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.