Tyson

by Stephanie Stebbins

James Toback is a brave, brave man.

After knowing Mike Tyson for the past two decades, he decided to film a documentary about the famed boxer’s career, complete with poetry and walking on the beach. That’s right. Poetry by Mike Tyson while he strolls along a sunset beach….and there is some crying, too. Unless you have lived under a rock for the past twenty years, you probably have a pretty good idea of who Mike Tyson is.

He is the boxer who managed to incite the ire of almost the entire nation by punching out a guy in 90 seconds on a pay-per-view event. He was married to Robin Givens. He once screamed at a reporter, “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me!”

He is also, hands down, the best boxer of my generation. I guess you can only take so many knocks to the head before you get the wacky. That’s the way I justify it and try to put it into some kind of perspective, anyway.

The documentary begins with Tyson talking about his early days of growing up in Brooklyn’s rougher areas.  He hung with a rough crowd, stole, sold drugs, and generally just tried to survive.

He also kept pigeons.

This is where the crying starts.

He kept pigeons that, by his own admission, he loved very much. One day, one of the neighborhood kids who continuously gave him hard time killed his pigeons.

He marks this as the time when he set right in his mind that no one was going to mess with him, anymore. He beat the kid up, won, and grieved for his pigeons.

It was also the first time in his life where he felt powerful, and it set his course for the rest of his life.

He began his career by being trained by the talented and famous, Cus D’Amato.  Tyson speaks very highly of their relationship, and it is Cus, he says, who taught him how to be a man and built up his self-confidence that set him on the path to being the powerhouse he eventually became. It pulled on my heart strings a little to hear and see the pain he felt as he talked about him. He claimed that after Cus’ death, he was never the same.

As someone who knows little to nothing about boxing in general, I learned a lot about the sport through his eyes. The most interesting part of this documentary, to me, was when he was just talking about boxing and learning the ropes of it and making his way.

When he gets into the late 80’s and 90’s era of his life, he talks about his very public controversies and what was going on in his own mind during that time.

There are quite a few cringeworthy moments he expands upon throughout this time frame, but what he never does is deviate from the truth as he knows it.

He is blatantly honest and surprisingly remorseful.

As we move into the later years of his life and the present, he relates his sorrow over the loss of his love for boxing and his excitement over the program he is now committed to that has kept him free of drugs and alcohol and the ability to live his life chaos-free. You get the sense that he is moving toward peace and filling the “void” he never seemed to be able to fill in his younger years.

You almost can’t help but to want him to keep fighting for that, most of all.

What I liked the most about this documentary was that there was absolutely zero bias, and you feel as if you are being given the truth directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. It is just as simple as a man telling his story in his own words, the story of a life lived underneath a spotlight and microscope of fame and glory, all while trying to retain his true self.

And it all started with pigeons.