The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (23 page)

Even against “Buster” Douglas and Evander Holyfield there had always been the chance that a sudden savage right hand or crushing left hook could turn things around but, against Lewis, Tyson never showed that he still had the power or ability to turn the tide. Neither did he have the excuse of inadequacy in his corner this time. Respected trainer Ronnie Shields tried desperately to motivate Tyson between rounds, urging him to “let his punches go”, but Tyson seemed incapable of throwing anything significant. He appeared mesmerized by the constant jab-jab-right of Lewis and obligingly walked on to the punches round after round, merely proving his ability to absorb heavy punishment.

The bout could well have ended earlier than it did if Tyson hadn’t benefited from some dubious refereeing decisions. I groaned as Tyson went down in the fourth round but was then confused and delighted at the referee’s deduction of a point from Lewis for holding and pushing Tyson to the canvas. It was true, Lennox had draped his massive bodyweight over Tyson but, to my mind, he was already on his way down from a punch at the time.

Then, as Lewis opened up and hurt Tyson, the referee stopped him and gave Tyson a standing eight-count, giving him a chance to recover.

It was all immaterial. I watched in stony silence as Lewis
repeatedly
drove his punches into Tyson’s battered and bleeding face. In the eighth round a left hook precipitated the end. As Tyson lurched to his left from the force of the blow Lewis perfectly timed a
following
right cross. It exploded upon Mike’s chin and he fell heavily to the floor, not rising until the count had reached ten.

It was the conclusion which most boxing experts had predicted, particularly in light of Tyson’s woeful preparations regarding warm-up bouts and his weight-gains between contests (although he had managed to slim down considerably in comparison to his bulk against Nielson.) However, Tyson retained the ability to confuse onlookers who thought they’d summed him up. Just as Mike was garnering praise for his willingness to take a beating like a warrior and not quit on his stool, he had the media scratching their heads with his post-fight comments, in which he did everything but kiss Lewis’s ass. As he stood looking up at his unmarked conqueror, dabbing at the blood leaking from his right eye, Tyson – the man who’d stated that he wanted to “eat Lewis’s children” and “rip out his heart” – described Lewis as “a masterful boxer”, adding, “The pay day was wonderful. I really appreciate it. If you’d be kind enough, I’d love to do it again. I think I could beat you if we tried one more time.”

Let’s analyse these words. He was more or less saying: “I’m finished as a fighter but I need lots more money to pay off all my debtors and fund my extravagant lifestyle. Thanks for this
opportunity
. Now, would you like to beat me up again, as I need much more money than you’ve already given me?” (And I didn’t even need the Enigma machine or the Da Vinci code to crack his underlying meaning.)

I loved Mike to bits but I’d have been so much happier if he’d told Lewis he was a bum and that, if they’d met ten years earlier, he’d have “ripped his head off”. Tyson’s comments removed any
lingering
illusions I or anyone else had that he was still interested in the heavyweight title or in improving his status in boxing history. He was in it purely for the money now and this meant that he would never regain the former ferocity or “bad intentions”. In which case, without that mindset and anger, Mike Tyson was just a small, ageing heavyweight.

However, luckily for him, Lennox Lewis also thought about boxing in terms of pounds-and-pence and said that he’d happily give Tyson a rematch. And so, the saga continued.

On my forty-first birthday I sat at my dad’s house, preparing to let my family know that Maggie was pregnant. During the year or so we’d been together my family had welcomed Mags into their midst, almost as much because of the sheer contrast in personalities between herself and Liz as for anything in particular Mags had done to try and ingratiate herself. My dad had been the biggest revelation.

The others had been fine about Mags’s skin colour from the start but my dad had taken more convincing. He’d sometimes ask me whether I felt self-conscious walking down the road with her – Yeah, right, with my shaven and tattooed head you mean? – or whether it was “fair on Jim, for his dad to have a black girlfriend”, etc.

