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Mike Tyson, master manipulator? ... Uh, no
© St. Petersburg Times Silly me. I fell for it. All this time, I thought Mike Tyson was an idiot. I thought he was a once-and-future convict, a ranting, raving nut-job who should be parachuted into Afghanistan at the nearest opportunity. I thought he was a bad person in a bad profession living a bad life. You can imagine my embarrassment. Yep, I was flabbergasted to discover that, all this time Tyson has been pulling the collective leg of the nation. That Mikey. What a kidder. At least, this is a possibility raised in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, where the musical question is asked whether Tyson is "the ultimate psycho celebrity in the midst of a public breakdown -- or the shrewdest self-promoter in boxing history." Aha. All this time, he was being shrewd. Why didn't I think of that? There is a moment, just before everyone leaps from behind the furniture and yells "Surprise!" when you know you have been had. In those frozen seconds of time, you realize that reality as you knew it has altered and you are, in fact, stuck at a bad party while wearing a pointy hat. This is sort of like that. Turns out, Tyson isn't the bloodthirsty, rule-breaking, out-of-control meltdown we had believed him to be. He's a Svengali who knows just which hot buttons to push and when. He's a media manipulator who is playing a role to help hype his fights. Riii-iiight. It was bound to come to this. When someone is whacked beyond belief, after a while, you don't believe it. For years now, Tyson has been more of a professional loon than a boxer, keeping the purses high with the promise of blood on his chin. It was a matter of time, then, before someone began to suspect this was all planned in the name of advertising. Next thing you'll tell me is that Crazy Eddie isn't really crazy. It's an act? All this time, when Tyson was chewing on human flesh, and threatening to kill Lennox Lewis' children, and blaming the media for writing about him because it made it impossible for him to, uh, "date" nice women, he was just trying to juice the gate? When he was being crass about women, about racism, about religion, about the United States, he was just trying to sell pay-per-view? And his rape conviction? Was that all theater, too? Was he really on a sabbatical, playing chess with Bobby Fischer and writing his memoirs, instead of in prison? The marriage to Robin Givens. We've seen her work; she's no actor. And was the hunk of ear missing from Evander Holyfield's head just special effects, like Hayden Christensen's arm in the new Star Wars movie? Uh-huh. As conspiracy theories go, I like it. You can just see Mike, sitting around the room with other image-shapers such as Elvis Presley, Madonna and Michael Jackson and talking about how he had fooled the media. "Yep, you're the man," Madonna would say. "It reminds me of back in the day, when I fooled everyone into thinking I had loose morals. I have to thank the NBA and Major League Baseball for acting along so no one bothered me when I was working with the homeless." "That's nothing," Elvis says. "Not only am I not dead, I didn't even like fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches." "Did you see what I did?" Jackson says. "I told people I wanted to buy the Elephant Man's bones, and the newspapers printed it. They said I spent my nights in a sleep chamber. They said my best friend was a chimp. Can you believe the media?" It's the same with Tyson. I'll bet he doesn't even have the voice of Tweety Bird. I'll bet, when no one is listening, the guy sounds like Pavarotti. Deep voice. Deep thoughts. And so it was some time back when Tyson, intelligent and sensitive soul that he is, noticed his boxing skills were somewhat faded. (Perhaps he noticed this when a palooka named Buster Douglas broke his face. Unless, of course, you suspect Tyson was being shrewd by losing, too.) Was Tyson to be forgotten like yesterday's meatloaf? (Oops. That isn't meatloaf. It's Riddick Bowe. Sorry, Riddick.) Or was he going to come up with a grand scheme to retain his main-event status? Aha, Tyson thought. I'll become a wild man! I'll be uncontrollable! I'll be a mindless, unthinking predator with rocks in his head! When it was pointed out that Tyson was talking about stealing the act of George "the Animal" Steele, Tyson was undaunted. "I'm not going to settle for George Steele," you can imagine him saying. "I'm going to be Hannibal Lecter!" Yes, it has worked for him. Every time Tyson goes wiggy, people tend to forget he hasn't been a good fighter since disco. Line up his opposition, and it looks very much like the original cast of the Love Boat. As long as he threatens to eat Gopher's kidneys, who cares? Every now and then, Tyson says something that makes you think he's trying to foster the image that this is all marketing. He talks about Hemingway and Machiavelli, which shows he's intelligent. He talks about owning a thousand pigeons, which shows he's sensitive. He spent almost $4.5-million on cars in 33 months, which shows he's generous (he didn't even ask for the zero percent interest clause). Over the years, we've all called Mike a lot of names. Cannibal. Rapist. Thug. Cretin. But shrewd? Someone's pulling your leg. But it isn't Tyson. It's Sports Illustrated.
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