no punch. But the mob boys who own him aren’t worried. They puff his record with enough roundheels to go thirty and zero, with twenty-eight KOs . . . and Toro’s ready for the six-figure paynight that meant real money in the 1940s and ’50s.
Fast forward to the ’90s: we’ve got multimillion-dollar TV fights on pay-per-view and the ante’s soared from million-dollar gates to $70 million, the record set last 19 August for the ‘Tyson’s Back! Coming Out Party’ (out of the slammer!) at $1,500 a pop if you wanted ringside to smell all the excitement, and 50 bucks if you chose to be a TV couch potato to watch ‘the biggest sporting event in the history of the world’, as promoter Don King did his modest best to describe his King-size spectacle.
In the paragraph above, smell is the operative word. In front of a live audience of 17,000 and millions of jaundiced eyes from Texas to Thailand, write in the name Peter McNeeley for my Toro Molina, and you have another major fraud perpetrated on a bamboozled public by our master of bamboozlement, Don King.
Deafening were the cheers for Mike Tyson as he moved menacingly down the aisle, Tyson Redux, emerging dramatically from a cloud of blue smoke to a soundscore of thundering drums. Seventeen thousand delirious voices chanting ‘Mike! Mike! Mike!’ as he stalked the ring in his now familiar all-business black trunks, black shoes, no socks, a plain towel with a hole in it for his stolid head. Then, only a few minutes later, just as deafening were those 17,000 voices now chanting ‘Bull-shit! Bull-shit!’
In just 89 seconds ‘the greatest sporting event in the history of the world’ had become ‘Brute farce! The most farcical sporting event in the history of the world.’ It came as part of King Vision’s three-minute special, with Johnny Gill’s eccentric rendering of our national anthem sucking up two-thirds of that time.
There can be no question that ‘Hurricane Peter’ came to fight. That is, he made all the right moves. He checked in at the MGM Grandiose. He showed his muscles and blew kisses at the weigh-in. He obliged with some po’ white poetry (Robert Frost, forgive me) à la Ali: ‘I’m Peter McNeeley from Medfield, Mass / And I’m here to kick Mike Tyson’s ass . . .’ He bopped down the aisle in his robe of Irish green, waving bravely to the waiting crowd. He fell to his knees in pious prayer, perhaps praying that his mentor, Vinnie Vecchione, would save him from bodily harm. He didn’t make a wrong move until the bell for round one, when he barged out of his corner like the Boston Bull (minus the other syllable) that King & Co. had trumpeted him to be. Six seconds later he was down from what looked like a glancing blow to the inviting Celtic chin. He got up and charged again, throwing wild punches like a barroom brawler after one too many. He grabbed the rusty Iron Mike and, in the only effective attack of the brief, unsightly night, suddenly lifted his head and butted Mike. Meanwhile Mike was missing with awkward left hooks that made one think back wistfully to the young destroyer who took out a legitimate professional, Michael Spinks, in less than a round seven years ago.
That was a memorable performance. This overblown thing was, put simply, a mess. His timing off in wild hooks that left Mike wide open, able pros like Bowe and Holyfield, maybe even Moorer, Foreman or Lewis, would have spotted vulnerability. Finally Mike managed a professional right uppercut that found the waiting jaw again and took the wind out of the ‘hurricane’. The Medfield Pretender (who could be fined for impersonating a prizefighter) was down again. That’s when the fun began. Peter was ready to continue, though not looking overjoyed about it, when into the ring came saviour Vecchione. He had seen enough. He was taking his boy home to the safekeeping of Mommy and Daddy. Six hundred thousand dollars richer. Minus Vinnie’s third (or maybe half?) and a 100-G kickback to old-time henchman Al Braverman.
Flashing back from the serio-comic ending of this unconscionable mismatch – which we had foreseen as a bad one-round joke – the film writer in me envisioned the following pre-fight scene in the McNeeley home:
MOTHER McNEELEY: (or Daddy, or the blonde girlfriend who high-fived him when Peter came back to his corner after the ‘fight’): ‘Tell me the truth, Vinnie. Is our boy going to get hurt?’
VINNIE: ‘No problem, Mom. First sign o’ trouble, I’ll be in there to save ’im.’
And of course the boxing writers, those nasty people, those character assassins back in the press room were spreading the rumour that Vinnie had money on Tyson in one.
The post-fight press conference was more King/Visionary than ever. If I had promoted this salami I would have headed for the hills or disappeared into the witness protection programme. But there was our unflappable Don flashing his victory smile. Unfazed by the booing and the switchboards clogged with outraged customers wanting their money back, King Don pronounced this a triumphant evening and hailed the unabashed McNeeley as ‘a magnificent warrior who attacked Mike Tyson like I’ve never seen any heavyweight do before!’ If there is a Chutzpah Award, Mr Unflappable has won permanent possession.
