With exceptions that don’t use all the fingers on a single hand, all professional boxers, and especially heavyweights, end up as pitiable examples of human beings, and people like James Toback take glee in watching them and listening to them, much in the way small boys tear legs off flies and watch them stagger.
"Tyson" is a new documentary about the fighter and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, in the headlines recently when his infant daughter died and, two weeks later, he married someone who was not the mother of the child. Yes, that Mike Tyson, with the film written and directed by Toback, who too often glorifies and practically fawns over the fighter as he has done with other athletes like Mohammed Ali and Jim Brown.
Was Tyson a great fighter?
I can’t answer, but I do know he had great strength and speed, and an style that sent him on constant attack, with what appeared to be considerable killer instinct. He bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear in one bout. He savaged and pounded opponents until real terror showed on their faces, as Larry McConkey’s cinematography clearly demonstrates.
But Tyson was a bully, a brutal husband, a convicted rapist, a man like so many athletes who was carried along by his skills and a group of subservient leeches who sang his praises and sucked his blood.
Toback is merciless as an interviewer; in other words, he lets Tyson talk, and ramble, and bathe in his own self-pity. Sure he had a tough life, growing up in one of Brooklyn’s more woeful neighborhoods. But along the way to becoming the tired old man who sits on his California porch and recites a litany of blame – always someone else, of course – he squandered millions of dollars, did irreparable to dozens of human beings.
I don’t have any sympathy.
At the Plaza Frontenac
-Joe