I remember when I was 11 years old, my dad showed me a tape of the Mike Tyson v. Carl “The Truth” Williams fight he’d watched with my uncle the night before. I watched in amazement as Iron Mike tore into Carl Williams, knocking him down in something like a minute and 30 seconds. Mike’s arms were like sledgehammers, swinging into Williams, folding him in half.
When Williams got back to his feet, he was wobbly and dazed. The referee asked him if he knew where he was, but he stared back at the ref blankly, mouth wide open. He looked like he was asleep with his eyes open. This was the beginning of my fascination with Mike Tyson.
Now, at 27, I’ve heard all the arguments against boxing (and against Mike Tyson, but we’ll get to that later). People love to jabber on about how it’s violent and how it’s mean and blah, blah, blah. Look around you. Everything is violent. We’re still offing Iraqis every day because their leader who we now have in custody didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction that we needed him to have to convince about half of us that it was worth killing more Iraqis (and as of today 1,700 of our troops). Write a letter to your governor about that, and leave boxing alone.
OK, yes, two guys hitting each other with padded gloves is violent. But if you live on planet Earth and you’ve chosen this subject to be alarmed by, you’re probably the same type of person who needs Angelina Jolie to explain to you that kids are starving in Africa. Oh, how I digress already.
What I’m trying to say here is that at 11 years old, I didn’t think about all this stuff. I just knew that Iron Mike was way cool. He was the youngest champ ever and by the time I saw him pummel Carl Williams, he had already won 38 bouts, almost all of them by knockout and most in the first few minutes of the fight. He didn’t lose. And something about that was just so fascinating to me. He dared people to get in the ring. I remember after the Carl Williams fight, he said, “I’ll fight anybody. I’ll fight them in their backyard.” And he wasn’t just fighting bums. He took out Larry Holmes in four rounds, Frank Bruno in five rounds, and Michael Spinks in one round.
Around my neighborhood, everyone talked about Mike Tyson. We all loved to fight. And we all loved to watch fighting. Sure, boxing appeals to our lowest senses. But it’s damn exciting – and it cuts through all the shit that other sports dance around. Face it, we love conflict. Look, people watch NASCAR because someone could have a wreck and die. That’s the only reason why. The presence of death has them all fantasizing about filling that empty space in the sliding back glass of their pickup truck with another memorial peel-off sticker. A lot of people watch basketball because Ron Artest might flip the fuck out and beat up some dumb fan and they’ll have something to talk about with their barber or their wife’s friend’s husband that they don’t know what else to talk about with. I was watching golf yesterday (I don’t get cable. Leave me alone.) and two of the golfers got into an argument and the announcer guy was like, “Get a close up that! Let’s see what he’s saying to him! Can we get a close up of that?!” I imagined him saying off camera, “…and get me some Kleenex, this game is finally exciting!”
Boxing cuts right through all that bullshit. And Mike Tyson did, too. I’ve always liked that about him. While Lennox Lewis was heralded as fighting like a master at a chess board, Mike Tyson just kicked your ass. I understand that for most people that’s hard to understand. I wish I could explain it. But I’ve written about 600 words and I don’t think I’ve really explained anything.
Let me try this way: Most of what you see on TV and what you hear on the radio isn’t real. It’s not. Even now, in the age of reality television, it’s all fake. But, love him or hate him (and I know most people swing hard toward the latter) Mike Tyson has always been real with us. He’s taken a bi-polar American public to the pinnacle of pugilism (winning fight after exciting fight and talking us through each one in a lexicon that would make Muhammad Ali blush) and to the dark depths of his personal life (the Robin Givens accusations, the rape allegations, the road rage, the humiliating meltdowns.) And he really would have fought any of us in our backyards.
Like him, I suffer severely from depression and mood swings and lack of moods; I have a walk-in closet worth of skeletons; I have more regrets now than I ever have. Like Mike, I often regress to the pain I felt as a child and I take that pain out on the wrong people.
When he told a group of reporters a few years ago that he wished he could kick all of their children in the testicles so the reporters would know how much pain he feels, I wondered if I was the only person who understood exactly what he meant. When he told USA Today a few weeks ago that he felt like he’d wasted his whole life, I understood that, too – even though people close to me probably can’t figure out why I’d think that, which actually makes me even more sad. We both have some admirable qualities about us (He’s raised pigeons since he was a kid – and I recently read that he’s trying to get the laws changed in his neighborhood out West so he can keep all of his 350 birds on his property.) But we both have some really ugly sides to us – that may be more of understatement for him than for me. We can both be cold and emotionless, without even really trying to be. Either of would be a great study in the nature v. nurture debate.
When I hear people make jokes about Mike Tyson, calling him an ear-biter or constantly reminding me that he’s a convicted rapist (A girl came to his room in the wee hours of the night and his trial was in Indiana, one of the last states where lynching was legal – I’m just pointing this out in case you didn’t know.), I wonder what else the world actually expected of him. He was abused as a child, had no real parental guidance (his alcoholic mom was repeatedly beaten by her long string of boyfriends), was arrested at 12 for stealing a purse and then wound up on the doorstep of a boxing trainer, who took him in and passed on some boxing knowledge and then died before Mike even became champ.
