Another on Tyson road to self-ruin

More than a decade has elapsed since Mike Tyson defeated an opponent of substance, yet the onetime heavyweight champion continues to pack them in. Over 40,000 tickets have been sold for Tyson's Hampden Park clash against Lou Savarese, an exercise for which the diagnosed manic-depressive and sometime cannibal will be compensated to the tune of millions of dollars.

Oscar De La Hoya, the self-proclaimed Golden Boy of boxing, lost for the second time in three fights when he was outpointed by Shane Mosley in Los Angeles last weekend. Between his purse guarantees and his cut of pay-per-view television income, De La Hoya raked in $15 million for his losing effort, and unless the 27-year-old former welterweight champion makes good on his threat to retire from the ring, he will be paid a like amount for a rematch this fall.

Tyson spent most of the 1990s eradicating his promise of greatness, and by the millennium had become a tiresome sideshow freak. Mounting evidence suggests that the De La Hoya of the early 21st Century could become the Tyson of the '90s. The parallels are almost eerie.

Tyson was orphaned at an early age. De La Hoya's career might have been better served if he had been too. His father, Joel De La Hoya Sr, has pocketed $20 million over the past eight years for serving in a largely meddlesome role as his son's "manager".

In his early years Tyson was bankrolled by the consortium of Bill Cayton and the late Jimmy Jacobs and Cus D'Amato, the legendary trainer who became his legal guardian. After the deaths of Jacobs and D'Amato, Tyson cast Cayton aside and aligned himself with Don King.

When De La Hoya's mother Cecelia was dying of cancer in 1990, the family was faced with mounting hospital bills. To protect De La Hoya's amateur status - the Barcelona Games were still two years away - the family turned to fight manager Shelly Finkel, who eventually paid over $100,000 towards Mrs De La Hoya's chemotherapy, hospitalisation, and funeral, only to be rewarded by having Oscar walk away and sign with the rival management team of Robert Mittleman and Steve Nelson when he turned pro two years later.

In fairness, inside a year and a half De La Hoya would desert Mittleman/Nelson the same way he had Finkel. More recently, the Golden Boy fired Mike Hernandez, the Los Angeles-based automobile mogul who had served as his "business manager" since 1993.

Most knowledgeable chroniclers of the fight game trace the beginnings of Tyson's backslide to his acrimonious 1989 firing of Kevin Rooney, the trainer who had guided his career since his amateur days. In the past four years, De La Hoya has dumped respected trainers Jesus Rivero, Emanuel Steward, and Gil Clancy.

As a link to the past, Tyson has kept in his corner Jay Bright, a boyhood friend from his D'Amato days. Robert Alcazar, an equally inexperienced trainer who makes Jay Bright look like Angelo Dundee, continues to work as the chief second in De La Hoya's corner.

Tyson's first short-lived marriage was to actress Robin Givens. De La Hoya lives with and is engaged to Shanna Moakler, a former Miss USA and star of the cable soap opera Pacific Blue who is the mother of De La Hoya's 14-month-old daughter Atiana.

Tyson has driven into trees and wrecked a motorised tricycle, but escaped with no worse than concussion. Two years ago De La Hoya's Mercedes was totalled when he stalled on a California freeway and was rear-ended by a speeding truck. The boxer escaped injury because he had walked to the side of the road to summon help on his mobile phone.

The event which had the most significant impact on Tyson in the 1990s, of course, did not come in the ring at all, but the three years he spent in jail as the result of his 1992 rape conviction. De La Hoya remains the defendant in a civil lawsuit filed two years ago by Nicole Rao, who claims that in 1996, when she was 15, she was raped and imprisoned by De La Hoya at his condominium in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

De La Hoya's response has been that the absence of criminal charges and the protracted delay in filing the suit demonstrates that Rao was just another girl looking for a handout (a supermarket tabloid had earlier published legal papers confirming a $2.5 million payment to another under-aged girl). In last week's Sports Illustrated, S L Price cites testimony from a former De La Hoya bodyguard confirming the essentials of the charge, as well as from Rao girlfriends who say that after watching the boxer ply her with booze, one of them said "Oscar, quince anos" ("Oscar, she's only 15 years of age"), only to have the boxer smile and climb into his car with Rao in tow.

De La Hoya, by the way, at first tried to claim to Price that he had never even met Rao, but changed his tune when he learned that the magazine had a 1996 photograph of a grinning De La Hoya with the 15-year-old girl taken at Cabo San Lucas that summer.

The Golden Boy has earned millions outside the ring endorsing everything from underwear to milk. In 1988, I was with Tyson in Tokyo, where he was handsomely paid to tape a Japanese beer commercial. A few days later, Cayton arrived, bought his way out of the deal, and ordered copies of the tape destroyed. As laughable as it seems in retrospect, his then-manager thought it would be detrimental to his client's image if Tyson were seen drinking beer on television.

Tyson spent the 1990s, when he wasn't behind bars, not fighting Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis. He wouldn't even get into the ring with George Foreman, and never would have fought Evander Holyfield had a listless Holyfield performance against Bobby Czyz not convinced him that Evander was a shot fighter. In the two bouts against Holyfield he was first embarrassed, then knocked out, and on his way to being embarrassed again when he decided to make a meal of his opponent's ears.

De La Hoya has been the loser in his two biggest fights, against Felix Trinidad and now against Mosley, and won controversial decisions in two others, against Pernell Whitaker and Ike Quartey, yet the public's fascination with the two men ensures that the dough will continue to roll in. And if Oscar's drawing power ever starts to slip, he can always go out and bite somebody.