Boxing: They are gathering around the banks of the Potomac not so much for a boxing fight this evening as for the faltering re-enactment of an American sporting tradition: the untrammelled fury of Mike Tyson. To the loyal Tyson fans in the MCI arena tonight, it does not matter that Kevin McBride is Irish or has ambitions of his own.
To most of those shelling out a reputed $500 a ticket, it matters only that McBride is a big, white, slow-moving mortal - live bait for a boxer whose wildness continues to give respectable America goose-pimples of pleasure despite itself.
"I'll gut him like a fish," Mike promised in that curious half-whisper of his on Wednesday afternoon in what was his lone departure from the latest plea for understanding.
Though McBride has been nursing dreams of this fight since his Clones boyhood, a decade spent toiling in the lonesome underworld of professional boxing has taught him the public expect nothing from him other than to be quickly parted from his senses - to bear witness to the fact that somewhere within Tyson, behind the tattoos and quasi-mystical utterances, lurks some vestige of the unknowable entity that knocked out 44 men over 20 years.
For McBride not to join that long line of fighting men trampled and demoralised and hurt during Tyson's long and lurid career would be inexplicable. It would be an end to the myth that Tyson can once again claim the heavyweight crown he wore with such easy disdain nearly 20 years ago.
But McBride believes he can be the man to draw the curtains on Mike Tyson's fight life. And of late, he has had a hypnotist tell him so. At the weigh-in on Thursday, jazzed up for a live broadcast around America, the Clones man towered over Tyson and raised his biceps theatrically for the crowd.
Tyson stayed perfectly still, looking somewhat vulnerable in white briefs, holding the Irishman in that feral, half-reproachful stare of his. McBride clocked in at 271 lbs, Tyson at 233 lbs.
"Kevin is actually heavier than that," said his trainer Pascal Collins afterwards.
"We were walking around Congress today for about an hour and in that heat Kevin probably lost another few pounds. And you can bet Tyson was drinking a lot of fluids to get up to that weight. That's the heaviest he's been. I'd say in the ring, Tyson will probably be close to 225 lbs and Kevin will be pushing 275. That's 50 pounds in the difference and Tyson will feel it when Kevin hits him."
Most of McBride's 37 career fights (27 knockouts, four losses) have been in the unglamorous demimonde of the boxing circuit and he has patiently waited for this date with Tyson to materialise.
The MCI arena is expected to sell all 19,000 seats. For McBride, the exposure has been extraordinary. In classic boxing parlance, this is his shot. This is his chance to be someone. If he can somehow defend himself against the early advances when Tyson will go at him with pit-bull fury, if he can keep his mind clear during that tempest, who knows? Just maybe he will wake up on Sunday as the latest Great White Hope.
But that would be akin to a fairy story and such is the darkling atmosphere that still surrounds Tyson, it is hard to imagine beyond the swift and bloody finish the public crave.
