"WELL then," cries Mr Don King, with enthusiasm befitting a man who looks as if 100 volts have just passed through his body. "Let's get this show on the road. Showtime."
This is a Don King press conference. Mr King's flunky introduces him as "the renowned philanthropist and the greatest promoter the world has ever seen". That's it from the flunky. Don King returns to the microphone.
There are 53 people on the dais look"ing down on approximately the same number of TV cameras and perhaps 150 bored print journalists. Most of the people on the dais and in the audience have been sitting there for an hour, making calls on mobiles, waiting for Don King. Now it's showtime.
It seems likely that boxing folk never die. They just shed the last of their dignity and fly to Las Vegas, the great neon lit pawn shop in the desert. In Vegas, dwindling celebrity always recoups a little something, even after the house has taken its cut.
Joe Louis came to Vegas when money was tight. Wheelchair bound and broke, he got a job as a celebrity greeter at the door of one of the casinos. They put a sign on him saying "Joe Louis, Former Heavyweight Champion of the World". Most days Joe couldn't hold his head up straight but it suited the high rollers and low ballers not to have to make eye contact. They passed by and shook his hand and at the end of every week they slipped him a couple of hundred bucks for his troubles.
That was then, of course. This is now. Different times, different folks. Showtime.
If, for instance, you withheld your affections from Muhammad Ali 20 years ago, it might have been because you didn't like the way he ran his mouth or because you didn't agree with his stance on Vietnam or maybe you just feared the incomprehensible religion he embraced.
Withholding your affections from Mike Tyson and Don King is a different matter entirely. It has been said of King that he would have fed Joe Louis, wheelchair and all, to Tyson if he thought it would draw a paying crowd in Vegas King, the former numbers czar from Cleveland, Ohio, who started his promoting career with a charity bout after which he profited over both Ali and the local hospital - is the symbol of the new ruling order. Tyson, so used and abused and enslaved that even after a jail term for rape he still looks like a victim, is the emblem of the wealthy new underclass.
Tonight, Tyson vs Bruno, promoted and conceived by King, who holds an eternity of options on both fighters, represents the reality of modern professional boxing. The sweet science is no longer a sport, just an arena in which spivs and TV moguls might consummate their union.
Before a live audience composed mainly of media hacks and celebrities (in alphabetical order the list of celebs runs from Drew Barrymore to Forrest Whittaker - still time for Bertie Ahern to come in at number one) Mike Tyson will fight Frank Bruno tonight in a bid to become the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. More precisely, Tyson will fight Bruno in a bid to become one of the heavyweight boxing champions of the world.
The golden era is far behind. Big time fights no longer go to Manila or Zaire or even to the friendly grime of Madison Square Garden. Casinos use the blood, sweat and tears of honest pugs to attract the high rollers to their tables. Promoters cut deals to manacle fighters to particular gambling houses. TV keeps the money circulating through the diseased body.
Tonight the 5,500 bedroom MGM Grand Hotel is full. The hotel's top gambling customers have been flown in gratis and "comped" for the weekend. Some 5,000 of Frank Bruno's English fans have arrived bellowing football chants with beery breath. All of the 750 celebrity suites are occupied. Coverage is beaming out to almost 100 nations, almost all of them pay per view deals.
For his troubles Mr Tyson will receive $30 million. For being the champ and an all round good egg, Mr Bruno will receive $6 million. Does he resent the disparity? Sure he does.
Much has changed since Las Vegas became the home of boxing, the place where old pugs come when they want to deposit their dignity in a hotel safe. When Mike Tyson ended his three and a half year incarceration in the Indiana Youth Centre, he chose Las Vegas as his home. Islam's newest postulant bought a big house and built a big wall around it. Taxis drivers will take you past it for a fistful of dollars and tell you that Iron Mike never has less then six cars in his driveway: "Dang fool can't drive but one of them. Must keep them for company."
