From Weekend 1
lonely. Menacing people no longer holds the charm for him which it once did.
Training hasn't been going well and an open session with the public this week has been cancelled. It is the job of Team Tyson to provide as much hilarity as possible to cheer Tyson up.
"The most popular man in the whole world," booms Don King, "from Africa to Australia, from China to Japan they love him, and they are talking about him."
Mike Tyson is unmoved by the news that they chatter about him incessantly in Tiananmen Square and on Bondi Beach. John Horne has a new tack. He steps up to the microphone.
"Let me say," he says, addressing the media as if listening to him was a matter of choice, "let me say that I used to believe you guys. But I have read the lies that you all have printed, the stories about Mike that came from nowhere but your own heads. I have nothing to say to you. You must all be ashamed."
He sits down. Tyson just stares ahead, dead eyed and disinterested. The media who have come along just in case a punch gets thrown, stare back. Team Tyson is having trouble selling Mike Tyson to himself even. When it comes to the dreary rituals which mark all such events, Tyson goes through the motions, obligingly staring into Frank Bruno's eyes, the pair making believe that they truly hate one another, that they would be fighting it out even if $36 million was not being divvied up.
In prison Tyson read Voltaire and Machiavelli and others. He embraced Islam and had portraits of Mao and Arthur Ashe tattooed on alternate triceps. His three and a half years inside were perhaps the first peace he has had in his brief and troubled lifetime. For a youngster who had 40 arrests on his sheet by the time he was 12 years old and who discovered a more lucrative way of channelling violent energy not long after, life has never been anything but turbulent.
He seems so alone now. His trainer and father figure Cus D'Amato long dead, his entourage filled out with sycophants and leeches. "I can look after myself," he says softly. "I was a kid before and now I am a man. I work for God. I bear witness to him. That is my strength and my maturity."
Free now, yet enslaved like a piece of livestock, he is sullen and disinterested in a way which doesn't suggest strength and maturity. Has workouts in an unprepossessing little corrugated iron hut down on Gragson Avenue have been disastrous, by all accounts. Tyson comes and goes, brooding, and unhappy. He has uttered perhaps 10 sentences to the media all week. His occasional whispered asides to members of his entourage provoke either an orgy of concerned nods or a mass outbreak of split sides. Those who work for Mike Tyson find him to be a very wise and very witty man.
Among others, views are mixed. Sufficient wisdom has not been granted Tyson, for instance, in the matter of dealing with Desiree Washington, the beauty queen whom he raped. The lack of an apology or a decent show of remorse has irked middle America and those who were once attracted by Tyson's menace are now slightly repulsed by it.
Only once has he put himself in a position to be asked about his victim. On the eve of his first comeback fight against Peter McNeeley, he was asked if he had anything to say to Desiree Washington. "Just sit back and enjoy the fight," said Mike, still callow after all these years.
All week Don King has been screeching to the effect that he has just a handful of prime tickets left. Post prison Mike Tyson isn't as easy a sell as he used to be. His occasional outbursts on the general subject of women haven't helped. "All of a sudden they care about black women?" he said before Christmas of a group calling itself African Americans Against Violence. "Give me a break."
Don King, meanwhile, is giving nobody a break. Not while box office returns are sluggish. He has picked a theme and he is running with it, well, he is dragging its flailing form along behind him. Drawing on the MGM Grand Hotel's tacky movie theme which recreates The Wizard of Oz in the main lobby, Don King announces that Mike Tyson has...
"followed his own yellow brick road to this wonderful fantasy wonderland.
Look through tinsel coloured glasses and your dreams can come true.
Do not abberate (sic) from your agenda and you shall be lifted up to Oz."
Mike Tyson stares into the middle distance. Frank Bruno rolls his eyes. Judy Garland spins in her grave. The Tin Man takes another pull of crack cocaine. Only in America.