Mike Tyson (1986)

Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas. With his much-publicized 27-0 record as a professional boxer, of which twenty-five victories are knockouts (fifteen in the first round, several within sixty seconds), with so much expectation centered upon him as the "new hope" of heavyweight boxing, Tyson recalls the young Jack Dempsey, who fought his most spectacular fights before winning the heavyweight title. Like Dempsey in the upward trajectory of his career, Tyson suggests a savagery only symbolically contained within the brightly illuminated elevated ring, with its referee, its resident physician, its scrupulously observed rules, regulations, customs, and rituals. Like Dempsey he has the power to galvanize crowds as if awakening in them the instinct not merely for raw aggression and the mysterious will to do hurt that resides, for better or worse, in the human soul, but for suggesting incontestable justice of such an instinct . . .
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Blood, Neon, and Failure in the Desert ( Mike Tyson: 1987)

Confronted with an opponent like "Bonecrusher" Smith, who violates the decorum of the ring by not fighting, Tyson is at a loss; he hits his man after the bell, in an adolescent display of frustration; he exchanges insults with him during the fight, makes jeering faces; pushes, shoves, laces the cut over Smith's eye during a clinch; betrays those remnants of his Brooklyn street-fighting days (Tyson, as a child of ten, was one of the youngest members of a notorious gang called the Jolly Stompers) his training as a boxer should have overcome. In short, his inexperience shows.
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Tyson/Biggs: Postscript (Mike Tyson: 1987)

As with the young, pre-champion Dempsey, there is an unsettling air about Tyson, with his impassive death's-head face, his unwavering stare, and his refusal to glamorize himself in the ring—no robe, no socks, only the signature black trunks and shoes—that the violence he unleashes against his opponents is somehow just; that some hurt, some wound, some insult in his past, personal or ancestral, will be redressed in the ring; some mysterious imbalance righted. The single-mindedness of his ring style works to suggest that his grievance has the force of a natural catastrophe. That old trope, "the wrath of God," comes to mind.
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Rape and the Boxing Ring (Mike Tyson: 1992)

The dazzling reflexes were dulled, the shrewd defensive skills drilled into him by D'Amato were largely abandoned: Tyson emerged suddenly as a conventional heavyweight like Gerry Cooney, who advances upon his opponent with the hope of knocking him out with a single punch—and does not always succeed. By 25, Tyson seemed already middle aged, burnt out. He would have no great fights after all. So, strangely, he seemed to invite his fate outside the ring, with sadomasochistic persistence, testing the limits of his celebrity's license to offend by ever-escalating acts of aggression and sexual effrontery.
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Mike Tyson: 1997

Tyson, it's now clear, has no such resources, of either a physical or psychological nature; he has no "character" once his rote strategy of nondefensive aggression is thwarted, as it would be thwarted by any shrewd opponent like Holyfield. Where Tyson erred was in fouling, not fighting better; he'd believed that he was going to lose because of the gash above his eye, and he may have been correct, but, lacking the character, or "heart," of a true champion, who will fight even when he knows he might lose, he didn't try.
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Muhammad Ali: "The Greatest"

There has always been something enigmatic about Clay/Ali, a doubleness that suggests a fundamental distinction between public and private worlds. And what a testimony is Ali's career of nearly three decades to the diversity of media attention! In our time, in his sixth decade, long retired from the sport that made him famous and from the adversarial politics that made him notorious, Ali now enjoys a universal beneficence. He has become an "American icon" known through the world; a brand name symbolizing "success." He remains a Muslim but no longer belongs to the Nation of Islam; he no longer makes pronouncements of a political nature. He has become a mega-celebrity divorced, like all such celebrities, from history; a timeless mass-cult contemporary of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.
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The Cruelest Sport

Boxing is only possible if there is an endless supply of young men hungry to leave their impoverished ghetto neighborhoods, more than willing to substitute the putative dangers of the ring for the more evident, possibly daily, dangers of the street; yet it is rarely advanced as a means of eradicating boxing that poverty itself be abolished; that it is the social conditions feeding boxing that are obscene.
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Floyd Patterson: The Essence of a Competitor

In 1961, with his spectacular defeat of Johansson, his career took on the quality of legend, and he enjoyed celebrity of a quintessentially American kind. He was given a $35,000 jeweled crown by his trainer, the late Cus D'Amato, a man not known for extravagant gestures; he was invited to the White House to meet President Kennedy; sportswriters universally acclaimed the intelligently controlled aggression of his ring style; he received thousands of letters from fans—including, unexpectedly, Swedes who seemed to have taken the soft-spoken, introspective young black American to their hearts, despite the fact that he had knocked out their own champion Johansson in two highly publicized bouts in 1960 and 1961.
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