A Boxing Memory: Mike Tyson

A Boxing Memory: Mike Tyson

By Garry White

Rather than being, as often perceived by its detractors, a feast of brutality, boxing is closer in its execution to the immovable logic of pure mathematics. A sport that is all about angles -be it from the perspective of hitting or not getting hit- can do little else than to hold geometry at its centre rather than an ill-disciplined uncontrolled bloodlust. 

This truth exists even in the granite fists and leaden feet of even the most unreconstructed slugger. Without an understanding of ‘angles’ either programmed or subconscious, then no one is getting hit… at least not effectively. The truth is that the textbook aptitude of the pure technical boxer -pugilisms own Oxbridge scholars- will almost always prevail against the one-dimensional knockout artist. Every student also knows that you can’t absentmindedly ‘cram’ this stuff the night before the test or try to wade in on a wing-and-a-prayer, only burning the midnight oil and hitting the books is a sufficient pathway to prolonged success.

Mike Tyson in his first age as a professional boxer understood this requirement perfectly. His was a world where no stone was left unturned in pursuit of preparation. Be that the rote learning of numbers in the gym where his own professor, the venerable Cus D’Amato, would throw out the arithmetic and Tyson would calculate it into defensive and offensive actions in the ring. Or all those evenings spent studying boxing’s version of The Classicssyllabus. Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Battling Nelson, and all these ancients reflected from a projector onto a white sheet in a Catskills study. Of all the boxers of his era and beyond, Tyson really understood the sport and its history, seeping as it did from his every pore. 

But more of that later.

Understanding ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson or worst of all attempting to place him in the all-time list of heavyweights requires us to return to ‘Angles’ once again. This time not of the mathematical variety but instead from the viewpoint of perception. Not just how we view him but more intrinsically where we are viewing him from. 

Is he just a name in a book, a record to forensically examine on Boxrec, a doomed ghost punching on YouTube, always one step behind us in the past; his ultimately ill-fated story all played out? There is nothing new to learn about Tyson’s career. We have seen it all writ large, so often, and for so long. 

And if this is how you view him: looking over your shoulder purely into the past at an 80s or even 90s world that you never experienced, then your conclusions, once you have weighed him in the balance, are likely to find Michael Gerard Tyson wanting.

Conversely, my Grandfather, who was devoted to the pulverising fists of Jack Dempsey as an infant -a figure he would only have ever read about in newspapers or caught briefly on scant newsreels- and later as a young man to the great Joe Louis would have held a different perspective. 

Later still, he grew to admire Ali as well as the supporting cast of Frazier, Foreman, Norton, et al. On any given day a conversation with him could take in multiple staging posts on boxing’s journey from the 1920s to what then was then our late twentieth-century present. Yet, to him, Tyson couldn’t hold a candle to any of those abovementioned names, not even to a 190 lbs ‘Manassa Mauler’. 

Many observers today would find that ludicrous. If the world of Tyson is distant and removed from their understanding then Dempsey’s Roaring twenties world of prohibition, Al Capone and Spatz must feel like an entirely different universe. But as we have said: perception and the angle from which that perception is wrought is entirely critical.

My Grandad viewed Tyson in his present against a landscape that stretched back a further 60-odd years. Perhaps the truth is the memories that are twinned with the sunshine of our youth are always the sharpest. However, one should also recall venerable boxing trainer Ray Arcel, whose career spanned seven decades from the 20s to the 80s and included fighters of the calibre of Benny Leonard, Ezzard Charles, Tony Zale, Roberto Duran, and Larry Holmes. When Arcel was once asked who was the greatest of his cavalcade of champions, he had no hesitation in proclaiming that it was Leonard. At lightweight, he was sure that the little ‘Ghetto Wizard’ from the Jazz Age would have seen off Duran and his concrete hands.

History and a long life bring experience and understanding. The same applies as equally to my Grandad as it does to a famed New York trainer who worked the corner at some of the biggest nights in boxing. It allows everything to be framed in a broader context. Yet it would also be naive to ignore a romantic preference for the salad days of youth.

And I suppose that is it. The first fighter that caught my Grandad’s attention one hundred years ago was Jack Dempsey, for me it was Mike Tyson. Those distant early Sunday mornings of watching him fight and eviscerate all opposition. The pictures were never quite live but seemed as good as live in a world where Ceefax doubled as the internet. 

Witnessing that first championship win, where Trevor Berbick tried to prove his toughness by outmuscling ‘Iron’ Mike and wearing point-blank shots on the chin. Tyson paid him for his impudence with smashing blows that reverberated across time and space and the Atlantic Ocean to a small boy in an 80s chequered dressing gown. 

At the abrupt conclusion, Berbick was left with nothing but the millstone of having his whole career crystallised into a few seconds of lurching around the ring like a drunken sailor. Meanwhile, Tyson took his first step toward joining up the disparate pieces of the heavyweight crown. The rest is history. As I said, everybody knows it already. And still, the names of those beaten opponents are forever locked in my memory ready and willing to be regurgitated in any order that takes my fancy. 

