Boxing's Allure

An explanation for boxing, at least an excuse, has never been harder to summon or easier to see than it is now, simmering in the eyes of Mike Tyson. Muhammad Ali's face, when his was the face of boxing, at least had a note of humor, a hint of remorse, even the possibility of compassion, though he gave no guarantees. Tyson does: brutal, bitter ones.

The usual case for boxing as art or science is rougher to make in the face of this face. Valor can be redeeming; so can grace, poise, bearing, even cunning. But this is a nightmare. The monster that men have worried was at the heart of their indefinable passion, of their indefensible sport, has come out in the flesh to be the champion of the world. Next Monday night, he will be served Michael Spinks.

Perhaps it is anachronistic to mention only men. Maybe boxing is an anachronism: the manly art of self-defense. Take it like a man. Be a man. In Archibald MacLeish's play J.B., Job told the Comforter, "I can bear anything a man can bear -- if I can be one." But nobody talks about being a man anymore. When it comes to bloodlust, female gills pant up and down too. In the matter of boxing's fascination for writers, gender has certainly not been disqualifying. Still, the suspicion persists that males secrete some kind of $ archetypal fluid that makes it easier for them to understand what's at work here.

As a fictional character, Tyson would be an offense to everyone, a stereotype wrung out past infinity to obscenity. He is the black Brooklyn street thug from reform school, adopted by the white benevolent old character from the country who could only imagine the terrible violence done to the boy from the terrible violence the boy can do to others. "I'll break Spinks," Tyson says. "None of them has a chance. I'll break them all." Other sports trade on mayhem, but boxing is condemned for just this: intent.

It is not a sport to Tyson. "I don't like sports; they're social events," he says, though he holds individual athletes in casual esteem. The basketball star Michael Jordan, for one ("Anyone who can fly deserves respect"), or the baseball and football player Bo Jackson. Tyson says of Jackson, "I love that he's able to do both, but I heard him say that he doesn't like the pain of football. That makes me wonder about him. Football is a hurting business."

If objections to a blood sport were simply medical and not moral, the outsize linemen who blindside diminutive quarterbacks would inspire grim alarms from the American Medical Association instead of cheery press-box bulletins about "mild concussions." The fact of boxing, not the fate of boxers, bothers people. Naturally, the pugilistic brain syndrome of Ali is saddening. And when Gaetan Hart and Cleveland Denny were breaking the ice for the first match of Leonard-Duran, it was regrettable that nearly no one at ringside so much as bothered to look up or today can even very easily recollect which one of them died. Regrettable, but not precisely regretted.

Only the most expendable men are boxers. All of the fighters who ever died -- nearly 500 since 1918, when the Ring book started to keep tabs -- haven't the political constituency of a solitary suburban child who falls off a trampoline. Observers who draw near enough to fights and fighters to think that they see something of value, something pure and honest, are sure to mention the desperate background and paradoxical gentleness, which even Tyson has in some supply. "I guess it's pretty cool," he says, to be the natural heir to John L. Sullivan, to hold an office of such immense stature and myth, to be able to drum a knuckle on the countertop and lick any man in the house. "If you say so."

Beyond the power and slam, the appeal of boxing may just be its simplicity. It is so basic and bare. In a square ring or vicious circle, stripped to the waist and bone, punchers and boxers counteract. Tyson is already the first, and potentially the second, so the eternal matchup of gore and guile doesn't just occupy him outwardly, it swirls inside him as well. Modern moviemakers are good at capturing the choreography of fights -- they understand the Apache dance. But in their Dolby deafness they overdo the supersonic bashing and skip one of the crucial attractions: the missing. Making a man miss is the art. Fundamentally, boxers are elusive. They vanish one moment, reappear the next, rolling around the ring like the smoke in the light.