Unscathed, and now safe from harm, McNeeley could exult: ‘I talked the talk and I walked the walk . . . he was so friggin’ strong . . . after I got up the second time I twisted my knee . . .’ To hoots from doubting Thomases, he fought back, a little harder than in the ring, ‘Looka the tapes! . . . Looka the tapes!’ So he can go back to Medfield with head held high. He wasn’t knocked out. He twisted his knee. He can tell that to Peter McNeeley, Jr, when the kid, a fourth-generation ‘opponent’, goes in there for his paynight in 2020. This thing could go on for ever. Or maybe they’ll get smarter in the twenty-first century.
The cleanest blow of the night came from an anonymous hero who asked, ‘When is Mike going to have his first fight?’
So after 89 seconds that proved absolutely nada about Mike’s ability to compete with the best, the Mike Tyson Show rolls on. But King, Showtime and the MGM Grand need a summit meeting to decide where it rolls to. If Mike keeps on fighting stiffs, even Don King – who can sell ice cubes to Eskimos and ham sandwiches to Hasidic Jews – may have trouble getting the suckers to shell out a second time, or third. And if Mike goes in against a legitimate heavyweight who may not be Frazier or Holmes but can fight a little, he could be in trouble.
‘Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,’ said our perceptive novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. There’s something about Mike Tyson, when you listen to that squeaky, little-boy voice, that makes you feel sorry for him. Even with his 25 mil for a sorry night. Thanks to his sorely missed Cus D’Amato, Mike is a student of fistic history. He’s watched the films, from Johnson and Jeffries to Louis and Marciano. Where will he fit into the Grand Scheme? He can be the richest athlete in America, knocking off the Lou Savareses, and maybe Oliver McCall, who’s having trouble keeping his finger away from his nose, or the other ‘Champion’, Bruce Seldon, who boxed on the undercard and, with his right hand seemingly chained to his shoulder, jabbed holes in the big, no-talent Indian Joe Hipp.
Mike Tyson – even if no longer the wonder boy he was in the ’80s – could run through Don King’s laundry list of bogus ‘heavyweight champions’ and keep it all in the family. His jillion-dollar deal with King/Showtime/MGM points him in that direction. Why take a chance with a Bowe or a Holyfield when you can make a mint with South Africa’s Frans Botha, the White Buffalo?
Is Mike Tyson going to contribute to the downward slide of the once meaningful heavyweight championship? Or has he come back to redeem it? When Ali came back from his three-and-a-half-year exile, he fought a top contender, Jerry Quarry. When Sugar Ray Robinson came back from self-imposed retirement, he fought a tough cookie, Tiger Jones, and lost. But he got better and better until he cleaned out a middleweight division starring Bobo Olson, Carmine Basilio, Gene Fullmer and Jake LaMotta.
The 29-year-old Mike Tyson, riding the American roller coaster of fame, fortune and notoriety, may not know it but – like the fight game itself – he’s facing an identity crisis. Stay tuned.
[1995]
What is there to say about Bruno–Tyson? In a thimble, Mike was ready to rumble and Frank was ready to tumble. The once and future king of the heavyweights not only made his intentions perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of the encounter at the MGM Grand on 16 March, he had established his domination of the British Pretender to the throne in those tense minutes in the ring even before the opening bell. While 6,000 Brits, overdosing on love of country, queen and beer, chanted themselves hoarse with their ‘Bruu-nooos! Bruu-nooos!’, Britain’s first heavyweight champion since Fitzsimmons (OK, one-third of one) was standing in his corner with the eyes of a victim about to be strapped into the lethal chair.
I like to sit close enough to watch the eyes of boxers. I’ve been doing it since the Joe Louis days. If the eyes are indeed the mirror of the soul, poor Frank’s eyes betrayed a fighter’s most terrible affliction, fear. While Tyson was stalking the ring like a wild thing, but a very self-contained wild thing, was the Black/White Hope of the Empire throwing punches into the air in the traditional mode of the warm-up to the fray? No, he was crossing himself! Not once, but again and again. Meanwhile the beery Brits were on their feet in patriotic delirium, wrapped in their Union Jacks; and somehow we were no longer in Vegas, we were in a rowdy British soccer crowd far across the sea.
But not HRH’s Sir Frank. Unlike the British knights of old, this was no Sir Lancelot going forth to do or die. This was T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Man, all six feet three inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of him, going forth most reluctantly to die. In place of the eerie ‘Bruuu-nooo’ that echoed through the packed arena, the heavy-muscled black giant from Hammersmith was hearing ‘Oh . . . nooo, oh-nooo . . . Please, Massa King, give me my six million and send me safely home to Mama and the queen.’
