Mike in pre-fight funk

Dean Juipe

Friday, Jan. 15, 1999 | 11:15 a.m.

Former champion's dark side resurfaces for bout with Botha

Progressively surly and uncooperative as the week went on, Mike Tyson comes into his Saturday fight with a figurative chip on his shoulder.

His mood has darkened.

Call it a sharpening of his focus or merely the resurfacing of his less temperate side, the former undisputed heavyweight champ shares more than a few characteristics with a ticking time bomb.

Unusually congenial in the weeks leading up to his fight with Frans Botha at the MGM Grand Garden, Tyson, for the past few days, has reverted to his sullen, easy to provoke, ways.

He hasn't had much to say and what little he has offered is unprintable in a newspaper and unusable on television. Expletives and their mandatory deletions are flustering editors everywhere.

But even if Tyson had something to say, it would have to be taken with a degree of suspicion. After all, it's Tyson who was the source of stories that indicated he was being paid $20 million or $30 million or even $35 million for this fight, when, in truth, the real figure is an almost un-Tyson-like $10 million.

That's the sum that was filed on Tyson's behalf with the Nevada State Athletic Commission on Thursday.

By grossly exaggerating his take for the slow-selling fight, Tyson may have exposed himself as a chronic spinner of tall tales. If so, that may help explain many of the comments he gave during a series of late 1998 interviews that painted him as not only compulsive but dangerously insecure.

For instance, he told Playboy magazine that "my life is doomed the way it is." And "I expect the worst to happen in my life." And "there's not much more of this s - - - I can take." And "I've been f - - - - - most of my life." And, perhaps the topper, "I know I'm going to blow one of these days."

Truth is, the real Tyson is an extremely complex individual who also happens to be a fabulous prize fighter. He's an unpredictable man of limited patience.

Botha tested that patience just a bit at Thursday's weigh-in before his manager, Sterling McPherson, intervened. After each man got off the scales -- Botha weighed 233 pounds and Tyson came in at 223 -- promoter Dan Goossen demanded the pair pose for pictures. There was an uneasy silence between the fighters although Botha was inching forward toward Tyson in defiance when McPherson pulled him back.

That wasn't staged. Botha has grown weary of Tyson's sometimes childish behavior and he was looking to take a stand.

Tyson, however, barely acknowledged his existence.

"Hey, I'm not fighting (Evander) Holyfield," he said a day earlier when asked why he didn't seem to respect Botha or even have anything to say about him.

Obviously, it will be up to Botha to earn that respect when they fight Saturday in a 10-round bout that tops a nine-fight card. Slow ticket sales aside, the fight will be available on pay-per-view virtually around the world.

For an accurate measure of Tyson's appeal, consider that boxing events have provided the top 11 pay-per-view audiences of all time and that Tyson has been a participant in seven of the 11. More specifically, Tyson has been a participant in seven of the top nine pay-per-view events of all time, topped by his June 28, 1997, fight with Holyfield.

The fact that Tyson is able to generate money was no small consideration for the NSAC when it voted to relicense him last October following a 16-month period, during which his license was revoked for twice biting Holyfield's ears in that 1997 fight.

That fight was worth $30 million to Tyson and contributed to him earning an almost unfathomable $140 million for the six fights that followed his 1995 release from prison. (He served three years of a six-year sentence in Indiana for sexual assault.)

Nonetheless, the IRS handed him a delinquent tax bill for $12 million in '96 and Tyson supposedly still owes $7 million toward that debt.

"I'm not tight with the dollar," he says. "I'm very frivolous at times."

He admits to having purchased 110 cars since first becoming a heavyweight champ in 1986. He once spent $1.5 million on five automobiles at Jim Chaisson Motors in Las Vegas and needed only a few minutes to do it.

"We had to scramble," Chaisson said of meeting Tyson's order.

Jewelry is another weakness, one that resulted in him having a credit line for $800,000 at a local store, The Jewelers of Las Vegas. Later, however, the store sued Tyson for $805,000.

That suit is just one in a staggering total filed against Tyson during the 1990s. As it stands, he has at least two significant suits pending, one against his former promoter, Don King, for $100 million and one filed against him by King for $110 million.

"I don't know about all that," Tyson habitually says of his financial dealings. "I can spend a quarter of a million dollars in a weekend on a good time."

To meet those fanciful desires, he needs to keep the fans interested and he needs a fairly steady run of big-money fights.

"I put people in body bags when I'm right," he says of his appeal, and his record all but verifies that outrageous claim.

Despite his consecutive losses to Holyfield, Tyson is 45-3 with 39 knockouts in a pro career that dates from 1985. A fairly diminutive slugger at only 5-foot-11, Tyson has a sculptured physique and a warrior's mentality.

For the better part of his reign, fans loved him for his no-nonsense approach. He's still the same, yet boxing fans have been standoffish in their approach to this fight with Botha.

Arguably, that's what has Tyson all but raging mad as the fight nears. If he was counting on a pay-per-view bonanza that might lead to something like a $35 million payday, reality has since picked his pocket.

"I don't care about money, but I love to spend it," he said during a recent civil, if not tame, interview.

But now he's hostile. During a series of snippet-like interviews he did with TV stations around the country Tuesday, he swore so repeatedly that it was beyond being casual. He was doing it with malice, making the interviews themselves worthless in terms of on-the-air value.

"What do you want from me?" he asked to no one in particular.

To Playboy, he said "I'm the extreme psycho. I'm a scumbag and I don't trust anyone."

As confessions go, that one may or may not have been good for his soul.

"I don't know what the hell's wrong with me," he said after exposing himself in Playboy and perhaps having second thoughts about it. "I'm just always feeling no one cares."

At times like that, he cuts a sympathetic figure. Underprivileged as a youth in New York, he went on a meteoric rise from street punk to adulated world champion.

Few could have made the journey unscathed.

Yet he still brings dishonor to himself on occasion and might even be headed back to prison, the result of pleading no-contest to a pair of assault charges in Maryland that followed an Aug. 31 traffic accident in a Washington suburb. Sentencing on those charges is expected next month and, if nothing else, Tyson could see his probation revoked in Indiana. (It expires in March.)

Nonetheless, before his withdrawal in recent days, he had a devil-may-care outlook on life.

"I live hard," he said. "I play hard. Life's pretty interesting when you do it like that."