If the allure of boxing is hazy, the awe of the champion is clear. Regional vainglories like the World Cup or the World Series only aspire to the global importance of the heavyweight champion. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Ali truly possessed the world -- countries that couldn't have picked Jimmy Carter out of a lineup recognized Ali at a distance -- to the extent that, in a recurring delusion, the world had trouble picturing boxing beyond him. When Dempsey went, he was taking boxing with him. If Louis surrendered, the game would be up. Without Ali, it was dead. Wiser heads, usually balanced like towels on the shoulders of old trainers, always smiled and said, "Someone will come along." Tyson's place in the line is undetermined, but he is certainly the one who came along.

In what is now a two-barge industry, Spinks will also have something to say about lineage. The fight is in Atlantic City instead of Las Vegas, which might be called the aging champion of fight towns if the challenger were not so decrepit. Atlantic City forces its smiles through neon casinos that, like gold crowns, only emphasize the surrounding decay. Similarly, Tyson is the younger party involved, but it hardly seems so. The boardwalk age guessers would be lucky to pick his century. He is 21.

All over Tyson's walls at the Ocean Club hotel are the old sepia photographs out of which he has stepped, going back to Mike Donovan, Jack Blackburn and Joe Jeannette, who in 1909 fought a 49-rounder that featured 38 knockdowns. Louis, Rocky Marciano and Ali are there, but Jack Johnson, Jim Jeffries and Stanley Ketchel are more prominent. (John Lardner told Ketchel's 1910 fate in a pretty good sentence: "Stanley Ketchel was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.") The repeaters in Tyson's gallery are Joe Gans and Battling Nelson. In a 79-year-old picture, Nelson is posing after a knockout with his gloves balanced defiantly on his hips. Tyson struck that same attitude five months ago over the horizontal remains of Larry Holmes.

"I like them all," says the curator from Brownsville and Bedford- Stuyvesant , completing his tour, "but Nelson and Gans are special. Both of them great fighters ((lightweights)) and fellow opponents near their peak at the same time. That's always special."

In this at least, Michael Spinks can concur. Though ten years older than Tyson, he has managed to register three fewer professional bouts -- 31 to 34 -- and only four of those against heavyweights. All told, the two men share 65 victories and uneven parts of the mystical championship. While Tyson owns the various belts, Floyd Patterson says, "Spinks has the real title, my old title, the one handed down from person to person." Spinks was first to get to Holmes (whom he out-pointed twice), the acknowledged champion for seven years. Patterson forgets, though, that Holmes' branch of the title originated when Michael's older brother Leon skipped a mandatory defense in order to preserve a lucrative rematch with Ali. Holmes won his championship from Ken Norton, who won it from no one. He was assigned the vacated title on the strength of a slender decision over Jimmy Young that may have represented a backlash against the creaking mobster Blinky Palermo. Boxing is a dazzling business.

Cus D'Amato, the manager who stood up to the fight mob in the '50s, who defied the murderous Frankie Carbo and helped break the monopolist Jim Norris, died in 1985 at 77 and left Tyson in his will. "More than me or Patterson," says D'Amato's other old champion, the light-heavyweight Jose Torres, "Tyson is a clone of Cus's dream. Cus changed both of us, but he made Mike from scratch." In Brooklyn, Tyson had drawn the absent father and saintly mother, the standard neighborhood issue. "You fought to keep what you took," he says, "not what you bought." His literary pedigree is by Charles Dickens out of Budd Schulberg. When Tyson wasn't mugging and robbing, he actually raised pigeons, like Terry Malloy. A tough amateur boxer named Bobby Stewart discovered Tyson in the "bad cottage" of a mountain reformatory and steered him to D'Amato's informal halfway house at Catskill, N.Y.

Torres recalls the very sight of Tyson at 13: "Very short, very shy and very wide." D'Amato pegged him for a champion straight off, though the resident welterweight Kevin Rooney was dubious. "He looked like a big liar to me; he looked old." Hearing that he was destined to be champ, Tyson shrugged laconically. But before long, everyone in the stable began to see him out of Cus's one good eye. "If he keeps listening," Rooney thought, "he's got a chance." The fighters' gym has a fascination of its own: the timeless loft, the faded posters, the dark and smelly world of the primeval man.

