Mike Tyson
But like my late and sorely missed grandfather telling me about trudging through eight feet of snow barefoot just to get to go to school when he was young, I will undoubtedly tell my kids and grandkids about Mike Tyson. These days, if you want to talk about how almost otherwise undescribably hot a girl is you might invoke Liv Tyler or Cherlize Theron or, to throw a bone to my younger readers, Lindsay Lohan. Five years ago, though, those names would have been different. Five years hence, I guarantee they will not be the same names either (men are pigs; we like new blood. I apologize to our woman readers). But one metaphor has been the same for the last two decades. If guys want to invoke someone who is a bad man, if they want to talk about one dude they would not want to face in a dark alley, if they want to place bets that will never be cashed in on who we would be willing to spend two minutes in a ring with for a million dollars, that name has been the same: Mike Tyson.
In a sense that invocation is foolish. I remember February 10, 1990 as well as just about any in my life (hint: I am a pathetic loser with no sense of perspective). That was the night when James “Buster” Douglas knocked out Iron Mike Tyson for the heavyweight championship of the world. I remember it, as do most guys my age, because it was like the day I discovered that there was no Santa Claus. Because to that point, I had never seen a more devastating puncher in my life. Mike Tyson destroyed people. He took big, cocky, strong, fast young men, and he knocked them out with the sort of lightning-fast, savage efficiency that had no equal.
You have to remember that in the 1980s, boxing was actually dominated by the little guys – and in boxing, anyone who is not a heavyweight is a little guy. Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran, and Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns were the glamour boys of boxing in the 1980s, and they generally defined the decade by fighting with one another in various and sundry permutations. Many of those fights were classics (Hagler-Hearns still represents the three most savage rounds I have ever seen, and the way Leonard toyed with Duran in their rematch embodied the sweet science, never mind the Leonard-Hearns and Leonard-Haglar fights). The heavyweight division, if not a farce (that seems cruel to say about any generation of athletes) was certainly a dim shadow of what it had been throughout the 70s, when you had the Thrilla in Manilla and the Rumble in the Jungle and when every heavyweight fight, telecast on the networks and featuring Howard Cosell (sign of a true Important Sporting Moment) must have seemed like sporting ambrosia (hell, the two best Rocky movies were products of the 70s – art imitating life). Put it this way – one of the marquee heavyweight fights of the 1980s in the heavyweight division was the championship fight between Larry Holmes, who had caught Ali toward the end of his career when The Greatest should have retired, and Gerry Cooney. This is not a good sign.
Then along came Mike Tyson. Oh, even then we knew that this guy was the ultimate example of the gladiator -- a bad man who had knocked out old ladies for their grocery money and who you could not even fathom being near your girlfriend, Mom, or sister, but who was undoubtedly riveting. But Tyson was no Ali. He was not even a Foreman. If he had a parallel it was Sonny Liston, too bad for words, prison sentences in his past only making him more ruthless, more devastating, more indomitable. But of course being young, none of us, those young men my age, ever would have drawn the logical comparison, had we drawn the comparison at all: Liston was a bully, a punk. He preyed on those weaker than him because he thought they were all weaker. That is, until Cassius Clay came along, the Louisville Lip, and proved that there was in fact someone badder. (And if you have ever seen the tapes of the way Ali played with Floyd Patterson a wile later, holding him up just to beat him down, snarling “What is my name?!” after Patterson had so foolishly insisted on calling him “Cassius” even after the fateful name change, if you know the way Ali humiliated the great former champion, then you know what bad was, at least once.)
But there are some, like me, who revere the heavyweights of the 1970s, and yet who still, in the time capsules of our mind, know that there was never, ever, anyone like the Mike Tyson of the 1980s. The youngest heavyweight champion in history (and let’s face it, for all of the De la Hoyas and Gattis and Camachos, there is one division in boxing that takes the spoils, leaving the rest with scraps) Tyson was simply Hell’s wrath personified. His punches were not only the most powerful that anyone had ever seen, they were also lightning quick. His fights were like something out of a cartoon – 91 seconds is the one I best remember, in the summer of 1988, when he obliterated Michael Spinks. But 1st round knockouts ceased to be shocking anymore. Tyson’s fury took on a gracefulness that seems inexplicable now, in an era where even the consensus heavyweight champion, at one point big, rugged Lennox Lewis, seemed like a cipher.
And then came that February night. I was a freshman in college. It was the beginning of the era when big fights were no longer on basic cable, so in my dorm (we called them “entries” at Williams) we were stuck with the post-round commentary on ESPN. It did not take long, and suddenly, the world changed. Columbus Ohio’s own Buster Douglas (and my roommate was from Columbus, and thus insufferable in the way that that only someone who roots for different home teams from you can be) had knocked out Iron Mike. It seemed impossible. But it had happened. Mike Tyson had lost, and though we did not know it at the time, so had his aura of invincibility.
Seriously – it happened just like that. One minute Mike Tyson was the scariest and most dangerous man on the planet. The next he was involved in a massive and bizarre and truly disturbing rape trial (unlike OJ, it is worth noting that no one ever really doubted that he did it. And we all knew Desiree Washington's name – compare that to Kobe today.) After that it is like a blur – the Holyfield fiascos (I cannot possibly come up with a clever ear biting joke, though I will note that Holyfield was head-butting him throughout that fateful fight, as was his style, and I feel very strongly about this) and the Lennox Lewis nightmare, by which point Tyson’s career was already gone due to the same happy pills that, while ruining him as a boxer (I also feel strongly about this) also probably made him safer within society.
And so this brings us to what happened a couple of nights ago. It is hard to encapsulate the fall of Mike Tyson because even as he plummeted he showed us what he was capable of – the knockout of Francois Botha, himself a ferocious puncher, a few years back reminded us of what Tyson could do, of the power and menace and pure hate that those fists of his represented, always his key to success in the ghetto and the ring, his key to $20 from an old woman’s purse as sure as they were his key to $15,000,000. And even today, after his loss in a fourth round knockout to, well, I cannot even bring myself to say the name, better not to sunder the memory of this awful, tragic, vexing, compelling, evil man any further, but Tom and I were talking and we agreed. In the first round he tore a ligament in his knee. He still won the first three rounds and was winning the fourth. He could have won. He would have won. And with just one or two wins, with that punching ability, with even a hint of that ferocity . . . But the same bully who had revealed himself to be human, to be tamable, to be weak, in 1990, showed up once that knee popped and his balance and ferocity failed him. In 1988 such a fight would not have gone four rounds. The tenacious fury of those fists would have done in two minutes what Tyson will never do again. He will never be twenty years old, the baddest man on the planet. He will never be the most feared, the most frightening, the most intimidating. He will no longer evoke fear or loathing. Mike Tyson is much less. For now, saddest of all, he evokes pity.
NOTE: Edited at 4:45 CST on Monday, August 2 for a couple of facts -- the name of the rape victim (Thanks to Greg Robinson) and the precise nature of how the Tyson-Douglas fight was and was not telecast that night (Thanks to Tom).