Heavy Hitter Also a Heavy Thinker

Prizefighting is not ordinarily thought of as the sport of choice for the literati. In fact, we have had heavyweight champions--Sonny Liston comes to mind--who not only never read any great books, he couldn’t even read a “No Smoking” sign.

There were some fighters, you were not even sure they could talk, never mind read. Recall the New Yorker cartoon in which a fight manager looks across the ring to an opponent who looks as if he arrived in a cage and says, “My boy says he don’t fight till he hears it talk.”

Then there was Gene Tunney. Gene was the most bookish heavyweight champ who ever lived. The competition wasn’t very deep, of course, but Gene read more books than a librarian.

He showed up for the first Dempsey fight weigh-in with a well-thumbed volume of poetry in hand. Someone asked him what it was, and he answered, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Later, in Dempsey’s camp, someone asked Jack’s trainer, Jerry (the Greek) Luvadis, what Tunney was reading. “A book about some guy’s red sailboat,” he said.

Was Tunney that erudite? Well, he could quote Shakespeare by the hour. He had appeared on stage in “The Merchant of Venice” in high school and he became George Bernard Shaw’s favorite prizefighter.

The literary quotient of the fight game has declined considerably since Tunney’s time. Batman comics are more apt to be the reading matter of choice than the collected works of Charles Dickens.

Until now. And guess who has become the prize ring’s latest bookworm.

You’ll never believe it. Iron Mike Tyson is who. Yeah, that Mike Tyson.

Now, on the face of it, Michael does not seem the type. No corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeve. He doesn’t smoke a pipe. He doesn’t speak in polysyllables.

He’s not into romance literature. Danielle Steele is not his bag. Mike is not into the minor British poets or even T.S. Eliot or Browning or Keats. He has dabbled in Voltaire, thinks Hemingway had his moments but is no expert on Trollope or Thackeray and thinks Tolstoy could have used an editor.

No, scholar Tyson’s literary idols--are you ready for this?--are Mao Tse-tung, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

Now, this is heavy stuff for a guy who makes his living busting jaws and making people bleed. These authors’ stock-in-trade is not mystery, adventure, biography, romance or travel. You don’t read their books to find out who done it or who gets the girl. There’s no part in these scenarios for Meryl Streep or Clint Eastwood. These writers deal in something called dialectical materialism, which is not on your everyday best-seller lists.

Marx’s literary output scarcely ran to stock Hollywood boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl stuff. You couldn’t make a musical out of “Das Kapital” or the Communist Manifesto. Marx so hungered for a classless society that he invented one.

Ordinarily, a guy who reads this kind of stuff is some fuzzy-haired academic with dandruff on his collar, glasses like Coke bottle bottoms, and he probably has a beard, has classes of four and is writing a book on Lenin’s mistress.

You wouldn’t ordinarily think a guy with a great left hook, a record of 41-1 with 36 KOs, would be into Marx and Hegel, but 36 months in an Indiana prison cell gave Mike the time to commune, so to speak, with some of the great thinkers of the centuries past.

He’s a student, not a disciple. In fact, Mike is a bit put off by the fact that Marx turned his back on the God of his fathers in his quest for classlessness. Mike doesn’t want to rewrite history, he just wants to learn it. As to his own beliefs, Mike says only, “I am a Muslim in the purest sense of the word.”

It’s a new contemplative Mike Tyson who is returning to his violent roots. He is returning to bring order to a heavyweight boxing division that can best be described as chaotic. Probably not one person in 1,000 can tell you who the heavyweight champion of the world is. In fact, there are about 10 of them, all equally unknown.

Tyson fights a non-contender, a club fighter named Peter McNeeley, Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It may be less a fight than a recital. McNeeley has won 36 fights, 31 of them in Massachusetts. He is undoubtedly the best fighter in Whitman, Mass.

There is the notion that prison might have dulled the fistic skills of Mike Tyson. But history shows that Sonny Liston spent not one but two stretches in Missouri’s state pen, and when he got out, he was the better off for all those months of lights out at 7 p.m. and saltpeter in the hash. The time he might have been dissipating, he was living like a monk.

Tyson may be the beneficiary of three years of monastic living. If so, young Master McNeeley may need a priest more than a referee.

And Tyson may strike a blow for book learning. He might be the first heavyweight since Tunney who not only reads great literature but who knows that Karl Marx wasn’t Groucho’s brother.