Word: tysons
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...Tyson, surely. "He's a very powerful young man," whistles Spinks through an air-conditioned smile. "The majority of the guys he's fought have worried about getting hit -- I worry about it too. He's got such an advantage; he's so strong. But he does things that are mistakes that he might have to pay for." Is Spinks afraid? "Sure, I've got to have my fear," he says. "I refuse to go into the ring without it." But he also says, "I have a nice grip on my pride: I boss it around. I wear it when...
...This is the first time Tyson is going to meet some talent; Spinks is a thinking fighter," says the venerable trainer Ray Arcel, 89, who carted 13 opponents to Louis before beating him with Ezzard Charles. ("And you know something? As happy as I was for my guy, that's how sad I was for Joe.") Nothing can touch boxing for beautiful old men. "Tyson is learning how to think too," Arcel says. "He's picked up a lot from those old films he studies, including a little Jack Dempsey." He first saw Dempsey in 1916 in New York City...
...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...