Interviewed on my way to the press section, I had given my predictions on the assumption that I had seen more heavyweight title bouts than anyone else on the grounds and knew what I was talking about. Wrong again. In the first two rollovers, McNeeley and Mathis, there was rust on Iron Mike, and he was missing with looping punches, his timing and balance well off the high-water mark of the late ’80s prior to the Buster Douglas debacle. So it made good sense to think we would only see 50 per cent of the vintage Tyson, whereas Bruno might come into the ring with more confidence with the wearing of the gaudy belt. With that logic programmed into this white-haired computer, I had made a modest wager on Tyson by KO in six. We all bring our pre-fight videos to these contests, and mine had Bruno holding him off a bit, with his thirteen-inch reach advantage with the jab and his pride in the eyes of his countrymen carrying him on another round or two. So if he fell in five, six years ago, why not make it in six for ’96?
But as Bruno crossed himself for the last time and Tyson came storming out of his corner, wasting no time in going for the kill, I knew I could tear up my chit. Bruno wasn’t using those long arms to establish the jab as had Tony Tucker and some of the box-fighters Mike had faced in the past. His arms were thrust forward for only one reason: to clasp them behind Tyson’s thick neck and hang on for dear life. The diminutive referee Mills Lane would have to pry himself between their combined 470-pound bulk to separate the two and give Mike room to land punishing lefts and rights before the terrified Bruno grabbed again, hanging on to Tyson like a drowning man reaching a life raft. A committed warrior stout of chin and brave of heart might have made this interesting for a few rounds as further test of Tyson’s improvement. For let there be no doubt, Bruno had good reason for his pre-fight trepidations. The Tyson of ferocity, intensity and ability to punch in rapid, thunderous combinations was back. He had shortened his punches since the first two easygoers of Tyson Redux, was no longer off balance as he had been for McNeeley and Mathis, and was dealing excessive but disciplined punishment that had the ringsiders ready to restore him again to their all-time litany: Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Ali . . .
The Union Jacks weren’t waving quite so exuberantly now, and ‘Bruuu-nooo!’ was trailing off to an embarrassed hush. In the second round Bruno’s sole means of defence, the desperate holding, was so insistent that Mills Lane seemed ready to present the beleaguered ‘champion’ with the ultimate disgrace, disqualification, for refusing to fight. But early in the third round ‘Big Frank’, as his large and boisterous constituency had been calling him, finally obliged by giving Mike the opportunity to land a series of short and savage left hooks, followed by two quick and devasting right uppercuts. Bruno was still on his feet but listing badly, going down like the Titanic. The Bruno Boyz, after surging through the MGM Grand all afternoon, could only drink in sorrow now.
On the way to the post-fight press conference – where of course neither victor nor vanquished showed up – I felt a tinge of sorrow for the wilted Brits who had saved their shillings to cross an ocean and a continent to cheer their standard-bearer. After the abbreviated battle, Bruno had stood in the ring rather forlornly with his battered eye and apologetic countenance, still clinging to a last-gasp chauvinism in slowly waving a Union Jack. And some of his downcast compatriots managed to chant up a few die-hard ‘Brunos’. ‘We British are somewhat different about all this than you are over here,’ said John Rawlings, a British journalist working alongside me at the press table. ‘You may put greater emphasis on winning. These chaps are still loyal. It’s like a soccer match. Their team may lose but they never think of changing sides. They accept Frank as a loyal son who gave a lift to British boxing even if he failed tonight.’
What has happened to the British heavyweight? In the bare-knuckle days there were the heralded champions of England, Tom Cribb and ‘Gentleman’ Jackson, Jem Belcher, and Tom Sayers, the middleweight with the heavyweight belt who stood up to the giant American invader John C. Heenan for 60 punishing rounds. Somehow English grit was associated with ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’ and the worldwide prowess of British arms to the turn of the twentieth century. It may be too neat to make a case that with the loss of empire came the demise of heavyweights sporting the Union Jack. It’s a pathetic roll call: ‘Bombadier’ Billy Wells and Joe Beckett, who had great difficulty remaining vertical in the ’20s, notorious ‘Phaintin’ Phil Scott in the ’30s; the game but hapless Don Cockell; porcelain-chinned Bruce Woodcock . . . The bleery Brits wrapped in their Union Jacks and their faded dreams are so desperately in need of heroes. It’s too bad Bruno couldn’t have gone down like a game Royal Navy ship with all flags flying and all guns firing.
