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June 2009

Tyson on Tyson: A Fighter’s Struggles

By Greg Thomas

In the days after I watched Tyson, the former heavyweight champion and his furious fists haunted my dreams.  I couldn’t shake the fear of a pair of boxing gloves suddenly and brutally pummeling me.  There’s plenty of evidence in Mike Tyson’s new self-centered documentary to justify that anxiety. The man was an beast in his day, both in and out of the ring.     

Tyson is a voyeuristic roller coaster ride with one of America’s most brash and controversial celebrities of yesteryear.  The film delivers a critically reflective chronicle of a man at war with himself. Universal binaries of the human psyche – love and hate, fear and confidence, pride and vulnerability – violently clash inside Tyson’s head and pour out of his mouth and his fists. He admits as much in the opening moments that he suffers from “chaos of the mind.”

Tyson, both man and film, is chockfull of conflicting inner voices, a motif that helps drive his life story. He’s self-contradictory; his lispy, high-pitched voice and rambling speech a perfect contrast to his unbridled force and masterful precision as a fighter.  The film’s director, James Toback, pits video clips of Tyson’s earlier days – the rise and glory – with footage of his subsequent unraveling.

In his formative years as a teenage crook in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Tyson developed an uncontrollable rage that only his trainer and surrogate father, Cus D’Amato, was able to discipline; by channeling it into boxing. D’Amato’s expertise, crossed with Tyson’s brute strength and absolute devotion to the craft, form the basis for Tyson’s early fame and success. But D’Amato’s life was cut short just as Tyson solidified his reign as world champion, a blow from which Tyson never fully recovered. From that point forward his life devolved into a series of missteps and poor decisions, each more devastating than the last.

Flash forward to 2008. In an unprecedented bout of composure, the overweight, over-the-hill legend sits calmly in a sunny seaside home and tries to explain himself to the camera.  In between emotionally charged moments in which he grapples with past demons, Tyson’s stream-of-consciousness delivery prompts unintentional and amusing punch lines.  While the film is by no means an objective portrayal of Tyson’s successes, failures and struggles – his is almost the only voice throughout the film – the boxer’s scatterbrained babbles are rooted in a genuine desire to understand himself and successfully navigate the world. The film hinges on his honest fight for a suitable identity, a process driven by Tyson’s insights, which are, more often than not, illuminating and compelling.

At first glance, the introspection smacks of an attempt to justify Tyson’s past indiscretions – which include drug addition, an ugly public divorce, and a sexual assault conviction – but he never apologizes for who he is or what he’s done.  Despite his failures to redeem himself, the sincerity of his self-analysis redeems the film.

Toback successfully humanizes the bloodthirsty image Tyson left us with after his 1997 ear-gnawing bout with Evander Holyfield. In doing so, the filmmaker forces us to ask ourselves whether we can forgive the pain Tyson has inflicted both in and out of the ring.  With no one else to turn to, Tyson turns to the camera, seeking redemption and possibly acceptance.

By the film’s end it’s tough to understand Tyson’s motives. Sympathy may be too much to ask, but his harsh introspection and forth right delivery suggest more than an elaborate publicity stunt.   Much like Tyson’s life, and the lives of many professional boxers, Tyson begins strong, fast and exciting, and closes on a steady diminuendo in which the boxer cavalierly concludes, while slumping into a comfy couch, “What I’ve done in the past is history, and what I do in the future is a mystery.”

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