James Toback’s "Tyson"

"Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?" – Joyce Carol Oates/Rape and the Boxing Ring (1992)

I first met Mike Tyson three years ago at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. I'd seen him fight many times, and was in awe of his speed and power, his ambition and success, at the same time as I was troubled at how elemental, how primal he appeared, embodying as he did all the unchecked impulses that have fueled mankind's worst excesses – the killer instinct, the will to win at any cost.

Tyson was in the ring teaching youngsters the rudiments of boxing, fulfilling a public service agreement in lieu of doing more time for one of his many run-ins with the law. He was no longer champion. His glory years were behind him. He'd been in an out of jail more times than anyone could count. And his fortune, the hundreds of millions he earned by scrambling other men's brains, had been squandered or stolen by Don King and other "leeches," as Tyson calls them, supposedly administering to his welfare.

Watching Tyson that afternoon, I was, even though surrounded by all manner of celebrity gawker, able to observe him unmolested. He was not especially tall, but he was exceptionally broad, with a huge head adorned by the now-famous Maori tattoo, and hands and feet that looked more like paws than any known human appendage. And his physical presence – the knowledge that here was Mike Tyson – seemed to electrify the molecules around him. But rather than give off an air of intimidation, he emanated vulnerability.

Tyson and I spoke for half an hour and he couldn't have been more kind. Gentlemanly and polite, he seemed as interested in me as I was interested in him and went out of his way to put me at ease. He was somewhat wary at first, natural under the circumstances, but there was no bluster, no bravado, no hostility, no preening ego or bad attitude. Tyson was humble, down-to-earth, someone who, if not quite at peace, saw himself as just another man, no better or worse than any other. It was a bit of a shock to discover that Tyson wasn't the monster I'd been led to believe. Instead, I discovered that he had been misunderstood, misrepresented, misconstrued.

James Toback's long-awaited documentary, Tyson, is an attempt to set the record straight. Toback has known Tyson since he was a teenager and had already cast him in two of his films, Black and White in 1999 and When Will I Be Loved in 2004. He is also the sort of compassionate interlocutor (although a silent and invisible presence in the film, which is a self-analytical, stream of consciousness monologue) an armored character like Tyson needs to let down his guard.

Toback culls the newsreel archive to show Tyson at different stages of his career, recounting the former champion's storybook rise from the mean streets of Brownsville to Cus D'Amato's gym in the Catskills to the bright lights of the Vegas Strip and beyond. The director hits all the highs (youngest man, at age 20, to win the heavyweight crown) and lows (the Barbara Walters interview, the rape conviction, the Bite of the Century) that are synonymous with Tyson's tale. And Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn't pull his punches. He simply points his two cameras and lets Mike be Mike. The champ parades his man of a thousand faces, so that we get to see all sides of Tyson, often on split-screen and just as often in rapid succession, as he morphs from the violent Mike to the gracious Mike to the self-aware Mike to the clueless Mike to the self-pitying Mike to, finally, the Mike who is incomprehensible, most of all to himself.

It's easy to view Tyson as the anti-Ali, as someone who seems to have taken perverse pleasure in middle fingering the world, who appears to stand for nothing, to believe in nothing, who appears more at home receiving lap dances from floozies than awards at testimonial dinners. But that dime store analysis does a disservice to Tyson, no less than to Ali, as Toback's revealing documentary makes clear.

Beautifully filmed, Tyson, which runs 88 minutes from opening to closing bell, leaves one with the impression that it's impossible to fully understand another human being (just as it's impossible to fully understand ourselves). We can sit in judgment while lounging in our armchair or rattling around our ivory tower, but Toback's willingness to acknowledge and make allowances for human frailty, writ large in Tyson's story, makes his documentary an intrinsic document, as it also reminds us of the world of possibility, no matter how tenuous, at our fingertips. Or, as Tyson observed when Toback showed him the film for the first time: "It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I'm the subject."

(This review first appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal)

Norman Mailer's "King of the Hill"

The opening words of Norman Mailer’s King of the Hill, Mailer’s treatise on the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, raise the bar for those who write about the fights.

“It is the great word of the 20th Century. If there is a single word our century has added to the potentiality of language, it is ego. Everything we have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmares of human destruction, has been a function of that extraordinary state of the psyche which gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not.”

