TEARING DOWN THE IRON CURTAIN

Meet the New Mike Tyson, maybe not a softer Mike, but, at 30, suddenly speaking with nostalgia about the past and resignation about his distant future.

The great, random rage of his youth still has public flashes--a snarl, a venomous dismissal of a question, a burst of profanity in a quiet room.

But more than two years after being released from prison, the man who is about to become a father for the fifth time and who recently became a husband for the second, clearly hungers for a life beyond boxing, the only thing he has ever really known how to do.

On the cusp of what could be his last epic fight, much closer to the end of his career than to its peak, are we witnessing a mid-Mike crisis?

“I don’t know about going back to that younger person,” Tyson said this week of his flamboyant, controversial days. “I’m not dealing with a middle-age crisis or anything like that. I’m doing OK.”

Tyson reportedly will earn $30 million in his rematch Saturday against Evander Holyfield at the MGM Grand Garden arena to try to regain the World Boxing Assn. heavyweight title he lost to Holyfield last November.

Because he never fought a rematch against Buster Douglas, this is the first time Tyson has had a chance to avenge a loss--or to prove once and for all that there is a man he cannot defeat.

But he swears he does not concern himself with vengeance. His mind these days seems focused on reputation, not retribution, on his mortality as a fighter and a man, not his old image of invincibility.

“I don’t know if this is a turning point in my career,” Tyson said. “The way my career, my deal is set up, I’m pretty much set. There’s not going to be any kind of change in my life.”

This week, he said the fighter of the past he most identifies with is Sonny Liston--the savage, intimidating heavyweight champion who had countless brushes with the law, never captured the public’s heart in the wake of Muhammad Ali’s rise, and who died tragically in Las Vegas, because he never could call anywhere else home.

Tyson lives in Las Vegas. He has had troubles with the law. He is ferocious in the ring.

A large segment of the public still follows Tyson, has always cared for Tyson. But with Holyfield’s scintillating 11th-round knockout still ringing in his ears, the non-champion Tyson ruminates about his antisocial similarities to Liston.

“It may sound pretty morbid and grim, but I pretty much identify with that life,” Tyson said. “We’re not as smart. . . . I just think he just wanted people to respect and love him and it never happened, you know what I mean?

“Basically, I’ve been taken advantage of my whole life. I’ve been abused, I’ve been dehumanized, I’ve been humiliated, and I’ve been betrayed. That’s happened all my life, and I’m kind of bitter and kind of angry at certain people about it.

“It keeps you sharp and witty by being revengeful and bitter, but it keeps you broke--financially broke. And I’m not interested in being broke.”

His children now are the only priority, Tyson says. He fights to build them a nest egg, to give them the childhood and the life he did not and will never have.

“I want to take the punches so they don’t have to take the punches,” Tyson said.

There is a weariness to the words, an almost fatalistic streak. He fights in the ring, but Mike Tyson isn’t fighting the world anymore.

“I’ll tell you this,” Showtime executive Jay Larkin said, “the Mike Tyson I knew before prison [after being convicted of rape] and the Mike Tyson I know after prison is different in one major respect: There is a maturity in the things Mike says behind the scenes that wasn’t there before, and there’s a mellowness.

“I wouldn’t call it a sorrow or a melancholy, but I would call it a more realistic approach to life that wasn’t there before.”

Tyson already has said he wasn’t mentally prepared for Holyfield the first time, that he relaxed because he thought Holyfield was too old to challenge him.

Holyfield himself has suggested that he and Tyson are about equal in strength and skill, but that he puts so much pressure on Tyson that he has no choice but to break.

Is he ready to break again?

“Everyone in boxing probably makes out well except for the fighter,” Tyson said. “He’s the only one that suffers basically most of the time, he’s the only one that’s on skid row most of the time, he’s the only one that everybody just leaves when he loses his mind. . . .

“He sometimes goes insane, he sometimes goes on the bottle, because it’s just. . . . I think it’s a highly intensive pressure sport and that allows people to just lose it.

“There’s so much you can take and you break.”

Tyson associates long have pointed to his bouts with deep insecurity, and this week, Tyson’s own view of the significance of his recent marriage to Monica Turner was ripe with his own peculiar sensibility.

“Wives are known to run off, fall in love with other people, because they’re human, run away, even die,” Tyson said. “But you have to take care of children. And I’m just looking forward to that.

“I’m glad I’m at the stage of my life that I have children, and they’re not old enough to really know what’s going on. Pretty soon I won’t be in this business and I can pay more attention to them.

“I just don’t want the street to get my kids. I don’t want the street to get a hold of my kids, have these guys in the streets getting high. The only thing I think about now is who they’re going to marry and what school they’re going to go to.

“Look, my children, they’ve got a mother who’s a doctor, a bright, loving woman, a father who’s rich and takes care of them. I had an alcoholic and a pimp for parents. They’re going to have a great life, if they don’t turn out to be bad children.”

At the end of the 80-minute interview session at Don King’s house this week, Tyson, tellingly, made a point of poking fun at his own naivete, and his past taste for instant anger.

Soon after he was released from prison, Tyson, who converted to the Muslim religion during his three-year term, says he approached a Las Vegas Muslim group and said he wanted to donate $250,000 to help build a new mosque.

The donation, Tyson says (though the group disagrees), disappeared, and the mosque never was built. (The group says the money is still in its building fund, and plans are still being worked on for the mosque.)

“I’m angry because I was stupid,” Tyson said. “Giving absolute strangers $250,000? I should have known deep down inside they didn’t like me anyway. They didn’t really like me, man.

“I just felt, ‘God, this is beautiful. We’re all brothers, man.’ What it comes down to, God is in your heart. God judges what’s in your heart. Really, I was trying to buy my way into heaven. I deserved to get beat.

“ ‘I think I’m the slickest guy in the world, know every move . . . and these guys, I made them call me. ‘Take it! We’re going to do this for a mosque!’

“I never told that to anybody. Those people know who they are, and they did wrong. Five years ago, I would have been a different person if they’d done that to me--a different outcome. And I’m just glad I am a different person.

“It wouldn’t have been pretty.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

* WHEN: Saturday.

* WHERE: MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas.

* TV: Pay-per-view, show begins at 6 p.m.

* RECORDS: Holyfield 33-3 (24 knockouts), Tyson 45-2 (39 knockouts).

*

INSIDE

* TYSON LOSES DECISION

The Nevada State Athletic Commission rejected Team Tyson’s protest of the appointment of Mitch Halpern as referee. C5