predicted:
"I think Tyson knocks him out in
the first or second round. You never get what you fully want from a Tyson fight
and this one won't last long."
The Independent's brilliant sports columnist, James Lawton, described Kevin
McBride as Tyson's "feeblest opponent
since a bar-room scuffler from Boston, Pete McNeely, was unearthed by promoter
Don King as a "welcome home" ring present for Tyson after he had served three
years for rape". Yet Irish non-entity
McBride has ended the career of the legendary Mike Tyson, the fight halted by
the referee after 6 rounds.
Tyson was fighting
because he has debts of $30 million. The McBride fight netted him $5 million, of
this he would draw just $1 million, and the rest would go to his creditors.
(McBride received just £80000 even though he won). If he beat two or three more
no-hopers Tyson could have had a shot at a lucrative world title, thus resolving
his financial catastrophe. And there are so many titles to chose from, and
currently three world champions. John Ruiz is WBA champ; Chris Byrd is IBF
champ; and the talented Vitali Klitschko is WBC champ. Here the truly farcical
nature of professional boxing asserts itself: fights are arranged between
managers based upon the income they will generate and are often very unequal.
The alphabet soup of governing bodies both maximises revenue and effectively
avoids control. In 2003 Tyson was barred from fighting in Nevada after he
attacked Lennox Lewis at a press conference, the fight was simply moved to
Memphis.
In the 1976 film,
Rocky, Silvester Stallone plays washed up
amateur fighter Rocky Balboa, who by chance is given a shot at the world title
to fight the fictional Apollo Creed. Sadly, a number of inferior sequels and
imitations have diminished the reputation of the film, but in a way Rocky's
celluloid triumph does sum up the popular appeal of boxing. Rocky is portrayed
as an inarticulate but well meaning man with very limited prospects, and the
love interest in the film is unconventional as Talia Shire plays an introverted
and difficult girlfriend. It is artificial, but a nod to blue collar experience
away from the glitz of most American movies. (It is perhaps worth saying that as
a portrayal of mundane working class life Rocky is very derivative of the far
superior Marty
(1955), onto which it grafted a perfunctory boxing plot.) In an example of life
imitating art in 2003
California production company Triage entered talks with Tyson's management about
a reality show where the winning member of the public would fight Tyson,
although this came to nothing.
Nevertheless, Rocky
builds upon the simple myth of boxing, that it is a path to glory out of extreme
poverty based upon self reliance. In Elia Kazan's anti-communist film
masterpiece On the Waterfront,
Marlon Brando articulates the pain of failure: "I
coulda had class, I coulda been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what I
am".
Tyson's image makers
understood this myth of boxing very well. This is what people pay to see, an all
or nothing struggle where the victor escapes, but of course the essential
dramatic tragedy and what makes boxing so compulsive is that the winners cannot
escape, because to win they must be so competitive and aggressive they cannot
find peace in victory. The flawed heroes and villains of the boxing world live
the torments of Hamlet, but expressed with the drawl of Sylvester Stallone, not
the poetry of Shakespeare. And vicariously as well, we the audience indulge in
the primitive, animal pleasure of fighting: surrendering our conscious and
critical self to the guilty, sensual experiences of flesh upon flesh.
Tyson had it all:
doomed youth, aggression, flamboyance. In 1987, as the world's youngest ever
world heavyweight champion he
visited a high school in Brooklyn, stood on a stage and talked about the ravages
of drugs and how many of his companions at school or in the street were either
in prison on dead. The only way out was with his fists and his own raw
aggression. Yet this was also myth as his brother escaped by simply going to
college and becoming a pharmacist in California.
Tyson
did more than flirt with disaster, he courted disaster and made a serious
lifetime commitment to it. His first marriage to actress Robin Givens ended in
bitter recriminations over wife-beating. He ran his car into a tree in what
appeared to be a suicide attempt. He smashed up his family home. He was
convicted of raping Desiree Washington, an 18-year-old beauty queen, for which
he served half of a three-year sentence. He was sentenced to another year for
assaulting two motorists in a road rage incident in 1998. In 2002 he bit off
Evander Holyfield's ear in the most infamous heavyweight title fight in modern
history. "I'm an animal in
the ring" Mike Tyson
declared afterwards.
Although the ear biting incident was clearly outside the rules, the injuries
legitimately inflicted during the fights are worse. The British Medical
Association explains: "the
brain is encased only by the skin-covered skull and attached to its interior by
fine filaments of blood vessels and nerves. (One of the most useful models to
describe the structure is that of a jelly suspended in a box by threads on all
sides). When a boxer sustains a direct blow to the head - which has been likened
to the effect of being hit by a 12lb padded, wooden mallet travelling at 20mph -
the head rotates sharply and then returns to its normal position at a much
slower speed. In addition, the different densities of the different parts of the
brain also move at different rates and the overall result is to create a
"swirling" effect inside the brain. Resulting damage: surface damage from brain
hitting against inner surface of skull; tears to nerve networks; tension between
brain tissue and blood vessels may cause lesions and bleeding; pressure waves
created causing differences in blood pressure to various parts of the brain;
(rarely) large intracerebral clots"
So is
it a genuine sport? My God, yes, boxing is the exemplification of sport. Sport
relentlessly pursues a single theme: who is the strongest, who is the fastest,
who is the best, who is the champion? And at the top of the tree is the
Heavyweight boxing world champion. Boxing is the sport where one man is
measured
simply against another man,
to find out who is the better animal. One man is vindicated, the other man
literally beaten.
And I
use the term
measured
advisedly. Kevin McBride's victory showed
that there is unpredictability in the overall result, and clearly talent and
aggression can determine the outcome. But at the end of a brutal sixth round
Tyson was penalised two points for a head-but that reopened a cut on McBride's
eye. This meant that the judges were split: two judges had Tyson leading 57-55
after six rounds while the third had the 32-year-old McBride ahead by the same
margin.
Let us step back from
that and consider - there are rules to boxing, and points are awarded. So that
the animal aggression, the wilful and deliberate infliction of pain and damage
of one individual upon another can be measured, compared and quantified.
Statistics can be compiled and leagues drawn up. So boxing is not an ancient
anachronism, it is a relatively modern invention of capitalist sport industry.
The reduction of human beings to abstract physical effort, whose output is
measured.
The rules were
originally codified by the Marquis of Queensbury. What irony that this is the
individual who destroyed Oscar Wilde in the courts for daring to love another
man, yet he devised the obscene point system for deliberate violent damage by
fists of one man against another - what further irony that Queensbury's
barrister was the bigot Edward Carson whose violent orange shadow has lain
across the North of Ireland for a hundred years.
Boxing is not uniquely
dangerous. Perhaps steeplechase horse racing has a worse safety record. A plaque
was unveiled in March 2005 to mark the 298 fatalities in Australian racing, and
just two weeks later two more jump jockeys died within 3 days of each other.
British and Irish racing has known less fatalities, but head and spinal injuries
leave many Jockeys incapacitated; and deaths are still more common than in the
boxing ring.
Yet boxing is unique in
that the physical injury and damage in other sports is incidental: whereas in
boxing it is the aim of the sport. No civilised society can condone boxing, and
it should be banned. The final words must go to Tyson himself: "I've
never done nothing to the Establishment but make money for them, yet they treat
me like a whore."
BMA arguments to ban
boxing:
https://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/BoxingPU