COMMENTARY : Bad Image Is Good Box Office

Mike Tyson’s indictment on a rape charge in Indianapolis Monday was handed down as he was approaching his long-sought opportunity to gain recognition as one of the century’s two or three great heavyweights.

He might still achieve that, but it will not happen in the kind of environment he imagined.

For the first time in America, a heavyweight championship fight will be held with an indictment for a crime of violence hanging over one of the participants.

And yet, boxing people are saying, Tyson’s showdown with heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield Nov. 8 at Caesars Palace has been made even richer by the indictment.

Try to make sense of that.

In the cold and often murky commerce of professional boxing, the indictment is seen as reinforcing promotional elements that were already in place, the ultimate matchup of Mr. Clean, Holyfield, and Mr. Bad Guy, Tyson.

“I think (the indictment) reinforces the belief that Mike Tyson is an animal, that the good-guy-vs.-bad-guy thing is enhanced considerably, more than would otherwise be the case,” said Bert Sugar, boxing historian and publisher of Boxing Illustrated.

One highly placed boxing pay-per-view consultant said that the fight everyone expected to gross $100 million in pay-per-view dollars might now earn even more.

“A lot of people who would never consider buying a PPV boxing show will buy this one, because of the rape thing,” he said, asking not to be identified.

“Part of it will be people who want to see what all the excitement is about, and the other part of it will be an awful lot of people hoping to see Holyfield beat the hell out of him.”

Tyson’s estranged manager, Bill Cayton, seemed to agree Monday.

“There are some very sophisticated people in the pay-per-view business who believe that (the indictment) will be a substantial plus, and I think they are probably correct,” he said.

Cayton was co-manager of Tyson with the late Jimmy Jacobs, who died in 1988. Tyson chose to be advised solely by promoter Don King later that year. Cayton said he hasn’t spoken to Tyson for nearly three years.

One thing seemed certain Monday, that the flamboyant King’s oft-repeated line, “Only in America . . . “ was never more true than now.

Promoters say that Tyson will earn at least $15 million Nov. 8, Holyfield at least $32 million. All seats in Caesars’ 15,300-seat stadium sold out in a record 12 days after the fight was announced.

In other words, they’re saying that a fight that was already projected as the richest might soar off the boards--because one of the fighters is charged with rape.

Tyson-Holyfield was supposed to have happened 17 months ago. They had signed for a fight in Atlantic City for April of 1990. Then Tyson unexpectedly lost his championship to Buster Douglas.

Ever since, Tyson and King have pursued Holyfield, who knocked out Douglas last Oct. 8 for the title.

But Michael Gerard Tyson, at 25, seems to boxing people today to resemble a locomotive that has jumped the tracks rather than a talented fighter facing a date with his boxing destiny.

His predicament today would have been hard to believe in 1984, when he first appeared on the boxing scene. He tried out for the U.S. Olympic team that summer. But as an inexperienced amateur, he was wildly out of control and undisciplined in the ring.

Today, through his apparent lack of control outside the ring, he has become his own worst enemy.

The rape indictment is only the most serious in a long string of troubling incidents that have accompanied his years at the top.

In 1988, during his brief, stormy marriage to actress Robin Givens, Tyson dented his $183,000 Bentley in a New York City auto accident, then gave the car to the two policemen who investigated the accident.

That same year, Givens and her mother went public with tales of beatings by Tyson during the marriage.

In 1988, at 22, he grossed $50 million, nearly half of it from his one-round victory over Michael Spinks.

What ever became of the quiet, painfully shy kid who showed up in Ft. Worth for the 1984 Olympic trials? Predictable, perhaps.

He was a child of the streets of Brooklyn, from a broken family. By his own account, he was mugging old men at 12, stealing their watches and engaging in petty thievery.

Many attribute his problems today to the loss of two early mentors, Jacobs and Cus D’Amato. D’Amato, who had Tyson paroled from an Upstate New York reform school in 1982 into his care, died in 1985. D’Amato had become Tyson’s legal guardian, had taught him to box and had turned him into a boxing historian.

But it seems he never taught the young Tyson how to avoid trouble.

D’Amato died a year before Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick and became heavyweight champion. Tyson loved D’Amato, and even today has difficulty talking about him.

Jacobs, D’Amato’s longtime friend and sponsor, with Cayton owned the world’s largest boxing film library.

Although the deaths of D’Amato and Jacobs appear to have been traumatic for him, the pivotal point in Tyson’s boxing life apparently was the afternoon of Feb. 11, 1990, in Tokyo. There, he lost his unbeaten record and, more important, his championship.

He lost to Douglas that day, he said, because he was not in shape.

“I had a lot of easy fights, I had started cutting corners in training. . . . That will never happen again,” Tyson said afterward.

His fitness as a fighter is a subject of lively debate in boxing today. Some say the post-Douglas Tyson is a changed, diminished fighter. Others maintain that he is at the peak of his career and was never better than he was in beating Razor Ruddock in the rematch June 28.

Many say that if Tyson defeats Holyfield as easily as he has beaten so many other opponents in his 41-1 career, they are willing to rank him with the division’s greatest champions, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey.

But nearly everyone in the sport agrees that Tyson’s boxing career is far easier to predict than his life.

INDICTED: A special grand jury deliberated two hours before indicting Mike Tyson on a rape charge. A1