The Rust Settles on Iron Mike Via NY Transfer News Collective - All the News that Doesn't Fit THE RUST SETTLES ON IRON MIKE By Jon Hillson LOS ANGELES (NY Transfer)--There are some long faces when I come into work on Sunday morning on the United Airlines ramp at Los Angeles International Airport. A lot of money rode on The Fight the night before, and it had saddled up on Iron Mike, who ends the evening as Prone Mickey, wobbling on his knees. This lasting image is a long way from his prediction that he would "crush the skull" of his foe, reigning champion Lennox Lewis. A lot of guys I work with who have these long faces are pretty savvy types, and you'd think they'd know better, but they like Mike. And because of that they listen to Mike. And because of that Mike takes them, and a lot of other people, to the cleaners. The rust had settled a long time ago on Iron Mike. He had gotten beaten up by Buster Douglas in Tokyo in 1990, kayoed by a 42-1 long shot. He had spent three years in the can for rape. He returned to the ring, met Evander Holyfield twice, losing both times -- first by knockout, then by disqualification, after he orally assaulted Holyfield's ear, proving he'd bitten off more than he could chew. His punches were bigger and more powerful than Muhammad Ali's, and for sheer ferocity there's been no one quite like him -- maybe Stanley Ketchel 80 years ago; you get the picture. But those who compare him to Ali as a person, a figure, a personality, are way off-base. Ali's boxing skills of speed and style remain unparalleled. No heavyweight ever like him. But what made Ali was the inner person, the real fighter -- not the boxer -- who stood up to everything the U.S. government could throw at him. The charges, the insults, the banning. He was hated by liberals and conservatives, by virtually the entire official sports industry and all of its hangers-on. They despised him for being who he was, what he did, and when he did it. They reviled him for never, ever giving in. Malcolm X was in his dressing room and at ringside in Miami when he beat Sonny Liston, the last night he was called Cassius Clay. Ali grew up in, became part of, and drew strength from massive, history-making social movements -- the Black struggle for freedom, and the anti-Vietnam war battles it inspired -- both of them worldwide struggles. Mike has always grown from, been part of, and been enabled by one thing: the promotion. As his career careened in limbo, Tyson got busted anew, served three months for assault, and came back again. He punished a string of what in boxing parlance are called tomato cans. Palookas, or guys who never were or would be fighters, in there for a payday. Pugs with china chins and glass jaws who hugged, held, and went down with a single blow. After the contract between Tyson and Lewis gets signed -- a complicated task, since many promoters, rival cable moguls from HBO and Showtime, respective entourages, and other bottom-feeders were salivating so much over the potential lucre that the ink might run -- Iron Mike's real work begins. Chief promoter. You see, Tyson is a shot fighter, as they say. I'm not talking about his "character." That's a subject that's as out of place in boxing as it would be in a discussion about the morals of investment banking, CEO compensation packages or U.S. foreign policy. I'm not for putting boxing under the "character" microscope, while the real thugs, bums, and crooks get to look civilized just because they don't beat up each other personally, for pay. Others are employed to do their dirty work. And I'm not going into his mental state, which this time around was a function of the con. "We're discussing him like he was Charles Manson," Bob Poppa complains on ESPN. "He's just a fighter." But not much of one anymore. Tyson hadn't had real competition for years, hadn't won a big fight for a decade. He was, in a word, old. And not the old Mike -- who, if you like boxing, pushed your adrenalin button faster than anybody since Muhammad Ali. Tyson lets fly a few wild lines. He had talked earlier about how he would "eat [Lewis's] children," a neat feat, since Lennox is childless. He swore a lot at news conferences, flaunting his bullying, take-no-prisoners aura, showing off the tattoos of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and Mao Zedong that adorn his body and that have everything to do with image and nothing to do with ideas. In a staged incident waiting to happen -- a photo opportunity supposedly to announce the contract -- Tyson had approached Lewis and took a half-hearted swing at him. A