Tyson unveils his rag-to-riches tale
Fresh from spat with local news anchor, boxing great bonds with fans at ACC
They arrived late, they clapped a lot, they listened when they chose to.
No doubt about it, the audience was the most interesting thing about Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, which played one sparsely attended performance at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday night.
Tyson himself is a known quantity by now. The only question was whether he’d gush, like he did with Mayor Rob Ford, or glower, as he did with CP24 anchor Nathan Downer.
For the record, it was the hearts-and-flowers Tyson at the ACC. So much so, in fact, that although patrons were lining up four deep at the bar to purchase drinks before the show, they might have been better off with a hit of insulin.
It’s surprising how few of them there were. In its theatre configuration, the ACC can hold 5,200 seats, but the upper level was closed down and no one was sitting off to the sides.
In fact, at the announced 8 p.m. start time, there were maybe only 400 people thinly scattered throughout the cavernous space. By 8:45, that number had more than doubled, but it was still a pretty poor showing.
Maybe they knew that before Tyson took the stage there would be an endless self-serving introduction by Ring TV’s Alexandre Choko, which amounted to an infomercial for his own book, The Future of Boxing.
Even Tyson later commented, “What the f--- was Alex doing up there so long? Didn’t know this is a one-man show?”
But it was a boxing-savvy crowd. The weighty, elderly man next to me in a World Boxing Federation blazer and a jaunty peaked cap leaned over when a picture of Muhammad Ali flashed on the screen and whispered to me, “See this bracelet? Ali gave it to me on my 70th birthday.”
And when Tyson introduced former champ Shane Mosley in the audience, the reaction was genuinely enthusiastic.
So a love of boxing united them, but that was where the generalities ended. The crowd was 80 per cent male, but that’s to be expected with someone like Tyson whose attitude toward women falls into the “Madonna/whore” camp.
Audience age ranged from 30 to death, but there were a few younger guys who had shown up with their dads for a bizarre bonding exercise.
Surprisingly, the crowd was heavily white, but it cut across all financial brackets, with a goodly sprinkling of well-suited men who looked they had just rolled down from Bay Street, after a tough day and a few martinis, while at the other end were greasy dudes with backpacks who might have made the pilgrimage from the North to the show.
Tyson onstage is a big, shambling presence, clown-like in a lemon yellow suit and white shoes, with a pink shirt and a floppy pink-and-white pocket square. He frequently shows us how badly he can dance and does impersonations of people in his life that are so broad as to be cartoonish.
But still, he holds us for the first third of the show as he catalogues his amazing journey from the slums of Brooklyn to the heavyweight championship of the boxing world.
This part is entertaining and enlightening, but before long we’re into much murkier territory with hatefilled rants about first wife Robin Givens and a truly tasteless anecdote about how he caught her fellating a very, very young Brad Pitt in the white BMW he had bought for her.
The audience started to split up at this point, with some sitting in silence while others hooted with increasingly raucous laughter. Things got courtroom-tense when he flatly denied he had raped Desiree Washington and then, truly muddled in a long section about how he lost his title and became a coke addict.
By now the evening was well past its advertised length of 90 minutes and even Tyson sheepishly said, “I’m kinda goin’ on up here,” and wondered what the show’s putative director, Spike Lee, would think of its current shape.
What’s most troubling is the way Tyson balances his misogyny toward all the “bad” women in his life against the saintly treatment accorded his mother, sister and daughter Exodus, all of whom died before their times.
And there’s the obligatory, “I’m trying to make the best of my life every day” speech that lets you know you can start fumbling for your umbrella.
At the end, everyone rose to their feet immediately, but Torontonians give standing ovations to anyone.
What’s more fascinating is that while a very small, hard-core clique rushed toward the stage to make contact with Saint Mike, the rest of the audience emptied the theatre in record time.
As Tennessee Williams once said, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.”