To D'Amato, the punching and ducking were rudimentary. Hands up, chin down. Accepting discipline was harder, and controlling emotion was hardest of all. "Fear is like fire," he never tired of saying. "It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn it down." D'Amato's neck-bridging exercises enlarged Tyson's naturally thick stem to nearly 20 in., and the rest of him filled out in concrete blocks. Like every old trainer, D'Amato tried to instill a courtliness at the same time as he was installing the heavy machinery. "My opponent was game and gutsy," the 17-year-old Tyson remarked after dusting a Princeton man during the Olympic trials of 1984. "What round did I stop the gentleman in, anyway?"

But in two tries Tyson could not quite best the eventual gold-medal winner, Henry Tillman, who fought him backing up (Spinks' style, incidentally). When the second decision was handed down, Tyson stepped outside the arena and began to weep, actually to bawl, a cold kind of crying that carried for a distance. He was a primitive again. As the U.S. boxing team trooped through the airport after the trials, a woman mistakenly directed her good wishes to the alternate, Tyson. "She must mean good luck on the flight," said the superheavyweight Tyrell Biggs, a future Tyson opponent who would rue his joke.

Turning pro in 1985, Tyson knocked out 18 men for a start, twelve of them within three minutes, six of those within 60 seconds. He did not jab them; he mauled them with both hands. They fell in sections. His first couple of fights were in Albany, on the undercard of the welterweight Rooney, at an incubator suitably titled "the Egg." Rooney worked Tyson's corner and then fought the main events. Knowing time was short, D'Amato thought to leave a trainer too. "We were fighters together first," says Rooney, 32, who has not warred in three years (his delicate face is practically healed) but never officially ! retired. "That's my advantage as Mike's trainer, knowing how a fighter thinks. We're a legacy: he's the fighter; I'm the trainer. We're not in Cus's league, but we're close enough." At any mention of D'Amato, Tyson is capable of tears.

For a time, boxing people questioned whether Tyson was tall enough, scarcely 5 ft. 11 in. "My whole life has been filled with disadvantages," he replied in a voice incongruously high and tender. Tyson's provocative description of himself as a small child is "almost effeminate-shy." But no one doubted the man was hard enough. He wanted to drive Jesse Ferguson's "nose bone into his brain." Civilized fighters like Bonecrusher Smith might choose to hang on in hopes of a miracle, but Tyson wearily informs every opponent, "There are no miracles here." When the circle finally came round to Biggs, the Olympic jester, Tyson "made him pay with his health. I could have knocked him out in the third round ((rather than the seventh)), but I wanted to do it slowly so he could remember this a long time."

Even for boxing, what this depicts is stark. But Tyson doesn't wince; he shrugs. "Basically I don't care what people think of me. I would never go out of my way to change someone's mind about me. I'm not in the communications business." This was made particularly clear to a wire-service reporter whose hand proffered in greeting was met with the chilling response, "One of your trucks ran over my dog." Tyson had confused U.P.I. with U.P.S.

In contrast, Michael Spinks cares how he is perceived. He keeps a dictionary handy, and privately speaks it into a tape recorder, since the time he was embarrassed by an unfamiliar word. As for communications, he is willing even to puzzle out cryptograms. From across the ring before Spinks' first Holmes fight, he studied the vacant figure of Ali, trundled in for ceremonial purposes. Ali's hands were at his sides and the fingers of one of them were jumping around in a pathetic way that even Spinks took for palsy. "Then I realized what he was doing. He was telling me, 'Stick, stick, stick, side to side, stick, feint, move.' I nodded my head, yes." Do softer sports have sweeter stories?