Meanwhile the Tyson ship is full speed ahead. He was ‘improving’, a suddenly more animated Iron Mike told the ‘fight doctor’, Ferdie Pacheco, in the ring right after the dramatic third-round curtain. And his explanation that he had used a series of uppercuts adopted from the legendary Henry Armstrong style proved that this student who learned his boxing history at the knee of Cus D’Amato (with help from fight film collector and co-manager, the late Jimmy Jacobs) is serious again. Bad news for ‘sparring partner champions’ like Bruce Seldon and Frans Botha. But after Mike cleans up the devaluated heavyweight title picture, maybe the conflicting powers that be will let us see the real things for a change. Maybe we’ll get Tyson–Lewis, Tyson–Moorer, Tyson–Bowe.
Give us followers of this tarnished sport something to cheer about without having to wrap ourselves in patriotic flags waving on hollow men.
[1996]
Last month it was Mike Tyson v. Evander Holyfield. This month it’s Tyson v. the Nevada Athletic Commission, and Mike loses again. This time his licence to perform in professional boxing rings has been revoked, subject to reapplication a year from now. Cynical observers from the New York Times to the New York Post see it merely as a 12-month prelude to Holyfield–Tyson III, with the gross for the next one exceeding the record gross set by this eerie fiasco. But according to the legal adviser to the NAC, ‘Unless the commission changes its mind, this would be a permanent revocation.’ And from Mike’s former trainer, Kevin Rooney: ‘Basically, it’s a death sentence.’
No matter which side of it you come down on in judging the severity of Mike’s punishment, I see this as something that goes deeper than any legal decision. Call it Requiem for a Heavyweight. It’s time to assess the tragic career of the once-glorified ‘Iron Mike’ – now scornfully put down by his new army of detractors as ‘Iron Bite’.
As a fight fan who hies back to the glory days – Louis and Schmeling, Louis and Conn, Marciano, Walcott and Moore, Ali-Frazier I, II and III, and Ali’s storied destruction of Big George Foreman – 28 June 1997 goes down in my book as the Night of the Ugly and Nasty. A desperately frustrated Mike Tyson, outclassed in the first two rounds and on the road to a second humiliating defeat at the hands of the miraculously rejuvenated Holyfield, seemed to have long forgotten everything his mentor, the unique Cus D’Amato, taught him about boxing and character. Poor Cus was left spinning in his grave as Mike abandoned the Marquess of Queensberry Rules he had learned in Cus’s gym when the teenage convicted mugger was transformed into a disciplined amateur boxer caringly protected and coached to fame and fortune as the youngest man ever to win the heavyweight championship of the world.
When, to our unbelieving and horrified eyes, the once-but-not-future king of the heavyweights took not a nibble but a mouthful of Holyfield’s right ear and gnashed on it like a rabid dog, Mike took boxing back to the cave. Forget all those noble words writers from Jack London to A.J. Liebling to Joyce Carol Oates have used to defend the ‘Sweet Science’. He made veteran sports analyst Dick Schaap wonder aloud if boxing has had it. Lord knows, Oliver McCall, Andrew Golota and now Mugger Mike have done their worst to give the fight game two black eyes and a missing ear.
When feisty little referee Mills Lane stopped the ‘contest’ to give the ring doctor a chance to examine the cannibalised auricle, the history of the once-noble heavyweight championship had reached an all-time low (and that includes the Schmeling–Sharkey and Sharkey–Carnera performances).
But moments later the Biter of the Ear was at it again, working on Evander’s left one now, with the ringside wags already updating Evander’s subtitle to ‘The Real Meal’. But this wasn’t joke time. This was sick, sad, sordid and psycho. This was the most revolting moment I had seen in some 70 years of ringsiding. This made Two-Ton Tony Galento’s job on Lou Nova look like Boy Scout pattycakes. This put Pittsburgh’s Fritzie Zivic in line for the Clean Sportsmanship Award. And in the ugly brawl that erupted in the ring after Mills Lane finally DQ’d the perpetrator, a berserk Mike Tyson reverted from professional athlete to mean street mugger. When less troubled kids had been in school, Mike had been luring old ladies into elevators and scoring clean knockouts to the sides of their heads to cop their groceries and purses. The purses were a little bit larger now, like 30 million, but not only can’t money buy happiness, it can’t exorcise the demons, and Mike’s were buzzing and biting like a shaken nest of hornets on that tainted Saturday night. Spitting out his mouthpiece, Mike exchanged his left hooks and right uppercuts for upper and lower molars as a more direct way of inflicting bloody damage on an opponent who refused to take a backward step and bow down in fear as had Tyson’s pathetic rollovers, McNeeley, Mathis, Bruno and Seldon. In all those mismatches, Tyson had come out swinging wildly, missing as much as he was landing, and learning nothing that would prepare and fortify him for the first unintimidated and thoroughly professional challenger he would face as an alumnus from the slammer. In Tyson–Holyfield I, he came out swinging and missing again, and when he did manage to land, Evander had the audacity to hit him back. The look on Mike’s face at the end of that round seemed to say, ‘No fair, that’s not the way Team Tyson tells me it’s gonna be: I walk in, I land, they fall down, I go home and count the money.’
