[On June
13th, 1935, underdog boxer James “Cinderella Man” Braddock won a
stunning upset decision over heavyweight champion Max Baer. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy that story and other ways in which this complex sport reflects
American histories. Leading up to a weekend post on some of the undisputed
champs in the realm of boxing films!]
On three stages
in the bizarre public arc of a 1980s boxing champion.
American
athletes had also been (or at least had the potential to be) celebrities since
at least Babe
Ruth’s era, if not indeed that of the first professional football player, Pudge
Heffelfinger. But the mid-20th century rise of the television age
brought enhanced such possibilities for athletic celebrity (with my Wednesday
subject Muhammad Ali
a prime example; seriously, just watch the first couple minutes of that hyperlinked
1963 interview and you’ll see just how much the camera loved Ali [then still
known as Cassius Clay] and vice versa), and the late 20th century
emergence of the multimedia and cable news era brought even more opportunities
for telegenic athletes to become global celebrities. Magic and Michael in
basketball, Doc and Darryl in baseball, and Montana and Marino in football were
all great examples of that trend in the 1980s, but I’m not sure any 80s athlete
became more famous than heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson.
At the height of his boxing success Tyson was making as much as $25 million
for a single fight, and raking in far more than that in endorsements and television
rights and the like.
Some of the
other 80s athletes I mentioned dealt publicly (and have continued to deal) with
serious issues (especially drugs
for Doc Gooden and, later, AIDS
for Magic Johnson), but of that cohort only Mike Tyson went to prison for a
violent crime. By 1992 Tyson had undergone a serious of public failures,
including his 1988 divorce from actress Robin Givens (after she accused him of spousal abuse,
in a televised interview, natch) and his 1990 upset loss of his
heavyweight title to Buster Douglas. But it was a 1991
accusation of rape by Miss Black America contestant Desiree Washington that
led to Tyson’s February
1992 jury conviction of that crime and his three-year prison sentence with
the Indiana Department of Corrections. That jail time was in no way the end of
Tyson’s boxing career, however: at least some of those aforementioned ginormous
paychecks came for fights after Tyson’s release from prison, which reveals
(among other things) the extent of his celebrity, the degree to which such
uber-celebrity is always driven by a desire to watch potential trainwrecks
unfold, and the lack of seriousness with which American culture takes the crime
of rape. Not surprisingly, this second act in Tyson’s boxing career ended with
another shockingly violent moment (ie, not the usual boxing violence about
which I wrote on Monday, but unsanctioned such violence), this one in the ring.
That 1997
scandal more or less ended Tyson’s pro boxing career; but his career as a
public celebrity has continued and even deepened in the two decades since. There
have been various signal moments along the way of this unfolding third act, but
I think a particularly salient one would be Tyson’s surprise guest
starring role in the blockbuster comedy film The Hangover (2009). Tyson was, of course, playing himself in that
film, or perhaps purposefully playing an even-crazier (and apparently heavily
drugged) doppelganger of himself. Our inability to be sure about which of those
possibilities was the case, and indeed the blurring of the line between Tyson’s
actual self and the performance of that self in public (see also: his appearance at the roast of
Charlie Sheen, which began with Tyson accurately quoting William
Shakespeare, again natch), seems to be precisely the point. At least from this
outsider’s perspective, the world of boxing overall (at least at its most
publicly famous level) feels as if it has become quite close to reality
television in the last couple decades, and so this third iteration of Mike
Tyson, while far from the boxing ring, might well be one more stage of athletic
celebrity.
Boxing films
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other boxing stories or histories you’d highlight?
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