Boxing is our most con­tro­ver­sial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abol­ished. Its detrac­tors speak of it in con­tempt as a “so-called ‘sport,’” and surely their logic is cor­rect: if “sport” means harm­less play, box­ing is not a sport; it is cer­tainly not a game. But “sport” can sig­nify a par­a­digm of life, a reduc­tion of its com­plex­i­ties in terms of a sin­gle sym­bolic action—in this case its com­pet­i­tive­ness, the cru­elty of its Darwinian enterprise—defined and restrained by any num­ber of rules, reg­u­la­tions, and cus­toms: in which case box­ing is prob­a­bly, as the ex-heavyweight cham­pion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quin­tes­sen­tial image of human strug­gle, mas­cu­line or oth­er­wise, against not only other peo­ple but one’s own divided self. 

— Joyce Carol Oates

Someday, they’re gonna write a blues song just for fight­ers. It’ll be for slow gui­tar, soft trum­pet and a bell.

— Sonny Liston

As a child some­where on the jour­ney towards ado­les­cence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were cer­tain names that brought with them entire worlds. “Maradona” was one this lit­tle Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around foot­ball pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of play­ers far more capa­ble than he. “Schwarzenegger” and “Stallone” made for air machine guns, ban­dan­nas, throw­ing each other in the mud and learn­ing to love the art of gra­tu­itious bloodshed.

Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaugh­ter­house would name their dogs (and, even­tu­ally, their chil­dren). Tyson was hud­dled con­ver­sa­tions under the bridge about sixty sec­ond knock­outs, older cousins with cig­a­rettes in their mouths, replay­ing the fist swings with a slow and sin­cere rev­er­ence. Tyson was in the play­ground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly mov­ing amongst us, games of British Bulldogs sud­denly turn­ing to the heavy­weight cham­pi­onship for inspi­ra­tion. Seconds out, they’d shout, and the bricks were only ever those sec­onds away.

At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writ­ing very smart and even­tu­ally leg­endary work on Tyson, con­tex­tu­al­is­ing him amongst the greats. But the rum­ble in the jun­gle, to us, was prob­a­bly an episode of GI Joe. We were becom­ing vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same per­son but could not tell you the rea­sons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren’t the word that made the world shake.

That word was Tyson.

I knew noth­ing of box­ing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure dis­til­la­tion of the fight. Kid Dynamite trans­formed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn’t the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pum­melled. He was unbeat­able because you can’t beat rage like that. You can’t beat the streets, and the pris­ons, and the anger.

You know what hap­pened. Others have writ­ten it bet­ter. Those who actu­ally know some­thing about box­ing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sen­tence. The come­back. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, fag­got. Don King. The col­lapse. Dragging box­ing down with him.

And always, at the cen­ter, that man, that strange, self-victimising mad­man with the motor mouth. With his man­sions aban­doned, he is reduced to that hoari­est of cliches, the fallen heavy­weight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a real­i­sa­tion there would be no tri­umphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.

James Toback’s film about the man could barely be called a doc­u­men­tary. It’s a por­trait, I sup­pose, or a mono­logue. Or some­thing else. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing beast of a film, largely because it does that most obvi­ous of things: it points a cam­era at Mike Tyson and asks him to tell us who he is, and how he got to here.

“I think that he is so inca­pable of guile and of rep­re­sent­ing him­self with inten­tion one way or another, as opposed to just say­ing what’s on his mind,” Toback explains to me as he works the phones for the Australian release of the film.

“There is enough self-incrimination from him that one doesn’t need to add to the mix in order for it to feel like a bal­anced por­trait. In the way I edited the film, it was also with­out any effort to try to make him look good, it was just to try to make him look like what he is.”

Earlier this year as I passed through Kentucky, I vis­ited the Louisville museum built in hon­our of home­town boy Muhammad Ali. When I say museum, I mean shrine/motivational speech in the form of build­ing. As I wan­dered amidst the children’s hand­prints and soar­ing string-soundtracked doc­u­men­taries about the audac­ity of self-belief or some such, I got to think­ing a lot about the sto­ries of the great box­ers. The inter­est­ing stuff is never in what they achieved, it’s in how they failed. It’s in where these peo­ple who we invested so much hope and belief in, for the most basic and pri­mal of abil­i­ties, acted as thugs. As fight­ers. As fail­ures. That’s the story I wanted from the Ali museum. It’s the story you always want about the champ. “Find the great­ness within”? That’s hardly the story we’re look­ing for.

