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Boxing gets even more bizarre
Sure, people are aggravated at the moment. Most of them don't mind paying $49.95 for a meal, but it seems like a lot to pony up for the privilege of watching someone else eat one. Which might explain why the phone lines at the Nevada Athletic Commission were lit up Sunday with callers demanding that the board pay their cable bills this month.
But anyone who thinks the sport's credibility was further eroded by Mike Tyson's crude attempt to make a meal of Evander Holyfield forgets the obvious: You can't lose what you don't have. Indeed, the only thing boxing does have in abundance lately is weirdness.
Several years ago, one spectator took the invitation to drop in on a fight literally. He tried to parachute into the ring at Caesar's Palace while Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe were still occupying it. Naturally, being a fight fan, he missed.
Last winter, after being disqualified for the second time in as many attempts to beat up that very same Mr. Bowe, Andrew Golota refused to explain his troubling penchant for delivering low blows. Maybe he was too embarrassed to say in halting English that he kept confusing Bowe's shoelaces for his belt.
Earlier this year, Oliver McCall stood in the middle of a ring against Lennox Lewis and with tears streaming down his face, refused to fight. When the commission pulled him in and asked about the incident at a disciplinary hearing, McCall said he was just setting a trap. Given a similar opportunity, Gen. Custer would have said the same thing about Little Big Horn.
And then came Saturday night, when the game everyone said could not get any more bizarre did.
The videotape will never do this one justice. Seeing was disbelieving. Even in "Ultimate Fighting," where the choke holds are real and eye gouging the stock-in-trade, combatants know where to draw the line. Boxers did too, or so itseemed until Tyson decided to redraw it halfway up Holyfield's right ear.
One moment it was a boxing arena, the next moment it was a test kitchen and the moment after that -- after Tyson had tasted fear and Holyfield's ear and was made weak by both -- it was nearly the scene of a riot.
"Fear causes people to do the easy thing or the quickest thing," Holyfield said Saturday night, just moments after the first wave of pandemonium died down,.
The first real heavyweight champion boxing has had in some time could have substituted the word "greed" for "fear" when talking about Team Tyson and been just as correct. And if boxing had anything resembling truth-in-advertising statutes, those two words would have been branded on Tyson's biceps instead of likenesses of Mao and Arthur Ashe that reside there now.
The day he walked out of a prison cell three years ago, Tyson and his cronies insisted he was a changed man. He had those impressive tattoos on his arms and a stack of weighty books under them, and in this sense he was different: The Tyson who came out was a much more desperate man than the one who went in.
But it turns out he was a changed man in this sense, too: The Tyson who emerged was nowhere near the warrior -- mentally and physically -- who spent three years as a guest of the state of Indiana.
Tyson probably knew that in his heart of hearts the day he was set free, and if not, he certainly had the notion planted in his head by Holyfield's punches last November. That may explain all the brooding of late, the increasing fascination with the sad life and tragic end of Sonny Liston, the infatuation with getting a different referee to work the rematch.
When he was the baddest man on the planet, Tyson never bothered to learn the referee's names or even what they looked like. That was for his opponents; they were the ones depending on timely intervention.
Looking back, it seems clear now that Don King knew he had a spent fighter on his hands, too. The fear and greed that inspired may help explain the unseemly haste to serve up Peter McNeeley, Buster Mathis, Frank Bruno and Bruce Seldon in such quick succession.
More than anyone else, more even than Tyson himself, King probably knew his fighter didn't have the stomach for stronger stuff. If Tyson ever attempts a comeback, we may find out whether the rest of us do, too.