The first encounter was a major bump on the tracks of the Don King/Mike Tyson Express, but nothing like the major crash on the rematch, when Mouthy Mike Tyson, egged on by an arrogant corner choking on its own hubris, bit off more than he could chew. Adding madness to mayhem, Mike was right there in the middle of the post-fight riot swinging on a couple of the local gendarmes, and not connecting in this extracurricular added attraction, either. It must have been interesting viewing for his parole officer and Judge Gifford if they happened to buy into the $49.95 pay-per-view entertainment back in Indiana, where Mike had had another off-night at that Black Beauty contest in ’91.
In a ring that had gone berserk, what I called the Brawl after the Fall, it seemed as if the only island of sanity was the winner-and-still-champion, the self-contained and evangelical Evander. There is a genuine circle of serenity around this man. Whether it is training in the peace and quiet of his native Atlanta, or in Houston where I watched him prepare with quiet intensity for Foreman and Bowe, or whether it is in the ring in the MGM Grand press camp two days before the Tyson fight, where I talked to him quietly on the ring apron, oblivious to all the hype and pressure around him, he is incredibly unchanged. Told that ‘Mike likes to say he’s the baddest man on the planet’, his answer was an in-character understatement: ‘I’m really not interested in being the baddest man on the planet. My only interest is being the best man in the ring.’
Now, after the eruptive DQ, Mike was giving a convincing impersonation of the maddest man on the planet, raging around the ring while the Fight Doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, was combining his interview expertise with sound medical advice: ‘Go straight to the hospital and get that masticated ear injected against infection and sewn up.’ ‘If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em,’ seems to have been the fistic strategy of the poor little rich boy who admitted that he ‘snapped’ after an inadvertent head-butt, abandoning the protective rules of boxing for the more primitive demands of the Brownsville jungle where this son of an absentee pimp and an alcoholic mother was raised in poverty and crime.
The rage to survive by any means possible may have been sublimated by the saintly/cagey Cus D’Amato when he became young Mike’s legal adoptive father and channelled his son’s aggressive urges to make him the most charismatic and biggest money fighter of the ’80s. Even then, when the fates seemed to be smiling on the reform school alumnus, there were serious lapses, when young Mike would go AWOL, take to the streets of the nearest town and prey on teenage girls. But there were other times when he was Cus’s dutiful son, and I was among those at the memorial in the ring of the Fourteenth Street Gym with him when he shed real tears for the departed Cus and muttered aloud, ‘What will I do without him?’
Now in the ring of the MGM Grand in volatile Las Vegas, the answer was all too clear: in the face of intense pressure that you cannot handle, you unravel, come apart, abandon the sport of boxing and revert to mugging. If you can’t win fair and square, try to break his arm, knee him in the balls, gouge him, bite him, and if one bloody ear doesn’t do it, go for the other.
After a major fight, reporters are trained to interview the principals involved – the boxers, their trainers, managers, cutmen. This was the only fight in my remembered history when the most unlikely of interviewees was someone like MGM Grand underling Mitch Libonati, whose job it was to cut the gloves off Holyfield after the bout. Instead he had the presence of mind to search the canvas of the riotous ring for the missing piece of Evander’s right ear. Miraculously – under the feet of all those rioters messing and mugging up the ring, including the masticator and now No. 1 Public Enemy of boxing, Master Tyson – Libonati found the missing mouthful of Mr Holyfield and turned it over to a paramedic to pack in ice and rush to the nearest hospital where Mitch hoped it might be reattached to the rest of the champion’s auditory organ. ‘I realised right away what it was,’ the unlikely hero of this loony evening said to me after the melee. ‘And I hoped it would be helpful. Mr Holyfield is a very nice man, and I wanted to do everything I could to help him.’
As it turned out, the unassuming ring attendant’s good deed was aborted, like this mad and manic fight itself. Somehow in the utter confusion of the aftermath, when Molar Mike was being led back to his cage under a nightmare barrage of beer cans, garbage and spittle, the paramedics lost the missing gristle, flesh and skin that had been gnawed from the top of Holyfield’s ear and then spat out on the bloodstained canvas. ‘It looked like a piece of chewed sausage about half the size of my pinky.’
