As a boxer ages his sparring partners get younger, the game itself gets more desperate.’ So wrote Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing, her classic meditation on prize fighting. This little book came out in 1987. The following year, Oates published one of the greatest ever profiles of a fighter.
Her subject was Mike Tyson: the ‘psychic outlaw’ whom she shadowed as he prepared to fight Trevor Berbick (a contest that made 20-year old Tyson the youngest ever heavyweight champion of the world) and continued to watch as he blasted through James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith and Tyrell Biggs.
Oates captured the young Tyson not only as a man but as a cultural phenomenon. He had the ability, as she put it, “to galvanize crowds as if awakening in them the instinct not merely for raw aggression and the mysterious will to do hurt that resides… in the human soul, but for suggesting the incontestable justice of such an instinct.”
When Tyson fought, the world wanted to see him win. But they wanted more, too. They wanted Tyson the fury, the monster, the barbarian. They wanted blood.
It is hard, revisiting Oates’ image of the emerging, electrifying Tyson as he first met the world in the late 1980s, while knowing the path that lay ahead of him: to think that only a decade later Tyson would be a convicted rapist who in 1997 bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear in the ring; to know that by 2005 he would be the tattoo-faced, washed up, bum fodder beaten by the journeyman Kevin McBride.
It is much harder to accept that this week, aged 58, Tyson is preparing for his 59th official fight, against Jake Paul: a YouTube prankster who was not born when Tyson fought Berbick and Frank Bruno and Buster Douglas; for whom the sweet science of boxing is basically a goof-off.
Mike Tyson in his prime represented the awful, compelling, bodily and spiritual jeopardy of boxing: a sport in which one has to put everything at hazard just to step between the ropes. Paul has figured out a way to earn millions of dollars from boxing without ever really being a boxer. He has made the fight game into a Jackass stunt.
Goading Tyson into fighting nearly four decades past his prime is not an original trick. Every heavyweight champion since Rocky Marciano has fought on past his best, and some have signed up for pro wrestling bouts and other circus acts in the name of a quick payday. But this is a sad case all the same, and though we cannot expect Paul to feel shame, we ought to be slightly embarrassed to have a hand in building the society that has allowed him to prosper.
Dragging Tyson out of a retirement which has been plagued by illness and injury is not a sporting decision. It is a cheap stunt that speaks to our current season of lazy cultural nostalgia, and specifically to the current vogue for cosplaying the long 1990s.
Everywhere we see the craggy alumni of half-forgotten fin de siecle rock groups re-emerging as tribute acts to themselves; TV and film franchises (Alien, Gladiator, Dune etc) chopped up and remixed in the hope that something new can be squeezed out of the same old stories. Bringing back Iron Mike is in this sense bang on trend.
Boxing is not Hollywood. It’s not Wonderwall. The hurt game is dangerous. It can be lethal
Yet it is worth remembering that boxing is not Hollywood. It’s not Wonderwall. The hurt game is dangerous. It can be lethal.
Putting Tyson in the square circle one more time and hoping he will treat Netflix viewers to a rousing impersonation of his former glory sounds like a great gas. And we can hardly blame Tyson himself for taking his twenty million dollars.
But this is a joke that is primarily on Tyson, and secondarily on boxing itself. A freak show in which a silly young man sticks his head in an old bear’s mouth to see if the few remaining teeth are still sharp is not only undignified. It would seem to confirm Karl Marx’s famous maxim that when history repeats itself, it usually does so as either tragedy or farce.
