TYSON'S CORNER.(Mike Tyson )(Biography)

It is always perilous to predict the end of anything (ask Francis Fukuyama), but it was surely an adequate sign of boxing's eclipse that, among the fifteen thousand people who paid to see Mike Tyson fight a very tall tomato can named Kevin McBride the other night at the MCI Center, in Washington, many more knew the details of Iron Mike's credit record (more than twelve million in arrears to Internal Revenue) than they did the current and parlous state of the heavyweight division.

As an athlete, Tyson misplaced his dark cloak of invincibility fifteen years ago in Tokyo, when a wan and pillowy pug named Buster Douglas knocked him out. Ever since, the pattern has been the same. Those whom Tyson could intimidate quickly with thudding left hooks and the memory of his criminal reputation were soon safely dispatched, but the game opponents who could brave two or three rounds of the Tysonian whirlwind profited by the desperate rages that inevitably followed: the ear-biting, the head-butting, the attempts to break a limb. Tyson would unravel, fall down, or be disqualified.

And so no one in Washington was paying for athletic display. Tyson was everyone's freak show, a grotesque and guilty entertainment at once violent, unpredictable, haunted, thrilling--but truly dangerous only to himself, to his opponent, and to those who, like Desiree Washington, the beauty queen, ended up testifying in court. People paid to see Mike Tyson, one ex-wife suggested, in the same spirit in which they went to horror movies or rode the roller coaster.

And yet Tyson also provided his audiences and chroniclers with a kind of three-penny Raskolnikov and Bigger Thomas. He asked to be pitied, adored, and despised; above all, he pitied, adored, and despised himself. He reeked authenticity. John McEnroe was outrageous to the extent that the son of a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison can be outrageous. He never bit Bjorn Borg, never threatened to eat the spawn of Jimmy Connors. Tyson was unschooled in the niceties. He didn't know his father or who he might have been. His mother, Tyson once said, died in a cardboard box, and he was sure he would end up the same way. As a kid, he was a thug, following old ladies into elevators and beating them up and stealing their groceries. When he became champion, his renunciation of poverty was absolute. During one thirty-three-month period in the mid-nineties, he spent $4,477,498 on cars and motorcycles. (Over the years, he owned a red Lamborghini Countach, a Bentley with a bumper sticker reading "I ♥ Allah," and a Lamborghini "jeep" that had been built for the Saudi king.) He spent ninety-five thousand dollars a month on jewelry and clothing, $411,777 on pigeons and cats, and an untold amount on pet lions, tigers, and "royal blood" Shar-Peis. When he was not training, he redirected his energies. For one erotic marathon, a satrap lined up twenty-four women for the night. His ...