Plastic surgery will undoubtedly restore Evander’s right ear to the cosmetic wholeness it enjoyed before Mike forgot that he had signed a $30 million contract for a fight to be fought with gloves. The restoration of Mike’s psyche is a far more lengthy, complex and maybe even more expensive process. Truth is, Mike has been in free fall for the last ten years, since his disgraceful loss to a mediocre Buster Douglas. He’s been losing ever since, to trees, to abused and vengeful women, and to a capacity for self-delusion that’s been fed by ex-cons and psychopaths who know nothing about self-defence but everything about self-indulgence.
While we looked to Evander to repeat his performance and stop the retrogressive Tyson again, we can’t claim the omniscience of Teddy Atlas, the scrappy little ex-trainer of Michael Moorer, who lived with Cus and Mike in Tyson’s formative years and helped transform the thug into the pug. A few hours before the fight, Teddy called it on the nose or – forgive us – the ear: ‘Mike will foul on purpose and get disqualified. It’s in his nature. I can tell Mike is planning it if Evander fights back and doesn’t submit.’ Teddy even mentioned the possibility of biting as Mike’s cowardly way out of a situation he couldn’t control.
Maybe we should call him Irony Mike Tyson, because as we now look back on his $200-million slide from his fame in the ’80s to his shame in the ’90s, I remember a charming evening I happened to spend with him back in what seemed like the Golden Days, when he had just reunited the heavyweight championship of the world. Of all the boxers I have known, Mike was by far the most scholarly in terms of heavyweight history. Cus D’Amato loved to talk about the old champions, and co-manager, classy handball champion Jim Jacobs had cornered the market on fight films all the way back to Johnson and Jeffries. Mike had watched them all and talked knowledgeably and lovingly on the defensive skills of Jack Johnson, the devastating two-fisted power of Joe Louis, the ferocity of Marciano, the genius of Ali. There was no doubt in his young mind that night that he walked in the path of their glory and was destined to carry forward the torch previously held by our legendary champions.
But there was a dark cloud hovering over this brooding man-child in a troubled world. On the eve of his title defence against Michael Spinks nine years ago, while predicting a Tyson KO in the New York Post, I wrote: ‘So on goes Tyson . . . on to more astronomical gates and astronomical troubles. One can’t help feeling that for all his $5-million dollhouse, his Bentley, his Rolls, his women and his business controllers, the worst is yet to come . . . The biggest fight of all may still be Tyson v. Tyson.’
Or, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, rivaling Teddy Atlas as a fight prognosticator, ‘There are no second acts in American lives . . .’
With all the cynical ‘Bite of the Century – Bite of the Ear’ jokes bandied around the press tent that wretched Saturday night, those of us who still cling to boxing despite its bone-deep afflictions wonder how many more tragedies, scandals and crocodile bites we can take.
Sean O’Grady, the former lightweight champ and current TV boxing commentator, says ‘Ban Tyson for life’. So do almost two-thirds of the fans. But check out the ratings on the Showtime rerun. Jay Larkin, the Showtime honcho, while giving lip service to Tyson’s ‘totally reprehensible, totally inexcusable’ behaviour, also calls it ‘exciting, entertaining and compelling television’. Considering the mindless and gratuitous violence exploited on network and cable every night of the week, Mike’s Hannibal Lecter impersonation has four-star appeal for sadists and masochists. And, alas, there seems to be enough of them to up the ratings.
But for the purists in the impure world of boxing, it’s the pits, and Senator McCain’s Professional Boxing Safety Act couldn’t come soon enough. Even though it’s only a very small beginning. The grotesque climax to Holyfield–Tyson II, with its one-year banishment for Tyson (and then maybe forgiveness if he’s a very good boy?), suggests how far we still have to go.
[1997]
Iron Mike Tyson had shed his armour. The man millions of white Americans (and some bourgeois blacks) loved to hate has had his comeuppance. There he was, once the unbeatable terror of the heavyweights, hailed in his early twenties as the worthy successor to Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, staring sightlessly up at the ring lights as the referee reached the fatal count of ten. In less than 24 minutes Lennox Lewis – the first British champion since ‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons 104 years ago – had given Tyson the beating of his life. All week long Tyson and his cornermen had talked a ferocious game. Mike wasn’t merely going to knock out Lewis. He was going to crush his skull. He was going to drive his nose bone into his brain. And then, one of the tiresome Tysonites promised in a pressroom filibuster, ‘We’ll throw his body in the river.’