There was Tyrell Biggs who danced frenetically as though he were competing for his life in some depression-era dance marathon. He looked good and slick for a couple of rounds; the familiar jab and move elusiveness. But eventually, he got left bloodied and horizontal… they always did. 

Big Tony Tubbs, who lived up to his surname, was rinsed by one short left hook that sent him spinning and sprawling into the ring post and the waiting canvass. The gloriously named Pinklon Thomas appeared tough and unfazed before an accumulation of punishment forced him to embrace his inevitable horizontal destiny. Poor Carl ‘The Truth’ Williams lied to us in a 92-second reversal.

Only James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith avoided the humiliation of a beatdown for an altogether different kind of ‘humiliation’. He didn’t come to fight. Instead, he handed over his WBA title in a bore-fest of hugging and holding. He played the percentages and clearly determined that his focus was merely on getting out of there with his faculties still intact. Bizarrely, as a nine-year-old, I remember feeling quite proud of Smith, that he’d taken the unbeatable wunderkind the full twelve rounds and denied him yet another knockout. You see, I hadn’t grown to love Tyson yet. For me, he was still in the Jack Dempsey, patent leather shoes, draft dodger phase. 

I didn’t like what as a child I perceived as his cockiness. All those post-fight interviews where he would tell us what he was going to achieve. I should have known then that what I took for ‘cockiness’ was just a certainty in his own ability and destiny. But I still wanted my boxing heroes to be more like big Frank Bruno: a gentleman with a solid array of one-liners that he would repeat on a continuous loop. Oh, how I and all my friends wanted him to beat Tyson. I still recall in Middle School some other kids putting on a play about it in assembly. Obviously among a group of 11- and 12-year-olds Bruno was promised to come out on top against Tyson and his force of darkness. 

I think we all believed it too, that it was possible; that Frank could go to Vegas and beat the man that had so far been unbeatable. And for one brief moment, as Harry Carpenter proclaimed, “He’s hurt Tyson,” the dream was allowed to brush the hem of reality. But it wasn’t to be. 

By the time Tyson fought Bruno again -six years after his invincibility was upended by Buster Douglas at the Tokyo Dome- I had started to like him. I didn’t necessarily want him to beat ‘our’ Frank, but I knew with utter certainty that he would. My school days were now behind me, my knowledge of the fight game improved exponentially, and the conviction of my friends that Bruno was going to win had begun to irk me. I remember being out on the town on the Saturday night of the fight and all those drunken shouts of “Brunoooo! Brunooooo!’ – perhaps rather sadly I just wanted to be proved right. 

But this wasn’t the Tyson of old. The 5”11 giant that terrified Michael Spinks into a 91-second humiliation or poured clinical scorn on old-timer Larry Holmes’ plans to ‘Shock the World.’ He may have appeared the same and his punches achieved the same results, but in many ways, he was becoming a cipher. Or at least an extreme parody of what he once was. This would become stretched further as the years went on. As Lewis dominated him, he degraded himself against Holyfield, and the likes of Danny Williams and Kevin McBride absurdly defeated him.

And why had I grown to like Tyson when one considers the unenviable rap sheet that led him to serve three years in an Indiana prison? It is a difficult question to answer. I felt then, as I do now, that there was a sadness to him, but also an under-appreciated intelligence and sensitivity. He appeared sadly typecast in his own story, with no one willing to allow him to change the inevitability of the well-worn plot. ‘The baddest man on the planet’ shtick, once a visceral nod to his devastating efficiency in the ring, was reduced to a mere trope in order to sell headlines. He needed the attention and the putrid money that it brought. But as an intelligent man it must have sickened him: playing the ‘animal’ for the circusgoers who purported to despise him, whilst they gleefully peered through the gaps in their fingers at his latest shame and humiliation.

And where did all that money go? It’s a tale as old as boxing. As Paul Gallico once said of the giant Primo Carnera “The wise-guys took and trimmed him” – the same people, carrying different names and faces, did it to Tyson as well. And what wasn’t stolen was frittered away on distractions and gifts to buy the affection of hangers-on. They all left him in the end as the money ran out. Perhaps all along he understood the inevitability of this.

Mike always was a philosopher of sorts. I first heard Friedrich Nietzsche not from the pages of the German philosopher but the lips of Tyson instead. Nietzsche’s famous quote: “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” could almost have been written for him.

There will always be something of the Greek tragedy about Tyson, both his ring carrier and his life, where so much promise and sporting excellence has been left permanently tainted. True, his life has become more stable of late, but you always assume that the next disaster is lurking quietly out there and waiting to strike. It is hard to imagine an end for Tyson that involves falling quietly asleep in a well-upholstered armchair. Perhaps, it is miracle enough that he is still with us at all.  

But we’ll always have those unmatchable early mornings from the 80s. Their pictures still flash like lit flashbulbs in our collective memories in crystal clear, untainted technicolour. A place where the world was still out there to grab… for both of us. 

And if you doubt this truth, well perhaps it’s because you weren’t there. For you, its magic will always prove elusive, like a child reaching for a disappearing balloon that has already faded far beyond the horizon.

But it matters not, because as we all know, this thing is all about ‘angles’ and the direction you happen to be looking.