Questions such as these were raised periodically but they’d become infrequent, as Mags had won him over with her niceness. Nevertheless, it was with more than a little trepidation that I announced the news of the impending new arrival.

I told them that “something” would be arriving soon at the flat and that something would grow bigger and bigger each year until, eventually, it would be adult-size. When my mum responded, “You’ve got no room for a pot plant in that tiny flat,” I gave up trying to be subtle and told them: “Maggie’s pregnant.”

My mum and sister were delighted but my dad’s response sickened me: “Let’s hope she loses it!”

I felt physically ill and had to force myself to keep quiet,
otherwise
forty-one years of bitterness towards him would’ve come tumbling out of my mouth. As he left to pick up the Chinese takeaway we’d ordered, mum cuddled me and told me to ignore his comments.

I’d just add them to the stack of hateful comments he’d made over the years. He and Liz would’ve made a fine pair!

* * *

In February 2003 Mike Tyson commenced his boxing rehabilitation by meeting fellow puncher Clifford Etienne. The public needed to be convinced that Mike was deserving of another bout with Lennox Lewis before they’d part with their money again and so he’d agreed to several warm-up contests which, if successful, would lead to the lucrative rematch later in the year.

Tyson blew Etienne away in the opening minute with a
devastating
right hand but this was incidental in comparison to the litany of incidents before and after the bout.

Before arriving in Memphis, Tyson had announced that he was withdrawing from the contest. The reasons ranged from flu to
diarrhoea
, a back injury to an infection in the facial tattoo he’d had done (this was a Maori design across the left side of his face that got me thinking about tattoos again until Mags said “No!”). The real reason appeared to be that Mike had thrown several temper tantrums and refused to complete his training. Trainer Freddie Roach even advised Tyson not to turn up, as he didn’t feel that Mike was fit enough. Well, Tyson was physically fit enough to hammer Etienne into unconsciousness, but what about his mental fitness?

Even after all those years of competing, Tyson still struggled to control his pre-fight fear and emotions. It wasn’t even the Lewises and Holyfields of the world that induced these self-doubts, for Tyson had exhibited similar nervousness and unstable behaviour before facing Julius Francis!

Lennox began to get twitchy about the prospect of banking another multi-million payday and tried to convince Mike to meet him again in June 2003, without a prior contest. Tyson, however, stuck to his guns and stated that he needed at least one more fight before jeopardizing his health again against man-mountain Lewis and so a double-bill was arranged for June, in which Lewis would headline, whilst Tyson would face the decent Russian boxer Oleg Maskaev. Then, if both men proved victorious, they would have the rematch later in the year.

So … this is what actually happened in Mike’s crazy little world. In May promoter Don King, who’d been circling Tyson warily from a distance for some time, hoping to ingratiate himself again despite their legal battle over King’s alleged fraudulent behaviour, made his move and attempted to speak to Tyson. Mike responded to him in words beginning with “f” and – allegedly – a physical assault. However, their altercation and King’s attempts at
convincing
Tyson that he could make far more money if he returned to Don’s camp seemed to have an effect on Tyson. He suddenly refused to fight Maskaev and, with his withdrawal, any hopes of the Lewis rematch were ended. (Subsequently, Maskaev became a
heavyweight
champion himself and so it’s a shame that we never got to see him swap blows with Tyson.)

Lewis went ahead and defeated the dangerous Vitali Klitschko and then retired, stating that the only fight which still motivated him was the Tyson rematch but he no longer believed that it would ever take place.

Tyson, meanwhile, did have a fight in June. Unfortunately, it was in a hotel, against two men who’d drunkenly mocked him. Tyson put them both in hospital and was promptly arrested.

In July 2003 I was offered the role of Disability Project Manager for young people within a London borough, and – for the first time – commenced employment which offered both job satisfaction and decent financial remuneration.

Then, in October, Mags and I celebrated the arrival of our
beautiful
daughter Delilah. We couldn’t have been any happier but we needed to find somewhere else to live now. This proved problematic.