Although Mailer is writing about last century and not our own, the permutations of ego — his ego, our ego, Ali’s ego — have not lost currency.

Mailer writes: “Ego is driving a point through to a conclusion you are obliged to reach without knowing too much about the ground you cross between. You suffer for a larger point. Every good prizefighter must have a large ego, then, because he is trying to demolish a man he doesn’t know too much about, he is unfeeling — which is the ground floor of the ego; and he is full of techniques — which are the wings of ego. What separates the noble ego of prizefighters from the lesser ego of authors is that the fighter goes through experiences in the ring which are occasionally immense, incommunicable except to fighters who have been as good, or to women who have gone through every minute of an anguish-filled birth, experiences which are finally mysterious.”

Comparing boxing to giving birth is only possible with language, but “There are languages other than words, languages of symbol and languages of nature. There are,” according to Mailer, “languages of the body. And prizefighting is one of them . . . Boxing is a dialogue between bodies. Ignorant men, usually black, and usually next to illiterate, address one another in a set of conversational exchanges which go deep into the heart of each other’s matter.”

Boxing is the game of the underclass. It was for the Irish, Italians and Jews. Now it’s for our beige, brown and tan brothers.

“Ghetto cultures, black, Puerto Rican and Chicano cultures . . . speak to each other with their bodies, they signal with their clothes. They talk with many a silent telepathic intelligence. And doubtless feel the frustration of being unable to express the subtleties of their states in words, just as the average middle-class white will be unable to carry out his dreams of glory by the uses of his body.”

It’s not only athleticism which sets these men apart. They also have balls.

“They are men’s men,” Mailer writes. “Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.”

The machismo that boxing perpetuates hits the heights when it comes to heavyweights.

“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God,” writes Mailer. “You have nothing to measure yourself by.”

Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, aka The Greatest, fit the bill.

Ali was “well on the way to becoming America’s most unpopular major American. That too was part of the art - to get the public to the point of hating him so much the burden on the other fighter approached the metaphysical — which is where Ali wanted it. White fighters with faces like rock embedded in concrete would trade punch for punch. Ali liked to get the boxing where it belonged - he would trade metaphysic for metaphysic with anyone.”

Metaphysics aside, could Ali trade bombs with Joe Frazier?

“Frazier was the human equivalent of a war machine,” Mailer writes. “He had tremendous firepower. He had a great left hook, a left hook frightening to watch even when it missed, for it seemed to whistle; he had a powerful right. He could knock a man out with either hand — not all fighters can, not even very good fighters.”

Frazier was one the greatest pure punchers in boxing history. Comparing Smokin’ Joe to Rocky Marciano, another bruiser with a killer punch, Mailer speculates: “If those two men had ever met, it would have been like two Mack trucks hitting each other head-on, then backing up to hit each other again - they would have kept it up until the wheels were off the axles and the engines off the chassis.”

Frazier was tough, but it was a game to Ali.

“For the fight, Ali was wearing red velvet trunks, Frazier had green. Before they began, even before they were called together by the referee for instructions, Ali went dancing around the ring and glided past Frazier with a sweet little-boy smile, as if to say, ‘You’re my new playmate. We’re going to have fun.’”

The men and their seconds met at the center of the ring.

Norman Mailer describes the action: “The referee gave his instructions. The bell rang. The first 15 seconds of a fight can be the fight. It is equivalent to the first kiss in a love affair. The first round set a pattern for the fight. Ali won it and would win the next. His jab was landing from time to time and rights and lefts of no great consequence. Frazier was hardly reaching him at all. Yet it looked like Frazier had established that he was fast enough to get in on Ali and so drive him to the ropes and to the corners, and that spoke of a fight which would be determined by the man in better condition rather than in psychic condition, the kind of fight Ali could hardly want for his strength was in his pauses, he nature passed along the curve of every dialectic, he liked, in short, to fight in flurries, and then move out, move away, assess, take his time, fight again. Frazier would not let him.”

Smokin’ Joe was pressing The Greatest, not letting Ali fight his fight.

“Frazier moved in with the snarl of a wolf, his teeth seemed to show through his mouthpiece, he made Ali work. Ali won the first two rounds but it was obvious he could not continue to win if he had to work all the way. And in the third round Frazier began to get to him, caught Ali with a powerful blow to the face at the bell. That was the first moment where it was clear to all that Frazier had won a round. Then he won the next. Ali looked tired and a little depressed.”

