Hard-Bitten Fight Fans Will Still Pay to Watch Tyson

To set you in time, we had finished off the pizza, but they still hadn’t found Evander Holyfield’s ear.

I guess that puts it sometime after 9 o’clock Saturday night, and the three of us sat in my living room, having just witnessed the Holyfield-Tyson fiasco on pay-per-view. Indignant that Mike Tyson’s biting had stopped the fight prematurely, I whined to my friends, “Do they really think people would pay to watch this guy fight again?”

My friends’ joint reply: “Of course!”

There you have it.

Multiply the two of them (and probably me) by a few million homes, and you’ve got Tyson-Holyfield III, “The Champ vs. The Chomp.”

The post-fight condemnations of Tyson are almost beside the point, if only because they’re so automatic. After all, is there anyone out there who endorses biting during a prizefight?”

Given that, only one conversation piece matters: Will we pay to watch Tyson fight again?

We can vent all we want about the bad boy, but refusing to buy his product is about the only way we can put our money where our mouths are.

Mike Tyson doesn’t exist as a moneymaker unless the public pays. Fight promoters won’t guarantee millions of dollars to a fighter no one wants to watch, any more than movie studios would spend millions on a movie star no one wants to watch.

There’s a reason Arnold Schwarzenegger gets $20 million a movie and Pee-wee Herman considerably less. There’s a reason Tyson gets millions for title fights.

Why put the burden on a state boxing commission? Why should Nevada ban Tyson for an extended period? If he doesn’t fight in Nevada, he’ll fight somewhere else. Why not let the public speak for itself, especially if it’s as outraged as it claims to be?

Let’s search for evidence to suggest that people will boycott Mike Tyson.

Well, let’s see. He was convicted of raping an 18-year-old woman and went to prison. Since his release, he’s made more than $130 million from a mere handful of fights. Like the man says, he’s got children to support. Having forgiven him for rape, will we now draw the line at biting?

The smart money says we won’t. We’ll queue up again to watch Tyson fight, not because we necessarily want to, but because we have to. A sociologist at a university or some guy on a bar stool could explain it better than I, but it has something to do with an innate desire among a sizable number of us to watch men beat each other up.

My dad took me to closed-circuit fights from the time I was not much older than 10. I’ve been a fight fan ever since. And yet I still like jazz, walks on the beach at sunset and kittens named Fluffy, so go figure.

Anyway, when I was a kid there was a middleweight named Carmen Basilio who was very good at fighting but better at bleeding. He’d usually begin bleeding during the weigh-in and would continue for several weeks after his fights. By the end of his fights, his skin had the texture of moist crepe paper, but the bloodier he got the more the crowd loved it.

That’s the promise that Tyson brings to the ring, and it’s why any public boycott of him poses a daunting challenge for us mere mortals. We may try to convince ourselves we won’t reward Tyson by patronizing his fights, but he’s one of the more dependable purveyors of a product to come along in quite some time. His product happens to be mayhem, but in that sense, he’s more dependable at what he does than any movie star.

Think about it. Has Tyson ever failed to deliver the goods? You don’t get boring 12-round waltzes with Tyson in the ring. You either get him flooring the other guy or Tyson going out in dramatic fashion, as in his previous losses to Buster Douglas and Holyfield. And, notwithstanding the initial gasping from last Saturday’s rematch with Holyfield, look at the end result: Tyson delivered a shocking drama that has the world taking notice.

So, he’ll be back. And we’ll be back too.

If we aren’t--if the public somehow rises up and rejects Mike Tyson and the guarantee of carnage that he brings to every fight--then we’ve got a story on our hands.

It’ll be the story of humanity reversing course at this late date in our history and saying no to violence. I would not advise a large wager on that prospect.

The wheels are already in motion for his return. Tyson has made the obligatory apology. Holyfield is the forgiving type, plus he knows he can beat Tyson.

The only missing element is the boxing fan. Will he and she pony up again to see Tyson climb into a ring? Will we put more millions of dollars in his pocket, not certain of what kind of savage or aberrant behavior we’ll get in return?

Of course we will.

In fact, that is the reason why we will.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.