Word: tyson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Lester Johnson," Tyson yawns. "No decision. Just ten rounds, I think. Dempsey wasn't a long-fight guy. He would break you up." A puzzlement curls his eyebrows. "When you're a historian, you know things, and you don't even know why you know them." Preparing for the day's sparring, greasing himself like a Channel swimmer and admiring the reflection in a long mirror, he sounds almost bookish, until Rooney turns up a copy of Plutarch's Lives and Tyson inquires archly, "Who wrote that? Rembrandt...
...field, he is erudite. "Howard Davis was middle class, wasn't he?" Tyson muses idly, referring to another Olympian on Spinks' team. "Davis was a real good boxer. You can come from a middle-class background and be a real good boxer. But you have to know struggle to be the champ." Without socks, robe or orchestra, wearing headgear as spare as a World War I aviator's, Tyson hurries out to demonstrate his point against an unsteady corps of clay pigeons with perfect names like Michael ("the Bounty") Hunter and Rufus ("Hurricane") Hadley. The slippery leather thuds reverberate through...
...much like Rembrandt, Tyson fights by the numbers. "Seven-eight," Rooney calls the tune, signaling for combinations. "Feint, two-one. Pick it up, six-one. There you go, seven-one. Now make it a six." The savage sight of Tyson advancing on his sparring partners recalls the classic moan of an early matchmaker: "He fights you like you stole something from him." Uppercuts are especially urgent. "If you move away too much," says Oliver McCall, the best gym fighter of the nine revolving lawn sprinklers, "he'll punch your hipbone and paralyze you in place." Hurricane comes...
...training-camp workouts and at ringside on fight night, the cauliflower reunions fill in another piece of the picture. They are bittersweet delights. Few of the usual suspects favor Spinks. Jake LaMotta thinks Tyson "is gonna go down as one of the greatest fighters of all times, and he's gonna break all records, and he's gonna be around a long, long time, and he's gonna make over $100 million. I could be wrong, but that's my opinion." Billy Conn, the patron saint of overblown light-heavyweights, says, "I think Tyson will...
Nobody speaks it with huge conviction, but the most promising theory in behalf of Spinks holds that the real world has recently descended on Tyson in the forms of a famous wife, a flamboyant mother-in-law, a $4.5 million mansion in Bernardsville, N.J., a parade of luxury cars (including a dinged one worth $180,000 that he tried to give away to the investigating officers) and a custody battle that pits the well-cologned manager Bill Cayton against the understated promoter Don King. Last August, once Tyson had all the belts, King threw a coronation for history's youngest...