08.05.06 – By Michael Klimes: ‘Iron Mike’ The first chapter starts in 1991 and the reader encounters the greatest boxer in the world at the time: Mike Tyson. McRae met and interviewed him just three weeks before the Desiree Washington Affair stuffed the gag into the mouth of his loud career. He had also, just a week before, ‘demolished a $20,000 lens of an ABC television camera’ with a right cross..
It is understandable and humorous to think that McRae, a true boxing fan would have noticed what type of punch it was. The camera man (who ran away) was surely not interested in such details. McRae felt uneasy about meeting Tyson for the obvious reason that ‘Iron Mike’s’ temper could swell up to dangerous levels and no one, not even the man himself could tell when he would blow.
McRae’s Impression
We see McRae’s cleverness at balancing all the controversial strands which were Tyson into some cohesive entity to find out what was beneath ‘his chest, fifty inches broad’. Tyson’s biography is well painted by McRae. He ‘never had much of a childhood’ and he was repeatedly bullied as a young boy. He came from ‘the most desperate quarter of Brooklyn’. His father, Jimmy Kilpatrick disappeared when he was a one year old and Tyson was whipped by his older brother Rodney.
Eventually, after Tyson was treated like an animal he became one in is his more chaotic periods and ‘bullied anyone he wanted, hooking up with a teenage gang called the Jolly Stompers’, collected a gun and begun robbing people. Hope looked like it was on the horizon when Tyson found Cus D’Amato, ‘the legendary Italian American trainer’ who ‘was determined to mould him into the greatest boxer of all time.’
Unfortunately, D’Amato, the person Tyson loved more than any other died when he was a precocious nineteen year old ready to become boxing’s biggest megastar. The management of Tyson’s career passed into the hands of the manipulative Jim Jacobs and Bill Clayton, who, ‘apart from marketing him brilliantly hid the extent of their control.’ Jacobs died in 1988. He was a long sufferer from leukaemia but never told Tyson. This further contributed to shaking Tyson’s fragile psyche.
However, another hammer blow was struck by the actress Robin Givens and her mother. Tyson married and divorced Gibbons in the same year. ‘Their union was damned despite Tyson’s hapless adoration. Givens and her mother treated him like an idiot child while transferring $10,000,00 from his account to their own.’
Tyson’s nemesis was his attitude towards women. A factor in the development of this problem was influenced by D’Amato who ‘understood the making of an extraordinary champion required an abnormal breeding.’ D’Amato handed a baseball bat to an inexperienced Tyson and told him (after he admitted that he thought he was repulsive to girls), ‘keep this bat. You’ll need it when your heavyweight champion of the world to fight off all the women who’ll be chasin’ after you.’
The Interview
The former champion was scheduled to fight his rematch with Razor Ruddock and gave McRae a penetrating insight into his warped world. Tyson was charming to his interviewer and considerably eloquent for a man of his sullen reputation.
Tyson discussed his loneliness, ‘after Cus died’ and his estrangement from boxing as his salvation because, ‘When you look at the scumbags in boxing, you think there must be something hollow at the centre. They’re eating into the heart and soul of the fighters…. They get treated like shit.’ Tyson also adds, ‘Many people are in for it themselves.’
The World Heavyweight Championship is the only prize which kept Tyson fighting because, ‘It’s my destiny.’
At the end of the chapter McRae concludes, ‘I had always liked him when we met. But his charm towards me by more salient truths. There had been too many outbreaks of rage towards women to respond otherwise.’
This is invaluable material for anyone who wants to gain a rough indication into what made Tyson tick.
Michael Watson and ‘Simply the Best’
After the exile of Tyson into the abyss of a cell McRae continued his fascination with the blood-sport by visiting Michael Watson before his rematch with Chris Eubank, the fight which left Watson permanently brain damaged and evaporated Eubank’s killer instinct. McRae captures the magnetising opposites these warriors were and the chemistry it produced.
Tragically, the chemistry generated too much of an explosion.
Watson was the God fearing Christian who worked very hard at his craft and was far less bombastic than Eubank and Benn. He was also, probably better than either of them at what he loved. The rivalry between Eubank and Watson mirrored the antipathy which had existed between Frazier and Ali. It is very easy to see, for the most novice boxing fan or maybe even the most rabid boxing abolitionist that the bizarre world of boxing can sometimes be saturated with more hype than actual fighting.
This is one ugly side of boxing because fans pay out hard earned money to see a luminous bubble, which was really hollow burst in their faces. Even more tragic is the fact that a lot of great rivalries in boxing have relied on the cultivation of disliking the other fighter and sometimes this has caused problems.
In Eubank and Watson, maybe one could go as far stating there was a distaste prior to their rematch. Frazier, we know, harbours a lasting resentment against Ali that at the very is least rancid and at the most stepping on hatred.
