Tyson Is No Throwback to Iron Age, After All

Well, Joe Louis he ain’t.

Dempsey-Firpo, it wasn’t.

What it was, to tell you the truth, was an agony fight. This is what the fight mob calls it when two guys maul around the ring all night long like a couple of stuffed toys.

I now know where Bonecrusher got his name. He tries to hug you to death.

It looked more like the Harvest Moon Ball than a fistfight. Two interior decorators could have done each other more damage.

It was a gavotte. The last time you saw anything this stately, one of the parties was carrying a fan and the other had a powdered wig.

You can tell Jack Dempsey and Tunney and Ali they don’t have to move over just yet. Jack Johnson, Marciano and John L. Sullivan, your reputations are still safe from Mike Tyson.

He threw a shutout at James Odell Smith, formerly known as Bonecrusher, Saturday night, but that wasn’t hard to do. Old Bone never had the bat off his shoulder. He just stood there taking pitches. He should have bought a ticket.

One guy wouldn’t fight and the other guy couldn’t.

Mike Tyson acted as if he’d been asked to climb the Matterhorn. He didn’t need gloves, he needed a rope or a ladder.

The fight was supposed to give us a real heavyweight champion for a change.

After all these guys named Buster and Pinklon and Witherspoon, five or six guys named Tony and a bunch of fat old parties who looked like chocolate eclairs in shorts, we were supposed to have a pug for the ages again. A Make-Way-for-the-Champ guy.

We were going to get a guy you could call a Manassa Mauler or Brown Bomber without blushing. Or trying not to laugh. The kind of guy you could write about. The kind of guy who could go into a bar and announce, “I can lick any man in the house.” The kind of guy who would make you say things like, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of Mike Tyson.” A guy who would go into the language. The kind where, when you did get into a barroom fight, somebody would demand, “Who do you think you are--Mike Tyson?”

This is the kind of fighter we were led to believe Mike Tyson was. Echoes of Louis, Rocky, the Mauler.

Echoes of Jack Sharkey, maybe. Johnny Risko. Louis could have fought him in a tuxedo. Ali wouldn’t have known he showed up.

Even the ads before the fight warned you that you should go see him the way your grandfather wished he had seen Dempsey or your father Rocky Marciano. Relics from the days when the heavyweight champion was deemed to be a force of nature like a hurricane, earthquake or a dam burst. When a heavyweight title fight was an American historical institution like a Bunker Hill or a Gettysburg Address or a Presidential Inaugural. You told time by it.

Mike Tyson was supposed to be a throwback to that time and place. They said that he fought the way the old-timers did, that watching him make his fight was like watching a tiger stalk or a rhino charge. A leopard in a tree.

He was supposed to fight out of a crouch like Dempsey and to make his fight like the German Army. All firepower. Coming at you from all directions. You half expected Bonecrusher to ask after the evening was over, “How many guys did I fight in there tonight?”

Well, of course, Bonecrusher didn’t fight anybody. His gun never left the holster till there were about nine seconds left in the final round. It was like a guy making faces at you from a car window.

Well, Mike Tyson was a long way from that buildup Saturday.

Bonecrusher Smith is an imposing physical specimen, to be sure. He looks like a Russian statue. Unfortunately, he fights like one, too. The last time anything this slow came into view, the Titanic hit it.

But this wasn’t supposed to be Bonecrusher’s night. He was just the instrument. Iron Mike Tyson was the soloist.

Iron Mike knew it. After the fight, he confessed ruefully, “I know I’ll get it from the critics now just because this guy wouldn’t fight me.”

But all the great ones really require of an opponent is that he shows up. It doesn’t always take two to tangle in the fight business. After all, it was Louis who said of an opponent, “He can run but he can’t hide.” With Tyson, they can.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Iron Mike is really the Tin Man. But he might be lucky that Bonecrusher didn’t fight.

There’s an old axiom in the fight game that a good big man will always beat a good little man. This was no test. Bonecrusher made his fight like a guy waiting for a trolley. Next to a beehive. But the fact remains that Mike Tyson gave Bonecrusher 5 inches in height, 11 inches in reach and 14 pounds in weight. He looked most of the night more as if he was trying to jump into Bonecrusher’s arms than to fight him. The fight seemed just out of his reach.

Maybe immortality is, too. Because Rocky Marciano’s reach was not long enough that he could scratch his ears. But he found a way to bust up guys with it. And he was never as tall as the guys he fought. When the fight started, that is. Tyson was still looking up to Bonecrusher when the night was over.

The legend of Iron Mike Tyson is on hold. It may stay that way. Owing to circumstances beyond his control: talent.