He had good reason to be tired and depressed. Frazier was bobbing and weaving will power throwing punches with bad intentions.

“There is an extortion of the will beyond any of our measure in the exhaustion which comes upon a fighter in the early rounds when he is already too tired to lift his arms or take advantage of opening there before him, yet the fight not a third over, there are all those rounds to go, contractions of torture, the lungs screaming into the dungeon of the soul, washing the throat with a hot bile that once belonged to the liver, the legs are going dead, the arms move but their motion is limp, one is straining with another will, breathing into the breath of another will as agonized as one’s own.”

The fight moved into the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth rounds and Ali was forced to dig deep. Frazier was ahead on two of the three scorecards. If Ali was to win the fight and reclaim the title, he was going to have to try to slow Joe Frazier down.

“Ali had never been a street fighter,” writes Mailer, “and never a whorehouse knock-it-down stud, no, it was more as if a man with the exquisite reflexes of Nureyev had learned to throw a knockout punch with either hand and so had become heavyweight champion of the world without knowing if he was the man of all men or the most delicate of the delicate with special privilege endowed by God.”

Frazier won the first half of the ninth round with a nonstop head and body attack, but Ali turned things around in dramatic fashion: “Now he jabbed Frazier, he snake-licked his face with jabs faster than he had thrown before, he anticipated each attempt at Frazier counterattack and threw it back, he danced on his toes for the first time in rounds, he popped in rights, he hurt him with hooks, it was his biggest round of the night, it was the best round yet of the fight.”

Ali took the tenth, but the eleventh and twelfth were Frazier’s. The thirteenth round could have gone either way, unlike the fourteenth, which was all Ali.

The bell rang for the fifteenth and final round and the heavyweight championship of the world was up for grabs. Ali “came out dancing for the 15th, while Frazier, his own armies of energy finally caught up, his courage ready to spit into the eye of any devil black or white who would steal the work of his life, had equal madness to steal the bolt from Ali. So Frazier reached out to snatch the magic punch from the air, the punch with which Ali topped Bonavena, and found it and thunked Ali a hell and hit Ali a heaven of a shot which dumped Muhammad into 50,000 newspaper photographs - Ali on the floor!”

Frazier landed a left hook for the ages which dropped Ali to the deck. Unconscious when he went down, he was conscious when he rose to beat the count. Ali and Frazier fought to the final bell. Smokin’ Joe retained his coveted crown.

“The world was talking instantly of a rematch,” Mailer writes. “For Ali had shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true. He was a man. He could bear moral and physical torture and he could stand. And if he could beat Frazier in the rematch we would have at last a national hero who was hero of the world as well, and who could bear to wait for the next fight? Joe Frazier, still the champion, and a great champion, said to the press, ‘Fellows, have a heart — I got to live a little. I’ve been working for 10 long years.’ And Ali, through the agency of alter-ego Bundini, said — for Ali was now in the hospital to check on the possible fracture of a jaw — Ali was reported to have said, ‘Get the gun ready - we’re going to set traps.’ Oh, wow. Could America wait for something so great as the Second Ali-Frazier?”

Naming Names

Prizefighters, no matter their religion, change their Christian names, the names they had at birth, into something suited to a hands-on profession. Nicknames, sobriquets, ring monikers, are as commonplace, as everyday, as integral to the game as the uppercut and hook off the jab.

Sometimes changing a name seems the most natural thing on earth. Consider, for example, that champion of champions, Cassius Clay, first known as the Louisville Lip, who changed his name to Cassius X, then to Muhammad Ali, before finally settling on The Greatest.

A prefix to a real name sometimes says it all. Savor this quintet of sweetheart pugilists: Sugar Ray (Robinson), Sugar Ray (Leonard), Sugar Shane (Mosley), Sugar Ramos and Sucra Ray (Olivera). My mouth waters at the thought of all that talent.

The epithets used by boxers in Regency and Victorian England set a high historical tone for nicknames with punch. A Young Ruffian fought. So did an Old Ruffian. For fans that hungered for action, Beef a la Mode was a contender, as were Cabbage, Giblet Pie, Young Rump Steak and Catsmeat. Alongside these gents scuffled such well-named notables as No Neck (Duggan), Gallows Dick, Yokel Brute, The Chelsea Snob, Holy Land Pink, Cripplegate and Death.

