Word: champ
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...wartime Army service. In a few days we'll see a bio-pic on soccer legend Diego Maradonna, from two-time Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica. Today brought three docs from three continents: James Toback's Tyson, an extended interview (plus copious fight clips) with the former heavyweight champ; Daniel Leconte's It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks, about a French magazine brought to court for defaming Islam; and Jia Zhangke's 24 City, on the lives of three generations of factory workers in China...
...pupil: he obsessively studied old films of boxing legends, learned the spiritual side of the warrior mentality and, he says, "restrained myself from having sex for about five years." He tore through the amateur ranks, knocking out one opponent in a record eight seconds, and was heavyweight champ before...
...stay hungry when you're dining on caviar, sycophancy and willing women? Everyone wanted to spend time with the champ. ("I met the President of Istanbul.") Raised by a prostitute mother, deprived of his father figure when d'Amato died before Tyson won the title, he dreamed of creating his own family, but his marriage to actress Robin Givens - and her relating of his supposed brutalities in a joint interview with Barbara Walters - was his first sensational humiliation. The teenage celebate needed to dominate women by the dozens, the hundreds, though he says that what he really wanted...
...After prison he returned to the ring with facial tattoos of a Maori warrior, and images of Mao and Che on his body. But those were only emblems of the focused ferocity that used to be inside him, of the burning concentration that made him a champ. Tyson lost his last chance at a championship by notoriously snacking on Evander Holyfield's ear. A couple years later, he ended his boxing career in the most humiliating way: not on his feet, or on his back, but on a stool, refusing to come out and fight for the seventh round against...
...These days, professing paternal joy in his six kids, Tyson says, "I have to live on the top of the world or the bottom of the ocean, but I don't know how to live in the middle of life." Now twice the age he was when he became champ, Tyson sings the sad, familiar refrain: "old too soon, smart too late." Not too late, though, to offer a hard-won perspective on a hard-fought life, in a movie that's a contender for best sports documentary, heavyweight class...