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.