"America would hate to have him living next door," said one observer, "but is still fascinated by him. Later Tyson said gleefully that Biggs had screamed like a girl.Always there was the carefully created impression that Tyson was beyond salvation; like Liston, who was not so much a hero as a morbid obsession, he did not have the power to step off the road to perdition. He was painting the story of a life defined by pain and forces over which no individual could truly exert control - yet buried away was the fact that his brother had escaped the scabrous streets of Brownsville and lived peacefully as a chemist in California.Notoriously, the young Tyson speculated on the pleasure he would get from driving the nose-bone of an opponent into his brain. Others saw it merely as another step along the way of merchandising a dark preoccupation with violent death. In the build-up to the Holyfield fight, Tyson's camp talked of the challenger being taken home to Georgia in a coffin.When you thought about it even then, nearly a decade ago and with Tyson not just 30, such imagery had long been the dominating motif of his life and his career.As the newly crowned champion of the world in 1987 he visited a high school in Brooklyn, stood on a stage and talked about the ravages of drugs and how many of his companions at school or in the street were either in prison on dead. Before committing his ear-biting atrocity on Evander Holyfield nine years ago, Tyson visited the poorly tended grave of Liston in a cemetery under the flight path of Las Vegas airport. He took flowers and talked about the sadness that engulfed him when he thought of the end of the sullen champion widely believed to have been killed by order of the Mafia For some there was poignancy in that scene.
"The best bet is that Tyson will die young, maybe shot in some bar late at night by a jealous boyfriend or husband, or someone Tyson has pushed too far, or frightened too much. He's like a bomb waiting to explode," said Giachetti.Here this week you can hardly hear a tick. He was asked whether he saw the McBride fight as his second chance to rescue something to carry him through the rest of his life. "No, no," he laughed, "I've had 30,000 chances, not like Sonny Liston, who had no chance."Sonny Liston, now that is a name to conjure despair. It was that Tyson would never make middle age, and indeed he might be lucky to reach 30.
"Will I be fighting at 40? Hell, yes, that's practically tomorrow," he says.When he became the youngest heavyweight champion of the world, and King crowned him in a grotesque ceremony in the ballroom of the Hilton Casino Hotel in Las Vegas, the fight man Richard Giachetti, a trainer of the fine heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, made public a growing theory within boxing. Tyson's earnings on Saturday night are guaranteed at $5m (£2.7m). What is happening here this week has little to do with boxing. It is another chapter of Tyson's unlikely graduation into early middle age.
