Voices
When Heroes
Go Bad
The co-dependence of Mike Tyson and the press
Iam not the only one confused by Mike Tyson. Since his pro debut in 1985, reporters have rolled with the former heavyweight champ through numerous cycles of vilification and glorification. Despite some noteworthy attempts to round out this troubled soul — Joyce Carol Oates’s essays for Life (1987) and Newsweek (1992) considered Tyson within the context of his painful upbringing and the savagery of boxing; a 1995 Sports Illustrated piece by Steve Rushin and Sonja Steptoe questioned whether “an athlete’s actions outside the arena diminish his greatness in it” — the interchange of victory and ignominy that defines Tyson’s career has produced mostly one-dimensional portrayals. This is evident in the collection of Tyson covers Sports Illustrated has done over the years: “Kid Dynamite!” (January 6, 1986), “Dynamite!” (December 1, 1986), “King Mike” (August 10, 1987), “Too Much!” (February 1, 1988), “Will Love and Marriage K.O. Mike Tyson?” (June 13, 1988), “Tyson: Is the Fury Gone?” (June 24, 1991), “Guilty” (February 17, 1992), “Madman!”(July 7, 1997), “Monster’s Ball” (May 20, 2002).
Tyson may not be the typical sports star, but these Jekyll and Hyde renditions tell us something about our confusion over how to handle heroes when they go bad, from Pete Rose to Daryl Strawberry, and now maybe Kobe Bryant if the rape charge against him holds up in court.
Not that it’s easy. Recently I saw video footage from 1982 in which Tyson, then a hulking sixteen-year-old, sobs uncontrollably while trainer Teddy Atlas tries to console him with hugs and a soft-spoken pep talk. The scene is part of the Fox Sports “Beyond the Glory” documentary on Tyson that aired last summer. “I’m Mike Tyson, everyone likes me,” the boy, who four years later would be the youngest-ever heavyweight champion, muttered through tears before his final fight in the National Junior Olympics. Tyson wasn’t afraid of losing the bout but of losing the approval of the people who supported him. It was heartbreaking to try to reconcile the fragile, affection-starved boy in the video with the highly unsympathetic man we know today.
Attempts to write off Tyson over the years — through his rape conviction, prison sentence, and numerous other bizarre and violent episodes — proved premature. In a 1988 commentary for the New York Daily News, Michael Katz bade farewell to Tyson, writing “You were a great fighter Mike Tyson . . . I won’t miss you.” In 1991 The New York Times’s Robert Lipsyte referred to Tyson’s erratic behavior as an “orgy of self-destruction.”
But in 1994 Pete Hamill visited Tyson in the Indiana prison where he served three years on a rape conviction, and wrote convincingly in Esquire of Tyson as thug-turned-Renaissance-man. Tyson had converted to Islam and had spent his incarceration in fervent pursuit of knowledge. He impressed Hamill with references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Maya Angelou. “In prison,” Hamill wrote, “Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.”
Within a year of his release on March 25, 1995, Tyson had amassed a reported $65 million for bouts against Peter McNeeley, Buster Mathis Jr., and Frank Bruno (all of which he won). Of the comeback Hugh McIlvanney wrote in The Sunday Times of London, “As he comes back at the age of 29 he has the good fortune to find a heavyweight division devoid of truly outstanding performers . . .” Tyson’s career has been hanging in the balance ever since. As long as his promoters could cobble together big paydays based on the vanishing possibility that Tyson could still unleash his trademark ferocity on Champion X, we in the press blissfully continued to mainline him. After Tyson knocked out Clifford Etienne in forty-nine seconds on February 22, 2003, The Boxing Times declared that “Tyson’s stunning first round destruction of Etienne catapults the bad boy of boxing right back to the ranks of title contenders.”
The media’s co-dependent relationship with Tyson has not gone unnoticed. In 1999 Lipsyte, for The New York Times, contrasted our simplistic condemnation of Tyson with our absolute deification of the other Mike (“Jordan the Good”). Katherine Dunn, in her highly sympathetic article for PDXS in 1997, admonished her fellow journalists for calling Tyson “dirty, disgusting, repellent, bestial, loathsome, vile, animalistic, vampiristic, deranged, maniacal, cannibalistic, murderous, cowardly,” after he bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Dunn made the case that Tyson — who, by the way, is not the first fighter to use his teeth in the ring — had been provoked by Holyfield’s holding, shoving, low blows, and head-butts, which went unacknowledged by the referee (and alleged Holyfield friend) Mills Lane.
Tony Sewell wrote this in the Voice in February 1999:
The recent condemning of Mike Tyson by most of these [sports] writers after his jail sentence is just hypocritical. These were the same writers who waxed lyrical about Tyson as the greatest athlete on earth and gushed orgasmically at the power of his punches. Now, like scorned lovers, they rail against him . . . .
It may be that well-rounded coverage of Tyson requires some contradictions. Consider Geoffrey Gray’s December 22 article for The New York Observer: “The prospect of a real comeback in boxing seems to recede further from Tyson’s grasp,” writes Gray. Then, in the next paragraph: “Mr. Tyson remains boxing’s biggest, most lucrative fighter . . . . There are still glory days to come.” True enough on both counts.
Today we hear primarily of Tyson’s legal troubles and psychopathology. But his offenses of late — the June 21, 2003, brawl in Brooklyn, his filing for bankruptcy last August, the assault on Don King’s bodyguard on May 3, 2003 — are not among his worst. Back in January 2002 the Las Vegas police were investigating two separate rape allegations against Tyson. Those more alarming charges (for which the police claimed there was substantial evidence) were less publicized, possibly because of their proximity to Tyson’s much-hyped fight with Lennox Lewis (originally scheduled for April 6, 2002, it was postponed after a scuffle broke out at a prefight press conference.) The discrepancy in press coverage suggests that our growing intolerance for Tyson may be linked more than we realize to his chances for a professional comeback.
Seven years ago Robert Lipsyte wrote, “Don’t count out Tyson quite yet; if he doesn’t find a way to self-destruct in the next few weeks, he may find a way to reinvent himself.” It is still good advice. Last spring Tyson received rave reviews for his stint as cohost on ABC’s late night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live; and, not surprisingly, rumors of a Mike Tyson reality show are in the air. How will we cover that?
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