Toback has been Tyson’s friend for most of the two and a half decades that he has spent in the gaze of an often repulsed but always fas­ci­nated pub­lic. Toback him­self has an inter­est­ing place in Hollywood his­tory as a direc­tor who has never par­tic­u­larly lived up to the promise of his 1978 debut Fingers, a man full of great ideas for films that never quite come off. Just as I was begin­ning to study film, a decade or so after those play­ground head smashes, I came across a copy of his diary in an issue of the British film jour­nal Projections. It doc­u­mented his idea for a film that was sort of the rem­nants of an acid trip, some­thing deeper and darker and more bril­liant. But it was lost to his own unre­li­a­bil­ity, and to his pro­cras­ti­na­tion. It’s a strange, com­pelling slice of the cre­ative self that I’ve always kept some­where in my head. The film he was try­ing to make even­tu­ally became the much-derided Harvard Man, with Adrian Grenier star­ring (in place of the young Leonardo DiCaprio Toback was attempt­ing to woo in his diary), and Sarah Michelle Gellar back when she could get roles in films. It was not the film he wrote around in a thou­sand dif­fer­ent ways in those diary pages. Toback, in my Hollywood story, is genius and poten­tial, almost always lost at the point of actual realisation.

With Tyson, he hits upon a per­fect inter­sec­tion of style and sub­ject. To make Mike Tyson “look like what he is” is not sim­ple — first one must fig­ure out what Mike Tyson is. Toback might have a bet­ter idea of that than any other film­maker. That “self-incrimination” he talks about is at the core of the film. Joan Didion wrote that we tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live. Tyson tells him­self many; he blurs the bound­aries of him­self in their con­tra­dic­tions and their jus­ti­fi­ca­tions. Toback seizes this, lays the man over the top of him­self in split screen, throw­ing you directly into the con­fused, uncer­tain space of his head.

“Since he is a frac­tured, mul­ti­ple per­son­al­ity, I felt that the only way of aes­thet­i­cally and styl­is­ti­cally find­ing a good struc­ture for him as a sub­ject of a cin­e­matic por­trait would be split-screen and mul­ti­ple voices,” he says. “I’d exper­i­mented with both tech­niques before in Harvard Man and in Black & White, and had grown increas­ingly intrigued by that method, so I thought if ever it was war­ranted, it’s now.”

For Toback, there was never any temp­ta­tion to intro­duce the sort of talk­ing heads you might have had in the great box­ing films of the past, like say a Norman Mailer equivalent.

“I would prob­a­bly not have wanted to make that movie,” he explains. “That ends up being a kind of jour­nal­is­tic exer­cise, which would not at all have appealed to me.

“The only vague moment of temp­ta­tion I had with that, and it wasn’t a real one, because it would have blown the whole movie styl­is­ti­cally, was to allow Alan Dershowitz, who was one of the most promi­nent crim­i­nal lawyers and law pro­fes­sors in America, to say what he has said many times, which is that the rape con­vic­tion was the sin­gle worst mis­car­riage of jus­tice in his forty years of fol­low­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in crim­i­nal cases. And that any lawyer who thought that it wasn’t should go back to law school, only try a dif­fer­ent one from the one he went to the first time.”

If you are to look at the film as either an attempt to sell a “true” ver­sion of Tyson, or as a jour­nal­is­tic enquiry, this is an inher­ently fatal flaw in Toback’s approach. If he were to include Dershowitz, Toback could and should have included a thou­sand oth­ers who have said just the oppo­site. But that is a dif­fer­ent film. It is not this one. I asked him if any ground rules were laid down on other side when it came to the top­ics of the rape charges, or Evander Holyfield’s ear, or any of the other crit­i­cal junc­tures in the story.

“None,” he says. “I just threw them out as sub­jects and treated them the way I treated every­thing else, which was to throw them out as sub­jects and let him go.

“That to me was the way to do the movie, not to try in any way to get him to say this or that, or cover a sub­ject he hadn’t, but to give him the sub­jects that I con­sid­ered of fun­da­men­tal inter­est, intro­duce those sub­jects, and then just let him go.”

The end result, as Oates put it, is to turn Tyson into some­thing like an abstract piece of art. We do not know the objec­tive truth of the man, but then nor does he. Tyson him­self did not know that this was the film that would result.

“He had no clue,” Toback said. “It was actu­ally remark­able, I showed it to him in a screen­ing alone, the two of us were sit­ting there. He said ‘it’s like a Greek tragedy, the only prob­lem is that I’m the sub­ject’. One of the things that I knew would make the movie riv­et­ing is the ele­giac con­scious­ness and tone that he has.”

The ver­sion of Tyson I walk away from the film with isn’t the one I’ve car­ried with me over the years, built first on those play­grounds and bridges and later in the writ­ings of the intel­lec­tu­alis­ers of the sport. This Tyson is a man who has lived a life dom­i­nated by inse­cu­rity, and by child­hood trau­mas he has never been able to get past. For bet­ter or worse, this is what has defined the rest of his life.

“He gives you a very vivid sense of that in his descrip­tion of his child­hood,” Toback agrees. “This sense of a short fat kid being bul­lied and pushed around. That whole story of the neck of the pigeon being bro­ken by some bully and how he man­aged to sum­mon up the courage and the strength to knock the guy out, but still was always haunted by his sense of him­self as some­one who was, at any given moment, going to be pushed around and bullied.”

