Attitude His Best Weapon

On June 19, 1936, at Yankee Stadium in New York, Max Schmeling, an overage ex-heavyweight champion from Germany, knocked out Joe Louis in 12 rounds for what was the greatest upset in boxing history, not even excepting James J. Corbett over John L. Sullivan.

On Feb. 11, 1990, in Tokyo, James (Buster) Douglas, a journeyman heavyweight from Ohio, knocked out Mike Tyson in 10 rounds. It made Schmeling-Louis look like a foregone conclusion. It was like watching Superman flying into a sparrow and falling. The public didn’t think Mike Tyson could be hurt by anything less than a falling safe.

The difference between the two events is, Louis got his revenge two years later when he took 2 minutes 4 seconds to send a screaming Schmeling to the hospital with kidney damage. Tyson will probably never get to erase his defeat. Buster Douglas is as long gone as Saddam Hussein. When Floyd Patterson lost his heavyweight championship to Sonny Liston in 1962, he tried to disappear from the face of the earth. He felt he had let the country down from the White House to the poorhouse. He fled Chicago wearing a false beard and dark glasses, driving alone to his hideaway in New York.

Mike Tyson took defeat with a shrug. Oddly, he almost appeared to welcome it. He took the attitude Joe Louis took when he was knocked out by Rocky Marciano and his dressing room was filled with sobbing compatriots. “Hey!” Louis said. “I knocked out lots of people!”

Mike Tyson’s public image is one of unrelieved menace, uncompromising hostility. His ring presence inspires almost cartoon-character dread. He comes in the ring stockingless, wearing a faded, ripped sweat shirt. The eyes glitter. The muscles ripple. The impression he conveys is of a killing machine, a predator. If you see him coming, retreat. If this doesn’t work, run. There are no soft edges here.

It is the notion here that this portrait persists because Tyson is on public view only standing glowering over a fallen foe--or in a mass news conference where he is bored to tears, as is everyone else, by the bombast and prattle of promoters, managers, spokesmen and hucksters.

Tyson’s most persistent image at these functions is that of a reluctant witness, and he frequently puts his head in his arms and either sleeps or pretends to. He gives monosyllabic answers, looks with bored disinterest at his opponent and appears to wish he were doing something more fun, like visiting the dentist.

It’s a pity that the Don Kings and the Murad Muhammads dominate these sessions because there is more to Mike Tyson than the thug exterior he presents to the public at these forums. They appear--as the one did Tuesday at the Century Plaza--to irritate him and encourage him to lash out from time to time into three- and four-letter profanities to betray his irascibility. Mike Tyson calls crap crap when annoyed.

It’s when he goes on talk shows, as he did on Arsenio Hall’s, that you can perceive some depth here.

Mike Tyson is not Muhammad Ali. But neither is he the Neanderthal Man he projects.

He’s only 24, but he already knows that adversity fits a man. Calamity forms him. Nothing could be more boring than going through life with the bands always playing and the flags flying.

Far from feeling humiliated when he lost his title and appeared on international television groping around the ring floor for his mouthpiece, Tyson appeared almost cheerful about it.

For one thing, he told Hall, he found the public to be far more caring and concerned than the old undefeated Iron Mike would ever suspect. Said Tyson: “They used to call, you know what I mean, for something they wanted, they were going to get turned out unless they could pay the rent sort of thing. Now, they called to see if I was all right.”

It was nothing new. A phenomenon as old as sport. As a boxing buff himself, Tyson should have known that Jack Dempsey never became the beloved figure he was to go down in history as until Gene Tunney beat him. Dempsey did not go down in boxing lore as loser to Tunney. He went down as the people’s champ, a guy who got cheated out of his championship by a faulty count.

The public likes its heroes fallible, human.

As a boxing historian, Mike Tyson should also know that he has lost his chance to go down in history as only the second heavyweight champion to go undefeated--and only about the third or fourth to get no chance to avenge an upset. Louis avenged Schmeling. Ali avenged Joe Frazier. Gene Tunney lost only one fight in his career--to Harry Greb. But he beat Greb, badly, three times after that.

The likelihood of Mike Tyson’s ever meeting Buster Douglas at anything more violent than a banquet is remote. “Do you feel ticked off--cheated--that you will never get a chance to avenge yourself on Douglas?” he is asked. “Nah!” Mike says with a shrug. “That’s an emotion and you don’t let emotions get in the way in this business.” Clearing the record may have been important to the Louises and the Tunneys. It gets a low priority from Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson doesn’t see pugilism as a contest of left jabs and right crosses anyway. He sees it as an imposition of wills. And this, he feels, is what makes it an uneven contest when one of the wills belongs to Mike Tyson.

Most people would feel a twinge of apprehension fighting a pug whose nickname is Razor, as Tyson will on March 18 at the Mirage in Las Vegas, when he fights Donovan (Razor) Ruddock. You recall the famous cartoon where a pug’s manager whispers to the promoter, “My boy don’t fight till he finds out exactly why they call him the Bushwick Assassin.”

Guys named “Razor” are not Tyson’s problem. Guys named “Buster” are. He has no trouble getting his will assembled for guys who get their nicknames out of a street mugger’s manual. It’s guys who sound like they’re getting their first haircuts who lull him. If he could just get Don King to shut up for a few minutes, he might let the public in on this secret.