For Tyson, No Rules Were Rule

In the wake of the Mike Tyson-Mitch Green rumble, Wallace Matthews of Newsday suggested that Tyson is paying a price for the coddling of Cus D’Amato, Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton when they were grooming him to be a champion.

“They never made him follow any rules,” Matthews quotes a Tyson family member as saying. “When anything happened, they just paid somebody off, and it was forgotten about. And now, he thinks that’s the way to handle things. He doesn’t understand that it doesn’t make everything all right.”

The source told Matthews: “There must have been 100 written reports about him in high school, but Cus would always say, ‘Don’t worry, Jim Jacobs will get you a tutor.’ He was thrown out of school two or three times, but they always got him back in, until finally he was expelled after a serious incident. There was a police order to keep him off the school grounds after he assaulted a teacher.”

Added Matthews: “Jacobs and Cayton paid $105,000 to get the charges dropped when Tyson grabbed a 17-year-old female parking-lot attendant and slapped around her 20-year-old supervisor in Los Angeles last year.

“And that’s not all. Remember the Albany, N.Y., shopping-mall incident, in which Tyson and a friend were ejected by a security guard for allegedly making lewd comments to women and throwing merchandise around a store? It, too, was quickly hushed up by Jacobs and Cayton.”

Add Tyson: From USA Today: “For a long time, Tyson’s management insisted he neither smoked nor drank.

“Anybody who saw Tyson celebrating his birthday two months ago at an Albany disco would know that he’s no stranger when it comes to Long Island Iced Tea--a potent potable that includes vodka, gin, rum, tequila and triple sec.

“After downing several large, ice-filled tumblers of the concoction, Tyson looked much happier than even the night before when he thrashed Michael Spinks.”

Trivia Time: In Thursday night’s exhibition game, what did the Denver Broncos’ John Elway and the Indianapolis Colts’ Gary Hogeboom have in common with the ESPN analyst, Joe Theismann? (Answer below.)

Now-it-can-be-told Dept.: Pittsburgh Pirates reliever Jim Gott was good enough in football at San Marino High School to be offered a scholarship to Brigham Young University, but that wasn’t his motivation.

“I played football for only one reason,” he told the Pittsburgh Press. “There was a guy a grade ahead of me and he said I was a sissy for not playing football. That’s all I needed to hear.

“I went out for football and made sure the next two years that I found him on every defensive drill. I’d just crush him.”

Attention, USC: From USA Today oddsmaker Danny Sheridan: “UCLA will destroy Southern California by four touchdowns in the final game of the Pac-10 season to reach the Rose Bowl.”

Ouch: Indianapolis running back Eric Dickerson, recalling the 1985 season, when the Rams went to the National Football Conference final with Dieter Brock at quarterback, said of the passing game: “It was rotten, to be honest.”

Trivia Answer: They wore the same number Theismann did, No. 7.

Quotebook

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Joe Magrane, analyzing an outing: “I had three things working for me tonight--sinker, slider and bone chips.”