Vanished is the era when it was all but obligatory for the rock gods to bow out early – Janis and Jimi and Jim and Kurt: it’s a dark, glittering cast. Now, they go on forever.
The Rolling Stones led the way of old old-stagers flying into their 80s like the attic portraits of themselves escaped and running amok, but still full of attitude and still able to transport their audience to the decades when their faces carried no lines of age. And still able to make music.
Sport is a crueller form of expression. Years ago, playing a storming reunion gig at Electric Picnic, Andy McCloskey, the lead singer for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, looked down on an ecstatic crowd after launching himself through another synth pop classic and uttered a blunt truth. “It doesn’t get any more f**ken dignified,” he said.
It seemed, on the concrete fringes of Dallas on Wednesday night, as if ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson was reaching the same conclusion. He sat centre stage with the cast of boxers who will feature on Friday night’s streamed live show by Netflix, which purports to be the future of boxing. And maybe it is.
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Tyson will earn a reported 20 million dollars for his troubles. Not an eye-watering sum for a fighter who once bought the biggest house in Connecticut – 21 bedrooms, 25 bathrooms – just because, and later admitted he wasn’t sure he ever visited every room in the house. But not bad for 16 minutes (max eight rounds of two minutes) against a 27-year-old with a big attitude and bigger mouth. Jake Paul was forced to do all the talking for the pair in the hyped-up press conference because Mike, clad in dark denim, had reverted to impenetrable, monosyllabic silence.
“Is the old Mike back, is vintage Mike back?” asked the announcer Ariel Helwani excitedly.
“You talkin’ to me?” Tyson asked.
“I’m just happy to be here,” he said – and that was about as chatty as he got.
When Bruce Carrington, the Brooklyn boxer thrilled to be on the same card as Tyson, offered an imitative reprise of a famous Tyson riff from back in the day, the older man sat in silence with no emotion.
“Well, it’s very eloquent” he said when asked for a reaction. “But that day, I was off my meds.”
In such a relentlessly promoted environment, there was something piercing and uncomfortable about the line. Whether Tyson was hamming up the glowering, menacing figure of old for a new generation didn’t really matter. Throughout his life, Tyson has battled mental health issues and has spent the last two decades, in retirement, chronicling his worst fears and thoughts and self-loathing.
“Yeah, it’s cute,” Jake Paul said of his opponent.
“I fear no man, so I want him to be that old savage Mike. He says he’s going to kill me – is that what you are going to do Mike? Cos I’m ready, I want that killer. I want the hardest match possible Friday night and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out. So, is that what you are gonna bring? Homicidal?
“I’m just ready,” Tyson replied in that whispery voice of his.
There are several generations of fight fans for whom this spectacle is deeply dismaying. Paul is a s**t talker of the very first rank: he could chirp and chatter unpleasantries for hours. As a practitioner in pure commerce, he has managed to suck the old game of boxing out of its smoky, pinstripes-and-dames past and into Paul’s own world of “content” and “platforms” where everything is disposable. Still, he managed to stumble on the only relevant question of this bleak moment in sport when he asked Tyson: “So, is that what you are gonna bring?”
Iron Mike, of course, ignored the question completely. It could be that he was just playing his part. And it could be that he simply doesn’t know the answer himself.
Friday night’s live-stream fight card will feature a classic rematch in Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano.
The men’s main billing may have nothing to do with boxing but it has plenty to do with ageing. Almost 20 years have passed since Tyson ran out of all the old rage against Kevin McBride, a decent Monaghan man and an ordinary boxer, who met the legend on the right night in Washington. Tyson’s lightning right upper cut no longer carried the same lethal force. The stamina was gone. He was finished. And that was then.
The price that Tyson may pay now for his lucrative pay cheque is the lasting ignominy of a defeat – and worse, a knock-out – against Paul, an opponent who doesn’t even qualify as a professional boxer.
“Just excitement,” big Jake said when asked what it is he feels he has to offer boxing.
“Big fights. Big knockouts. A lot of fighters go in there and they have boring-ass fights like Floyd Mayweather. I’ve brought a lot of excitement to the fights knocking people out on the biggest platforms possible, knocking out the biggest names and making match-ups that people want to see, crossover MMA fights, things like that. So, I am gonna continue to do the biggest fights and pay per views, the biggest streams across the board and people resonate with my content and promotional ability.”
In other words, he can rifle through the faded treasure chest of 20th-century boxing and take whatever gem and costume he chooses to use in his ephemeral world of disposable clips, which millions around the world munch happily and quickly forget about.
And this is where Mike Tyson finds himself. Even in his younger days, when his edge and violence fascinated and appalled a more impressionable world, Tyson was quick to depict himself as a freak, as a nobody: as the John Merrick of his age. And he is such a smart and bleak observer of human behaviour that beneath his showtime glowering darkness in Dallas, it is possible that Tyson was absorbing the hollow fact that here he is again, back in that old place. Still the outsider, still the savage performer capable of drawing the diamonds-and-pearls-and-limos crowd. But 58 years old now.
And Paul’s instincts are right. Around the world, boozed and restless on a Friday night, millions will tune in to see what happens when you pluck a dark anti-hero from the old century of boxing and have him ‘fight’ against one of the original stars of online self-made personalities. Can Tyson shut him up, knock him out, make him scared?
Mike Tyson stared ahead and said nothing. In a mood like this, he has the eyes of a shark. Who knows what he was thinking.
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