Tyson 2000

BUSINESS DAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2000

HOW STRONG IS Mike Tyson? Why, he is so strong he does not even need to hit you. The wind speed of his gloves windmilling above your head is enough to knock you down.

The more I watch Tyson’s recent fights, the more convinced I am that I have chosen the wrong career. I am sure with a little training I could last two rounds of not being hit by Mike Tyson. Just last week I was not hit by Larry Holmes, and I cannot begin to count the number of times I have not been hit by George Foreman. And let me tell you, George Foreman does not hit you a whole lot harder than Tyson does not hit you.

Last Saturday Iron Mike dropped Julius “Dead-weight” Francis five times in five minutes with a series of cuffs and waves and an unprovoked cuddle, leading me to suspect that the chief objection to his fighting in Britain had been raised not by women’s rights activists but by Equity, the British actors’ union.

Tyson at least knew his lines and had rehearsed his moves; it was such a shamefully ham-fisted performance from Francis that both Tyson and his current overlord Shelley Finkel were scrambling after the fight to insist that Tyson had knocked him out with a body blow. It was a necessary subterfuge. Even Stevie Wonder, seated at ringside behind David “I wear the pants in this house” Beckham, could see that Tyson had missed with the punches to Francis’s head. The fight was the least convincing piece of sporting theatre since the Pakistani cricket team played Kenya, yet there is no denying that when Tyson fights he generates a primal excitement.

Tyson’s aura was built 15 years ago, based equally on his ferocious fighting ability, and his hype as the baddest man on the planet. In a curious irony, today it is the talent that is over-hyped, whereas my fear is that Tyson may be badder than we realise.

Tyson has been beaten by every quality boxer he has fought. Even our own Francois Botha, as fearsome as a tub of yoghurt, nearly put him away.

Like Graham Hick on a flat pitch, Tyson can bully the weak and mediocre, but he folds against quality. He remains a drawcard purely because of his reputation for unpredictability and uncommon violence.

Tyson, truthfully, is not right in the head. He was not healthy when he went into prison, and if anything he is worse now. It is questionable whether he should be allowed to walk the streets. Listen carefully to one of his interviews – this is not a man feigning badness, but someone in tenuous and decidedly sporadic contact with what you and I call reality.

It has become a cliché to say that our interest in Tyson is similar to the urge to rubberneck when passing a car crash, but the tragedy of it is that on some level, we do not believe it is real. On some level we believe the blood and the piece of ear and the swearing and baby-talk are all hype and make-believe. We no longer blink when Julius Francis comes over all swagger and strut at the press conference, only to dive like Jacques Cousteau on the night, because we have come to accept that boxing is showbiz. Shows like WWF wrestling and even those poxy Gladiators have blurred the line between sport and play-acting to such an extent that we expect melodrama and plot twists; we almost expect real-life sport to appear scripted.

The more pantomimish Tyson appears, the more likely we are to accept it. It is a telling fact that Tyson was invited to join the WWF wrestling circus, but was ultimately regarded as not sufficiently stable to be a regular. When it comes to being a psycho, Tyson is too real to pretend, and yet he is too cartoonish for us to truly recognise what we are looking at. Tyson is a symptom of the devaluing of the real, and he may yet be its biggest victim.

When we finally get bored with Tyson we will switch channels, but Tyson confused, uncontrolled and becoming rapidly more so is stuck with himself. I hope I am wrong, but I have a feeling, with Mike Tyson, the worst is yet to come.