brawl ensued -- big guys in derbies hitting guys in suits -- and Mike mistook Lennox's thigh for finger food. Will there be a fight or a train wreck? That's the tease. The pre-fight build-up features Mike doing a Houdini imitation, trying to escape from the present and reinvent himself as the invincible gladiator of yore, no matter how undistinguished his previous years -- between the ropes -- had been. The kept press, the boxing media, and much of celebrity, which likes to been seen at ringside, gets on board, big time. The odds in Las Vegas -- where the state boxing commission had, my goodness, suddenly discovered its moral center, refusing to license Tyson to fight in Nevada -- almost reaches the level of a pick 'em: two-to-one, for Lewis. The odds indicate everybody is doing their bit in the promotion. They also signal a certain prejudice against Lewis. For the better part of a decade, he has punched out everybody he fought -- including avenging two knock-out losses. But because Lewis is of gentlemanly bearing, almost above it all, and speaks with British twang -- born in Jamaica, raised in Canada, fighting out of London -- he sems more like the unfighter. I like him because he wears long braids and puts them in a bun when he fights, and to me that's both style and guts. The spin was, you get Mike against Lennox and there's finally a real hombre in the ring. The Street puts the Brit in his place. Lennox plays a chess exhibition before the fight, getting checkmated by a 13-year-old. Tyson's shills talk about ripping out Lewis's intestines as one of his handlers -- that's the nice word -- tells the media that the champ "has a lot of bitch in him." Tyson is a one-man public relations firm, advertising agency, and infomercial rolled into one. The guy has turned a Ford Pinto into a late model beamer. He sells woof tickets to the willing. It begins to affect me. I'm beginning to think he has a shot. The hype -- not the fix -- is in, and it had enlisted everybody. Pay-per-view breaks all records, at $55 a pop, with 1.8 million buys and a gross of $103 million. The guys I work with, the ones with the long faces, don't just buy the fight. Failing to heed the famous warning, they believe the hype. The scam goes right up to the opening bell. Beefy, yellow-jacketed security guards form a diagonal line across the breadth of the ring between the two neutral corners. The pugilists will not be allowed to go nose-to-nose in the tradition of the stare-down, a theatrical staple of professional boxing. This is supposed to ensure that Mike doesn't succumb to the temptation to take a chew of Lennox's close-by snout. But there's never a chance of that. Lots of the fancy make it to the Pyramid in Memphis, an edifice of black glass that is also known as the Temple of Doom. You catch glimpses of, in alphabetical order: Tyra Banks, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Hasselhoff, Morgan Freeman, Mel Gibson, Cuba Gooding, Samuel L. Jackson, Jay-Z, Val Kilmer, Tobey MacGuire, Alonzo Mourning, the Rock, Chris Webber, and probably others whose names didn't make the coverage due to unwritten limit on name-dropping. The well-heeled pay a minimum of $2,500 to get close to the ring, in a city with one of the highest per capita rates of personal bankruptcy in the country. No cheap seats for the riff-raff. For the pre-fight show, the promoters solicit comments from all sorts of people picking the winner, leaving just the right balance between the two combatants. Welterweight champion Vernon Forrest, one of the best boxers in the world, puts his money on Tyson because "I like him." I like the Red Sox but you don't catch me betting on them. My favorite prediction is offered by former Olympian Nancy Kerrigan. She was only, she says, for a "clean fight." Smiling, she makes you remember that mugging a while back when she wasn't, and the term low blow joined triple axel and double lutz in the nicey-nice world of figure skating. The ice queen gets her wish. It is clean, but hardly the dramatic Rumble in the Jungle -- Ali's upset of George Foreman, or the epic Thriller in Manila -- Ali's wrenching conquest of Joe Frazier. It is the Mismatch in Memphis, the What Is against the Has Been. Tyson actually wins the first round. But as soon as Lewis shrugs off his best punches you know it's over. Target practice begins in round two, and Lennox is in command until the end. This comes mercifully in the eighth, with both of Tyson's eyelids slit and swollen by the effect of more than 100 on-target jabs from the champion's piston-like left hand. Iron Mike gets crumpled