Charming with brutality

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003 | 9:05 a.m.

Mike Tyson makes his entrance, and, as if on cue, reacquaints those in his presence with his unique brand of outrageousness.

Prefacing a Friday interview with reporters from the Sun, USA Today and the New York Times, the former heavyweight champion says he can talk about anything except the possibility of landing a Hollywood or TV acting role. A few sexually suggestive obscenities later, those who have gathered to peek or pry into his mind realize anything that might be said over the coming hour has half a chance of being whimsy.

Tyson, in his own repugnant way, is calculatedly brilliant. He knows what sells, and he's determined to deliver it.

"I don't charm people," he said. "I charm them with brutality."

And he's so good at it, he intends to extend his reign as a public figure -- if not a professional fighter -- well into the foreseeable future.

"I'm still here, ain't that something?" he said. "I keep it real. I walk it like I talk it.

"My life is a story."

And a well-chronicled one at that. Yet for all the statistical and biographical data that compiles his background, if not his rap sheet, Tyson is forever fresh.

The perception that he is aloof, standoffish or withdrawn barely registers on those infrequent days when he makes himself available for an interview. Wind him up: Tyson bursts with enthusiasm and self-deprecating invective.

"I'm like a woman, so it's difficult for me to get along with a woman," he says, two very public marriages and divorces slanting his view. Whether it was Robin Givens (in 1988) or Monica Turner (in 1997), Tyson was eventually dismissed by his partner in spite of astronomical wealth and the presence of children.

The three children he had with Turner are now virtually off-limits to him, although he currently has a 13-year-old daughter, a niece of the same age and a nine-month-old son living with him in Las Vegas.

The Osbournes, it can be assumed, have nothing on the Tysons.

"I'm like a woman going through my daughter's room," he admits, embellishing the tale with his disgust for the endless disarray of toiletries that clutter the chamber.

"I want her to stay with me forever, but this is looking very difficult," he says, drawing out the latter word for emphasis and eliciting a chuckle from the reporters and his camp hands who have encircled him on this day at the Golden Gloves Gym.

The daughter has designs on her own brand of fame, which her father has attempted to extinguish.

"I told her, 'No baby, Daddy's the only celebrity in this house,' " Tyson said. "I don't let no one in my family outshine me."

Turner, who lives in suburban Washington, D.C., limits the exposure her children have with her ex-husband.

"I love Monica implicitly," Tyson said. "But I can only have supervised visits with my kids, like I'm a child molester. She makes me feel very small sometimes."

Asked if his family life might make for suitable TV fare, Tyson balks.

"This won't be no sitcom," he said, adding that the world isn't ready for weekly intrusions into what might be a disfunctional African-American home. "I don't have the patience."

Yet Hollywood has an interest in Tyson and may settle for a series of TV shows in which some unfortunate soul is "lucky" enough to win the right to fight Tyson. "But I ain't going down there til they pay me," Tyson said as a forewarning to those who make such decisions in California.

As for how such a show might do, Tyson sees it for what it is. "Oh, it's going to get some ratings," he said with a robust glee.

So this is Mike Tyson, in demand on a number of fronts even if his future is perpetually cloudy. The only certainty: He will find a way to make, and spend, a buck.

On his immediate agenda is a Feb. 22 fight with Cliff Etienne in Memphis, an event that comes with lopsided implications even if Tyson is 36 and in decline as a fighter. After all, Etienne was knocked down seven times during his loss to midlevel talent Fres Oquendo, and Tyson -- sleek and durable, based on his appearance -- remains a mighty puncher.

"He's a tough, determined guy, but we're going to do a number on this cat," Tyson said, including trainer Freddie Roach and assistants such as Jeff Fenech, Tyrone Boone and Panama Lewis as part of his collective self. Asked if he thought Etienne was a poor match for a supposedly rejuvenated slugger on a mission, Tyson weighed in with a reference from his past.

"That's what you said about Buster Douglas," he countered, 13 years having passed since one of the greatest upsets of all time.

Considerably less stunning, although almost equally dramatic, was Tyson's loss by eighth-round knockout last June to heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis.

"I'm a prima donna and I thought I was bigger than boxing," Tyson says, implying that he didn't properly prepare for the fight in Memphis.

"I just got the s- - - beat out of me," he adds. "I could have stopped in the second round ... I was hurt ... but I wanted to go to my last breath."

His incentive: the late Cus D'Amato, who began training him at the age of 13, would have wanted it that way.

"It was, 'Stay in there and take your beating like a man,' " Tyson insisted.

Written off by many after a loss that dropped his record to 49-4 with 43 KOs, Tyson has, instead, regrouped under Roach's direction and is looking at a likely rematch with Lewis this summer.

"I waited til my face healed and started training again," Tyson said of the recovery process. "You always get over it."

He is, by his own if not others' account, immensely enduring and the focal point of a sport driven solely by the bottom line.

"I'm the only guy who can rule (boxing)," he said. "It's not about beating everybody."

Tyson was paid $17.5 million for the first fight with Lewis, although creditors (including the Showtime cable network) used the bout as a means of collecting on a debt that approached $12 million. A rematch with Lewis might bring a similar monetary avalanche, and it is apt to be in Las Vegas (where Tyson has already earned $169 million in his career).

Of course for all of the cash that passes through his hands, Tyson has an almost maniacal desire to spend it.

"I just do whatever makes me happy at the time," he said, and he has had the cars, homes, exotic animals and costly entourage to prove it. In court papers filed pertaining to his lawsuit against promoter Don King (who is, likewise, suing Tyson), Tyson listed his pocket expenses at $236,000 per month.

He finds female companionship especially alluring and he doesn't shy from expressing his desire for a certain sexual act. He mentioned that same act when recalling a meeting with fellow boxer Oscar De La Hoya and the threatening manner in which he approached the Golden Boy.

"I'm an animal," he said, and that might be the best way to condense the brush with De La Hoya and his fitful bodyguards.

Tyson loves these types of clashes, as if a confrontation is a mandatory outgrowth of any by-chance meeting with him. And yet he has said "I hate myself every day of my life" as if he truly means it.

His confessional characteristics never fail to amaze.

"I'm not emotionally mature," he says. "I'm just a guy who gets angry (and) if you get angry, people think you are one of the toughest guys in the world."

Iron Mike, the "Baddest Man on the Planet" as he is still affectionately branded, implies that his ferocity is but a ruse.

"I'm a delight, I'm humble," he says, as if his many transgressions were little more than the building blocks of his fame.

A juvenile delinquent who later surrendered three years in the prime of his boxing career in an Indianapolis prison on a sexual-assault conviction, Tyson is forever paying a price for his spontaneous combustions. Since the Indiana prison stay he has also bitten the ear of fellow fighter Evander Holyfield in a bout in Las Vegas, served four months in jail after a road-rage incident near Washington, D.C., and been the subject of almost countless sexually related charges and lawsuits brought by everyone from strippers to restaurant diners.

He also bit Lewis' leg during the pandemonium of a press conference gone awry in New York City, which prevented that fight from being held in Las Vegas as it was initially scheduled.

"It's broken, but we try to mend our lives sometimes," he said with an air of peacefulness that he hopes extends to him being relicensed in Nevada this spring.

And why wouldn't he be? With no pressing legal problems as well as his stature as a cash cow of almost record proportions, the state will almost certainly welcome him back once the rematch with Lewis -- or a similar fight -- is on the docket.

"Nobody can take anything away from a Tyson show," he boasts, impervious to defeat both in and out of the ring. "

archive