Free Tyson? No, Stripes Unchanged

Keep Mike Tyson where he is.

A hearing is scheduled for a courthouse in Indiana today, at which the disgraced former heavyweight boxing champion of the world is to appeal for early release from his six-year prison sentence for rape. Mike Tyson, raging bully, has never expressed one ounce of remorse for what he did. Until he does, don’t turn him loose.

He still doesn’t get it. When young Desiree Washington said “no,” she didn’t mean, “I mean, yes.” It does not matter whose room it was, what time it was, why Washington was there, what anyone was wearing. Tyson cornered her like a foe. He overpowered her.

Overpower him.

Cus D’Amato, the boxer’s long-ago mentor, once gave Tyson a baseball bat as a joke gift to fend off all the women who would be begging to be with him. But the ex-boxer Jose Torres, who tells this story without glee, also was the one who told of Tyson’s bloodcurdling attitude toward women, quoting Tyson as saying, “I like to hurt women. I like to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed. It gives me pleasure.”

Torres asked why.

Tyson told him, “Jose, I am that way and I don’t know why.”

Well, he had better know why and he had better know now.

Tyson is to speak today on his own behalf. Word is, he will say he has been rehabilitated, he will be as sincere as he knows how to be, but he will not acknowledge the crime of having sexually assaulted Desiree Washington inside an Indianapolis hotel suite.

Before we take him back, we have to be persuaded that Tyson is not a menace to society. We have to know he knows wrong from right.

Far more urgently, he has to know.

Robin Givens, the actress once married to Tyson, called him a manic depressive in her TV interview with Barbara Walters. Givens said, “It’s been torture. It’s been pure hell. . . . He’s got a side to him that’s scary. . . . He gets out of control, throwing, screaming. . . . Just recently I’ve become afraid. Very, very much afraid.”

Torres once asked the boxer to name the best punch he had ever thrown. Tyson said it was at Givens.

“She really offended me and I went bam. She flew backward, hitting every . . . . wall in the apartment.”

Frightening.

Remember, this is the same Tyson who once said to an opponent, Razor Ruddock, before a 1991 fight, “I’ll make you my girlfriend. I’ll make you kiss me with those big lips.”

This was Tyson’s idea of being funny--i.e., I’ll beat you up so badly, you’ll think you’re a woman.

Tyson’s corner men have faulted everybody but Tyson. They smudged the reputation of the 18-year-old victim. They disparaged the jury for its alleged bias and the Marion County prosecutor for his methods. It was implied that the judge had no business even hearing the case.

Vincent Fuller, the defendant’s original attorney, shamefully presented Tyson as someone who, in essence, didn’t know any better. Tyson can’t even explain himself, Fuller suggested. In his opening statement, Fuller said, “He’s never been trained in public speaking. He’s been trained to do one thing, to defend himself in a ring.”

Equally frightening.

Fuller is now off the case.

One of his co-counsels, a local Indiana lawyer, has taken charge of the appeal. Legal eagle Alan M. Dershowitz, as ever, has been on the lookout for technicalities. Associates contend the boxer has been a model example of convict conduct. These men want Tyson sprung.

Not me.

Not until we know--until we absolutely know--that this man has reformed.

In his book, author Montieth Illingworth quoted Tyson as saying after his Oct. 16, 1987 seventh-round knockout of Tyrell Biggs, “I did it very slowly. I wanted him to remember it for a long time. When I was hitting him in the body, he was making noises. . . . like a woman screaming.”

The writer Joyce Carol Oates attended that fight. She later wrote that Tyson fought as though “some hurt, some wound, some insult in his past, personal or ancestral, will be redressed in the ring. . . . His grievance has the force of a natural catastrophe.”

In other words, this was one angry man.

He’s different now? He’s a new man?

Convince us.