I hate posting this article, but it needs to be here.
Mike Tyson: Missing, presumed bored
by Ian Darke
SecondsOut.com
Reliable sources in Las Vegas tell me former undisputed heavyweight champion Mike Tyson is regularly skipping training as he moves towards a projected fight on May 19.
Twice in three days last week, Tyson’s training team turned up at the Golden Gloves gym and waited …..and waited…..and waited for Mike to show up. He never did.
This is apparently such a regular occurrence that head trainer Tommy Brooks, and his assistants Jay Bright and Stacey McKinley, seem cynically unperturbed.
They have a ritual. First they lay out Tyson’s kit neatly in the locker room and then prepare the tape to bandage the fighter’s hands. Then they stand around and chat and hope that maybe today Mike is in the mood for a little work.
But to save them all waiting in vain around all day, they have a system where they take it in turns to stay behind at the gym in case Mike shows while the others drift off to get on with their lives.
On the off chance that Tyson condescends to train, they can quickly be recalled with a phone call. One gym regular said: “I don’t understand it. What is wrong with Tyson? Has he never heard of the telephone? A quick call would at least tell the others not to bother hanging around.”
All this reinforces the belief that Tyson is only in this business because he needs the money, having reportedly got himself deep into debts with his TV company Showtime.
No one really believed him when he announced his intended retirement on the eve of the ill-starred fight with Andrew Golota in Detroit last October. But I think Tyson was speaking from the heart even if he knew he could not carry out his threat to walk away.
I think he is sick of his own goldfish-bowl existence and all the vilification that goes with it. Sick of being a pariah. Sick of the crazy madhouse that his life has often seemed to be.
And – most significantly perhaps – in his heart of hearts he knows he can never again be the fighter who terrorised the heavyweight division in the late 1980s.
Yes, he will return to that Golden Gloves gym even though the training has quite clearly become a chore this late in his career. Some days now, it seems, he just can’t face it. So he does not bother.
But I have never seen Tyson enter a ring out of shape. By May 19, I am sure he will have got his head and body in gear for David Izon, or whoever they are planning to put in with him.
He might even fight Lennox Lewis and get the big pay off.
But he will be there because at his back he always hears the bank manager hurrying near. How in God’s name did it come to this? Where did those millions upon tens of millions of dollars go?
Tyson must wonder himself how and why the biggest money-making machine in the history of boxing is still required to fight to pay his bills.
Mike frittered a fortune on failed marriages, big houses. booze, fast cars and even faster women (and, as they say, the rest he wasted ).
Then there was his controversial association with Don King and then John Horne and Rory Holloway. He feels they ripped him off and he will never forgive them. Somewhere along the line he was bled – or bled himself - dry.
And, amid all the chaos, the love of boxing and lust for glory that drove that teenager sitting at Cus D’Amato’s supper table died.
Maybe that’s why he wakes up and yawns at the idea of a day out at the Golden Gloves gym in Las Vegas. Then turns over and goes to sleep. |