For years boxing traditionalists have flinched at the X-rated dialogue. Trash talking has been raised to a fine art on the basketball courts and playing fields of America. But no one has ever attained the psychotic rage of Mike Tyson. In his hysterical outburst at the Sonny Liston weigh-in, the then Cassius Clay had screamed insults at ‘the big ugly bear’. Child talk compared to Mike’s variation on Hannibal Lecter: ‘I’m gonna eat your children.’ And indeed, when they had come together for their press conference to announce this fight earlier in the year, Tyson had lunged at Lewis and actually bitten him in the thigh. The evidence was still there, incredibly, when Lewis stripped for the weigh-in two days before the fight. An angry scar still there on his side. Taking no chances with this money-cow of a battle, for this weigh-in the promoters wouldn’t even allow the combatants to be in the same building at the same time. Lewis had arrived at noon so quietly that no one even noticed him until he was on the scale. And then he was gone again, the quiet man in a noisy world. All week he had taken the raving and ranting of Team Tyson with what the American press considered typical British restraint. Confronted with that threat to crush his skull and throw him in the river, Lewis characteristically never raised his voice. ‘We’ll settle this in the ring,’ he said, in the tone of a barrister saying, ‘I’ll have nothing to say until we’re in court.’
In the past I had been critical of Lewis for what I called ‘a want of passion’, an overcautious passivity that seemed to diminish him despite his obvious attributes. He has an excellent jab but seemed to use it erratically, and his jolting straight right he used fitfully. It had tended to make boring fights of his two meetings with Evander Holyfield and his challenge from David Tua. ‘Lewis is boring and Tyson is exciting,’ said Jay Larkin, the Showtime honcho at a pre-fight party given by the mayor of Memphis, ‘and that’s why we’re going over a million [PPV] buys. Nobody cares about Lewis.’
That was an in-house exaggeration, of course. The Brits were not in full force because of the World Cup soccer competition. But there were enough of them up there in the nosebleed seats waving their Union Jacks, chanting their ‘Loo-iss . . . Loo-iss . . . !’ and singing their soupy ‘Walking in the Lewis Wonderland’ to drown out the pro-Tyson crowd in the higher priced seats ($2,400 top) below. Sprinkled with celebrities like Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, basketball’s Magic Johnson and ex-champs Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield and Sugar Ray Leonard, the crowd on the floor roared their excitement every time Tyson’s familiar bald head was sighted on the big screen over the ring as he warmed up in his dressing-room, matched by resounding boos for Lewis as he prepared in his dressing-room with the same reserve he had shown all week. One man’s ‘boring’ might be another’s ‘professional’. In the midst of all this weeklong hyped-up Tyson-mania, I had rather welcomed Lewis’s failure to rise to the bait and join the circus. While I wasn’t quite ready to join the toffs in singing ‘Walking in the Lewis Wonderland’, I was beginning to relate him to the first gloved contest for the heavyweight championship back in 1892: the bellicose John L. Sullivan (‘I c’n lick every man in the house!’) v. the quiet young accountant from San Francisco, James J. Corbett, who withstood the ranting of John L., kept his poise and boxed Sullivan’s ears off to take his championship belt from that ample waist. For this accomplishment Corbett was awarded a fistic nom de boxe, ‘Gentleman’ Jim Corbett.
Watching Lewis fight the fight of his life, belie that ‘want of passion’, show not a hint of fear in facing the raging bull, absorb the characteristic opening-bell Tyson rush and then take control with punishing jabs, powerful right hands, on-target uppercuts, I began to wonder if Lewis weren’t ready for the fistic nickname we reserve our legendary heroes: Jack Dempsey the ‘Manassa Mauler’; Jim Braddock, the ‘Cinderella Man’; Joe Louis, the ‘Brown Bomber’; ‘Smokin’’ Joe Frazier; Cassius Clay, the ‘Louisville Lip’ . . . After his polite demeanour outside the ring and his controlled violence inside the ropes, maybe it’s time to dub Lennox Claudius Lewis, ‘Gentleman Len’.
And curiously, there seemed to be something contagious about this gentleman business. Tyson was on record as a bad winner – not only had he knocked out Frans Botha but deliberately broke his arm. In Glasgow, against Lou Savarese, it had not been enough to beat the hapless opponent senseless. He had added insult to injury by taking one more swipe at his victim on the canvas, and then swung on the protesting referees for good – or is it bad – measure.
