Like Everyone, Mike Tyson Is Looking for Work

According to recent reports, Mike Tyson is looking for a job, and he was hoping to land one as part of Manny Pacquiao’s training team. To that end, he contacted Pac Man’s trainer, Freddie Roach, about the possibility of working with him and Manny at Roach’s vaunted Wild Card Gym in Hollywood.

Roach turned him away.

“Unfortunately Mike isn’t doing too well at the moment,” Roach said about Tyson’s request. “I just got a call that he wants a job. Mike came to Manny’s last training day for the De La Hoya fight. Mike’s a good guy, he respects me a lot. I just don’t think he has the patience to be a trainer.”

Whether he has the patience or not, one thing that everybody knows about Tyson is that he certainly has the knowledge to train fighters. An astute student of the sweet science and an acolyte of the late, great Cus D’Amato, Iron Mike knows the ins and outs of the game as well as anyone in boxing today.

But given his track record of personal instability, it’s no surprise that Freddie Roach doesn’t want him hanging around on the fringes of the Pacquiao Express. That train is chugging along just fine without a sideshow distraction on the order of Tyson, not to mention the fact that Roach recently hired another former heavyweight champ to help him train Pacquiao, Michael Moorer.

For myself, I hope that Tyson doesn’t take Roach’s refusal too hard, because though Pacquiao is definitely the wrong gig for the man, I think he’s on the right path. It’s often been my fantasy that the happy ending for Tyson would come when he sobered up and rediscovered his roots as a trainer of young, troubled, inner-city fighters.

And it seems that he’s sober now, both in mind and spirit. What’s more, he’s completely broke, so it’s not surprising that given his level of celebrity in the boxing world that he thinks he’s entitled to start at the top as a trainer and jump right onto the team of the pound-for-pound best fighter in the sport.

But just think back, Mike, and you’ll recall from your own experience that it doesn’t work that way, not in this hustle. In boxing, as in life for most fighters, you start at the very bottom of the bottom. And something tells me that if Tyson can get back to from where he came, and do it as a force for good, as a disciple of Cus trying to give back all that he took from the fight game, he might be surprised by a future more rewarding than any conquest or debacle from his dizzying, lurid and infamous past.

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