Tyson in the Mood for Buster’s Last Stand : Boxing: Champion sees little of Tokyo before facing Douglas.

George Armstrong Custer stiffened, dropped his pistol and fell limply to the ground, a Sioux arrow in his back.

The heavyweight boxing champion of the world smiled thinly as he watched the movie “Little Big Man.” Sitting on the floor, he looked up at reporters who had come by. No questions were asked until the champion could see how the battle of the Little Big Horn came out.

“Wow,” Mike Tyson said. “Wipeout. Well, Custer . . . Now, that guy had some problems.”

Tyson in Tokyo. This guy has problems, too. But lucky for him, he has to dodge only the spotlight, not arrows.

He seems more intent on avoiding Japanese reporters than he does in beating James (Buster) Douglas, his opponent in the Tokyo Dome Sunday (tonight, PST).

He’s not cruising the Ginza. There is no basking in a spotlight that seems much more sharply focused on his squarish form here than anywhere else. He’s not in the spotlight here, he’s impaled on it. So, we find him where he is almost every mid-morning, in his hotel suite, sitting on the floor, a pile of video movies at his feet.

He does his road work at 3 a.m. to avoid armies of Japanese camera crews on bicycles who shiver in the 30-degree cold, watching all exits of the hotel.

“We told them I run at 4 a.m.,” Tyson said, grinning. “So I run at 3 a.m. I miss most of them, but not all of them.”

He and his sparring partners go to the Korakuen Gym to train, cars with dark windows pulling up at a rear entrance, so he can enter unnoticed.

Japanese newscasts have shown Tyson feeding polar bears at the Tokyo Zoo, Tyson congratulating participants in a wheelchair basketball game, Tyson at a martial arts studio . . .

A week ago he said: “Ali loved this--I hate it.”

To visitors in his suite now, he struggles to explain the balancing act he performs, with fame and the need for privacy.

“I haven’t gone out much,” he said. “I like it quiet and peaceful. (Fame) can take a lot out of you. But it’s nothing I can’t handle. Some guys, they get famous and kill themselves, you know what I mean? I can handle it, but I don’t have to like it.

“But you know what? It can stop quick, man. If you’re a great singer, all you got to do is sing a bad song. If you’re a great actor, don’t make a bad movie. And a fighter . . . a fighter can never lose.”

One of his favorite subjects, boxing’s history and his boxing film collection, came up. He spoke of Panama Al Brown, the 1930s bantamweight he admires.

“A very interesting guy to watch,” Tyson said. “He was tall and skinny. Most tall, skinny guys move around a lot. He was aggressive. He came after you.”

He admires the 1950s and ‘60s middleweights, and he mentioned Joey Giardello, Dick Tiger and Gene Fullmer.

“A couple of weeks before the (Carl) Williams fight (last July 21, in Atlantic City), I’m jumping rope in the gym and this old guy is looking at me. I saw him in the mirror. It was Giardello. I recognized him immediately. I said to him: ‘If I’d fought in the 1950s, how would I have done?’ He told me I’d have done great, and it meant a lot, for him to say it.”

He was asked if the constant media attention might lead to an early retirement from boxing. “Well, not much longer,” he said. “Maybe five years. Sometimes, you know what I mean, you get that feeling that you need to get away from it.”

Someone asked him about his friend, Darryl Strawberry, the New York Met outfielder who recently checked into a rehabilitation program. Tyson was annoyed by the subject of athletes and public announcements of drug and alcohol problems.

“I hate that,” he said. “A guy stands up and announces, ‘Hey, I got a problem here.’ Those kinds of problems . . . Show some character, man, you know what I mean? You solve those kinds of problems at home. Come on, it’s character.

“I mean, a guy admits his problem to everyone, and then just because he’s gone public with it, it’s supposed to be all nice and shiny? Come on.

“Ever see Beau Jack on films? Now there was character and courage. One time Cus (the late Cus D’Amato, who discovered Tyson) showed me a film of Beau Jack in a fight when he broke his leg.

“He actually tried to move around by putting both hands on his broken leg and trying to move it. In another film, Beau Jack was taking a terrible beating and he absolutely wouldn’t quit. Beau Jack wound up shining shoes in Miami, but Cus always tipped his cap to Beau Jack when he saw him. Cus was very big on character and courage, and so am I.

“All the champions, starting with John L. Sullivan, even if you don’t like them, you have to respect them.”

Strange, isn’t it, that a champion who can talk for an hour about character can, a day later, show up 23 minutes late for a televised news conference and utter a four-letter expletive into a microphone?

Tyson, who is almost always pleasant and cordial in gatherings of small groups of reporters, is almost always sullen and antagonistic at news conferences.

“I hate it, all those stupid questions,” he said.

When he walked into a large room where about 500 Japanese reporters had been waiting, Tyson was scowling.

His disposition didn’t improve at his introduction, when the female translator announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, Iron Mike Tyson is entering the room at this very moment!”

Then there were the questions from the Japanese reporters, one of which was: “Do you think you will win?”

Tyson’s answers to such questions were barely audible, one-syllable responses. He put on a headset and briefly listened to music. He tapped his fingers loudly and impatiently on the table.

He became even more irritated when an English-speaking reporter rose to ask if the rumors that he was seeing a Tokyo psychologist were true.

“No, it’s not true,” Tyson answered angrily, then launched into a confusing explanation of mental preparation for boxing and concluded by saying: “If you can’t fight, you’re . . . .”

The remark was sanitized by the translator, leaving the Japanese reporters wondering why the English-speaking reporters seemed shocked.

Nippon Television has a hospitality room here, where it shows all of its taped news coverage of Tyson’s Tokyo activities. One tape shows Tyson running alone in the darkness, around the hotel.

The video is apparently shot by a cameraman on a bicycle. Tyson pretends not to notice. He finishes his run, enters the hotel, and walks through the empty lobby, toward the elevators. And the cameraman, walking now, is still dogging him.

Finally, Tyson angrily whirls about and with both hands indicates that the cameraman should stop, turn off his lights, and go away.

The camera lights are shut off and we see the champion walking on, into darkness.