I didn’t want to rent a property, I wanted something I could call my own, but London house prices were astronomical, so we commenced searching for an area near to London but within our financial reach. Eventually we settled upon a small town in north Essex where my mum had moved to after her divorce but, although it was green and picturesque, it was also almost exclusively white, which caused Maggie extreme discomfort and the issue of race became a constant one in our conversations.

It was apt then that, around this time, I was studying race and culture as part of my Informal & Community Education Diploma for work, as well as reading a lot about mixed-race relationships and being a mixed-race child, in order that I might understand the kind of issues Delilah might face as she grew older.

This led me to examine what our friend Mr Tyson was struggling with for years. I wanted to understand how skin tone affects people’s treatment and perceptions of their fellow man. It’s obviously beyond the confines of this book to examine the subject in infinitesimal detail but issues of race must have a bearing on understanding Mike Tyson, for he was born into one of the most intense periods of change in American history, involving some of the pivotal figures in black social advancement.

The battle for social equality and acceptance became an
increasingly
bloody one, as black intellectuals and activists fought against segregation and oppression, during the Civil Rights Movement. Much of this oppression took the form of what Frantz Fanon described as “the Colonial mentality”. After decades of assumed white supremacy many black people actually perceived themselves as sub-standard, submitting to the racism and bullying of white people because they genuinely believed – due to years of having it viciously beaten into them – that they were inferior. Thus, it became as much of a battle for black activists to educate their peers as to their right to equality as it did for them to convince the white
establishment
of this fact.

One of the turning points was Oliver Brown’s battle to overturn segregation in the American South which, for those of you who’ve been living in ignorant bliss for half a century, was a process of discrimination by which blacks and whites were kept apart, to the detriment of blacks, and which Brown focused upon Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.

The furore this caused was unprecedented and inspired Dr Martin Luther King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, which finally resulted, in 1964, in legislation to eliminate all
discrimination
against race or skin colour.

Of course, love and happiness didn’t happen overnight – or even at all! – leading to the more aggressive urgings of Malcolm X (formerly Malcolm Little), the minister of the Nation of Islam who advocated meeting white violence head-on with reciprocal black violence in order to achieve parity. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) started to promote “Black Power” and coined the phrase “institutionalized racism” as a way of explaining that
discrimination
was deeply ingrained in all levels of the white establishment, due to centuries of supposed white supremacy.

Mike Tyson was thus born into a mid 1960s America that was in the midst of huge social change via the words and actions of the likes of the above and authors such as Maya Angelou, who vividly described her childhood in the prejudiced and segregated American South.

As a young boxing fan Tyson must have been aware of the
controversy
surrounding heavyweight champ Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali as a rejection of his “slave name” – blacks were traditionally named after their slave masters – and aligned himself with Elijah Muhammad’s movement, which controversially rejected integration with white society and fought for separation (as opposed to segregation!)

It still must have been hard though for the infant Tyson to hear songs such as “Young, Gifted and Black” or James Brown’s anthem “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”, whilst laying on his bed at night, listening to the sound of his empty stomach churning, wondering whether he would get his next paltry meal before or after another hideous beating from the brutal, disillusioned black youths on his deprived and crime-ridden neighbourhood.

No wonder then that the youngster grasped the opportunity to live in a large, rambling house in leafy Catskills with the elderly, white, boxing trainer and manager Cus D’Amato, who treated the delinquent Tyson like a human being for the first time in his life, as well as showing an interest in the teenager’s opinions, spending long hours talking to him about life and its unpredictability.

However, the following years of living and interacting almost exclusively with white people would result in an ongoing confusion around race which Tyson would struggle with for years, as he sought to understand his own feelings and personal perception of “who” he was, especially when he later became surrounded by strong black characters such as Don King, who convinced him that everything wrong in his life was due to a white conspiracy to keep the black man down. (A conviction that has more than a shred of truth to it.)