Tyson isn’t in his prime but the fight game is still about buzz and buys. It’s why Netflix is all in on Tyson vs. Jake Paul.
Having covered Mike Tyson since his most famously unsanctioned bout — a predawn TKO of Mitch “Blood” Green at an after-hours clothing boutique in Harlem, New York, on Aug. 23, 1988 — and having spent the past three-plus years anatomizing his ascent as a biographer, I’ve been getting a lot of calls, all posing the same basic question:
“Is this thing real?”
It’s real enough, what a spokesperson from the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation assures me is “a professional, sanctioned bout” with Jake Paul, live from AT&T Stadium, Friday on Netflix. Still, the cynicism comes as no surprise. It’s boxing, after all, where “real” fights can be effectively scripted (and often are) in the matchmaking. Also, it’s Tyson, for whom state-run boxing bureaucracies have always been compliant. In this case, Texas signed off on the Tyson-Paul request for 14-ounce gloves (instead of the heavyweight standard 10-ounces) and eight two-minute rounds (instead of the standard three minutes across 10 or 12 rounds for men).
What’s more, don’t expect the state to enforce its prohibition of marijuana against Tyson — who, of course, swore he quit weed in preparation for this bout — with the same zeal it did against, say, Keyshawn Davis, a rising star who forfeited a win after testing positive last year in Rosenberg, Texas.
But all that misses the point. Actually, it misses them both. First, Tyson’s is the greatest comeback I’ve ever seen, and likely ever will. By the time the city editor dispatched me uptown, Tyson was already in the throes of his first public crack up. In itself, that’s not unusual. Most fighters seem as though they’re born to be destroyed. They tend to get used up: physically, neurologically, spiritually and of course, financially. Tyson was always an extreme case, though.
At 22, his doom already seemed a lock.
In 2012, during previews for his one-man show, “Undisputed Truth”, I asked him if he ever imagined reaching his then-age of 45. “I couldn’t have believed that”, he said.
I’d venture an educated guess that, across the years, I’ve written more nasty stuff about Tyson than, well, anyone — much of it justified, some of it not, some of it shameful. But those same years also taught me that it’s better to judge fighters, not by their records, but by what they’ve survived. In Tyson’s case, that includes most of the urban plagues’ endemic to his Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1970s, including violence and fatherlessness, but also the untimely death of a mother.
Incarceration (juvenile and adult). Molestation. Booze. Coke. Boxing. Bankruptcy. Don King. The death of a child.
And perhaps, most treacherous of all, fame. Tyson got a lethal dose of a very particular American strain of it whose victims include Elvis, Marilyn and Tupac.
But here he is: a tennis dad with a Goldendoodle. It’s impossible to ignore that this second ascent coincides with the years of his now 15-year marriage to the former Kiki Spicer.