The little brother of Leon Spinks was obliged to be a fighter, since hand- me-down grudges were the uniforms of their neighborhood, the fiercest project in St. Louis. "What was it meant for me to do in this life?" Michael often wondered. "I was one hell of a paper salesman: the Post-Dispatch. Didn't win ( awards but made a lot of money, at least what we considered a lot. An honest dollar, my mother kept saying, and I liked it. I was 17, still working at papers -- tall too. 'What are you doing?' the guys would ask. 'Uh, I'm just helping my brother.' I was one of the best dishwashers, then one of the best potwashers, you ever set your eyes on." But he never figured out what was meant for him to do in this life.

Following his 165-lb. victory in the 1976 Olympics, Spinks resisted the pros instinctively. "It's a strange business, where the guy who takes all the licks ends up with the least. Eventually, though, I decided I might as well try to cash in on the gold medal. Being it was such a dirty business, I had this idea that, together, Leon and I could fight the promoters and maybe come out of it with something." In 1978, Leon won and lost the heavyweight championship quicker than anyone ever had, and began tooling the wrong way up one-way streets with his teeth out. "Leon went haywire," Michael says kindly. "It was a circus. It was a jungle. Leon was Tarzan and everyone was after him."

A younger brother cannot decently talk to an older brother like a father, so Michael could only watch and sigh. He loves Leon, who was still losing 33- second fights as recently as last month. By 1981, Michael had quietly won one of the several light-heavyweight championships from Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, and within another two years he consolidated all of the titles in a 15-round decision over Dwight Muhammad Qawi. Ten weeks before the Qawi fight, Spinks' common-law wife, the mother of their two-year-old daughter, was killed in an automobile accident. Spinks cried almost all the way to the ring. The old trainer Eddie Futch despaired. But the moment Spinks arrived, he seemed different. Leon was sitting at ringside in a cockeyed Stetson. "Straighten your hat, Lee," Michael said coldly.

Futch, a bouncy little man of 77, was a Golden Gloves teammate of Joe Louis' in 1934. Though only 140 lbs., he often sparred with Louis. "Always, on the last day before a fight, he wanted to be with me," Futch says happily. "I was difficult to hit." Eddie trained Joe Frazier, who was easy to hit. "The pressure Frazier exerted wore men down and made them make mistakes. He was perpetually in motion, always moving, bobbing and weaving. Tyson will go along and then explode. He probably hits as hard as Joe, though."

Norton, another Futch fighter, was as unorthodox as Spinks but less adaptable. "Most heavyweights are locked into a habit," says the sparring partner Qawi, co-champion no more. "But Michael can adjust." Even when Spinks is shadowboxing, Futch says, "I can see he's thinking, working out his plan, and changing it, and changing that." Spinks pledges, "I'll take something in with me, but I'll react to what I find in there."

Showing a modest manner uncommon among the unbeaten, Spinks explains, "I decided to become a heavyweight when I realized there was no money in being a light-heavyweight." The fight is promising his side $13.5 million. The new bulk of 208 lbs. becomes Spinks as well as his old 175, but he concedes, "I've been hit harder by the bigger men and have found no pleasure in it." (He will spot Tyson maybe 10 lbs.; Tyson will return 4 in. in height and 5 in. in reach.) On the chance that history was right about light-heavyweights never being able to step up, Spinks had left his daughter home from the first Holmes fight. "The second is the one she shouldn't have seen," he says, acknowledging a near-loss. In boxing, this qualifies as breathtaking honesty.

Spinks' fellow Olympian, Sugar Ray Leonard, laughs at that. "He always seems so cynical and pessimistic," Leonard says. "First doom, then gloom, and finally he prevails. At the Olympics, I remember Michael Spinks as a guy who did things that worked, though they happened to be wrong. He'd step right, step left, cross his feet and hit you. He'd always set you up for the punch he wouldn't throw. And he seemed forever to be looking for something."

Not Tyson, surely. "He's a very powerful young man," whistles Spinks through an air-conditioned smile. "The majority of the guys he's fought have worried about getting hit -- I worry about it too. He's got such an advantage; he's so strong. But he does things that are mistakes that he might have to pay for." Is Spinks afraid? "Sure, I've got to have my fear," he says. "I refuse to go into the ring without it." But he also says, "I have a nice grip on my pride: I boss it around. I wear it when I should. I throw it in the corner when I don't need it." He'll need it sometime Monday night.

