| On Friday, the boxer Mike Tyson will return to the ring for what may become the most watched fight in history. A former world heavyweight champion, Tyson is now fifty-eight, and nineteen years removed from his last professional bout. He is also more than twice the age of his opponent, the twenty-seven-year-old Jake Paul, a YouTube provocateur who has rebranded himself as a boxer. The pair will face off in the stadium that is normally home to the Dallas Cowboys; two hundred and eighty million Netflix subscribers will be able to watch live. In 1997, when Paul was still in diapers, The New Yorker’s David Remnick reported on what was then Tyson’s most infamous fight. The previous November, the reigning champion, Evander Holyfield, had put a brutal stop to Tyson’s comeback, which followed a three-year prison sentence for his rape of a teen-age girl. Tyson had always combined a deeply sympathetic personal story with an egregious criminal record: a desperately poor single mother; a coach who became both a savior and an enabler; repeated violence outside the ring, including against one of his ex-wives. Then as now, fans preferred to focus on his flamboyant life style, which included pet tigers that he would transport between his mansions, one of which he adorned with a life-size statue of Genghis Khan. By the time his New Yorker profile was published, Tyson was both history’s highest-paid athlete and someone suffering from a severe persecution complex. His notoriety had become a draw. In the course of his reporting, Remnick chats with Jesse Jackson in a hotel elevator and encounters Louis Farrakhan at Neiman Marcus. He also asks Muhammad Ali if he could have beaten Tyson in his prime, and receives an emphatic response. The article considers the ugly link between American boxing and slavery, and makes note of a surprising evolution among the sport’s highest-profile fans. Sweeping and nuanced, the piece proves that it’s possible to recognize boxing’s romantic side without dismissing its sordid elements. Summing up the distrustful relationship between Tyson and his promoter, Remnick makes an observation that could apply to those involved in this week’s fight: “There is no profit in judgment.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment