A Dope on the Ropes

LAS VEGAS â€”  Mike Tyson turns 31 today, and he has never seemed older, sadder, less relevant or more disqualified from greatness.

No, he won’t vanish into the mist after Saturday’s biting defeat, a third-round disqualification loss to Evander Holyfield. He’ll still be around to brawl and bite and perhaps bay at the moon if that is where his mood takes him.

But, 11 years since becoming the youngest heavyweight champion, his days as this sport’s most intriguing, sometimes most devastating, always most menacing man are over, culminating, fittingly, not with an exchange of punches but a timely gnashing of his teeth.

And surrender.

Tyson will fight for relatively big money, he will do interviews, he will still be surrounded by the hyenas he calls friends.

But the mystique and mystery is gone. He has proven beyond doubt what he is, and what he always will be: An immature, insecure basket case, for whom the rules of boxing and decency hold no bounds.

In the biggest-money, biggest-hyped fight of his life, Mike Tyson capitulated in the ring. Historically significant fighters aren’t supposed to yield, even in defeat.

Already, executives from his two corporate supporters--Showtime and the MGM Grand--are privately voicing doubts about their willingness to continue doing business with Tyson.

Tyson, whose past is littered with easy victories over scared fighters, submitted with a show of farce, moments after referee Mills Lane told him that if he bit Holyfield again he would halt the bout.

“He wanted a way out,� said Don Turner, the trainer for Evander Holyfield, whose right ear will forever miss a 1 1/2-inch chunk after Saturday’s biting incident. “And Tyson found it.

“I don’t know what’s on his mind. But if you got hit with the right hand that Holyfield hit him with, you might want to bite the guy too.�

All this only justifies the most telling charges against Tyson by some who know him best--that he was a street thug who was pumped up to be a knockout machine, a nervous school bully who never fought a fight against anybody who could hit him back.

Until Holyfield.

“Tyson planned this,� said Teddy Atlas, who worked with Tyson when he was a teenager, and who went on record late last week predicting that Tyson would lose by disqualification.

“I knew it would happen because Holyfield is just too much man for this guy. This guy all his life has found ways to get out.

“He’s never been able to face anybody his whole life on even terms. He always had to have an edge: Either his punching power obliterated the guy or he had it taken care of for him. He had guys who bought him out of trouble.

“It’s the opposite of the tough guy he pretends to be. And it’s the antithesis of the man who beat him, Holyfield, who has spent his whole life finding ways to stand up and face whatever was in front of him.�

At his best, in his early 20s, Tyson simply showed up and devastated opponents unprepared or unwilling to deal with his awesome hand speed: Michael Spinks, Tyrell Biggs, Trevor Berbick.

As he moved into the 1990s, with confusion in his personal and business lives, he was flattened by Buster Douglas--the only talented big man he ever faced; he never fought Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis or George Foreman--and struggled with Razor Ruddock.

In his post-jail career, Tyson took advantage of the weakness of the current crop of heavyweights--Frank Bruno? Buster Mathis Jr.?--while Holyfield went to war with Bowe for the third time.

Pointedly, Tyson only took the first Holyfield fight last November because he thought Holyfield was done. After that 11th-round knockout, and two more rounds of head-smashing Saturday night, Tyson knew he could not stand up to Holyfield.

Yes, he was butted, as he was in the first fight. But he’s a head-first fighter who has to understand the reality that in boxing, heads clash, and you have to deal with it.

“I thought it was interesting that when he should have been throwing punches, he chose to bite Evander,� said Jim Thomas, Holyfield’s lawyer, who was one of the 30 or so people caught in the ring melee after the fight when Tyson charged toward Holyfield.

“And then when there’s 25 people in the ring holding him back, that’s when he wants to start throwing punches.�

Remember that Tyson came out for the third round without his mouthpiece, Thomas said, and consider the circumstances of the bites.

“Mike Tyson had to get out of it somehow,� Thomas said. “And there was only one way without being knocked out.

“Tyson fought the first two rounds with his mouthpiece in place, and he lost both rounds on all the judges’ cards. In the third round, he came out without his mouthpiece. . . . That’s pretty interesting.�

Whether or not Tyson is suspended for a month, six months, a year or forever by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, his future is as a sideshow and his past can be re-examined with skepticism.

“Tyson was probably the most overrated fighter in the history of the division,� Turner said. “He was the most beatable champion in the history of the division. And Holyfield proved that.�

Tyson may get a title back--does that matter these days?--but someone who was knocked out in the only two tough fights of his life, then chomped off a piece of his opponent’s ear in his only attempt to reverse a defeat in a rematch, can never be aligned with Ali or Joe Louis or any of the other epic heavyweights.

His symbolic reign is over.

“Unfortunately, there’s still going to be a certain corner of people that just aren’t smart enough and just take the easy way,� Atlas said, “and they will say, ‘Yeah, the guy’s as savage, the guy short-circuited.’ And he even likes that.

“But he didn’t short-circuit. He planned this. The whole thing is so consistent with a guy who’s a fraud. OK, he was mad, he bit him once. Why do it again? He did it because this warrior, this real man was going to fight you with three-quarters of an ear.

“Forget about him being a brute--he’s not a brute, he’s Tinkerbell.