Tyson reform claims worse than tawdry bout
The ‘no-knockout’ fight with Roy Jones Jr tomorrow has been accompanied with talk of latter-day redemption. Oliver Brown reports.
After they both became world champions in 1986, Mike Tyson and Diego Maradona found themselves drawn together, identifying with each other’s destructive talents, destitute backgrounds, and with their shared appetite for darkness.
‘‘The important thing is that people like us, who come from the same placewe do, have always fought to get where we are,’’ Tyson told the Argentine on his short-lived TV show La Noche del 10 in 2005.
‘‘Andwe have had to put up with humiliating experiences. But they could never bring us down.’’
Maradona repaid the compliment with interest, purporting to ‘‘worship’’ the boxer while handing him a signed national team shirt. A less likely embrace between rogues you could hardly wish to find.
The death of Maradona this week, at the age of 60, triggered evident pain for Tyson. ‘‘He was one of my heroes and a friend,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I respected him so much.’’
There is, though, a less flattering parallel between the pair, in terms of self-inflicted indignities in later life. For all that Maradona never relented in pursuit of hedonistic pleasures, he abased himself with some of the sinecures he took, be it managing a second-division club in the United Arab Emirates or becoming chairman of Dynamo Brest, only the fifth-best team in Belarus.
Tyson’s track record since his
days as heavyweight champion of the world is similarly chequered. To pay off his debts in 2006, he staged an absurd series of exhibitions against Corey ‘‘T-Rex’’ Sanders, an opponent who wore headgear to compensate for his inferiority as a fighter. Tyson had to hold back just to ensure that the bouts lasted the allotted four rounds.
So derided was the spectacle by pundits and fans alike, Tyson would have been wise never to entertain an encore. Instead, on the outskirts of Los Angeles tomorrow, he is staging another unseemly cash-grab against Roy Jones Jr, a former fourdivision champion.
Tyson is 54 and Jones 51, but it is not the combined vintage of the two men that is the problem. After all, Evander Holyfield, whom Tyson was originally planning to face
before the deal fell through, has just turned 58.
What sticks in the craw is the dismal emasculation of it all. There will be no judges at ringside to determine awinner and, most bizarrely, no knockouts permitted.
The two wizened veteranswill also be wearing enlarged 12oz gloves to diminish the power of the punches and create a larger defensive guard.
Truly, you would see amore explosive contest at a sparring session. About the only athletic concession Tyson seems to have made is to ditch his marijuana habit, thus satisfying the antidoping protocols. Otherwise, the tawdry affair mystifies even Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who asked this week: ‘‘They’re not allowed to knock each other out? How do you enforce that?’’
Q
uite simply, if you remove the possibility of Tyson flattening Jones, you negate the purpose of watching him at all. Tyson owes his relevance these days purely to his infamous excesses, his ‘‘baddest man on the planet’’ marketing, to his boasts of wanting to kill in the ring and the accounts of him punching holes inwalls during his warm-ups. Recent viral footage of his sparring speed confirmed that he could still whip himself up into a human cyclone when the mood took him. To tell Tyson that he cannot mete out the same savagery to Jones is to remove the fundamental pillar of his appeal. And yet BT Sport believe that it is worth £19.95 of your money.
Tyson could not care less about how this looks. He points to the records that the fight has broken for pay-per-view pre-sales and dismisses any critics as ‘‘haters’’.
But there is more than one reason for detesting what this event represents. If it is widely accepted that we are not seeing the best version of Tyson as a boxer, then we seem to be encouraged to celebrate his reinvention as aman.
‘‘I’m not where I was before,’’ he said this year. ‘‘Happier, I don’t know if that exists, but I’m in a better emotional position.’’
He regarded Maradona as a kindred spirit because of his notoriety. But Tyson is notorious for vastly different reasons. Where Maradona captivated by his hard living and his vulnerability to temptation, Tyson’s transgressions are of a far graver order. In 1992, he was sentenced to six years’ prison for the rape of beauty queen Desiree Washington, who said in a letter: ‘‘I was physically defeated to the point that my innermost personwas taken away.’’ Even here, his acolytes have sought to defend him, highlighting how he grew up in a Brooklyn brothel where his mother was violently abused.
I asked Tyson once whether a corrosive attitude to women had developed in childhood, and he shrugged: ‘‘I just don’t thinkmy mother liked me very much. I don’t trace it to her.’’
The criminal record does not lie: Tyson is a convicted rapist, required under federal law to register as a tier II sex offender. He might be able to escape certain chapters of his past, not least the crass taunts and the gnashing of Holyfield’s ear, but he can never escape this. Tyson has long since forfeited his right to claim redemption through his human qualities. The fact that TV companies are still lionising him for his so-called fight tomorrow leaves the sourest taste of all.
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Tyson owes his relevance these days purely to his infamous excesses, his ‘‘baddest man on the planet’’ marketing.