Boxing: Dark legend finally dissipates

Mike Tyson sits on his stool as his trainer, Austalia's Jeff Fenech, talks to him before the start of round six of his fight against Kevin McBride. Picture / Reuters

In the late 1980s there seemed to be no limit to Mike Tyson's potential for destruction. He was a nihilist in boxing shorts but as long as he was contained by the lingering influence of mentor Gus D'Amato - and the control of his first manager, Jimmy Jacobs - he was a human scythe slashing through the heavyweight division.

That impact was so strong, so terrorising, that it has taken more than 15 years to fully dissipate. Now that it has done so utterly, now that every young heavyweight in the world mourns the fact that it was Kevin McBride who had the good fortune to be in the ring with Tyson this weekend, we can only ask why it took so long?

It was because of the sheer force of that first, mesmerising rush from the terrible streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn - a place so bleak that a policewoman once broke down in tears when asked to describe the conditions that shaped the boyhood and early youth of Tyson.

The young man carried a thinly suppressed anger that was at times diabolic in its force.

When he came into the ring, already pared down for the most basic of action in his black shorts and black, sockless boots, he created an apprehension that spread far beyond the ring and the palpable fear in so many of his opponents.

He offered the possibilities of unlimited violence, to the extent that when he felled former great heavyweight champion Larry Holmes in Atlantic City in 1988, an observer as experienced as British fight man Micky Duff thought for a moment or two that a fatal blow had been delivered.

Later that year, Michael Spinks, a fine fighter and former champion and a product of the tough East St Louis ghetto, dissolved before our eyes.

He rushed to his point of fear and was consumed by Tyson in much less than a round.

That was the high point of Tyson's menace ... 17 years ago. The rest is about exploitation and decay, his own manipulation of the meaning of those early years and also, principally, that of Don King, who recently was required to hand back US$14 million ($19.8 million), a fraction of what he was alleged to have spirited away from the dark legend he skilfully perpetuated for so long.

In the debris of Tyson's career - and maybe, it was hard not to fear, his life - an astonishing set of statistics underpinned the reality of what he had once meant to the public.

He was involved in the top four pay-per-view television profits of all time. Most significantly, one was for the grotesque mismatch King arranged on Tyson's release from jail after serving three years for rape. His wage, for attending the surrender of a club fighter from Boston named Pete McNeely, was $30 million.

Such fraudulence was the motif of almost everything Tyson did after surrendering his title to James "Buster" Douglas in Tokyo in 1990, when he launched himself into a pre-fight ritual of dissipation which, it was said, would have drained the fighting instincts of a small army.

It was a time of personal collapse. His manager Jacobs died. His marriage to actress Robin Givens was a humiliating disaster. He drove his Rolls-Royce into a tree, then tried to give it to a police officer.

There was talk of suicide, of the slippage of his mind to an extremely dark place. He told a reporter, who was questioning him about the value of psychology, "If you can't fight, you're f ... ".

It was a prophecy no less acute because it took him so long to reach the breaking point of a $55 million bankruptcy.

In 1996, he fought Evander Holyfield on the faulty premise of his advisers that the man from Georgia was broken and washed up - a theory provoked by Holyfield's listless performance against a puffed-up light-heavyweight named Bobby Czyz.

Holyfield slaughtered Tyson, and then in the re-match had his ears bitten by a man desperate to deflect from the fact that he could no longer summon his old powers.

When Tyson was pulverised in Memphis three years ago by Lennox Lewis, with whom he had sparred ferociously in the gym above the fire station in Catskill, New York, when they were teenagers, it was plain he had reached the bottom of the well. But there was still money to be earned; there was still an aura from the past to titillate a public more aware of what he was than what he had become.

Tyson's longevity was as extraordinary as it was shallow. Here in Washington for a week he played the old game of victim and urban guerrilla hero.

He visited war veterans maimed in Iraq and embraced their suffering. He trained at the leading black university, Howard, where he was lauded as a hero of black America, a man to be placed alongside Martin Luther King and a Howard graduate who became a Supreme Court justice.

He was asked why white America hated him so much. The old act worked as well as ever - right up to the point where he returned to the ring and found himself incapable of surviving against big, artless Kevin McBride, for whom he had promised the fate of a gutted fish.

But again, as he had been in Louisville last year against another journeyman, Britain's Danny Williams, Tyson was exposed as the seller of bogus goods.

Once it was a sensational line, a product heightened by the health warning it carried. Now it brought no more danger than a long-discredited threat. At last, there was no argument that it had to be discontinued.

Mike Tyson

Born: Brooklyn, New York, June 30, 1966.

Height: 1.80m. Reach: 198cm.

Professional debut: March 6, 1985.

Record: 50-6 (44 knockouts).

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