Remembering Mike Tyson’s Career
No he’s not dead.
But the Mike Tyson that I remember has been dead for quite some time. I had forgotten how impressive Tyson used to be until this clip on ESPN of Tyson at the beginning of his career, made me remember what it was like to watch Tyson fight when I was growing up. I was still in single digits age-wise when Tyson was beginning his tear through the heavyweight ranks, and I witnessed many of his fights as they happened; including his defeat of Larry Holmes, and especially, his total destruction of Michael Spinks in 91 seconds.
Along with many of my generation, I cut my teeth on Nintendo’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, and when playfighting in the schoolyard everyone knew who Tyson was and that’s who they wanted to pretend to be. Find me a boxer now that 10-year-old kid’s know who he is. Tyson was important to boxing. And whether purists want to admit it or not, Tyson is still the name most easily identified with the sport, by the common fan.
I remember vaguely the moment when Tyson’s career and his personal life jumped the shark; that moment being the 20/20 interview with Tyson and then wife Robin Givens. I was only a kid at the time, but I remember thinking that Tyson came off as anything but a tough guy, during the course of that interview, Givens managed to emasculate Iron Mike on TV, and I have my doubts as to whether or not Tyson ever really recovered from that show, or from the Givens relationship.
Today Tyson is what he is, an afterthought, a circus freak in the public consciousness. His out-of-ring issues have given his critics a chance to go off on Tyson and criticize his in-ring performance. He has been written off as a media creation, someone who was more of a promotional act than a boxing great.
But I remember what I saw. I saw a man with the fastest hands that I had ever seen in a boxing ring. I saw a man who beat opponents before he they even got in the ring with him. And I saw a fighter who dominated, like no one that I have seen fight since.
It’s hard to separate Tyson the fighter from Tyson the character, and when the book on Tyson is written, he’ll probably be remembered for the sideshow and not for the show, and that is a shame. Tyson was on his way back, before his personal faults caught up to him and he was jailed for rape, and to my mind, that is really when Iron Mike disappeared forever, as the man who came out of prison didn’t have the same focus, and seemed more content with just trying to be in the press, than in being in the ring.
It’s sad to say but after watching this clip, the thing that I came away with was how much better Tyson’s command of the English language was when he was younger, how respectful Tyson seemed, and how he let his fists do his talking for him. I’m not sure how much the death of trainer Cus D’Amato in 1985 had on Tyson psychologically, but there is no doubt that it left Tyson without the steadying influence that he needed and left him vulnerable to the exploitations of promoters like Don King.
Mike Tyson will always on my list of top fighters that I have seen. But only because of the way that I choose to remember his career, only in part. I choose to forget about the Holyfield debacles, and the threats of eating Lennox Lewis’ children, because to me, that was not Tyson who was fighting those fights. Watching that Tyson fight was like the way that my dad talked about watching Willie Mays play for the Mets in the twilight of his career. It was Tyson in name only, and he was only there because of reputation and ratings and for no other reason. When Tyson next fights it could very well be in a circus against a bear, or in a carnival against a kangaroo. It may even be in the Orient against a woman, as Planet Tyson continues to spiral farther and farther away from Earth and reality.
Tyson is a polarizing figure in boxing, if you’ll look, you will find many different opinions on Iron Mike. Many people will swear that he’s the greatest that they ever saw; while many will argue that he’s the most overrated fighter of all time, and was fed fighters to make him look undefeatable. Both of those arguments can be made validly, and there is information to support both arguments.
There are also those who do not dispute how great Tyson was as a fighter, but who argue that Tyson’s demons are largely of his own making, and that they should not be used to excuse Tyson’s career short-comings, and I respect that opinion. But for me, there was only one Tyson, he was the baddest man on the planet, the man that no one wanted to meet in a dark alley, and the man who fought with the tenacity of a pit bulldog. That Tyson, to my way of thinking, never got out of prison, never came back to the ring, and never ever got the chance to show how truly great he could have been. To my way of thinking, Mike Tyson got out of prison, but Iron Mike stayed behind, and is serving a life sentence somewhere that he’ll never be heard from again.