Followers of the sweet – if sometimes rancid – science have always defended boxing as a sport that civilised fistfighting. Away from the ring, most boxers were devoted pacifists, and in the ring their violence was kept within bounds by rules and referees. No one hits a man when he’s down, and if he hits a referee, it should be over and out. But Mike had fought like a throwback to the early bare-knuckle days, before the good Marquess of Queensberry, when gouging eyes and throttling throats were de rigueur. When Mike the muscular man-child was running the mean streets of Brownsville, it was strictly survival by any means necessary. Gouge, bite, blindside, rob – it was all in a day’s work. His daddy was long gone and Mama’s live-in boyfriend beat her up so regularly that one night in desperation she had poured scalding water on him. Mike Tyson was a child of violence, violence was the only school he ever attended, and while other ghetto-reared boxers learned to trade their street violence for the boxer’s discipline, there seemed to be a permanent rage in Mike that swept away those boundaries. The bad winner in the Glasgow fight became the bad loser in the second Holyfield fight, the notorious ‘bite fight’. He was a walking time bomb in and out of the ring, and to our common shame, the more outrageous his anti-social behaviour, the more tickets he sold. From a family where all three children lived in one fetid room, he had moved on to a twenty-six-room mansion – and then three mansions – and not one luxury car but a garage full of Bentleys and BMWs. He had been the flagrant flag-carrier for Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption. But with all the instant fame, success and money, the 12-year-old pickpocket-banger was always there, crouching dangerously inside him, ready to punch out young women, parking attendants, inquiring reporters, even two old men in fender-bender clashes. On the eve of the fight in Memphis the main topic of conversation was, ‘What will Mike do if he wins?’ And what if he lost?
When he did, ignominiously, the genteel atmosphere projected by the winner seemed to convert the loser. Tyson? A gallant loser? Did you say gracious? Tyson’s inability even to make a dent on Lewis, the total one-sidedness of the contest, was not the biggest surprise of the evening. That was reserved for Tyson’s gentlemanly reaction to the outcome. Pulling himself together after the knockout, he made his way to Lewis’s corner and, with genuine tenderness, wiped away a fleck of blood from Lewis’s face, telling him through bloodied lips that he loved him, he was truly a great fighter, the consummate fighter. Tyson has a way of pulling unexpected words out of his head. When he does, I hear the ghost voice of the dedicated old man who took him out of reform school at age 13, legally adopted and developed him. ‘Consummate’ is a Cus D’Amato word. Then Mike went on to say he loved Lennox’s mother too, and proved it by actually kissing her. Lewis in turn praised Mike for his courage in standing up to all those power punches, eating seven of every ten as Mike just stood there, an easy target, a human punching bag.
So whither goes our erstwhile Iron Mike? ‘At some point,’ said his disappointed trainer, Ronnie Shields, ‘the people who care about him have to say this is it, it’s over.’
That would seem the logical conclusion. But the fight game has always had an uneasy relationship with logic. With a record PPV gross of $103 million on 1.8 million buys, Mike’s purse could reach $25 million. Sounds like enough to retire on. Until you remember that going into this fight, Mike was $13 million in the red to Showtime. Now subtract two-thirds of the pay cheque for managers, trainer and taxes, and the sad arithmetic still leaves Mike $4 million or $5 million in debt. It’s the 2002 version of the Joe Louis story. Every time Joe fought, he was deeper in debt. And when he was finally knocked out by Rocky Marciano at the end of his string, the IRS was into him for millions of dollars he could never repay.
So let’s not hold our breaths about Mike’s taking his trainer’s advice and hanging them up before he becomes what the boxing boys call derisively ‘a trial horse’ or, pathetically, even worse, ‘an opponent’. I see him fighting his fellow slugger David Tua for a $10 million purse he’s unable to keep. I see an up-and-coming contender like Wladimir Klitschko wanting to add the Tyson scalp to his belt on his way to a title shot. I see Mike touring Europe, the angry bear let out of his cage to perform. Mike Tyson, undisputed king and hero of the late ’80s, weighs in as boxing’s first tragic figure of the twenty-first century.
Meanwhile the new king, now the heavyweight hero of the current era, has had the defining fight and has claimed the legacy he promised us. Now not just the loyal Brits in the bleachers but everybody is chanting, ‘Loo-iss, Loo-iss . . .’ And eager to know his plans. The heavyweight ranks are so thin that he may decide, aged 37 come September, that it’s time for a gentleman’s retirement.
Whatever he decides, he will always be remembered as the man who transformed Iron Mike Tyson from a bullying skull crusher to his humble No. 1 fan. One reason so many authors have been drawn to boxing is because its dramatic possibilities are so extreme. In what other sport does a single victory produce a winner for life, or doom the loser to tragic consequences? After the mayhem in Memphis, Lennox Lewis had all the world in front of him, if he wants it, which with his quixotic nature, he may not. And for poor, old, beat-up Mike Tyson, the wonder boy of the ’80s, it was all behind him now.
[2002]