You can give a skunk a bath but it’s still a skunk. And you can put a tuxedo on the sport of boxing but it’s still boxing.
Even the ring-card girls were wearing tails and bow ties Saturday night. Respect has been one of those unattainable goals for boxing, although it tries hard enough. There is something wonderfully absurd about the sport’s attempts to bring an element of class to something that is, at its core, brutal.
All of it is nonsense, although the best sort of nonsense. Boxing nonsense. Accusations and counteraccusations. Unveiled threats of bodily harm and mutilation. “Wizard of Oz” nonsense. Mike Tyson thinks of Lennox Lewis as the Cowardly Lion. Lewis thinks of Tyson as the Scarecrow (brainless).
Actually Lewis said he thinks of Tyson as a cartoon character, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of funny about the former heavyweight champion, unless you go for felonies.
Several writers trotted out conspiracy theories in the days leading up to Saturday night’s championship fight, the most prevalent theory being that Tyson would win because one of Lewis’ promoters, Gary Shaw, is changing sides after this fight and will work with Shelly Finkel, Tyson’s adviser. Shaw helped pick the referee and the three judges for the fight. Shaw reportedly helped negotiate a contract that guarantees a rematch.
Shenanigans? In boxing? My faith in the sport is being shaken to the core.
There is a lot of hand wringing among people who consider themselves the conscience of the sport. But they’re deluding themselves. There is no conscience here. If there ever had been a conscience, it took one punch too many years ago. The moral compass took a wrong turn and is hopelessly lost in the swamps of Jersey.
This is why we like boxing. Almost the entire buzz surrounding Saturday night’s fight had to do with Tyson. We were on hand to watch whether the former champ, teetering on the edge, would lose his balance again. Perhaps if we got the chance to ask the right question, we could give him a gentle shove in the small of his back.
What would Tyson do Saturday night? No one knew. When the big screen at The Pyramid showed tape of his arrival outside the arena before the bout, the crowd cheered. When it showed Lewis arriving, many in the crowd booed.
And Tyson still feels unloved.
“[Tyson] is very frustrated with the entire world,” said Emanuel Steward, Lewis’ trainer. “He feels he has been treated unfairly. If you read between the lines, deep down inside, he is a very hurt person. He feels like he has been abused. … He is living his life as if he does not care or expect to live [past] 40. He is just living his life day-to-day and does not give a damn about anything or anyone.”
Saturday night, inside The Pyramid, with the electricity of fight night buzzing, all of it served as the appetizer for the main course of red meat. Tyson and Lewis had been kept apart because of the danger of mixing these two chemicals in the wrong setting, at the wrong temperature.
Now all we had to do was get through the interminable wait. Fans were slow getting into the arena because of security screening, and Tyson didn’t seem in a hurry to get in the ring. For the city of Memphis, the delay couldn’t last long enough.
It isn’t pretty when a city throws itself at a sporting event the way Memphis has. It had the feel of a 50-year-old bachelor hitting on the waitress at the bar.
And so we had breathless, up-to-the-minute coverage of which celebrities had arrived in town for the big fight. Alonzo Mourning was in town most of the week, and sightings of the Miami Heat center were treated as if they were sightings of Howard Hughes, which would have been a heck of a story.
It was the great American pursuit of being somebody, of mattering. Bring Tyson in, hold your breath that no one gets killed beforehand and stand a little taller as a city. Did Memphis sell its soul? No but it did sell a lot of Tyson-Lewis T-shirts.
Well it’s boxing, and when you dance with the sport, some of it is going to rub off on you, for better or worse. Boxing came to Memphis because few other states would take Tyson.
It was fight night Saturday, and the sport was searching for more class and a higher profile. In the end, those two things were mutually exclusive. It was looking for Mike Tyson.