"This is the first time Tyson is going to meet some talent; Spinks is a thinking fighter," says the venerable trainer Ray Arcel, 89, who carted 13 opponents to Louis before beating him with Ezzard Charles. ("And you know something? As happy as I was for my guy, that's how sad I was for Joe.") Nothing can touch boxing for beautiful old men. "Tyson is learning how to think too," Arcel says. "He's picked up a lot from those old films he studies, including a little Jack Dempsey." He first saw Dempsey in 1916 in New York City, against John L. Johnson.

"John Lester Johnson," Tyson yawns. "No decision. Just ten rounds, I think. Dempsey wasn't a long-fight guy. He would break you up." A puzzlement curls his eyebrows. "When you're a historian, you know things, and you don't even know why you know them." Preparing for the day's sparring, greasing himself like a Channel swimmer and admiring the reflection in a long mirror, he sounds almost bookish, until Rooney turns up a copy of Plutarch's Lives and Tyson inquires archly, "Who wrote that? Rembrandt?"

In his own field, he is erudite. "Howard Davis was middle class, wasn't he?" Tyson muses idly, referring to another Olympian on Spinks' team. "Davis was a real good boxer. You can come from a middle-class background and be a real good boxer. But you have to know struggle to be the champ." Without socks, robe or orchestra, wearing headgear as spare as a World War I aviator's, Tyson hurries out to demonstrate his point against an unsteady corps of clay pigeons with perfect names like Michael ("the Bounty") Hunter and Rufus ("Hurricane") Hadley. The slippery leather thuds reverberate through the hall.

Not much like Rembrandt, Tyson fights by the numbers. "Seven-eight," Rooney calls the tune, signaling for combinations. "Feint, two-one. Pick it up, six-one. There you go, seven-one. Now make it a six." The savage sight of Tyson advancing on his sparring partners recalls the classic moan of an early matchmaker: "He fights you like you stole something from him." Uppercuts are especially urgent. "If you move away too much," says Oliver McCall, the best gym fighter of the nine revolving lawn sprinklers, "he'll punch your hipbone and paralyze you in place." Hurricane comes out of the ring still spinning. "He hit me on the top of my head," he whines. "It burns."

In training-camp workouts and at ringside on fight night, the cauliflower reunions fill in another piece of the picture. They are bittersweet delights. Few of the usual suspects favor Spinks. Jake LaMotta thinks Tyson "is gonna go down as one of the greatest fighters of all times, and he's gonna break all records, and he's gonna be around a long, long time, and he's gonna make over $100 million. I could be wrong, but that's my opinion." Billy Conn, the patron saint of overblown light-heavyweights, says, "I think Tyson will fix him up in a couple of rounds." Ali likes Spinks, but then Ali liked Trevor Berbick, whom Tyson knocked down three times with one punch. "I don't think Tyson will even be able to hit Spinks," Ali says. "He's like rubber."

Nobody speaks it with huge conviction, but the most promising theory in behalf of Spinks holds that the real world has recently descended on Tyson in the forms of a famous wife, a flamboyant mother-in-law, a $4.5 million mansion in Bernardsville, N.J., a parade of luxury cars (including a dinged one worth $180,000 that he tried to give away to the investigating officers) and a custody battle that pits the well-cologned manager Bill Cayton against the understated promoter Don King. Last August, once Tyson had all the belts, King threw a coronation for history's youngest heavyweight champion. The melancholy scene recalled King Kong crusted with what the promoter called "baubles, rubies and fabulous other doodads." Beholding the dull eyes and meek surprise under the lopsided crown and chinchilla cloak, King said he was reminded "of Homer's Odysseus returning to Ithaca to gather his dissembled fiefdoms." Sighs Tyson: "It's tough being the youngest anything."

