AMERICA AT LARGE:IN THE quarter-century I've known him I've been exposed to the multi-faceted creature that is Mike Tyson from every conceivable angle: the raging animal, the frightened boy-child, the sensitive boxer with the soul of a poet.
I’ve seen the ghetto thug and the sensitive father, the profligate spender who walks into a dealership and orders half a dozen matching Bentleys for his entourage and the victimised boxer who wakes up in the morning to discover that his trusted allies have looted him for a hundred million while he wasn’t looking.
I’ve seen the indestructible fighting machine who became the youngest heavyweight champion in history and the flabby, undertrained specimen who quit on his stool against Kevin McBride two decades later. I’ve watched him rage against colleagues he called “white faggot motherf***ers” and I’ve been a guest in his house. I’ve seen him bawl like a baby at the death of a trusted adviser, and I’ve seen him rail, years later, at how the same man “exploited” him financially. I’ve seen the contrite Tyson and the boastful Tyson.
I was there when he was being outfitted in a jewelled crown, an ermine robe, and a sceptre for a Sports Illustratedphoto shoot, and I've been there when he was led out of a courtroom in handcuffs. I've seen him almost breathtakingly eloquent, and moments later evince the naivety of a five-year-old child. I've seen him parade through Las Vegas casinos trailed by an entourage of 30, and I've sat, alone with him on a balcony, and watched him blink back tears as he told me he "had no friends".
I've also personally watched him bite two people, gnawing on one guy's ears and taking a chunk, with his gold-capped teeth, out of another's leg. This entire range of emotions is on display in the 90 minutes it takes to watch Tyson, the James Tobak-directed documentary that opened in limited release last weekend. Roughly 90 per cent of the film consists of a sometimes brutally honest monologue in which the one-time Baddest Man on the Planet lays bare his soul.
Four years after he last laced on gloves, Tyson remains an enigmatic, controversial, and polarising figure about whom almost everyone has an opinion, and my guess is that some of those opinions may even be altered by some previously unconsidered aspect of this tortured soul laid bare in the film.
There were even a couple of surprises for me. One was Tyson’s confession that on the night he knocked out Trevor Berbick, at the age of 20, to win the heavyweight title, he was painfully suffering from an untreated dose of gonorrhoea because he was too shy to approach a doctor. The other comes near the end of the film when Tyson, shown walking alone on a California beach, recites The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I knew Mike’s taste in poetry ran the gamut from Chairman Mao to 2 Live Crew, but who would have guessed he’d read Oscar Wilde’s, much less committed it to memory?
Tysonwas well received at both the Cannes and Sundance Festivals, and was critically praised by the New York Timesprior to its opening last Friday. The early returns at the box office, on the other hand, haven't exactly produced Tysonesque numbers: the weekend of the premiere saw it playing in 11 theatres in New York and Los Angeles, where interest would presumably run higher than in Middle America, and the three-day gross was an underwhelming €63,810.
As genuine as his self-effacing confessional might be, there is also the sense that a guy who learned to cheat and scheme just to survive his Brownsville adolescence may have spent all these weeks in front of Tobak’s camera just to set us all up for one big con. This comes midway through the film when Tyson addresses the singularly most defining episode of his life. Having confessed almost every imaginable sin and character defect (and claimed that “if I have any anger, and if it’s directed at anyone, it’s directed at myself”), he then defines himself as the victim in the 1993 rape case that put him behind bars at what should have been the prime of his boxing career.
“I was falsely accused of raping that wretched swine of a woman, Desiree Washington,” says Tyson in Tyson. Describing his conviction and incarceration as “the most horrible time of my life,” he laments that it “took away my humanity and my reputation.”
His reputation? The evidence of Tyson’s guilt was so overwhelming that at his trial not even his lawyers tried to claim he hadn’t done it. Rather, they mounted a defence suggesting that his reputation as a violent sexual predator was so widely known that a woman who would return with him to his hotel room should have expected to be raped.
Describing himself as “coarse and crass”, Tyson acknowledges his proclivity for what he euphemistically describes as “taking advantage of women” in the film, but denies having done so in Washington’s case.
Tyson’s denial here is not persuasive, but you have to suspect that maybe he thinks it is.
But considering that it consists, in essence, of an hour-and-a-half long monologue by one talking head, it’s a pretty fascinating glimpse inside that head, and Tyson’s description of Don King alone – “he was supposed to be my black brother, but he’s just a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherf***er” – is worth the price of admission.
Tobak has taken some artistic liberties with chronology that will probably be disconcerting to boxing fans. Footage from old Tyson spots cut back and forth to shots of him conferring with father-figure Cus D'Amato in the Catskill gym, even though Cus was dead and buried when some of the fights depicted took place. If you want to watch Tyson, you might have to wait a month or so until the DVD comes out.