LATER in the bowels of the MGM Grand Hotel in the deeply veloured dinner theatre, Mike Tyson says something sad and chilling about his dang fool life. Crippled with shyness, brush handle thick fingers boring into his own bowed head, he speaks about affection and company. That soft sibilant lisp which usually freights so much menace has the sound of the small child in it.
"I never dwell on who cares about me," he says. "I just think nobody cares. I'm not perfect. I try to do the right thing. I strive but I know nobody cares."
On either side of him men shuffle uncomfortably. Rory Holloway in his purple velvet suit with matching pork pie hat and John Horne in his pressed white cotton jacket stare at the table. John and Rory owe their living to Mike Tyson. Together with Don King, they comprise Team Tyson. At this moment Team Tyson is not comfortable. Unless you are Nicolas Cage, this moment of scold introspection isn't a quintessential Vegas moment.
Another heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson, once said that "when you've got millions of dollars you've got millions of friends". When you've got millions of dollars and a rape conviction you have marginally fewer friends. The same sort of friends though.
When life is a succession of unfolding Vegas moments John and Rory and Don can extract the juice, take the vigorish (a gambling term for adjusting the odds) and never ever feel uncomfortable. This was how they planned it during the three and a half years when Mike was away as a result of what Don King calls "his misfortune". While Tyson served his sentence for rape, King planned for the future. He employed Holloway (a childhood friend of Tyson's) and his associate, Horne. Upon Tyson's release they were to ensure that Don King's meal ticket couldn't fall into the wrong hands.
Few people are visited with misfortune equivalent to being chosen as Don King's meal ticket.
Vegas moments. Not many victims emerge shy and huddled from the back seats of stretched limos. Tyson does though, when he arrives for this slightly shambolic press conference.
His entourage, leather jacketed and radiant with a dopey sort of menace, creates a brisk bustle all round him everywhere he goes. Lots of people have a piece of Mike. Handlers, minders, managers. They make quite a show as they hustle their property through the lobby of the world's biggest hotel on the way to this press conference. The gamblers just gape 15 winners and one loser just went by. A Vegas moment, if not Vegas odds.
Men in suits, smart slick men who have barnacled themselves to Tyson, move towards each other as the serpentine entourage slides into the dinner theatre. They meet and they greet. Embracing each other, shaking each other by the shoulders, playfully smacking each other's faces. Made guys. "Hey we've got a piece of this action. Alright."
Jay Larkin of Showtime TV sums up the mood when he addresses the disinterested media minutes later. "Why's everyone so serious?" he asks. "There's sooooo much money here."
Today Tyson isn't shadowed by the serious nitwits in army fatigues, high boots and mirror shades who have accompanied him on other outings. Instead Don King has laid on a bus full of another sort of gimmick.
At most of Tyson's press appearances since his release from prison, a bunch of underprivileged black kids have been wheeled in as a living testimony to the fact that the new Tyson is part destroyer, part Francis of Assisi.
"Mike saw what they were doing down at the Martin Luther King Youth Centre," booms King, his baronial belly almost bursting through the buttons on his waistcoat, "and immediately he extended an invitation to these young people to come to his press conference."
The kids holler and cheer. As they might. Free admission to such enlightening press conferences can make the best of us giddy.
One's mind slips back to an older Don King story, how back in 1986 he took his tawdry circus to Atlanta, there to honour the birthday of Martin Luther King, who had made his home in the southern city. With characteristic modesty, King advertised his fight bill with posters bearing in one corner a portrait of Martin Luther King and the words "I have a dream". In the other corner, another black visionary, another King, Don King, was depicted. Beneath him were the words "Only in America".
Atlanta was outraged. King (Don, that is), who once kicked a gambler to death for owing him $600, was non plussed. Apparently, an integral part of Martin Luther King's dream was that, Tim Witherspoon and Tony Tubbs would get it on, with Don King taking most of the gross and all the options on the winner.
Back on stage in Vegas now, the Don King Show is in full swing. Tyson looks distracted and bored and devastatingly
To Weekend 3