When Mike Tyson steps into the ring in Las Vegas this Sunday, it will be the former world heavyweight champion’s first fight since spitting out a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Michael Ellison reports from New York
The very name, even shorn of its all- too-shameful associations, is blunt and menacing, abbreviated like a sawn-off shotgun.
So when the lord of the dance, Michael Flatley, says an evening’s prancing is akin to going 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, no one need ask what he’s talking about. Nor is it necessary when the outgoing senior vice-president of Boeing describes the commercial aircraft business as like getting in the ring with Tyson. But one might wonder if these gentlemen have their life’s struggles in perspective.
Rape and petty-hood nastiness outside the ring, cannibalism and the no- arguments authority of a slaughterhouse superstar inside it, there has never been anyone like Tyson in sport. So it’s showtime again, an almost ghoulish, voyeuristic showtime, in eight days when the youngest heavyweight champion in history climbs into the ring for the first time since June 28 1997. That was the night he bit one of Evander Holyfield’s ears and tore off a piece of the other.
Tyson, now 32, might well destroy his opponent in seconds; he could lose and be humiliated; or he may surpass even his own shameful achievements with who knows what? None of this really matters any more, all that does is that the bout is an event with millions for Tyson (though not as many as previously), millions more for pay-per- view cable television and a bit for the other guy.
In case anyone is wondering, the other guy is Francois Botha, a slow, apparently fearless South African. Botha, managed by Sterling McPherson, a Don King acolyte, is not a pushover. He is proud and tough, but slow and hittable. Port Elizabeth- born Botha, who calls himself the “White Buffalo”, says “everybody – not just in South Africa but in the United States – is looking for a white champion”, and claims to be a white hope for the sport and the heavyweight division.
Botha’s plan is to goad and tire Tyson, neither of which is very difficult. The main problem will be lasting through Tyson’s rights until he wanes in the later rounds. “This is a 10-round fight. Botha will breeze right through it because Tyson is not in condition. They can’t fool me,” said Botha’s chief trainer, Panama Lewis.
Botha has lived in the US for nine years and has a 39-1 record, with 24 knockouts. He beat German Axel Schultz in 1995 to win the then vacant International Boxing Federation (IBF) title, winning on points, but he was stripped of his crown when he tested positive for steroids. His only loss was against Michael Moorer in another attempt at the IBF title in November 1996.
Botha will bring home $1,8-million to defray the medical costs of facing Tyson, who will get $23-million to begin his comeback as a 7-1 favourite.
But it could be anyone in the ring, since it takes two to complete the Tyson freak show inside the ropes. On the other side, perhaps Roseanne Barr, James Caan, Woody Harrelson and Donald Trump will not be ringside, as they were 19 months ago, but adequate understudy celebrities will be.
Tyson reminded them of his unique qualities this week by breaking a self- imposed vow of decency. Asked what would happen if his opponent came straight at him, Iron Mike replied: “Die.” Invited to grace the memory of the late Jerry Quarry, who died at 53, a legacy of more than one punch too many, Tyson said: “What’s meant to be is meant to be.”
It seems almost incredible now to think that in the 1980s Tyson became the first boxer since Muhammad Ali that British fathers would drag their uncomprehending young sons out of bed to watch on television in the middle of the night. Of course Iron Mike did not have the grace, wit, charisma and artistry of the former Cassius Clay, but he had something Ali did not – the ability time and again to maul and dispatch opponents within moments, the perfect fighter for the nascent nil-attention-span age.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and author of the homage King of the World, has written that “Ali is a man who all his life lived in the moment . and it is only now, in late middle age, in the grip of illness, that he has had the time and patience to make sense of what he was and what he has left behind, to think about how a gangly kid from Louisville willed himself to become one of the great original improvisers in American history, a brother to Davy Crockett, Walt Whitman, Duke Ellington.”
Wow. But of course the noble Ali did not always seem that way, not to everyone. And without trying to excuse Tyson, he too has his iconic American brothers, though they are more likely to number such as Tupac Shakur, the rapper who died after being shot four times on the way back from – yes – an Iron Mike fight.
Tyson wasn’t such a bad man for a while after serving three years of a six-year sentence for raping 19-year-old Desiree Washington, a contestant in the Indianapolis Miss Black America beauty pa- geant. He made his millions, didn’t beat anyone up, his new wife did not accuse him of domestic violence – unlike the last one, actress Robin Givens – and then he had to go and bite Holyfield’s ears. That cost him $3- million and a ban from boxing.
Life since then has been a grot- esque pageant of self-pity leavened with a faltering attempt to do the right thing.
Or, to put it Tyson’s way: “I love the sport, the sport just doesn’t love me.”
Just before the Holyfield fiasco, Tyson was denied permission to keep two tigers and a lion on his estate south- east of Cleveland; five months later a court ordered him to pay $45E000 after a street brawl in Harlem; there was the stint as a wrestling referee; he crashed his Honda motorcycle in Connecticut; and then he crashed his 10-year link with promoter Don King.
Tyson claims in a lawsuit that King’s chicanery over the years deprived him of $100-million. Maybe that’s just what happens when a man who can barely read does business with a man who can count.
Either way, the boxer, who is said to have earned up to $140-million from six fights since his release from jail, could not settle a $13-million back- taxes bill.
Not that Tyson is prepared to go public on money problems. “I’ve got more money than you’ll even see in your life,” he says.
Yes, but the people to whom he refers
do not have the Tyson overheads – in 1995 alone he is said to have bought 10 BMWs, four Rolls-Royces, several Bentleys and a $3-million Las Vegas home on which he spent another $8- million.
This time his stock has fallen and he is going out at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for no more than $23-million.
Tyson is only there at all because, following a fruitless tour of the nation’s licensing authorities, Nevada, greedy for a week’s great business for its casinos, was always going to give him one last chance and allowed him to have his licence back.
Tyson reassured the commissioners by telling them: “I’m not going to kill anyone. I’m not a mass murderer.”
This was confirmed by psychological reports which said, hilariously, that he had a constellation of neurobehavioural deficits but was mentally fit for the ring.
Since then Tyson has been training at the inaptly named Madison Square Garden gym next to a taco stand in Phoenix, Arizona. There he has been trying to do the right thing, doing little or nothing to disturb the reputation for dullness of a city which was nevertheless the winter home of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright for 25 years.
Tyson has been visiting young reprobates in jail to instruct them in the error of their ways and handing out turkeys to the needy at Thanksgiving. But even when on his best behaviour, Tyson’s curriculum vitae always counts against him. The truth is that no amount of gentlemanly behaviour may be enough to keep Tyson out of jail.
Three weeks after the fight he will find out whether he must return for up to 20 years on parole violations – allegedly punching one man and kicking another after a minor automobile accident five months ago.
Lost somewhere with the Holyfield right lobe is another story, that of Lonnie Bradley, whose last fight was on the Tyson bill on what they call the night of the bite. The undefeated former WBO middleweight world champion has never entered the ring for more than $80E000 and has not entered at all since detaching a retina in sparring.
On what Bradley hopes is the road back, he has been working for $11,50 an hour as a security guard at the 1930s art deco palace of varieties, Radio City in Manhattan. But the injury has given him more time to watch fights and that has taught him something. “Boxing’s not just physical. It’s about character.”
Ever the victim, he offered this explanation for his problems: “If the sleaziest girl in the world says Mike Tyson grabbed her ass, society will believe her.” Perhaps he came closest to the truth by suggesting that the public remained fascinated with him because “they want to see my demise”. But even this fascination has its limits.