And let’s not forget the anomalous Fighting Quaker.

Some of the animals who fought in the ring and whose bite was worse than their bark were the Pit Bull, El Terrier, Mad Dog, The Animal, The Cobra, The Old Mongoose (Archie Moore), Bobcat (Bob Foster) and Big Cat (Cleveland Williams). The Wild Bull of the Pampas (Luis Angel Firpo) gave Jack Dempsey all he could handle in 1923. There were those highflying champs The Hawk (Aaron Pryor) and Game Chicken (Hen Pearce). There was Tiger Flowers.

Sometimes noms-de-guerre were an astute summing up of a fighter’s essence. Consider the Napoleon of the Ring (Jem Belcher), Old Master (Joe Gans), Toy Bulldog (Mickey Walker), Mighty Atom (Jimmy Wilde), Homicide Hank (Henry Armstrong) and Human Windmill (Harry Greb). There are Gentleman Jim (Corbett), Gorgeous George (Carpentier), Terrible Terry (McGovern) and Two Ton Tony (Galento). There’s the rags-to-riches Cinderella Man (James Braddock). There’s the Clown Prince of Boxing (Max Baer). There’s the canvas-loving Fainting Phil (Scott).

Our black brothers, especially in the past, were assigned politically incorrect honorifics. There’s no forgetting the phenomenal Brown Bomber (Joe Louis). One of Joe’s contemporaries was Gorilla Jones. The Black Terror (Bill Richmond) fought in Merry Old England. The Black Panther (Harry Wills) fought in the U.S. and Panama. There was a Young Massa. There was a Kid Chocolate, Little Chocolate, Old Chocolate and Chocolito. The Boston Tar Baby (Sam Langford) was an all-time great, as was The Moor (boxing pioneer Tom Molyneaux), also known as Snowball.

Boxing wouldn’t be boxing without the surname Kid. In addition to the aforementioned Kid Chocolate, aka the Cuban Bonbon, there is Kid Gavilan, Kid Broad, Kid Dixie, Kid Francis, Kid Graves, Kid Goodman, Kid Herman, Kid Kaplan, Kid McCoy, Kid McPartland, Kid Murphy and Kid Williams. There’s also George Kid Lavigne, “Billy the Kid” O’Shea, Hogan Kid Bassey, Jack Kid Berg, Ted Kid Lewis, Benny Kid Paret, The Stringbean Kid and Young Zulu Kid.

Where the fighter was born and raised looms large in the history of the fight game. Some hall of fame fighters who put boxing on the map were the Manassa Mauler (Jack Dempsey), Brockton Blockbuster (Rocky Marciano), Bronx Bull (Jake LaMotta), Boston Strong Boy (John L. Sullivan), Galveston Giant (Jack Johnson) and Michigan Assassin (Stanley Ketchel).

As we bob and weave our way across America we come across a Nebraska Wildcat, St. Paul Phantom, Livermore Larruper, Herkeimer Hurricane, Milwaukee Marvel, Kentucky Rosebud, Kansas Rube and Pottawatomie Giant. There was a Brooklyn Bomber and Brooklyn Billygoat, Harlem Spider and Harlem Harlequin, Astoria Assassin, Bronx Beauty and Brownsville Bum. Jersey Joe (Walcott) and Philadelphia Jack (O’Brien) were terrific champs, as were the Pittsburgh Kid (Billy Conn) and Boston Gob (Jack Sharkey).

Fighters representing foreign lands fought here and overseas. There’s the Light of Israel (English champion Daniel Mendoza) and Croat Comet (low-blow artist Fritzie Zivic), as well as the Tipton Slasher, Bristol Unknown, Belfast Spider, Durable Dane, Barbados Demon, Singular Senegalese, Basque Woodchopper, Scotch Wop, Australian Hard Rock and Elongated Panamanian.

Taking a swing at the former jobs of professional pugilists in Regency England, there were pugs who once were The Gasman, The Coachman, The Bargeman, The Waterman, The Collier, The Nailer and The Tinman. There was also a Master of Rolls and Sailor Boy, a Knight of the Cleaver and Bath Butcher.

