Grand Slam

"People all over are crying for a white heavyweight champion, including blacks," Francois Botha declared, shortly before a strangely gracious Mike Tyson sent him to Palookaville on Saturday. Unfortunately, nobody is masochistic enough to wish publicly for a white champion, and in any event, Botha, a native of Witbank, South Africa, and one-time IBC champion (he lost the title when it was revealed that somebody had slipped steroids into his biltong), is too gentle a giant to fit the bill.

Even for those few moments on Saturday night when his lummoxy punch-and-hold strategy seemed to be subduing Tyson -- or in announcer Steve Albert's pungent phrase, "smothering him in a mountain of white flesh" -- the self-described "African American" couldn't find any support outside of his corner -- and even they seemed diffident.

Which shouldn't be surprising. Who wants to see a guy talking peace and reconciliation to have a shot at the title? If nothing else, Tyson's frustrating career -- the long, dry seasons of chumpery he made us endure and maybe, most of all, his foray into cannibalism -- remind everybody that boxing is the one sport that doesn't even have a make-believe golden age to look back on.

The official word on this fight is that Kid Dynamite was "rusty" and that the matchup was a disappointment. But the only thing this fight lacked was the refereeing skills of Judge Mills Lane, who ruled Tyson's second ear-bite (though not the first) illegal in 1997, and now Gets It On with cockroach terrorists and irate petsitters. None of them, of course, approach Tyson's magnetic confidence in his own perdition.

"I expect the worst to happen to me in life," he told Playboy a few months before Saturday's fight. "I expect people to fuck me and treat me bad. That's just what I expect.... I expect that someday somebody, probably black, will blow my fucking brains out over some fucking bullshit, that his fucking wife or girlfriend might like me, and I don't even know she exists."

In the mouth of a more ordinary simperer or less erratic millionaire pugilist, this might sound like mere self-pity. But Tyson can turn all things into cosmic despair, typified in his suggestion that his critics write a letter to God asking, "Why did you bring this black convict into the world?" Like Chef Chin Kenichi, another genius who takes no pleasure in his skills, Tyson can lose on points and still win the battle. No jury would ever acquit him of rape, misdemeanor assault, or unsportsmanlike mastication, but Tyson's overall case -- that the world is united in an effort to send him to hell -- has always been rock solid. It's this readiness to go to what he calls "heaven, hell, wherever" that has allowed Iron Mike to subvert that moth-eaten boxing cliché -- the promising career that goes awry -- with a career that is been both promising and amiss in new and innovative ways.

This brand of Calvinism stands in beautiful contrast with the willy-nillyness of the proceedings, where prim reporters talk with straight faces about the "shame" the two-time champion has brought to his sport. Without Don King pulling the strings, Tyson-Botha was waged in a Sin City that now strenuously tries to put a family-friendly skin on its vice-ridden viscera. Elsewhere in the country, blandroids like George W. Bush promote a people-friendly political system, and people talk about a bipartisan (though, sadly, never bi-curious) Congress as if it were a good thing. The enforced niceness Rudy Giuliani used to craft his PG-rated version of the world's nastiest city has become a nationwide epidemic, while pugilistic phrases like "slam" and "take your best shot" and "go the distance" get circulated in inverse proportion to anybody's willingness to draw blood. Although professional boxing still produces evil geniuses like Prince Naseem Hamed -- the toxic and often shockingly lazy featherweight who is also a Tyson favorite -- it's hard to escape the sense that in this new nice-guys-finish-first ethos, even the sweet science is going soft in the heart as well as the brain. Slam Man, the most recent boxing-related workout product to hit the infomercial circuit, looks like a cross between Hannibal Lecter's traveling suit, a limbless crash-test dummy, and a Simon Says game. It would seem to be an ideal repository for the collective rage of our society. But where the faithful heavy bag, or even the humble Dud-or-Stud carnival punchout machine, allow the user to put some foot-pounds of pressure into their sparring, Slam Man rewards precision rather than power. The official Start to Slam! video features quick cuts of a fiery Sugar Ray Leonard laying into Slam Man's midsection. But my own experience -- while optimized for my physical specifications and desired workout goals -- suggests that either the middleweight legend was pulling his punches or the director cut away just before Slam Man took a dive. Unlike the Johnny Bench Batter-Up! -- a baseball-batting trainer that bore the imprimatur of a stalwart Cincinnati Red, tormenting countless children in the '70s -- Slam Man doesn't actually pull a Trevor Berbick when you hit it (in the case of Batter-Up!, the product's tendency to fall over was supposed to be a sign that you didn't have a "level swing"). But even with my girlish punching style, it was disturbingly easy to make Slam Man give ground. It's a perfect late-'90s product -- a boxing trainer that can't take a punch.

In Slam, Marc Levin's enjoyable but credibility-straining art-house favorite, the hero is no fighter, but Raymond, a pencil-necked poet of the projects whose verses about leaving "shadows on the sun" seem to have been inspired by the best of Electric Ladyland. But the central problems of the movie -- survival in a hard world, suffering surreal punishments (more than a year in jail for possession of a bag of weed), and faith in the absurd honor of enduring the unendurable -- are oddly Tysonian. The movie demands an unlimited suspension of disbelief. Raymond averts a prison-yard riot with his phat mad rhymes, brings peace among the gangs, and seemingly decides to endure a grossly unfair jail sentence in order to become a better man.

It's infectiously uplifting and exactly the kind of thing that makes you glad for the return of Mike Tyson, even or especially under the squalid circumstances of a slaughter match with a great white dope. No matter how nice things get, at least somebody out there knows competition isn't about fitness or personal growth or moral victory, but about kicking somebody's ass.