Tyson in Repose

As a guy who’s had his fair share of laughs at the expense of Mike Tyson’s furious brand of berserkitude over the years, I feel the need to comment on his recent appearance on “E60”, the new 60 Minutes-styled news magazine show on The Worldwide Leader.

For all of Tyson’s boorish mania over the years, there always was something of the idiot savant about the guy, educated by the streets and schooled in brutality and yet possessed, somewhere on the edges of his inner mayhem, of a genuine sensitivity and acute comprehension. Watching his E60 interview with Jeremy Schaap, you’ll see that side of Tyson in evidence, reflective and reserved and almost bizarrely sane for a man we’re accustomed to as being the veritable poster boy for violent insanity.

From about The Monster Mash moment onward, it’s seemed like the third and fourth and whatever other acts were remaining in the Tyson drama were going to be heavy on tragicomedy, the only narrative left for a man who would never quite escape our fascination and yet never completely regain it either. Greater men than Iron Mike – Bill Clinton and Ali come to mind – have wrestled mightily with the dilemma of what to do after their moment under the brightest of spotlights is over, and given Tyson’s skill-set and penchant for disarray (and, evidently, his savage addiction to booze and blow), it seemed inevitable that he would continue to tour the world on the never-ending bad acid trip of erstwhile celebrity, fueling our blog-driven desire for crazyass tidbits until he turned up dead somewhere on a doorstep in Madrid, or an alley in Hong Kong, or just slumped over on his toilet at home like the ubermensch of doomed aging mega-stars.

Maybe this is still the way he’s heading – who knows. But for the time being it seems that he’s gotten himself off the treadmill. He’s been clean for over a year now and he’s sober in every sense of the word. There’s a plaintive quietness about him that feels, even from the distance of television, like the quietness of a man who’s in the process of changing his life. And that, well, that might just turn out to be the biggest shock in Mike Tyson’s shocking career. Anyone who knows anything about him knows that in his prime he was a dedicated sweet scientist who studied the fight game like it was a comprehensive course in Western civ. – art, psychology and philosophy rolled into one. He learned this reverence from his mentor, Cus D’Amato, the most important figure in his early development whose death left a gaping hole in Tyson’s universe. The man I saw on E60 is a man who seems like he would be a worthy successor to the great training tradition of D’Amato. Tyson has forgotten more about boxing than most will ever know, and as he himself admits, he’s seen it all and done it all and then seen it and done it again. There’s many a raw fighter out there who could benefit from everything he’s got stored up in that enigmatic brain of his.

(The Tyson artwork above can be found over at No Mas.)

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.