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Mike Tyson’s once-ferocious fighting career was already helter-skeltering towards its feeble conclusion when the video-sharing platform YouTube first flickered into life in February 2005.
Four months later, the so-called ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’, who had cut a swathe through the world’s best heavyweights towards the end of the 1980s, was crumpling in the corner under the less than concussive fists of Irishman Kevin McBride in Washington DC.
Tyson’s pitiful professional conclusion, which followed innumerable controversies and scandals that dogged his career both in and out of the ring, served to soften the memory of the impact of those crushing early wins, and question his hard-won reputation as one of the most brutal and unforgiving world champions of all time.
So it is hardly surprising that Tyson professes himself entirely unconcerned by criticism of his decision to end his 19-year hiatus from the ring and return at the age of 58 to face the YouTuber Jake Paul in Arlington, Texas on Friday night.
“What do I care about my legacy?” Tyson said in a wide-ranging chat with Interview Magazine this week. “I never knew what a legacy was and people started throwing that word around so loosely. A legacy sounds like ego to me. I’m going to be dead soon. Who cares what somebody is going to think about me when I’m dead?”
Given the nature of Friday’s upcoming spectacle, it is perhaps telling that Tyson should choose to speak so fulsomely to a magazine founded in 1969 by Andy Warhol, who supposedly once opined that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”.
From the day he first emerged from the slums of Brownsville to leave Trevor Berbick devoid his senses and become the youngest world heavyweight champion in history at the age of 20 in 1986, Tyson has enjoyed and endured incalculable quarter-hours in the spotlight.
Friday’s bout, which will be contested over eight two-minutes rounds and using 14oz rather than the usual 10oz gloves, is merely the latest chapter, and another reminder of how Tyson has endured against the odds to reach a place of relative calm in late middle-age.
Since scraping himself up off the canvas against McBride, Tyson has proved more willing to court celebrity status, turning his best-selling autobiography, ‘Undisputed Truth’, into a one-man stage show, and making cameo appearances as a pantomime version of himself in professional wrestling shows.
These days Tyson, who once seemed hell-bent on self-destruction, languishing in jail for three years following a rape conviction, and filing for bankruptcy after blowing his estimated 400million US Dollars of ring earnings, claims to have found spiritual enlightenment by smoking toad venom.
You’ve got a YouTuber that has 70million fans. No champion has that many fans. And I’m the greatest fighter since the beginning of life, so what does that make? That makes an explosion of excitement.
Mike Tyson
“I tried this spiritual medicine called the toad,” Tyson said. “You see a toad, you bust its puss, you put it on like a mirror, and it gets hard. You rub it down until it become fine sand, and then you smoke it. Then you meet God. And this is what God told me to do.”
Fans whose parents were barely out of their teens the last time he laced on a pair of boxing gloves will form the majority of the expected multi-million TV audience, and it says it all that Paul – who was born five months before his ‘Bite Fight’ loss to Evander Holyfield in 1997, should have selected him as the ultimate reality TV foe.
“You’ve got a YouTuber that has 70million fans,” Tyson added. “No champion has that many fans. And I’m the greatest fighter since the beginning of life, so what does that make?
“That makes an explosion of excitement. And that’s what life is about – making the biggest impact before you die.”
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