Let’s start up in the airplane. It’s late April. A JetBlue red-eye flight from San Francisco to Florida. In a few moments, Mike Tyson is going to punch someone a bunch of times. In the 57-second phone video that tmz would release hours later, we first see a youngish guy who you might commonly consider a dickhead, swollen and dishevelled with arrogance. He is making cartoon faces for a friend who is filming and narrating from across the aisle, he’s squirming for the camera, he’s holding a plastic cup of something with a garnish lying at the bottom. He is leaning over the seat in front of him incessantly wagging a finger at the clean-shaven head of Mike Tyson.
We see the punishing artificial light of the cabins of commercial planes, still like some humming grey plastic purgatory, the tense and quiet misery of everyone wanting to be literally anywhere else. The dickhead sits back down and says, at full volume: ‘He is pissed. pissed.’
He has found himself with his own arena and in front of him is a once-terrifying man with a greying beard, a man who spoke his whole life of death and pain, Mike Tyson, that is what his name alone conjured, a kind of cyclonic, deranged violence that he would aim at either his enemies or himself and now he was in front of you, on the same plane as you, a plane you could also afford, you, the guy in a cheap T-shirt.
For all Tyson’s life he has been something to either worship or vandalise and here the dickhead seems at first annoyed and confused and then almost angry that Tyson had deprived him of an encounter, of the myth in his mind, a confrontation with God, of what you might consider a Mike Tyson Experience – and then one suddenly materialised.
The footage cuts next to Tyson bent over the seat and wailing away, every punch compact and quick and landing on the dickhead in a way that makes him look, almost, like he has been thrown from a moving vehicle. Another cut to him looking across the aisle to his friend and making a pretend sad face for the camera. His shirt is torn and some blood is dripping down his forehead.
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June 27, 1988. Atlantic City, New Jersey. The hbo broadcast of Mike Tyson’s fight against Michael Spinks begins from a helicopter. There is music that is just maudlin horns, what sounds like a military funeral, and here in addition to dickheads plumbing for Engageable Content is another quintessentially American feature: an empire that cannot resist celebrating itself, mourning itself, dazzled by itself; we want the glory but also the pity, we love dignity but are obsessed with rebels, we love modesty but are grabbing our balls. We see from the helicopter a golden beach, waves crawling up to a boardwalk. Beyond it there is a casino and inside is every kind of freak. The delusional, the hungry, the suckups and dreamers, the acolytes, the frauds and strivers, the grovellers, starlets with immaculate done-up hair and the egg-shaped men who teeter beside them. Around the ring, men in white jackets, men in tuxedos, women in red sequin dresses perched around the ring next to doughy slobs like rare birds sitting on the shoulders of pirates, everyone wide-eyed with the glimmer of anticipation and horror.
In the centre of it all is Mike Tyson, three days before his 22nd birthday and rippling in silence, with gentle eyes, dripping enormous bulbs of sweat.