McRae correctly concludes that Eubank, for his flaws and strangeness achieved three things, which many fighters of a far higher calibre never managed to do for some reason or another. Eubank retired with health and money because he realised, ‘there’s a nasty taste to this business. If you have nothing of significance to say, if you just make statements, your just a good fighter. And that’s not enough. You have to have a bit more.’
The acknowledgment from Eubank is what transformed him into the irritating enigma he was. He strutted, mocked other boxers, read poetry, lectured on philosophy and made grand statements so that he was, ‘seen as a presence’ and Michael Watson could,’ only box so he has none of my presence or money… it’s that simple.’
Eubank had intelligently hit a chord that forced Watson shiver and say, ‘ I’m a better fighter than him but I get none of the money or respect I deserve.’ The Watson-Eubank situation reflects the ongoing lesson for the trade nowadays. Fighters such as Ali, Leonard, Hamed, De la Hoya and Eubank earned so much money precisely because they were perceived as entertainers. They did something a little different to make them memorable and viewers (in any sport I think) do love characters. In tennis there was McEnroe and Connors, English football had Eric Cantona. The list can go on.
Watson explained Eubank’s behaviour as black man wanting to be white, ‘I think Chris Eubank is ashamed of his roots. Why else would he put so much pressure on himself, pretending he has a silver spoon in his mouth … I don’t understand it – I just think he is a very confused guy.’
The evidence for Watson being dramatically undervalued was seen in him fighting on the Eubank-Benn under card in 1990 (where Eubank took Benn’s W.B.O Middleweight Title in one of the best ever clashes seen in a British boxing ring). Eubank and Benn got six figure purses while Watson, ‘received only £15,000…even though, the year before he had been the first fighter to dent Benn’s unbeaten record.’
He had washed the slugger away with a well-rehearsed game plan of jabbing and moving. Eubank had been scrappier, relying on his almost superhuman ability to suck up Benn’s poisonous punches and unleashed his own crucible of shots that melted Benn into a liquid of tears. The case was in Watson’s favour regarding his lack of money. He finished Benn in six rounds. It took Eubank nine.
McRae believed Watson had, ‘the kind of life outside boxing which encouraged the notion that he was a more rounded than either of those men.’ He was simply a fighter that loved what he did, was a very dedicated athlete and had the objective of beating the man put in front of him. Along with that, he was a thoroughly good guy.
McRae travelled to Brighton to see Eubank the following day because of the paradoxes in boxing which Eubank had so vocally highlighted. One gets the sense McRae was trying to find a ceasefire between his romantic interpretation of the sport and his worries about its darker aspects. The writer was also attracted by Eubank’s contradictory public persona of deriding boxing as, ‘a mug’s game’ and doing it to ensure his ‘lifestyle’ yet ‘that he was interested in fighting-just beyond monetary terms.’
Eubank declared, ‘Boxing trades on the worst emotions’ and that was reason, ‘Why I am disrespectful of boxing tradition. The history is corrupt.’ Eubank’s ruthless ambition to be different was partially rooted in his two older brothers, Peter and Frank, who had been fighters themselves. They ‘were the pugs of money men’ that used them as fill in opponents for a boxer who fell ill before a bout. They were not paid handsomely.
He also gave McRae a glimpse of his rough background, originally from Peckham, in London. He was involved in the ‘boisterous ways’ of stealing high class merchandise from shops and selling it at cheaper rates back in his local community. He was sent by his mother to the South Bronx, New York and discovered, ‘I hated it. It was more than a jungle. It was dirty and dangerous.’ Subsequently, Eubank entered the gym and boxing became his life. In the U.S. Eubank had four fights in Atlantic City before returning to Britain and seeing the promoters. He found them ‘insulting’ because, ‘I was a fighter seeing them on my behalf but it was as if they were doing me a favour by even seeing me.’
Eubank teamed up with Barry Hearn and their business adventure was launched and it multiplied into a highly lucrative one.
The Fight and The Aftermath
‘I was a sucker for that night. And I did not want any old tactical shingding, or even a quick one-two rounder. I wanted the works…a stone cold classic,’ wrote McRae remembering the fateful night.
Eubank was outclassed for ten solid rounds and in the eleventh; he found his miraculous saviour, a rocketing uppercut that ruined Watson’s life forever. Muhammad Ali came to see Watson in hospital and McRae described ‘Muhammad Ali and Michael Watson, as broken mementoes, both looking as distant from their former lives as each other.’
Eubank aptly summed up so much of fighting when he observed, ‘Michael Watson was superman that night but in the end, his humanity took over. He was just human at the end – a man whose life has been destroyed.’