Excitement for Wii Punchout!! has had a dramatic effect on how I live my life. This afternoon found me watching Tyson, the Mike Tyson documentary, while at the same time playing the NES (Virtual Console) version of Punchout!!, sadly featuring that lame pretty boy Mr. Dream in place of Iron “Kid Dynamite” Mike. Here’s hoping they lined up a Tyson easter egg for the Wii version. Anyway…
The documentary Tyson is amazing. It’s just him for 90 minutes, sitting on a couch across from you, walking through his life. We get brutal montages of his victories, clips from past interviews and events, and unnecessary split-screen effects when the director seems to get bored, but the heart of the movie is Tyson’s aged and tattooed face, just confessing what the hell happened.
And it’s staggering stuff, he tells anecdotes with “OH Shit!” juiciness. Did anyone know he was a fat kid with asthma? Or that he loves pigeons, or that he got in his first fight because in his mean streets of Brooklyn hell childhood, a bully took one of his pigeons and broke its neck and threw it at him, and short fat asthmatic Tyson beat the crap out of him? He tells us about getting gonorrhea from some bathroom counter Business Time at a high end party, then stepping into the ring and ruining a guy’s face while his own junk was burning. He talks about the violent, feces throwing inhumanity of prison, defends his ear eating episode, and cries over the memory of his father-figure, the Yoda-like trainer Cus D’Amato. When he tells us about the women in his life, you feel bad for him because he’s stuck with the kind of women who would want to get with Mike Tyson. Ultimately, he’s a 40-year-old who’s infamous, isn’t quite sure what to do next, takes pride in seeing his kids through college, and doesn’t box.
The first things you notice in Tyson’s narration are his pitch and lisp, that caricature voice. But once accustomed, you realize how well spoken Tyson is, and not just for a jock. Sure he uses some words the wrong way, or at least in ways no one else does, but he actually demonstrates a shining, street-wise intelligence. He’s full of provocative quotes and emotional moments. When he says how before fights he’d fantasize about punching clean through his opponent so that his fist came out the back of his head, and then you see his knockouts, you believe him. Thinking of his trainer, on the verge of tears he says, “That’s why, once I got involved with Cus, I was a young boy, but.. he spoke to me every night about discipline and character, I knew, I knew nobody physically was.. was ever going to fuck with me again.” He pauses for a moment of reflection before continuing, “’Cause I talked to Cus and Cus told me, over and over again and over and over again every night, over and over for hours and hours when I was 13 and 14, he just told me I’d never have to worry about anybody bullying me again. I knew that would never happen again.” He pauses to find the right words. “’Cause I knew, ’cause I knew back then.. Aw man I can’t even think..” Then he finds the words he needs, “Because I knew I would fucking kill them if they fucked with me.” And then the emotion is too much, and we fade out to let him compose himself.
After prison, out of anger at the government he says falsely imprisoned him, he got tattoos of Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara, and he takes joking pride in wearing these hipster T-shirt icons before they were cool. In a photo montage showing him with countless blurred-faced club women, one shot shows a shirtless Tyson and a shirted girl wearing matching Che’s. He also became a Muslim in prison, the same religion Muhammad Ali brought respect to, but Tyson admits he took a too strict and militant understanding of the faith. A clip showing Tyson’s enraged response to a heckler includes the unfortunate quote, “I’ll eat your asshole alive”, and a fight interview contains the equally bad or worse, “I’ll eat your children, praise be to Allah!” The scenes from this period hold a sense that he really is trying to be a better person, but he’s pissed off well beyond what he can contain.
Despite the crazy words and crazy actions, Tyson’s documentary exposes the monster as a man. He’s most if not all of the ear biting, rapist train wreck you know from the news, but he’s got a family, and regrets about the relationships he’s screwed up, he doesn’t want to be that guy. There’s sure to be controversy over the statements Tyson makes that are incongruent with the accepted story of who he is. He says his first wife Robin Givens was talking crazy talk in the famous Barbara Walters ambush interview, that his rape conviction was a ridiculous fiasco of justice, that he only bit Holyfield’s ears after receiving rounds of eye cuts delivered via illegal headbutts. His obvious slickness at mental games makes you weary of trusting him, also the steady supply of batpoop nuts things he says out loud. But his open to a fault conversationalism makes him seem a truth teller; why tell us about some crimes and humiliations and lie about others? Likely he believes everything he says, but reality has its own opinions.
It seems like every infamous person should get the chance this documentary provides Mike Tyson, to tell their side of things, even if only to let their lives serve as bad examples.
