real deal
The bout between Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota could be more mayhem than Marquess of Queensbury Harry Pearson A century-and-a-half ago the great English showman Wombwell organised a fight between a pack of English mastiffs and one of the lions from his travelling menagerie. Ticket sales were brisk. On the night of the contest Wombwell’s marquee was overflowing with a drunken Victorian mob. The mastiffs were released into the lion’s enclosure. The crowd let out a bloodthirsty roar and then – nothing happened. The dogs were too frightened to attack the lion, the lion too docile to launch himself at the dogs.
Incensed, the audience began to jeer and demand their money back. There was some jostling and shoving, a punch was thrown and soon a full-scale riot had broken out. As the curses, fists, teeth and hair flew the lion and the dogs looked on bewildered. Friday night’s clash in Michigan between Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota is being touted under the tag line “Who let the dogs out?” but it is not simply that which has brought Wombwell to mind. Muhammad Ali once described the experience of having your senses scrambled by a punch as “going into the near room”, a freakish place where orange neon flashes, bats blow trumpets and alligators play trombones. These days the entire heavyweight division seems to have lurched across the threshold and taken up residence on the sofa. The efforts of dignified and courageous men such as Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield have done little to alter the impression that heavyweight boxing is spiralling downwards into a carnival of weirdness worthy of Wombwell and his cohorts. The Victorian fair-goer got to marvel at Miss Hipson The Middlesex Wonder (“Largest Child In All The Kingdom”) and The Amazing Pig-Faced Lady; subscribers to cable and satellite TV stations get Tyson and the Warsaw-born Golota. The only major difference is that, whereas The Amazing Pig-Faced Lady was actually a bear with clean-shaven snout, it appears Iron Mike and the “Foul Pole” may be the real deal. Tyson’s former-trainer Teddy Atlas defines his job as “taking a fighter into a dark place”. The former champion and his opponent both seem to have bought second homes there. The 2m Golota combines square- headed brutishness with a fragile psyche. In one fight he is apparently attempting to carry out a do-it-yourself vasectomy on Riddick Bowe with his bare hands; in another, with Lewis, he winds up in hospital after an anxiety attack. The 32-year-old’s manager, Lou Duva, claims that, when his charge enters the ring, he is battling two men, himself and his opponent. According to Duva, the strong, skilful fighter who won 111 amateur fights and took a bronze medal in the Seoul Olympics is sometimes left bound and gagged in the dressing room by his “evil twin”, who then steps through the ropes in his place and treats the 130kg Samoan Samson Po’Uha as if he were an eat-as-much-as-you- want buffet, butts Donnell Nicholson or makes an all-out effort to help Bowe reach the high notes in the middle eight of Sugar Baby Love. For the past few years the “evil twin” has been kept locked away in Golota’s Chicago attic. But then the 110kg fighter has not been under so much pressure; building up his record against a stream of the sort of opponents who could get knocked down by a parked car. One of them, “Timber” Jack Basting, is a 41-year-old former striptease artist; another, Tim Witherspoon, peaked around the same time as stonewashed denim.
Tyson, meanwhile, has gone from spouting Eric Cantona-esque aphorisms (“Some people hide behind buses and watch you fall in the snow”) to snacking on Holyfield and generally working up the kind of bad-boy image even Nike’s loathsome marketing department refuses to glorify. Last week Tyson claimed that sportswriters are vilifying him as an ogre. I take his point. The campaign against him is most irrational. This, after all, is a convicted rapist who said that one opponent “squealed like a girl” when he punched him, expressed a desire to drive another’s nose up through his skull and into his brain, reputedly told Tyrell Briggs that he intended “to make you my girlfriend” and vowed to cut out Lewis’s heart and eat it. We should lay off him a bit. It is not as if he is a serial offender or anything. Tyson’s and Golota’s meeting sold out in days – something the younger and more talented Naseem Hamed singularly failed to manage. Some may regard that as grotesque. Wombwell, I’m sure, would have appreciated the subtlety of it.
ENDS