IRON MIKE

I never did explain my thing about Mike Tyson.

He was my hero. Aged eleven, I considered nobody more worthy of my adulation. It was because of Mike that I’d drag myself out of bed three hours before I had to be ready for school so I could destroy my ankles running around and around my block. Because of Mike I did it again when I got home in the afternoon. And the jumping: the endless, tedious jumping-rope.

            I defended him. Long before Lance Armstrong made us all feel like assholes, I stuck-up for Tyson. When he beat-up his wife I argued with my friends: ‘We don’t know what really happened. Maybe it’s been blown out of proportion. And, anyway, the media needs to leave him alone – it’s just not fair’.

            When he had to postpone a title-fight after breaking his hand on some guy’s head in a night club I figured, ‘Hey, the fool probably deserved it’.

            Then there were the fights. He seemed to stop caring. Guys obviously beaten in the first two rounds would waltz him around the ring for another seven or eight or sometimes the distance. The man who eventually knocked him out in Japan, Buster Douglas, once lost a decision on Tyson’s undercard (The winner of that fight, a thoroughly ordinary monolith named Tony Tucker, went on to tie Tyson up for fifteen whole rounds).

            Then he raped that girl. Even then, knowing he was guilty, the naively adoring part of me rationalised, ‘Sure, he did it – but what the hell was the girl doing there anyway?’ Anything but admit it might be Mike’s fault. If even that didn’t kill the magic, his comeback did. Emerging from prison he phoned-in big money wins against a series of tubby, middle-aged never-weres I probably could have knocked-out.

            When he finally faced a real challenge he was no longer up to it. Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis were good fighters, but neither should have been in Tyson’s league. He knew it too. But they didn’t. Faced, for possibly the first time, with opponents not half-beaten before the opening-bell merely by his reputation, he went to pieces. Thwarted in his old tricks he snapped and bit-off part of Holyfield’s ear.

            By the time he got Lewis into the ring even Mike knew it was all over. As if doing penance he submitted to the mother of all beatings. And if that was the last time we saw him his career, though wasted, would have ended with some dignity.

            But Mike, it seems, doesn’t do dignity. From speaking tours to stupid film appearances via a brief wrestling career he kept the freak-show going. First he became an animal – then he became a joke.

            Tyson should have been great – the greatest. Instead his crash-and-burn dragged Heavyweight boxing down in its wake. That cancer, Don King, had already been white-anting it for a decade, but the wrecking-ball he used to finish the job was Iron Mike Tyson. And my inner eleven year-old has never gotten over it.

I THOUGHT THEY WERE VITAMINS

Greens Senator Richard Di Natale wants a senate inquiry into drugs in sport. He wants leading players and coaching staff from the AFL and NRL to appear and explain how it could have happened. He’s right, they should.

When the ASADA investigation exploded in the media my first response was, “Suffer, scumbag hypocrites”. It seemed like vindication. I and some of the best people I know are viewed as filth by much of society. We will always – no matter what we do to improve ourselves – be defined by what we once did to assuage appalling emotional and psychological damage. Accordingly, every time we let someone new into our lives we face an uncomfortable decision: whether to be honest or lie about a mistake we can’t un-make.

And now here came the nation’s sporting heroes, held up as models of virtue for children to emulate, showered with money, adulation and all the privileges afforded by fame, revealed at last as the cheating thugs some of us have always known them to be.

I was long ago disabused of any romantic notions about footballers or cricketers – fifteen years in Kings Cross, watching them get drunk or wired, start fights, abuse women and generally be obnoxious, took care of that. This recovering junkie felt good knowing the rest of the country finally gets it too. Unlike the rape scandals a couple of years ago, this time there would be no excuses.

But I’ve had some time to think. Senator Di Natale’s proposed inquiry is so important precisely because the drug issue highlights many of the same institutional problems that produced those ugly sex stories.

Take a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs or the bush. Put him in a situation where his only job is to turn up at training and at the game on the weekend; where he’s the subject of hero-worship disproportionate to his actual accomplishment; where he rarely hears the word ‘no’; and where, so long as he keeps winning, his most outrageous behaviour will be excused or covered-up. It doesn’t take a genius to predict the likely result.

Football, by its nature, is a community.  A few leaders come to the fore; the rest are followers. That same seventeen-year-old will be impressionable. He will cast about for role-models. He will accept as normal whatever the coach, officials or prominent players do or say. If he’s told, ‘Take this “supplement”’ – he probably will, whatever his qualms.

A senate inquiry should hear those stories. Not to excuse them – most drug users have an external locus of control; given a chance to blame someone else they will – but to expose the complexities of the issue. It should be more than a public skewering of the end-users and their suppliers.

The players need a chance to take responsibility for their actions; the clubs and governing bodies need to be exposed in their complicity; it needs to be addressed as a cultural issue, not the misbehaviour of a few rogue individuals or clubs.

 And along the way maybe, just maybe, we’ll stumble over a more compassionate, more realistic understanding of the drug problem in the wider community.

Or not ...

MARCH WINDS BLOW COLD

Seasons shift. Time marches on. The icy drizzle of our weird new climate settles over Sydney. On the mute TV the old Pope waves one last time from the balcony then, Nixonesque, boards the holy helicopter into gilded exile. He did what he felt was right.

            My ex-wife has, at long last, found a good man close to her own age and seems ready to settle down; a weight off my mind. My bf has a new tattoo I may never see up-close, thanks to a mutual capacity for emotional denial and poor impulse control.

            One friend prepares to depart these shores and live out his dream of being a successful touring musician. Meanwhile another friend moves to Sydney from the bush to find work and build a new life – his dream of being a champion jockey shattered, with his sternum, pancreas, spleen and most of his bones, in a riding accident.

            My sister’s boyfriend, made redundant a few months ago, consoles himself by purchasing one of those titanic American SUVs. Even my mother contemplates trading-up – a four-wheel drive just big enough for herself, her grand-daughter and her German shepherd.

            The Labor Government marches inexorably toward destruction; the Opposition, and its Howard era front bench, readies itself to revive the good old days of increased middle-class welfare, populist xenophobia, wedge politics and no spending on any infrastructure outside marginal electorates; some things change – others never will.

            And me? I’ve given up on changing. Rather, my project these days is to become more myself. I think it’s going well. In a few weeks I’ll be a qualified copy-editor, and will begin the daunting process of setting-up shop. It’s not exactly the most exciting business, but I’ll be largely my own boss; and it won’t hurt to make a few contacts in the publishing industry.

             My only real worry is that it will chew up time when I could be writing, but somebody once told me that you don’t find time for the important stuff – you make time. Anyway, having to worry less about the little things – like paying the rent and feeding myself – won’t be an unwelcome change. Who knows, I may even end up in a position to keep a roof over someone else’s head while they chase their own dream. I’d like that.

            Or, I could follow the old Pope’s lead and devote the rest of my life to prayer. That always works.