Mike Tyson's America

“Iron” Mike Tyson grew up in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. After his mother died when he was sixteen, he was adopted by Cus D’Amato, a reclusive boxing trainer and manager who had been responsible for making Floyd Patterson the youngest heavyweight boxing champion in 1956. I, on the other hand, grew up in a farmhouse with a stable family in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. I wanted to take Tae Kwan Do lessons but we couldn’t afford them, so I studied books explaining Asian martial arts instead.

The premise of boxing is ludicrous, which became a hugely popular word in my elementary school after we first heard it said in a nasally voice by none other than Mike Tyson. (That segue is cute enough I fear it will seem contrived….) Basically, boxing involves wrapping up your fists with leather-covered pillows and then attempting to punch an opponent in the front or sides of either the body above the belly button or head while he attempts to do the same atop a 256-484 square foot surface for 30-45 minutes.

Boxing aficionados will tell you the most important element of boxing is footwork. They will also tell you the most beautiful thing in boxing is the left jab. A left jab is a quick, straight punch thrown with the weak hand. It generally serves to measure the distance between you and the opponent and get the opponent off balance. Tyson was not a beautiful boxer- he had no left jab whatsoever. In fact, that is exactly the reason he was so successful.

Tyson was short for a heavyweight boxer. When I was a kid, I thought he was short like me, but actually he is 5’11’’. His reach is normal for his size, so was also less than that of his opponents. Tyson’s technique, cleverly designed to compensate for this, was to position both his gloves high in front of his face and explode toward his opponent like a bulldozer. He was able to nimbly move his head while keeping his arms rock-solid in front of it. When within jabbing range, Tyson didn’t as much as flinch. He just kept barreling forward, deftly cutting off the ring and both perplexing and intimidating his opponent just long enough to feed him devastating right hooks and uppercuts at point blank range.

In November of 1986, a year that had begun with the explosion of the Challenger, “Iron” Mike Tyson overtook Floyd Patterson’s record by a year and a half to become the new youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. Cus D’Amato died shortly thereafter. Around the same time, my rabbit, aptly named Snowball, froze to death. As Tyson continued to pummel opponents in the ring on an almost weekly basis, my dad turned the rabbit cage into a pigeon coop. I was spending a significant amount of my time reading Marvel comic books, an alternate universe filled with super humans whose personal lives we got a glimpse of in every third issue, and playing with the 1980’s version of G.I. Joe- poseable plastic fighters and vehicles of all different styles whose product tag-line was “A Real American Hero.”

My dad is not a fighter and does not condone fighting. He is what one might call a hobbyist. In the mid 80’s, he divided his spare time between building a boat in the basement, constructing wire-controlled gas propeller-driven model airplanes, playing in a basketball league and assiduously leading the church’s boy-scout group. And by “spare time,” I’m referring to time not being spent supporting a family of five on a single household income as a construction and maintenance worker and also sustaining a 3.5 acre lot with horses, pigs, chickens, a quarter-acre garden and a four bedroom, one bathroom century home that ran on propane and shallow well-water. All this while teaching me how to pitch a baseball, build bird houses and model rockets, shoot a rifle, ride a bike on gravel, play basketball and who knows what else.

I’m not sure why or how dad decided to add raising pigeons to the list. I also don’t recall what kind of pigeons we had at that time. At some point, he moved the pigeon coop from the converted rabbit cage to the machine shed where I was spending more and more time practicing on an old drumset he had bought me for $50. Having yet to develop the capacity for controlling dynamics, I would struggle to figure out how to continue to hear the pigeons cooing while attempting to accompany them on that drumset.

In 1988, just after ending my elementary school years and becoming old enough to finally join the Christian frontiersman re-enactment club my dad and brother were involved in, we moved a few hours south to a small town just outside Des Moines called Polk City. At the same time, my brother, six years my elder, went off to college in Iowa City. Dad asked if I would like to continue to raise pigeons with him when we moved. I can’t recall moving the pigeons from the farm, but I do remember going with dad to buy some new ones. On that trip I learned there were different kinds of pigeons, and it seemed to me a no-brainer that the best ones were those that periodically interrupted their flight with random freefall backflips. My dad wanted the ones that could find their way home from hundreds of miles away. The person selling the pigeons made sure we wouldn’t be using the birds for training dogs. I learned what was meant by that on the drive home. Dad had built a shed in the backyard which he divided it into two sections, one for his Racing Homers and one for my Rollers.

That summer, the neighborhood kids quickly introduced me to their two favorite things: Poison, a really bad “hair” band, and Mike Tyson’s Punchout, a really awesome Nintendo game. In it, you got to be “Iron” Mike and fight his opponents; learning their names, stats, strengths and weaknesses. We all knew it was an almost exact rip-off of an Atari game called Punchout, but it was way better in our eyes- because it was Mike Tyson’s Punchout. I couldn’t even beat the video game version of the guys Tyson had made short work of in real life.