Closer to home we had ragamuffins on street corners hawking the daily news: Newsboy Brown, The Fighting Newsboy (Mushy Callahan) and Abe the Newsboy (Hollandersky). There was a Georgia Shoeshine Boy (Beau Jack), Boilermaker and Fighting Marine (heavyweight champs Jim Jeffries and Gene Tunney). Men with nerves of steel were the Man of Steel (Tony Zale from Gary, Indiana), the macho Upstate Onion Farmer (Carmen Basilio from Canastota, NY) and The Fighting Dentist (Leech Cross from the Lower East Side), who knocked out teeth at night and replaced them the next day.

When people say “sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never harm me,” they could not be more wrong.

Ten-Count for Norman Mailer

“They are men’s men. Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.” — Norman Mailer

When boxing was a writer’s sport, Norman Mailer, who passed away last year at the age of 84, gave writing about boxing a good name. He was never a boxing guy, per se, but his contributions to the canon, although infrequent, challenge that of his illustrious peers. Mailer didn’t only write about boxing. His interests were too wide, his writing too eclectic, for easy categorization. Still, he understood the fights, and his writing bolstered the premise that boxing is, among other things, a thinking man’s art.

As a public figure for a half-century, Mailer made more missteps than most men in his position would have dared. There was, for example, his alarmingly hit or miss oeuvre; his quixotic campaign for mayor of New York City; his six marriages, the second of which ended when he stabbed his wife; his literary spats with the good, bad and ugly writers of his generation; and his Jack Abbott episode, where Mailer finagled the release of a felon with literary gifts from prison, who after six weeks as a free man killed a waiter in a dispute over a restroom.

In addition to those faux pas, Mailer tended, with all the consciousness he could muster, toward the abrasive. He was egotistical, arrogant, pigheaded, pugnacious, a born provocateur, but he fought the power, tried to rouse the sleepy from their slumber, and he wrote like a dream.

Although Mailer’s greatest works—“Armies of the Night” (1968), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), “The Executioner’s Song” (1979)—are not about boxing, it’s his writing about the fight game that concerns us here. An early boxing essay is included in a collection called “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer” (1963). It first appeared in Esquire titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” and while it’s a wild and wooly ride through the dense underbrush of Mailer’s erudition, the essay focuses in large part on boxing; the 1962 heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson; and the ring death of Benny (Kid) Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith at Madison Square Garden in 1964.

Mailer wrote of Floyd Patterson, “I had an affection for Patterson which started early. When he was bad he unbelievably bad, he was Chaplinesque, simple, sheepish, eloquent in his clumsiness, sad like a clown, his knees looked literally to droop. He would seem precisely the sort of shy, stunned, somewhat dreamy Negro kid who never knew the answer in class. But when he was good, he seemed as fast as a jungle cat.”

About Sonny Liston Mailer wrote, “Liston now emerged from the depths of the clubhouse and walked slowly toward us. He was wearing a dark-blue sweat suit, and he moved with the languid pleasure of somebody who is getting the taste out of every step. First his heel went down, then his toe. He could not have enjoyed it more if he had been walking barefoot through a field. One could watch him picking the mood out of his fingertips and toes. His handlers separated before him. He was a Presence.”

The fatal rubber match between Griffith and Paret was broadcast live on national TV. It was terrible on the tube. Norman Mailer was ringside:

“Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.”

Mailer’s “King of the Hill,” his treatise on the Fight of the Century between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, is exemplary writing about two great fighters and the first of their three classic bouts.

“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship,” Mailer wrote, “the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by.”

Mailer’s greatest accomplishment in the boxing genre, and by consensus one of his finest books, is “The Fight” (1975), his first-person account of the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. “The Fight” is a romp of a read from the first page to the last, but if you like your boxing straight no chaser, you might want to drown your sorrows in another tome.

Mailer on Don King: “How he could talk… Once when one of his lesser-known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward—fond was he of telling this story—and said, ‘Let us not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in half an hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.’”

Mailer on Ali: “His master’s assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, the glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.”

Unlike King and Ali, George Foreman “lived in silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep…handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence.”

Mailer once said about himself, “I seemed to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight.”

Norman Mailer died as he lived, writing and fighting the good fight until the final bell.