From the streets to juvie, Tyson found it impos­si­ble to trust in any­body. It wasn’t until he fell into the box­ing ring, and even­tu­ally under the wing of <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cus_D” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://en.wikipedia.org’]);“Amato”>Cus D’Amato, that he found direc­tion and peo­ple to believe in. The ver­sion of the D’Amato story told in this film — Tyson’s ver­sion of it — is dis­puted by many peo­ple who were there at the time. His depic­tions of D’Amato as the last great hope he had for a right­eous life aren’t shared by peo­ple like for­mer coach Teddy Atlas. But objec­tive truth, here, is not the point. The pass­ing of D’Amato, for Tyson, was the end of innocence.

“Everything from that point on was with­out any guid­ing force,” Toback explains. “It was with Tyson on his own, or tak­ing the advice and direc­tion of peo­ple who were both unin­ter­ested in his wel­fare and, in prac­ti­cal effect, lead­ing him down very destruc­tive paths.

“It would have been pos­si­ble to be unin­ter­ested in him per­son­ally and yet not be a destruc­tive influ­ence, but unfor­tu­nately he had both the lack of inter­est, and destruc­tive­ness, or at least peo­ple play­ing up his own capac­ity for self-destruction, which was clearly highly developed.”

Toback knew him over those years, and was watch­ing this hap­pen. But Tyson at that time was mov­ing in a dif­fer­ent world.

“I knew that when he was with Don King, then Robyn Givens, that he was off in a dif­fer­ent place,” he says. “It was very hard to com­mu­ni­cate with him in any seri­ous way dur­ing that period of time.”

To me, the kid who still knows noth­ing about box­ing, it seems clear that Tyson was the last great heavy­weight champ. If, in sport­ing terms, he was never a great to be men­tioned in the same breath as Ali or Marciano, then at least in leg­end, in the pos­ses­sion of that myth of being the one true Heavyweight Champion of the World, he sits along­side them in our memories.

“Is there any ath­lete,” Joyce Carol Oates asked in 1992, “how­ever cel­e­brated in his own sport, who would not rather reign as the heavy­weight cham­pion of the world?”. I’m sure Wladimir Klitschko and his brother Vitali are fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ters, and prob­a­bly excel­lent box­ers (with all of their doc­tor­ates and pol­i­tick­ing, and the nick­names Dr Steelhammer and Dr Ironfist in their pos­ses­sion), but how many kids these days are replay­ing their punches under the bridge? How many dogs do we meet called Klitschko? Not twenty years later, it seems Oates’ rhetor­i­cal ques­tion has found itself with a dif­fer­ent answer.

“I think there’s no doubt what­so­ever that boxing’s hey­day is over,” Toback says. “First of all, box­ing has always been, in the pub­lic con­scious­ness, coter­mi­nous with the heavy­weight divi­sion, and you had these icono­graphic fig­ures who, if you take them as a group, were prob­a­bly more promi­nent than the pres­i­dent of the United States. The great cham­pi­ons going back from John L. Sullivan to Corbett, to Jack Johnson, to Dempsey and then Louis, Marciano, Ali and then Tyson, there is no way that that era, or any­thing close to it, is going to come back. For a num­ber of reasons.”

Such as?

“Well I think one of them is that, like film for instance, which is a dying art­form — or let’s say one that’s being sup­planted and com­ple­mented by com­pet­ing art­forms that might be off­shoots of it — first of all there is Ultimate Fighting.

“But in addi­tion to Ultimate Fighting, there is this dilu­tion of the inten­sity by these com­pet­ing other forms. You have too many divi­sions, too many fight­ers, the var­i­ous other sports of phys­i­cal com­pet­i­tives­ness which have become promi­nent, and even pri­mary. When box­ing was in the era of Dempsey, Tunney, Johnson, there was basi­cally no foot­ball, no pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball, there was really just box­ing and base­ball. Now there’s all the rest of this competition.”

What Toback doesn’t men­tion as hav­ing con­tributed to the death are the sto­ries of box­ing in the eight­ies and nineties that turned the pub­lic away. The inter­twined sto­ries of Mike Tyson, and of Don King, cer­tainly no friends but co-stars in a tragedy played out in whichever casi­nos would take them (which, by the end, had them fight­ing in Kansas).

Though the com­pet­ing sports he men­tions may now be more pop­u­lar than box­ing, though they may draw the spon­sors away, and the view­ers who long ago gave up, there is one thing they will never have. They will never have that heavy­weight cham­pion of the world.

“That’s true,” Toback agrees. “The hope is for peo­ple who love box­ing is that some­one will come along to reignite inter­est but I don’t know who that fighter would be. He cer­tainly doesn’t seem to be vaguely on the hori­zon today.”