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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."