Columnist Dean Juipe: Tyson could feel betrayed by adviser

Dean Juipe

Friday, Feb. 1, 2002 | 9:41 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Advice is cheap, unless you're paying for it. And then it becomes very expensive.

Yet even the wealthiest client has no assurances that the advice he or she is receiving is worth a damn or any better than what they could get from the corner drunk or a sports columnist.

It's no consolation to him, but if Mike Tyson were to experience a clairvoyant moment he might easily question the money he has invested and the value he has received from his supposed adviser, Shelly Finkel.

Finkel is a New York businessman who seemingly makes a good living without any of his three prominent boxing clients having much to show for precisely what he -- and he alone -- has delivered to them.

He has Tyson, whose demeanor and current situation speaks for itself to some extent.

He also has a junior middleweight champion, Fernando Vargas, who is currently under house arrest in California and whose sorry attitude and lack of professionalism is an acute problem that never seems to be addressed.

And he also has a former junior welterweight champion, Zab Judah, who enjoys looking as if he just stepped out of the ghetto and who, when last seen in Nevada, was sticking his glove in referee Jay Nady's face as a way of protesting a stoppage.

Not one of these fighters is a decent guy or a real man in the richest sense of the word. In street vernacular, they might well be described as punks.

While Finkel, of course, cannot be held directly responsible for his clients' behavioral problems, there's a pattern here and it reflects as poorly on him as it does them.

The mainstream boxing media sucks up to sycophants such as Finkel, but in his case I truly wonder why. And why would any rising or potentially significant fighter want to have this man, with his recent track record, charged with guiding his career?

Whether Finkel manages to get Tyson a fight with Lennox Lewis or not, just look at how ineffective he was this week in Las Vegas when the matter of licensing the ex-champion came to a head. Finkel himself was accused of lying by a member of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and the local attorney he agreed to let represent Tyson failed miserably when it came to the most pertinent and determining item of the discussion.

What sent Tyson's chances of being licensed spiraling toward the denial he eventually received was his vague claim of having received psychotherapy -- as the NSAC had requested years earlier -- without providing documentation of those sessions or their results. The attorney, Bob Faiss, should have made sure Tyson didn't misstate the apparent facts, as Tyson appeared to be doing during questioning from the panel.

That critical mistake had Tyson looking as if he had fibbed, Faiss looking as if he hadn't done his homework and Finkel looking as if any blowhard from the audience could have replaced him and done just as well.

Despite their failures, the men around Tyson -- and there are a bunch of them, extending well down the food chain from Finkel and Faiss -- can look at the fighter as a cash cow.

The oddity: Tyson thinks he's using them and being dutifully represented, but from my perspective they're the ones who are surely using him.