But let’s be honest with ourselves. We’ve done to Mike Tyson what we’ve done to all of our heroes. We find them in the gutter, dust them off and then turn them into little amusing Davids, cheering them on as they go after Goliath. But then they become Goliath – and because we’re so fucking uncreative that we can’t think of another story, we go looking for another David. (Just to give us a little credit here, we also know the tale of redemption – in fact, that’s even more exciting than the David and Goliath one, but for people like Mike Tyson, there’s no redemption.)
I just never imagined that the last chapter in the book we’ve been writing about Mike Tyson for 20 years would be so ironically anti-climactic.
Saturday night, I walked into a sports bar in the biggest mall in Nashville – the one that they tore down Opry Land to stretch out over what seems like a million miles; the one I swore I’d never go into. After calling all the bars Friday afternoon, it was the only place I could find that was showing the Tyson fight. I ran with my brother-in-law through the rain, trying to tap into that 11-year-old in me that is so fascinated by fighting. But as we walked up to the bar, the match was already in the fourth or fifth round. I was crushed. How could I have been late to something that meant so much to my inner child. The 11-year-old gone, I stepped up to the bar, ordered a beer and asked the guy next to me, “How’s Mike doing?”
Reportedly, he was winning. He’d come out swinging, not as hard as “the baddest man on the planet” used to, but it was entertaining. I swigged down some Coors Light (This was a bar in a mall. Leave me alone.) and cheered on my hero.
And just from a fan’s perspective, I should point out her that it was quite interesting watching the always scrawny, but broad shouldered and big-hearted Mike Tyson go after a 6’7” Irishman with a bit of a beer belly. In his usual pre-fight banter, Tyson had vowed to “gut him like a fish” and while he wasn’t doing that, he was winning.
And I was glad to see the 38-year-old one-time great back at it again. I figured he’d knock this dude out in 7 or 8 rounds, fight another journeyman and then have a title fight sometime before his 40th birthday.
But then, something started to happen. Tyson started taking cheap shots. He threw an elbow and then tried to break the giant’s arm. And I just pretended it wasn’t happening. I figured he’d come back, throw some powerful punches and take out this guy who looked like Goliath, but clearly wasn’t worthy of the name. Except it didn’t happen that way.
At the end of the sixth round, ahead on the scorecards, Tyson went to his corner – and he stayed there, refusing to come out. In boxing, they call that failing to answer the bell. I was incredulous.
How the hell could a guy who I remembered running over top of the best trained athletes refuse to fight a slow, fat white bum?
How could my hero let me down, I wondered. I was confused. And I still sort of am.
The headlines in the paper the next day explained how “the circus was finally over.” Such a simple explanation. Such an easy way to finally write Mike off and move on to someone else.
I wanted to cry. I like Mike’s circus. I can relate to the circus. In a lot of ways, I think we’re all in the circus – maybe not all of us are the ringleader Tyson was, but we’ve all got a little bit of the circus in us. And, standing there, in fucking mall drinking domestic beer in a safe environment of mostly white patrons who wanted to watch a legend fall, I felt the tent coming down around me.
I’ve tried for the past two days to try to figure out what bothered me so much about Mike Tyson giving up. And I’m still not sure. The educated, intellectual person inside me respects him for saying he no longer wants to hurt people. He’s talked for a while now about leaving America, starting over, maybe becoming a missionary. And that sounds good to me. He explained after the fight how he just doesn’t have it in him anymore to hurt people. That sounds good, too.
But if he felt that way, why did he keep answering the bell all these years? Why didn’t he retire a long time ago?
That’s the thing – how do we really know when to stop doing something that’s just not working anymore, particularly when that’s all we know. And, tragically, maybe fighting is all Mike Tyson knows.
I can’t imagine what that feels like to realize that all you’ve ever known, all you ever done – you just don’t want to do it anymore. And even worse, no one has ever taken the time to explain to you how to do anything else. This is a guy who up until last year didn’t even know what his dad’s name was – much less get any of the lessons that dads are supposed to dole out over picnic lunches on red and white checkered blankets in the park.
So Mike did what he knew how to do. He held up his middle finger, stomped out of the arena and into that place that heroes go when we don’t need them anymore – which is, who the hell cares?
Less than a year after the fight that got me hooked on Mike Tyson, he went up against James “Buster” Douglas and lost – for the first time, knocked out in the 10th round. Think about if he had’ve stopped then. There would have been no biting of Evander’s ears, no disgraceful losses, possibly no rape allegations. He could’ve retired with what I’m assuming would have been one of the best records ever of 39-1.
Saturday night, Mike explained that he believed his career was over in 1990. But he just kept on going because that’s what he knew how to do. In his words, he was simply, “smart too late and old too soon.”
Maybe we all are.