by a sweeping right, and keels over backwards like a diver on a bad day. It is the last of 193 punches that Lewis lands in less than 24 minutes. That's about one every seven seconds, and means lights out. Tyson is, as the cognoscenti say, "gracious in defeat." He praises Lewis, wipes his own blood from the champion's head, and kisses Lennox's mom. He thanks Lewis for "the wonderful payday." Tyson the promoter delivers Tyson the punching bag. He even stays calm as smart-aleck Showtime commentator Jim Gray patronizingly praises him for transcending his previous style of "behavior." This mealy remark gets up the dander of Los Angeles Lakers star center Shaquille O'Neal, who must suffer an NBC on-court interview with the cloying Gray the following evening after a playoff victory. As the reporter and his microphone trail him, O'Neal gets in the last word: "Mike should have knocked you out Saturday night," he laughs at Gray. Tyson aside, Shaq gets props from a few million people for making this point, me among them. What next for the rust man? "Pay me enough money," the loser says, "and I'll fight a lion. Fighters never really retire. We hang on until the very last moment." Actually, and unfortunately, long after the last moment. The boxing racket is carnivorous, and it's just about done with Iron Mike's use-value. He's been a profitable investment, enriching all sorts of human beings you wouldn't want to break bread with and here is the product, finished, in debt up to his ears and ready to put on the trunks again. More than half of Tyson's near quarter-billion dollars in purses have ended up in the pockets of somebody else, among them so-called managers who took 50 percent off the top. There are liens from lawyers and networks on his current haul, along with a pending suit by vampire promoter Don King and an upcoming, big-time divorce settlement. Unlike in other sports, there's no players union in boxing, no pension fund, no healthcare benefits. This is why every once in a while you get to see a heart-rending human interest piece on a sports show about a fund-raising effort for a fighter suffering pugilistic dementia, or a former champion living in a homeless shelter, or an ex-contender who can't remember his name, and all the guys at the benefit say what a great guy he was and drop a sawbuck in the collection plate and leave to await their limousines and talk about what a good feed they put on for what's his name. I think about Muhammad Ali today, who hung on and on and on. He trembles so much he's barely able to speak, even as his rebel past is whitewashed and he is turned into a harmless national icon. That makes me tremble too, but not because I'm punch drunk. Tyson's fate will be worse. Emmanuel Steward, Lewis's longtime trainer, and one of the more astute in his trade, says: "Lennox just played with [Tyson]. If Mike had been a sparring partner, we would have gotten rid of him." But the promotion to which Tyson, in his many faces, guises, and voices was essential, brought $20 million to each camp, and buckets more to the wheels who called the shots. Tyson became, in Steward's words just 48 hours before the fight, "the most dangerous man Lennox has ever faced." Hide the tomato can. Bring on Iron Mike. "I don't have nowhere to go or nothing to do," Tyson says. "I'll just go fly my pigeons on the roof in New York. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm just going to chill out with my children and fly my birds." I also think of Teofilio Stevenson, the multiple world amateur and Olympic champion from Cuba, who more than three decades ago rejected a million-dollar offer to fight Muhammad Ali. Teo said no to the bribe, said he had everything he needed in Cuba, where the revolution had long ago abolished commercialism in sports and organized an amateur athletics movement to which millions have access. Stevenson walks tall and speaks clearly today, long after retirement. He's an elected member of Cuba's parliament. And neither he nor his constituents are known to tremble. Today the sports pages are full of post-fight post mortems. I wonder where were all these bright scribes the day before, now entertaining us with their know-it-all, I told you so commentaries. One of my coworkers with a long face thinks Mike will make a comeback. There is a rematch clause in the contract. He will take out Lewis the next time. I roll my eyes. He insists. "Just you wait," he says, without much conviction. Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon Hillson, NY Transfer. 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