Gnawing doubts about pay-per-chew revulsion

Tom Humphries Locker RoomSO. ARE YOU appalled and unsettled by it? Remember that this column offers a space where you may talk freely and in confidence about the troubling moral issues of the day. Go ahead.

Have you been tossing and turning? Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson have been in touch with each other's people concerning the prospect of getting back into a ring together. There presumably they would float like butterballs and sting like cheese. Don King would sell the show.

(Cocoon? This Time It's Dessert? Jurassic Park Three? More Flab, Less Ab?)

And perhaps if, as has hitherto been unsuspected, Evander Holyfield (very much the Steve Davis of fisticuffs, don't you think?) possesses the heart of the panto star, he might proffer his ear for Mike to chew on with some fava beans and a nice Chianti between rounds.

All the old jokes could get dredged up. Evander The Real Meal Holyfield, live on payperchew.

We in the media are pretending we are unsettled. We aren't really. The thing is I probably speak for most of us media pond scum when I say my instant reaction on reading of this reunion idea was that getting Tyson and Holyfield into a ring to reprise one of the most controversial and sad episodes of modern sport would be a tawdry, undignified, dangerous and exploitative exercise in money-making. And secondly that I want to be there to see it close up. Need to be there.

So, let's get it on.

Why all the moral handwringing? Tyson v Holyfield wasn't such a morally enriching idea back in 1997 when Mike got his pearly whites into Evander's lobe in the first place. It had been seven years since Tyson lost his world title to James Buster Douglas, seven years during which Tyson had been jailed for rape, served his time and beaten the, uhm, mighty Bruce Seldon to be handed the WBC heavyweight crown only to have his ass whupped by Holyfield in their first bout.

Tyson v Holyfield II was only ever going to end one way (okay, okay, nobody thought Tyson would actually attempt to bite his opponent's ear off; that was novel), so let's not pretend 11 years later putting the two men back into a ring and making a squillion dollars out of it would somehow degrade a noble lineage.

We all bought into the notion of putting a dangerously damaged human like Tyson into the ring in the first place. We paid to view and paid to be there when the rages which consumed Tyson and the sheer power which distinguished him made it more likely he would kill an opponent than either he or Holyfield would keel over with a coronary during any third bout between them.

Let's face it: we all happily got ringside for the exploitation of the young Tyson - a man who needed love and therapy more than he needed Don King's hand in his pocket - because in those brief, attenuated bouts which marked Tyson's pomp his fury and his wrecking-ball fists were more likely to provide us with the spectacle of real tragedy in the ring than to give us a morally uplifting storyline.

When I read some of the wounded moral outpourings about the latest Holyfield v Tyson wheeze I was reminded of something that happened to me on Christmas Eve last year.

Running (yeah, yeah, gazelle-like as ever) down O'Connell Street, I was stopped by a man who needed a word. He was still (implausibly, I know) exercised by the fact this paper had published that interview with Roy Keane back in Saipan in 2002. He felt that in the "national interest " the paper should not have published it.

It was Christmas Eve, and despite my gazelle-like appearance I was a little out of breath and dizzy and on the verge of a blackout so I just nodded and said okay, fair enough, but went away thinking, national interest? What, we were going to be invaded? Not doing well at the World Cup was going to induce famine and pestilence? There was going to be more Twink on the television?

It was a professional football tournament! There was a big story which diverted the nation from all its real troubles. National interest didn't come into it.

The point is whether we - the tiresome, sanctimonious media - should even pretend to be the moral arbiters of sport anymore. We don't have the energy, and professional sport doesn't have the will.

Perhaps we should just cover it all in tones of jaded cynicism until those rare moments come around when we are genuinely entertained or genuinely uplifted.

Tyson v Holyfield? Is it less morally reprehensible than Manchester City flying two of their players to Thailand to help with the PR spin as Thaksin Shinawatra, the old dictator, goes through the charade of appearing to fend off corruption charges and attempts to unfreeze, oh, €1 billion of his assets? Should we all pretend we can't figure out that Shinawatra wouldn't have got the plane home if taking a walk on the corruption rap wasn't a done deal already and that the players are just there to help people forget.

We'll tune in happily in a few months' time as the great commercial bazaar that is the Olympic Games gets cranked up in Beijing. What will be the appetite for hearing about the cost of the Beijing Games in terms of China's human-rights abuses?

Won't we all be too jaded to think about the eternal drugs problem which dogs and devalues Olympic sport? Of course we will. There will be no editors howling for pieces of that sort, because nobody wants to read them.

Tyson and Holyfield! I warm to the idea every time I think of it. It's made for the venality of Vegas and the greasy, clanging till of pay-per-view.

It could be emblematic of the entire modern era of professional sports, a great big cotton-candy fest of hype triumphing over substance, of notoriety exceeding reputation, of excess being better than success.

Bring it on! Send in the clowns!

And there are consolations to this dirty new realism which we must embrace. We in the media will be closer in essence to the sports people we cover than we ever have been. We shall be - as Mike Tyson said of himself recently - "working entertainers". Come on. Put away the smelling salts and the pulpit. Let's get ready to rumble.

Ears d'oeuvres, anyone?