Celebrate Dave George’s career with top columns
Perversely, boxer’s rape sentence has boosted fan interest in sham of a fight.
We look back at our sportswriter’s 40-year run with 20 of his favorite pieces: Today, a 1995 Tyson take.
“He’s Back” is the stupendously simple theme of tonight’s Mike Tyson TV special, and, fittingly, even that is a rip-off.
Michael Jordan’s NBA comeback began with the banner-headline quote “I’m Back,” and in that declaration was raw power on the order of Muhammad Ali’s return from exile.
Everything about Tyson’s coming-out party is manufactured, from the pretense of an actual competition here at the MGM Grand to the mythic imagination of Don King,
who strode giddily into a media workroom Friday afternoon and squealed, “This is bigger than the Great Wall of China.”
Bigger than the walls of the Indiana Youth Center, certainly. Tyson’s rape sentence, completed in March, had the peculiar purpose of selling this fight like no series of knockouts could. That’s boxing for you, consistently successful at beating the brains out of America. Typically, too, the issue of violence against women becomes an annoying afterthought in the lives of most men, hardly worth spoiling the rare and riotous mood of a heavyweight fight night out with the boys.
There need be no rationale to this dance with Don King, not when we are so willing to accept that Tyson, who gave up on earning his GED in prison because it was too frustrating, suddenly is one of the world’s deepest thinkers.
In the course of a live interview with Larry King the other night, Tyson revealed that he is paranoid about everything and fearful of nothing, all at once. He told reporters at an earlier press confer- ence that “to be betrayed is just not being prepared for it. If I can prepare for somebody trying to betray me, I’m no longer betrayed.”
Whoa, time for a standing-eight count. My head is spinning after that one. And here comes the knockout punch. Don King has gathered a group of Japanese reporters around him, and this is what he is telling them.
“The media buried me, locked me in a cave so I could never get out,” King said. “Then Mike Tyson rolled the stone away and said, ‘Don King, come forth.’ It was a miracle. I was reborn. And now I serve the master, Mike Tyson.”
There is much more to tell about the idiocy being sold as analysis and promotion at this fight, but we’ll leave it at that. My credibility as a reporter already is at risk simply by being here. Let’s move on to Iron Mike’s tin foil, “Hurricane” Peter McNeeley.
He has courage. He has a sense of humor. And, hopefully, he has good insurance.
Nothing more can be said about this mismatch that would explain the inevitable outcome or kill the curiosity. This guy’s fighting nickname could be Peter “Paul and Mary” McNeeley and the pay-TV sales still would set a record. He could go by Peter “Touchy Feely” McNeeley and millions would tune in to feel his pain.
And even if they billed this event as pay-per-few, in recognition of how many rounds the fight will last, it wouldn’t matter. Fans who refuse to spend $32 for an NFL exhibition will pay $45 tonight to bring an even less genuine article into their living rooms.
“Tyson is a demolition derby,” said Ferdie Pacheco, “a straightahead, violence-first fighter.”
Therein lies his appeal, as subtle as a shark in a tank of tuna. Sonny Liston, the same sort of monster, never would have said something like “I will kill Peter McNeeley, God willing,” as Tyson did this week. Neither would George Foreman, who was a thug in his first career and a preacher in his second.
Tyson’s attempt at mixing all these individual characteristics into one fighter is confusing. More than that, it’s unnecessary.
Tyson can’t do enough things wrong to make people turn away, and he can’t do enough things right to win them over.
All fans want from him is to provide the world with a heavyweight champion who looks like he could lick anybody on the planet.
That bare minimum, it seems, is worth the mockery.