TYSON: A Capsule Review

Just watched Tyson last night, a documentary by James Toback about the great heavyweight boxing champ of my childhood. Surprising how much of the Tyson history was familiar: I remember the Sports Illustrated cover with Tyson smiling broadly, not a care in the world, proclaiming the 19-year-old "Kid Dynamite!" I remember when Barbara Walters interviewed him and his then-wife, Robin Givens, together, and Givens all but screaming at Walters to get her the hell out of the marriage while Iron Mike looked on, incredulous, but keeping it together against all odds. I felt sorry for him then--the animal in the ring, his personal failings picked apart by two hyperarticulate women on national TV. I remember some of the stories of his tutelage under the great Cus D'Amato, and Tyson's incredible sense of loss when the old man died.

Then, of course, there was the freakshow: the rape conviction, the three-year stint in prison, the comeback, the ear-biting incident with Evander Holyfield, the precipitous decline into hubris as he began showing up ill-prepared for fights, his ignominious defeat at the hands of the far lesser Buster Douglas, his eventual, and perhaps inevitable, financial ruin at the hands of unscrupulous managers; his sad, final fight in 2005 with McBride, in which he refused to come out for the seventh round; his public admission, right after the fight, that he'd taken the fight for money only (not that anyone was surprised), that he was sorry to have let the fans down, and that he didn't have the 'guts' anymore to fight.

And yet. When you see Tyson in his prime, he is a machine. He's so shockingly fast that the camera can barely record him. His movements are so precise and smooth that it's hard to believe you're not watching a middleweight. And, as Tyson himself says, he took joy in what he was doing. In staring down another man, in beating him before the fight even began. I have never watched a lot of boxing, but when you see the Tyson fights of the late '80's and early '90's, it's easy to see you're watching not just uncontrolled power and balled-up anger let loose, but true athletic prowess along the lines of a Michael Jordan, or, perhaps more fittingly, Bruce Lee.

So the events of the movie were a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, as I imagine it would be for anyone of my generation. Tyson was always out there, and everyone, it seemed, knew that if he showed up in shape, kept it all together, listened to the right people, and stayed out of trouble, he was unstoppable. His only real adversary, as with so many highly-talented but self-destructive types, was himself (interesting that director Toback has worked so often with Robert Downey, Jr., himself no slouch in the talent/self-destruction department), and at this point, it seems to be a fight that Tyson has more or less lost.

We know the story, then. What the movie does so well is allow Tyson himself to tell it. Three-quarters of the movie is Iron Mike, talking to the camera in his strange, lisping, gentle voice, recounting his version of the history I grew up with. He grandstands; he falls into Don King/Ali-style rhyming platitudes; he's self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, at times, strangely, self-knowing. Oddly, it looks good on him: Tyson is far better-looking now than in the last few years of his fighting career. I don't know if he'll be able to put together much of a post-fighting career, but after seeing the movie I'm actually kind of hoping he does. When I was growing up and following the Mike Tyson saga, the guy always sounded crazy, scary, ferocious, horribly misguided and immature. The movie doesn't fully dispel any of these impressions, but it did make me do something I'd never done before, and that's actually root for Mike Tyson.