/ 5 July 2009

‘Iron’ Mike’s soft side

It is not mentioned in James Toback’s With: Mike Tyson, the 90-minute deferential documentary-fan-portrait, but Mike Tyson was at the centre of the greatest celebrity anecdote in history.

The boxer was at a party in New York in the late 1980s, aggressively hitting on (the phrase was never more appropriate) Naomi Campbell.

Incredibly, the only person to stand up to Tyson was a fellow guest, the 77-year-old British philosopher, AJ Ayer, who gallantly interposed his frail person. “Do you know who the fuck I am?” an astonished Tyson raged at him. “I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!” Ayer replied: “And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.”

Filmmaker James Toback does not allude to this remarkable encounter, perhaps because he doesn’t believe it, or perhaps because Ayer gets a technical knockout, but I felt we could have done with more of the Ayer spirit: questioning, sceptical, undaunted.

“Iron” Mike Tyson has given a series of interviews, or rather sympathetically edited monologues, to Toback and it is undoubtedly true that he is more intelligent and introspective than any lay observer could have imagined. This is, after all, the notoriously aggressive boxer who was jailed for rape, and once distinguished himself by biting off part of an opponent’s ear.

In that famously soft, sibilant voice, Tyson looks back at his life (he is now 42) and shows his vulnerable side. Some of these emotional moments look contrived. Tyson recites Oscar Wilde while looking at a sunset and it sounds phoney — but talking about his former coach and mentor Cus D’Amato brings him to the brink of authentic tears.

But at no point does Toback really probe and question. Was that rape charge fair or not? Tyson lavishes contempt on his accuser, but is not pressed on exactly what happened, though he is allowed to muse on how he likes to toy with his sexual conquests. As to what was done to him in prison and what he did to others … well, maybe we don’t need to ask.

Toback shows the ferocious tirade of jailhouse threats that Tyson unleashes at a press-conference heckler: an ugly, impotent fantasy of sexual assault.

It could not be more clear that prison was just part of a larger process of brutalise-and-be-brutalised. Boxing can be a cruel business and Tyson has enough insight to see that he got out of it relatively unscathed.

But he is no Ali, and there’s no point looking to Iron Mike for wit or idealism, something to be applied outside the ring. So why exactly are we in his company for an hour and a half? This isn’t clear. It’s certainly an effectively tough, unsentimental look at boxing. —