Boxing/Mike Tyson v Kevin McBride: If the Clones heavyweight manages to beat the bankrupt legend, the American finance centres will shudder. Keith Duggan is in Washington to witness a curious build-up
Regardless of what transpires between Mike Tyson and Kevin McBride in the ring tonight, the cultural melding the two fighters have concocted has been something to behold.
At Thursday's weigh-in in the Blackburn Ballroom at the splendid Howard University campus, McBride's Irish friends and supporters mingled among the posse of presidential proportions that follows Tyson's every footstep. The Brooklyn tearaway may be pushing 40 years of age now but he still has the magnetism to attract followers from each new generation, regardless of creed or class. Whatever it is about Tyson, he possesses some quality, some connection that touches many people and makes them want to empathise with him, however repugnant his past. In most American cities, there is still a significant minority who want to be like Mike and they turned up in Washington yesterday to pay homage, mostly young Afro Americans mingling among Frank Mulligan (McBride's first trainer), the Lord Mayor of Clones and other Irish fans. It was a crowd that will surely never be gathered in the same room again unless the Woo Tang Clan embark on a concert tour with Big Tom and the Mainliners.
McBride has handled the inevitable fuss and melodrama that accompanies fights involving Tyson with his customary laid-back and self-deprecating way. He engaged in the machismo showdown that followed the walk to the scales, enjoying the fact that it was Tyson, who was dwarfed by the 6ft in Irishman, that broke away first.
"He was givin' me that look and I just raised the arms and he turned, boy," laughed McBride yesterday morning, sitting in the lobby of his hotel and happily engaging with whoever crossed his path.
The past 48 hours have been mostly about getting through for McBride. "Time to get in the ring," sighed Goody Petronelli, McBride's trainer, to nobody in particular yesterday. "Too much hanging around. Always the way at these fights."
The event must remind the Brockton boxing legend of his halcyon days of the 1980s when he conquered the world with middleweight prodigy Marvin Hagler. The difference is that nobody is predicting anything close to the epic encounters for which Hagler was celebrated in Washington. Petronelli's man is the outsider tonight for a night of boxing in which the hustle for money is the bottom line. Kevin McBride takes home a reported $150,000 regardless of what he achieves in the ring. Tyson will bank $5 million plus, the vast majority of which is tied into his bankruptcy plan, which requires something like another seven fights before the man who blew $300 million can be declared solvent again. It is not so much the most notorious fighter of them all that McBride is meeting this evening as one of the most infamous personal overdraft accounts in American banking. If the Irishman wins tonight, the finance centres will shudder.
There is the sense that the American establishment would be delighted if the big, genial Irish man could wipe Tyson from the public consciousness this evening. On the mainstream talks shows this week, he was openly derided as "a loon" by one prominent broadcaster and the fascination surrounding his latest foray into the ring as "psychosis on parade". Regardless on the insults, Tyson does his level best to play the game, bound by exposure and the knowledge that this really is his last trick.
"I describe myself an icon," he ventured after Thursday's visit to the weighing scales. "You can call me many things but what it comes down to is I'm an icon, an international star. And people don't come to see freak shows, they don't want to be associated with that. People come to see me because I am a star, I am a great attraction and people know they are going to get entertained."
Although time seems to have taken the sharp edges off Tyson, the face no longer quite so planed nor the formidable physique as sleek, he remains a figure of fascination, even if it has been reduced to waiting to see if he will do his latest Hannibal Lecter impression. And although Tyson has contributed greatly to his public image as someone genuinely dangerous and barbaric, there was a grain of truth to Rock Newman's introduction of him as "the most famous athlete on the planet".
Entering middle-age, he is still carrying the same insecurities of his adolescence.
He wore a tee-shirt with a sketch of Cus D'Amato, his long dead coach and mentor and perhaps his only true friend, and spoke about the sage old Italian gentleman as if he were still a presence in the corner of the boxing ring.
Like so many fighters before him, Tyson has become trapped by the sport that he briefly held at his mercy, still trading on the distant memory of his pulverising Larry Holmes and Michael Spinks and Tony Tucker and electrifying his sport. After a long, slow fall from grace that seems to have lasted about 15 years now, the best that can be said for Tyson is that he has had the instincts of preservation to at least stick around, unlike his hero Sonny Liston. But even the outrageous pronouncements and gestures have a slightly stagey feel to them at this point and there was a testing moment during an interview on Thursday when Tyson, tired of a line of questioning pushing him on retirement snapped, "You think I should retire? You tired of seeing me too?" For that must be the great fear: that the audience will grow bored and leave Tyson to the loneliness he says he perpetually feels even when the crowds have gathered in adoration.
The good news for McBride is that he has managed to get his fight while the Tyson phenomenon still has its sell-by date. And although he is 32, the Irishman comes across as fresh and even boyish in comparison to the star turn. It is pretty much impossible not to warm to McBride, whose heart and spirit of generosity matches his gigantic frame.
"It was my privilege not just to know Kevin from when he was a youngster but to have fed him in my house as well," said Mayor Peter Mulligan , who wore the Clones chains of office at Thursday's weigh-in, much to the intrigue of the purveyors of Bling associated with the Tyson camp.
"This is just a humble, quiet Clones man who carries his punch into the ring. His father was a nice, hard working man, he worked in the local meat factory all his life and Kevin learned from him. Frank Mulligan always said Kevin had the punch to become the heavyweight champion. And he won't be getting carried away by all this. Take note. He is going to give Tyson a bateing. There is no doubt."
A Longford man who travelled over for the fight said after his brother, with whom McBride had worked construction in Boston, passed away, the boxer turned up unannounced to sympathise with his mother. The gesture made him want to come out and shout his lungs out for the Irishman. It is that strange combination of the intensely local mid-Ulster pride that McBride generates and the global aura that Tyson commands that gives this occasion a slightly leftfield dimension. Even Tyson himself seemed slightly disarmed by the openness of some of the McBride camp, offering a quizzical smile when the challenger's brother Damien shook his hand heartily with the greeting, "How's the form, Mike, I'm a brother of that big fecker there."
Whether it is down to show or complacency, Tyson has exhibited none of the anger or bile towards McBride that characterised his meetings with previous opponents. The Irishman has spoken openly of his teenage hero-worship of Tyson.
And like Tyson, who has a pronounced lisp, McBride took up boxing as a way of coping with a childhood speech impediment.
The one source of antagonism occurred when both camps were presented with their gloves after signing them in for inspection yesterday. Common practice is for the first-choice gloves to be kept in waiting for the fighters in case they could be doctored. "Anything can happen," said Pascal Collins, who will be in McBride's corner, yesterday. "It is just unheard of. Even if gloves are soaked, once they dry out they contract so the punch is much more severe. The knuckle is nearly coming through. We will be taking this up with the rules committee and there is no way we want either boxer fighting in those gloves."
It is unlikely to spark any major controversy. Mike Tyson is predicting a short and lucrative night's work. McBride, well drilled by Goody Petronelli and in daily sessions with a hypnotist, is convinced that this is the night he was born for.
He will enter the MCI behind a bagpiper playing the fields of Athenry, his father's name inscribed on his shorts. He is predicting deafening noise, tricolours in the darkened background and a long fight in the dead summer heat of Washington. Many fighters have gone into the ring with such conviction in their hearts only to feel the lightning strike of doubt when fixed with Tyson's black stare. If McBride can stay true to his aim this evening, the future will open up before him as never before and Iron Mike may well get to live out his rueful proclamation that he has become"old too soon, smart too late".
