Tyson’s the Essence of Boxing’s Appeal

This hue and cry about Mike Tyson, this flaming outrage, this moral indignation, this lament for the bitten ear. Hah! What a laugh. What a sham. What self-deception.

It’s almost as silly as Tyson’s apology. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never did it before,” he said. “I’ll never do it again,” he said. Hah!

This is the best thing that’s happened to the box office in years, in a generation. Suppose he fights Holyfield a third time. What if Tyson is suspended by Nevada, which courageously and temporarily suspended him last Tuesday, and Don King gets it together for the fight to be staged on an offshore barge. The pay-per-view revenue will be enormous. Wait until he fights anyone. Pay-per-chew is the promoter’s line.

This isn’t a blemish for boxing; this is the essence of boxing’s earliest days to right now. People pay to see precisely this.

Slaves were forced into combat for the entertainment of their masters. Rules were optional. What fun.

Beau Jack was a great lightweight, honored in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He began fighting at 15 in smokers in gentlemen’s clubs. A half-dozen blindfolded kids swung wildly at one another until one was left standing.

In 1936 Beau Jack won $1,000 in a battle royal at Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters. As a further reward, he was made the shoeshine boy at the club. Bobby Jones, the immortal, was a patron.

Only the zeroes at the end of the prize package have changed. The appeal has not.

Sure my friends Vic and Stan support the notion of the manly art of self defense and read A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science.” Suppose the rules were changed to protect the fighters from brain damage--give them real protective helmets and low-impact gloves. Who would watch? The whole lot of them wouldn’t keep Tyson in silk shirts.

Savagery sells. We lie to ourselves when we think rules civilize the sport: It’s all right to beat a man’s brains out, but biting is terrible. What Tyson revealed in biting Holyfield was the savagery that made Tyson fascinating in the first place.

He was going to the soul of boxing, the link between primitive men fighting for survival in the forest primeval and the fights to the finish in the streets and parking lots today. Ever wonder why the traffic always moves so slowly past a bad accident? Why are hockey fights more popular than hockey? Ever wonder why Jeffrey Dahmer stories drew so many readers?

In the ring, we think we are seeing nobility of spirit when a blinded boxer continues to take punishment. “I can not see my man, your Highness, I am blind but not beat. Only place me before him and he shall not gain the day yet.” That was Jack Broughton to his patron, the Duke of Cumberland, who thought he was losing his bet in 1747.

The crowd loved Broughton. Blood was never objectionable. Except in “Designing Woman,” when sportswriter Gregory Peck takes his date, Lauren Bacall to a fight and instructs her how to hold up a newspaper so her designer outfit doesn’t get spattered with blood. The rest of the crowd doesn’t shrink.

Ancient Greeks and Romans loved their bloody circus. Fighters were trained for war and when there was no war, they kept in trim by fighting at the whim of nobility. They wrapped their hands with leather thongs and studded them with metal spikes. There were a number of one-punch knockouts; the first blow usually crushed the opponent’s face. In his time, Beau Jack won 83, lost 40 and fought five draws. The all-time gladiator champion, researchers discovered was probably Theagenes of Thasos, who won 1,426 consecutive bouts. There were no losing streaks in his time and a draw was really a deadlock.

Wasn’t that barbaric! Civilization has come a long way. We don’t condone blood sports like bullfighting or cockfighting. Animals are killed in those sports. Legislators rail at the idea of extreme fighting in front of civilized people. Boxing is all right. But they mustn’t bite. Harry Malin, the 1924 Olympic middleweight champion, won his semifinal by disqualification when Roger Brousse of France bit him several times on the chest. Ah, steak tartare was not on the menu that day.

All Tyson did was bite off a piece of Holyfield’s ear and we said it was repugnant. What’s so surprising about that? Tyson was a street thug when boxing found him. He once told a magazine interviewer that he beat up an 80-year-old woman.

Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs restrained Tyson and made him a money-machine. When he was in the ring, he was a weapon of harnessed street fury. You watched with bated breath for the moment when he would destroy his opponent.

Of course, outside the ring, he was partly restrained. He slapped people around. He told his biographer, Jose Torres, that the greatest punch he ever threw sent Robin Givens, then his wife, across a large room into a wall.

When D’Amato and Jacobs died, Tyson joined Don King and the restraints were loosened. What Tyson reverted to against Holyfield gives more credibility to Desiree Washington’s allegations of rape that helped convict Tyson. He is what he is.

There are not enough silk shirts to disguise what’s inside. He could fight under the constraints of the rules as long as he was winning. He could be the bully he always was, but that was all right. When he lost once to Holyfield, and then felt himself in doubt the second time, no constraints could keep him from reverting to the street thug he really always was.

When Jake LaMotta was 9 or 10 years old, he would stand near his father’s grocery pushcart waiting for the day’s business to end. That’s when parents would put gloves on the neighborhood boys, form a ring, throw change on the street and the last kid standing would scoop it up. LaMotta said it paid the rent. He grew up to be the Raging Bull. He’s in the Hall of Fame.

And why would any promoter try to hide what’s inside Tyson. We just love it when it comes out, don’t we. Don’t be ashamed to admit it. You aren’t alone.

Just think, if a promoter of auto racing could only advertise: “Guaranteed--Three flaming wrecks. One driver will die.” There isn’t an arena in the world big enough for all the tickets he could sell.