Commentary : Mike Tyson’s Busy Months of Marriage

Stick close now, because the last few months of Mike Tyson’s life have been busier than a belt buckle salesman at a Wayne Newton convention. In May, after either slapping his wife or being slapped by her, he rammed his $90,000 Bentley into a parked car in Manhattan. Then, explaining, “The car’s giving me a lot of trouble,” he attempted to give it away right on the spot to a couple of police officers. (Eddie Murphy, stuffing his pockets in “Trading Places,” after being told he’s getting his own limo, a fabulous apartment and all the money he can count: “Oh yeah, stuff like this happens to me every day, every day.”)

In June, before Tyson’s bout with Michael Spinks, came the scandalous tales of household discord -- charges of wife beating and gold digging -- involving the lovely, talented and shopper-friendly Robin Givens and her hovering mother, Ruth Roper, who, you may remember, charged that Dave Winfield gave her a sexually transmitted disease.

In July, Tyson wheeled on his manager, Bill Cayton, attempting to dump him for Don “Work An Honest Day And I Want An Honest Deal” King and the noted boxing expert, Donald “Sure I Know Sugar Ray Robinson, Jackie’s Brother” Trump. In August, in an apparent attempt to take advantage of extended summer shopping hours, Tyson went to an all-night clothing store in Harlem, and broke his right hand there during a street fight at 4:30 a.m. with Mitch Green, who must have had the same haberdashery inclination; you know how it is, you watch Carson, you watch Letterman, you watch Costas, you watch 20 or 30 replays against Spinks -- that only kills a half hour -- you read a couple of Russian novels, all of a sudden it’s 4:30 in the morning and it hits you like a bolt of lightning, my God, you need a dinner jacket! You’ve got be able to get a dinner jacket at 4:30 a.m. in case you’re suddenly invited to cocktails in Tokyo. (How ‘bout that Mitch Green? Looked like he’d walked into a chain saw. Where does he go for family dinner, the Manson Family?)

Here we are in September -- my, how time flies when you’re having fun -- and from the Catskills comes word Tyson, perhaps on his way to an all-night tropical fish store, has cracked up his wife’s BMW, knocked himself unconscious and is suffering from amnesia. (Word to the wise: If you want to sell Tyson a car, don’t bother touting gas mileage, because he only gets as far as the nearest tree; stress the service angle.) What will he do next, hurl himself in front of the block-long boat from New Zealand? Every time we see him, Tyson’s wearing more bandages. By the time he fights Bruno, he’ll look like Claude Raines.

All this since he was secretly married in February.

Married life been bera, bera good to Mike Tyson.

In the continuing search to explain the bizarre and turbulent spins Tyson’s life has taken, The New York Daily News reported this latest car wreck wasn’t an accident, but that Tyson was actually trying to commit suicide -- a spectacular twist to an already convoluted story.

The physical evidence seems to contradict that theory. He hit the tree on the passenger’s side. Who’d have advised Tyson to commit suicide by smacking the passenger side, Leon Spinks?

If it’s Tyson’s marriage that’s causing him this grief -- and the News story presents a picture of a violent domestic life -- wouldn’t it make more sense for Tyson to consider an intermediate step, like divorce?

Even granting that it was a deliberate crash, it’s more likely that Tyson aimed the passenger’s side into the tree so he wouldn’t be hurt at all. Given that it was his wife’s car, he might have been trying to do her symbolic damage by damaging her car. On the other hand, maybe he just skidded on a muddy road.

A suicide attempt was dismissed out of hand by Cayton and Tyson’s trainer, Kevin Rooney, but Tyson himself has yet to speak on the subject, and no one is denying reports that Tyson has been urged by his wife and mother-in-law to see a psychiatrist. But what if he doesn’t remember any of it? (Now that he has amnesia, I guess he won’t remember that he promised me $2 million to write his autobiography.)

Poor guy probably won’t remember to pick up the dinner jacket he ordered at Dapper Dan’s All Night House of What’s Happening Fashions a couple of weeks ago, either. Mike could ask Walter Berry or Mitch Green to get it for him, seeing as they were there when he bought it. But he’d better tell Walter to drive; Mitch still can’t see out of the one eye, and, anyway, he’s already had his driver’s license suspended 54 times, suggesting this question: Exactly what do you have to do in New York to lose your license permanently -- hijack a bus and drive it through the lobby of Macy’s?

Though they may be coarse, baleful men, because of their great strength and physical prowess, heavyweight champions are traditionally the most celebrated athletes, universally admired as supermen. Since Ali, they also have become the most analyzed. Tyson is 22, a young, uneducated, fabulously rich young man with a well-documented history of antisocial behavior.

His occupation doesn’t discourage his violent tendencies, it merely redirects them. Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs, the men who served as his legal guardians and surrogate fathers, have both died. His marriage is obviously rocky, and his conduct has been startlingly chaotic. It should surprise no one that someone like this might resort to settling a problem by demolishing it. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to interpret not just this car wreck, but Tyson’s recent history of instablity and self-destructiveness is a cry for help from a troubled source.

You have to feel sympathy for his obvious state of confusion. By the same token, the volume of incidents and the cast of characters he’s aligned himself with are so ridiculous, it’s hard not to view them in the same surreal context in which they’re presented.