In the eighties, America and Americans were invincible. Perhaps the “Miracle on Ice” can be credited for setting the tone for the decade. We had not only the greatest athletes on the planet, as the 1984 Olympics would prove, but we also had the most entertaining movies, the most brilliant technology, the loudest music, the funniest comedians, Pepsi and break dancing. Sure, the Brits had Princess Di, but we had the king- Michael Jackson. We were so bad-ass we were winning the Cold War by intimidation alone. Everything was larger than life back then. Even our president was a Hollywood actor. We didn’t know or care to know about the wars his administration was instigating, funding and arming. Unbelievably in retrospect, we were also largely ignorant of the AIDS epidemic. We nearly got through the entire decade with only those six astronauts and the accompanying teacher being our only televised glimpse of reality, and they had become enshrined in our minds as epitomizing American bravery and fortitude. We even saved Jessica McClure from that well. 1989 was defined by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but we failed to appreciate the significance of this event as a poignant warning that we would soon find ourselves cleaning up all kinds of messes that would be the direct results of our decade of peace and prosperity. (When god announced her presence during the World Series and then let the A’s beat the Giants, we should have known we were headed for trouble.)

The early nineties sucked, and not only because of the fact that I was entering high school. The end began on February 11th, 1990. I didn’t watch the “Buster” Douglas fight. Nobody watched that fight, because we all knew nobody could beat Mike Tyson. He was “the baddest man on the planet.” Afterwards, we didn’t know what to believe anymore. Before we knew what was happening, we were fighting in Iraq, “Magic” Johnson had AIDS and Michael Jackson was white. We had been told there was no draft, yet here were getting “Selective Service” registration cards in the mail. Forced to inspect closer, we quickly learned not only was the Marvel universe fiction, but our media-fed one was as well. Obviously many of the greats of the era: Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, etc. have remained untainted, but that is beside the point. We as a collective had glass chins. We quickly found a new spokesperson for our generation in Kurt Cobain. The turnaround was so drastic that, on January 11th, 1992, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” supplanted Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” atop the Billboard charts.

Raising pigeons consists mostly of giving them straw, food and water, cleaning up their crap and making sure they are inside at dusk so they don’t get eaten by hawks and owls. The last is achieved by throwing rocks at them if they try and roost on the neighbor's garage. I sometimes drove random places with dad to release the Homers at gradually increasing distances. It wasn’t unusual for them to eventually fail to return, and every once in awhile, one that had been lost for several months would suddenly appear, ragged and beaten. Dad and I remained active in the frontiersman group, where we camped in a Baker-style lean-to tent dad had designed and sewn with three built-in cots. He also built oak and glass lanterns that we bartered with at “Rendezvous,” which were all-male gatherings during which we shot black powder rifles, threw knives, tomahawks and horseshoes, swapped tales and started bonfires with flint and steel.

During one such event, another member of our frontiersman group, whom I had known as far back as I could remember for being able to build the fastest pinewood derby cars in the state, spent an afternoon turning a leaky metal washtub into a washtub bass- only to discover he couldn’t play the thing. Others made brief and unsuccessful attempts, but when it was my dad’s turn, he immediately began plucking out familiar melodies. This astonished me likely as much as it had my parents when my brother had sat down at a piano and started sight-reading music back in ’82. Later that night there was a severe storm and we came within a few feet of being struck by lightning.

After returning home, dad bought a guitar and we started a Christian rock band. This was my first band outside of the organized school music program, which I remained heavily involved in, and my first taste of rehearsals, gigs, band mates and music equipment, which dad bought second-hand from a nice old junk collector named Fred. Also during this time, dad grew his hair long, got his ear pierced and bought a motorcycle.

My junior year of high school, I began dating a girl and discovered bebop. I worked as a prep cook and read classic literature. Dad didn’t know about any of this stuff. He followed meaningless drivel like college football and played golf, which was far too frustrating a sport to try and figure out how to do.

In retrospect, it is obvious that one way to defend against Tyson’s strategy is to tie him up before he can unload a punch, obliging the referee to break the pair up. Repeated, this would make for an interesting gambit to determine who would get more frustrated with a fight in which nary a punch would be thrown, the fans or Tyson. Evander Holyfield was determined to find out.

Mike Tyson’s early success combined with the untimely death of the architect of that success left Tyson without a backup plan. Having presumably never been exposed to the philosophy of fighters like Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, flexibility and adaptation were not in “Iron” Mike’s repertoire. He had instead been trained to be unyielding, and he had learned well. When things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, Mike Tyson didn’t get frustrated; he absolutely snapped.

Today, Tyson’s influence is very much alive in Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, a modern sport that combines fighting with grappling. Wresters who converted to MMA figured out that Tyson’s style was perfectly suited for them, as the way to defend it, tying up, is exactly what wrestlers want to do. MMA gloves are much less padded than boxing gloves, so even a boxing novice can knock someone out. (This is not to belittle MMA as a sport- I’ve realized the easiest way to defend oneself in real life is to learn how to do everything that is illegal in MMA.) Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, who a lot of kids today probably tout as the greatest fighter ever, made a career out of emulating Tyson’s boxing approach in MMA fights.

There is currently a television show about Mike Tyson learning to train Racing Homers, called “Taking on Tyson.” Tyson has raised pigeons most of his life, but they have always been ones that looked pretty or did tricks in the air. The unique thing about Homers is that they can find their way home from hundreds of miles away, but in order for them to be good at it, they have to be trained. To some, a show about a washed-up nut-job fooling around with birds might seem a bore, but I’ve remained glued to every episode, not only because Mike Tyson helped define my generation, but because it reminds how fortunate I am that, while my generation grew up looking for heroes in pop-culture, I was being raised by a superhero.