According to Patterson, "When you have millions of dollars, you have millions of friends." The Tyson camp's slice of this fight is $22 million, bringing his bundle so far to more than $40 million. "I originally picked him, and I still do," Patterson allows, "but now I give Spinks a chance." Torres looks at it the other way: "Who knows? It could be good. After all, doesn't he come from turmoil?" A little overwhelmed, Tyson says, "When I'm out of boxing, I'm going to tell everyone I'm bankrupt." In a sepia mood again, he adds that "Damon Runyon never wrote about fighters beating up their wife or getting into car accidents."

Before Tyson arranged to meet Robin Givens, 23, the television actress (Head of the Class) who took him for a husband in February, he once said, "I look in the mirror every day. I know I'm not Clark Gable. I wish I could find a girl who knew me when I was broke and thought I was a nice guy." Following the wedding ceremony, auditors and lawyers started to arrive. In Givens' estimation, "he's strong and sensitive and gentle. I feel protected, but he's so gentle that sometimes I think I have to protect him." Among her previous + heartthrobs were Michael Jordan and the comedian Eddie Murphy.

Tyson likes to say, "I suaved her." But he mentions, "It's no joke, I'll tell you. If you're not grown up and you want to grow up real quick, get married." In a slightly different context, but only slightly, he says, "So many fighters have been called invincible. Nobody's invincible."

Almost alone among boxers, Tyson has no entourage. It seems to be the only cliche he has avoided. He does his predawn roadwork by himself on the boardwalk, grateful for the solitude. "I don't have any friends. I get paranoid around a lot of people. I can't relax." Besides Rooney and Cutman Matt Baranski, only Steve Lott is admitted to the inner sanctum. "I'm the spit-bucket man," Lott says with shining eyes. "I would give my life for that." He was a handball buddy of Jimmy Jacobs', an honored player who died at 58 last March, reportedly of leukemia. Jacobs and his business partner Cayton, keepers of the most extensive film archives in boxing, were longtime benefactors of D'Amato's teacherage and co-managed Tyson. Lott is essentially a public relations liaison, but is as devoted as Tyson to the flickering images of history, and seems astounded that they suddenly include him.

"To be in the corner!" Lott exclaims. "To be in the dressing room! In that room before the fight, just the four of us, our heartbeats are deafening. When it gets really quiet, it's almost a despair. I don't know what it is. Maybe we don't want it to be over." Coming to life on the subject, Tyson says, "That's my favorite time, just before. I'm so calm. The work is over. You fight and you go home. Before or after, I don't respect any of them more than another. What they look like doesn't really matter. I never dwell on what's to be done or what's been done. I just don't think of stuff like that. In my heart, I know what to do."

He is referring to horror, and a good many people do not want it done. In the regular processes of human cruelty, nobody is arguing against competition or any of the subtler forms of combat. It's just that using brains to extinguish brains seems a little direct. Developing balance to knock somebody off-balance, honing eyesight to administer shiners, marshaling memory and ingenuity and audacity and dexterity -- and coordinating all of them against themselves, and against coordination -- seems self-destructive to a society.

Speaking in Japan some time ago, Jose Torres was asked why Puerto Rico had * so many boxing champions and Japan so few. "You can't have champions in a society that is content," he answered. "My kids can't be champions. I spoiled them." Ken Norton's son has become a pro football player. "You have to know struggle," Tyson says.

Of course, those who would take boxing away from the strugglers offer no plan to replace it. And no one wants to acknowledge that it may be irreplaceable. The high-minded view is that boxing will exist only as long as whatever it reflects in mankind exists, although picturing Spinks slaughtering Tyson is easier than imagining a world without men who ball their fists for pleasure or prizes. The big fight doesn't come along so often anymore, defined as the kind that can get in people's stomachs and occasionally have trouble staying there. But here it is again, for twelve rounds or less.

Perhaps the true horror is that there has always been a class poor enough for this, and maybe that's why so many people avert their eyes. Why others have to watch is a perplexity, and why some have to cheer is personal.