IT WAS the ultimate dog act, one of the most heinous moments ever in sport as Mike Tyson spat out his mouthguard, sank his long, thick canines into Evander Holyfield's ear, wrenched away a piece of flesh and spat it out on to the canvas. Tyson's reputation was already lower than a sewer rat's but in that frightful moment in a 1997 fight for the world heavyweight title, his standing as a human being sunk to an all-time low. Despite his rape conviction, his drug use, his profanity and his unpredictable mood swings, Tyson had always commanded a grudging respect in the sporting world as the ultimate fighting machine, a boxer of freakish speed and power who, in his prime, dominated the heavyweight division like few champions in history. But with this act of cannibalism, reviled even in the red-light district of sports that is boxing, he was exposed as nothing more than a cheap bully and a coward who could not take the sort of punishment he had dished out for years. And it got worse. Over the next decade the cycle of drugs, depression and rage reduced him to a sad, fat, bloated punching-bag. With a tattooed face.
In 2005 in a Washington restaurant, a couple of days before his last defeat, Tyson had leaned over to me and lamented that his whole life had been "a waste of time". One of the few friends who has always stuck by him, Australian boxing great Jeff Fenech, remembers visiting Tyson in Las Vegas six years ago and thinking he would never see him again. "He was so down and depressed, " Fenech said. "I thought it would be the last time I'd see my great friend. We've had so many heart-to-heart talks over the years. We understand each other. We were both really wild as young guys and he used to tell me that he didn't think he'd live to be 40. I knew exactly how he felt." So what the hell happened? How is it that Mike Tyson, now 46, a vegan looking as fit as the heavyweight who terrorised the sport in the late 1980s, was talking to the Australian media on Thursday by video link from Las Vegas about his new career as a motivational speaker and comedian? How did the self-styled "baddest man in the world" become all warm, and fuzzy and funny? Tyson's image loomed large on TV, filling the video screen with those huge shoulders that once hoisted all the heavyweight championship belts the world had to offer. He was laughing, joking clapping almost insanely - drumming his fingers impatiently at questions about his rape conviction and saying that boxing was just a bad memory. At one point he broke into a bad rendition of George Michael's Careless Whisper. At suggestions he was a superstar, he replied: "I don't know about that, but I've been called a lot worse." Tyson grew up in a particularly bleak slum in New York, mugging and bag-snatching while still a child, doing armed robberies by his early teens.
He became the youngest world heavyweight boxing champion aged 20 in 1986, was in jail between 1992 and 1995 for raping beauty queen Desiree Washington and spent nine months in jail in 1999 for what a judge described as a "potentially lethal" road rage assault on two men. He was banned from boxing for a year after biting Holyfield and squandered a $400 million fortune. These days he makes his living from a one-man stage show directed by Oscar nominee Spike Lee that is part confessional, part comedy, part kitsch. It has played Las Vegas and Broadway, and on his week-long tour of Australia in November, Tyson promises to give audiences an insight into what has lifted him from the depths of despair. "To be honest with you, in my show I don't talk a lot about my fights, " he said. "I only talk about two fighters, Mitch Green and Trevor Berbick. I didn't even know boxing existed any more. Boxing is so 19th-century now. "The show is more about my life, about evolving as a person, reaching that paradigm shift in life that we have to change or no longer exist." Of his days as the most feared fighter in the world, he said: "Those days are over, man. I just want to do my show, enjoy my life and have some fun. I forgot about most of my fights. Sometimes I look at films of myself and I think who is that guy? Man, what's all that about?" Fenech says Tyson's third wife Kiki, 35, born Lakiha Spicer, who he married in 2009, is the person who transformed his friend into a new man.
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