It wasn’t until he made the long walk from the dressingroom across the floor of Dallas Cowboy’s football stadium that it became clear what 70,000 paying customers and the millions watching – or, due to technical issues, not watching – around the world were hoping to see from Mike Tyson. They were tuning in to see the one magic act that everyone knows to be impossible. The rewinding of time.
In Dallas, the fans paid up under the wilful delusion that the old, long gone Mike Tyson would somehow materialise before them because they wished it to be so: alive again at 58 with the murderous intent and combustible fighting power with which he attacked the world from the age of 18.
The night was a strange combination of old boxing glamour and the uneasy sense that this fabricated headline fight between Tyson and Jake Paul was, at heart, a betrayal of the sport. Everyone was dressed in their best and the bartenders were busy dispensing cocktails to the beautiful people. As a spectacle in sound and vision, it was stunning and the expensive seats glittered with a random selection of celebrities – big Shaquille O’Neal strode the floor like a behemoth, Ralph Macchio and Charlize Theron beamed in a touch of Old Hollywood and Rob Gronkowski, the retired NFL star (and madcap enough to become sucked into this new fad of celebrity-fighting) was bouncing around. And it was the allure of seeing Mike Tyson that made the occasion.
The anticipation, in the minutes before the fight started, was genuine. Many of the fans here were not even born when Tyson was in his pomp. But they had seen all the old clips: not just the swift rage with which he dispensed of a long line of forgotten opponents but the disturbing interviews, the photos of Mike walking his pet tiger; of Mike quoting Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, of Mike facing the cops having bitten off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. In short, they wanted for themselves a taste of the wilder unreachable world of the 1980s and 1990s.
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And when Mike appeared in his customary black, unadorned cut-off warm up smock and began his slow-blank eyed walk to the ring, the people went berserk. For those few seconds they could fool themselves that they were about to witness the real thing; that Iron Mike could shake off two decades of inactivity and inhabit that untamed spirit.
From the first bell, the delusion began to fade. The eight rounds were a dud. It didn’t help the occasion that the previous fight, between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano had been lit with electrifying, constant menace and danger and that the pair had produced a fight for the ages.
Tyson threw a paltry 27 punches over the entire contest and spent the rest of the time moving and bobbing and keeping out of harms way. By the last round, the booing was sustained and lusty and thousands exited before the announcer confirmed that the winner, by unanimous decision, was Jake Paul. The big Rust Belt YouTube celebrity seems to skateboard through life with a blithe indifference to public opinion and leaned into the fact that everyone in the stadium was hoping to see Tyson knock the living daylights out of him. But he is a canny operator. And he knew. As did Mike Tyson.
On Wednesday, Tyson sat through the official press conference in a mood of baleful silence. At the time, it was optimistically interpreted as a signal that Tyson had pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into the bleak interior place where he becomes a machine born to inflict physical damage on his opponents. But as he moved stiffly back to his corner after each harmless, pointless round, the truth presented itself. Tyson remained silent because he knew what would happen here in Dallas on Friday evening. He promised he would “bring the devil himself” and he was true to his word. He made his deal, took the money and, well, hobbled, rather than ran.
[ Katie Taylor narrowly defeats Amanda Serrano in brutal contestOpens in new window ]
Of all the advance clips pushed by Paul’s promotions company in the lead up to the fight, nothing came close to capturing Tyson like the short clip of a young girl interviewing Iron Mike and asking him what type of legacy he would like to leave when he is done.
“Well I don’t believe in the word legacy. I think that’s another word for ego. That’s just some word that everybody grabbed on to. Now, it is used every five seconds. It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passin’ through. I’mma die and it’s gonna be over. Who cares about legacy after that? I am nothing. We are dead. We’re dust. We are absolutely nothing.”
“Thank you such for sharing that,” the young interviewer staring unblinkingly at the baddest man on the planet through her large spectacles. “That’s something I have not heard before.” But others have. It was a riff on Tyson’s favourite theme: the big nothingness of it all.
For a man who has been brutally tough in his verbal onslaughts towards other people, he has always reserved a sentimental spot for himself. And so, this humiliation against Jake Paul, a terrific promoter and, one suspects, a good hearted-Midwestern boy beneath the bluster and boasting, but an absolute no-mark in the realm of fighters Tyson has faced: it all fits perfectly with Tyson’s world view.
His final moment in boxing would be one of abasement: a living shadow of his former self enduring this parody of a fight and the growing disenchantment of the people who were there to see him. Afterwards, he muttered a few distracted words to the commentator and vanished. He did not appear for the midnight interviews in the Cowboys’ conference room, leaving his coaching staff to talk up the occasion.
“We worked for seven months for this moment. I really believed we had this victory before the fight. He never asked to give up,” his trainer, Rafael Cordeiro, said.
“He is the people’s champion. He has inspired many people outside the ring. Most importantly, Mike comes home to his loved ones,” he added.
And that much is true. In a weird way, Mike Tyson had executed his last, bleak magic act. He is hitting 60 and has banked $20 million for one night of vaudeville. Insiders say that Tyson the man is more content now than he has ever been: just another man in late middle age drifting towards eccentricity. That’s not a bad story where the afterlife of a heavyweight boxing champion is concerned.
But what happened in Dallas on Friday night, well, that was a death ritual. What the bored crowd saw was the endnote on that other Mike Tyson with that fearsome public image.
“I’mma die. I’m just passin’ through.”
And so it went. Just dust. Absolutely nothing.
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