Tyson’s Long Bout With Black Athletic Success

Before a few rap idols pretended to his throne, and before O J. Simpson unceremoniously seized his crown, Mike Tyson was the king of “troubled black masculinity.” As a youth, Tyson spent time in a detention center, had street brawls while a professional fighter and, as champ, was accused of being a “serial buttocks fondler.” Now, with not one, but two bites of Evander Holyfield’s ears in their heavyweight boxing championship fight, Tyson renews his kinship with the dragons of self-destruction and reclaims his kingship.

Tyson’s act is made uglier by the sense of inescapable tragedy that envelopes his life. Since he became, at age 20, the youngest heavyweight champion ever, Tyson has seemed spectacularly uncomfortable with the twin imperatives of black male athletic success: to nobly represent black masculinity while striving to undo its unfairly bestialized image in the public’s mind.

At the same time, Tyson crystallized the contradictions of a sport built on blood and brutality. His success inside the ring depended on his ability to harness an outsized fury that outside the ring could lead to great mayhem. Tyson’s occasional blurring of the boundaries between his two worlds--symbolized in allegations that he pounded his first wife, actress Robin Givens--undercuts a major premise of boxing: that it is civilized violence.

When Tyson joined forces with fight promoter Don King, they seemed to supply each other’s missing parts. They were a seamless conjunction of the savvy and the sensational, two black men whose showy success made some white folks mad. In King, Tyson seemed to find the father figure who could turn whites’ demonization of him into more than dollars. For Tyson, his solidarity with King was a psychic shield from whites’ attacks. For King, Tyson’s raw youth represented his most enduring and biggest paycheck. Equally important, Tyson became King’s field general in the ghetto rebellion against a more conciliatory style of resisting white supremacy often associated with black bourgeois culture. Tyson gave flesh and blood to King’s belief that the real forces that underpin capitalism are shrewd intelligence and relentless intimidation. In King’s business dealings, Tyson glimpsed the logic that had motivated his own fisticuffs: If you can beat ‘em, they’ll join you.

But his partnership with King did not squarely address Tyson’s desperate need for moral mentorship. If Tyson suffered from white demonization, with King he endured, to a degree, black exploitation. As a result, Tyson lacked a force to protect himself from his own worst tendencies, especially his seemingly uncontrollable urge to grope or fondle women against their wills, which eventually led to his conviction for rape. Even here, the support Tyson received hurt him. Desiree Washington, the woman whom Tyson was convicted of raping, was pilloried in many black communities, while Tyson was the subject of prayer meetings. When he went off to prison to serve his sentence, Washington became the “ho,” Tyson became holy.

When Tyson emerged from prison a changed man having converted to Islam, many black women were angry at just this sort of logic, whose immediate outcome was a Harlem parade to honor Tyson. These black women acknowledged that Tyson had served his time, but they wondered if he, or for that matter, most men, had learned their lessons. Tyson was, in essence, being forgiven without having confessed his sin.

It is ironic, though too predictable, that the pain Tyson caused black women wouldn’t be recognized or make sense until Tyson left his teeth marks on the body of a black man. There is still a lamentable hierarchy of hurt in black America. If men are harmed, there’s solidarity in crisis. If women or children suffer, sometimes at the hands of black men, their grief is enshrouded in silence or invisibility.

There’s no question that Tyson has faced enormous racism in his quest for pugilistic supremacy and personal dignity. There’s no question that Tyson’s second bout with Holyfield had an ugly religious undertone. Holyfield was the righteous warrior fighting for all that evangelical Christianity, contrary to its roots, has come to symbolize: rigid domestic rules, ahistorical piety and a claustrophobic view of faith in the public square. Tyson the Islam-reformed thug met his end in Holyfield’s halo. Tyson was rebestialized, but this time more subtly. He was now Mecca’s monster.

But none of this--not even Holyfield’s smoothly managed, unsportsmanlike conduct of head butting and low blows in their two fights--can account for Tyson’s terrible act. The best counterargument against Holyfield would have been a fist in his face, not an etching of Tyson’s bicuspids and incisors in his ears. The supreme irony may be that the only white man in the ring had to stop a hero of despised black masculinity from tearing the flesh of another black man.

For many, Tyson’s apology for his ring actions rung hollow, a futile gesture in a grotesque choreography of self-pity. As he awaits the decision of the Nevada State Athletic Commission on his future in boxing, Tyson still faces his greatest challenge: taming the demons inside.