Last Saturday morning in Arlington, Texas, Mike Tyson returned to the ring to star in a combat parody against a youtuber, Jake Paulborn in 1997, the same year as his second and unfortunate defeat against Evander Holyfield, when he ended up disqualified after biting his ear. More than thirty years separate both contenders and another twenty since Tyson did not enter a ring: too long to wait for a miracle. All experts agree that the fight – scheduled for eight two-minute rounds instead of the regulation three – was from start to finish a pantomime in which the old champion limited himself to raising his arms, receiving punches, walking across the canvas. and nibble his left glove as if it were another ear.
I have also read more esoteric explanations, such as that Paul did not want to knock down Tyson, or worse still, that the old champion held back when his rival opened his guard because the fight was rigged. Apart from being 58 years old, Tyson had just overcome an ulcer that last June caused him to lose eleven kilos in weight and receive eight blood transfusions. He did not seem to be in the ideal conditions to face a twenty-year-old in his physical prime, even if he was a loudmouth who, back in the eighties, would surely not have gone more than thirty seconds before landing face-first on the canvas.
Some of us expected a paranormal phenomenon like the one that occurred in November 1994 at the MGM casino. Nevada Grand Las Vegas when, against all odds, a forty-year-old named George Foreman knocked down the world champion Michael Moorer with a devastating right hand in the ninth round. Moorer – a fighter infinitely tougher, more skilled and more dangerous than Jake Paul– He dominated the fight from the first minute, dancing and cornering a tired Foreman who seemed to deserve more than ever the nickname he was given. Muhammad Ali: “the Mummy.” It was then that, despite the desperate cries of his coach, Moorer trusted himself, daring to enter into a cross-match against a legendary punching monster: the punch that sent him to the canvas was barely an extension of the elbow to the knuckles. Foreman was 45 years old, yes, but he had an impressive fight record since his return in 1987, against rivals as powerful as Gerry Cooney, Alex Stewart and Evander Holyfield.
By pure chance – and I hope it is not also prophetic – Tyson’s return intersects with the publication of black snowthe return to the rings of Roberto Estebanmy fictional boxer who was European middleweight champion, retired after a terrible defeat in Mexico City and dedicated himself to beatings for hire. I think that the crime novel is one of the great literary inventions of the last century, but at this point I can’t quite believe the idea of the solitary detective Sam Spade or Philip Marloweeven less the policeman, that uniformed guy who, as they said in The concrete jungleWhen you least expect it, he takes the side of the law.
In black snowthe third novel in the saga, Roberto Esteban finds himself involved at the same time in a gang war and in the search for a ruthless murderer of girls whose trail goes from the Riviera Maya to the heart of the Madrid mountains. He’s as old as me or Tyson, half lame since his knee was destroyed at the end of chalk children and half deaf as always, but he still has enough strength to face anything. In a way, Esteban is a scale model of Tyson, a neighborhood kid dedicated to crime whom boxing saved for a time from simple street violence. When Cus D’Amato found him in a juvenile reform school, Tyson was an intractable thirteen-year-old beast tied with chains to a radiator and with 38 arrests behind him.
Unfortunately, D’Amato died before Tyson won the title of world heavyweight champion. If he had remained under his paternal tutelage, instead of under the dark direction of Don King, perhaps Tyson would have managed to master the demon within him. The least important thing was his defeat in Tokyo against an average fighter, James buster Douglas, but rather his long and spectacular fall from the pedestal to prison, convicted of rape, and his metamorphosis into the caricature that appears in the first installment of The Hangover. Back in the nineties, he bought a pair of albino tigers that he used to frolic with in his mansion and a neighbor who one day came to pet them ended up losing an arm. On Saturday, thanks to Netflix, he earned twenty million dollars for his retirement, perhaps because the ring, although transformed into a theater, is the only place where he can still be Mike Tyson.
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