hiatus

other projects are taking up too much of my time. Will resume Free Rashad when the Carolina season starts up in November.

this is sad...

ahhhhhh crap.

This is part two of a series of thoughts on Mike Tyson. Part one is below.

II

All sports are marketed to children, or, when applicable, the child within us. What gets targeted, though, is not really childishness, but, rather, the happier approximation of childhood: the same wide-eyed kid who collected baseball cards, who wore his favorite player’s jersey, who practiced the commercialized cross-over in the driveway. The narrative of each game, season, series and franchise, then, is told as a children’s story, with simple delineations between good and evil, hero and monster. At first read, both humanity and inhumanity are assumed—as children, we do not question Grendel’s monstrosity or Beowulf’s intentions or humility. It is only later, as adults, when we can see a bit of ourselves in Grendel, that we ask questions, stitch together justifications and alter the shape of the narrative.

Similarly, our childhood sports heroes rarely hold up against time—Mantle staggers off, bottle in hand; we find Tiger balls-deep in a porn star; Jordan is off abusing dealers at the craps table; Clemens cockwalks around, needle stuck in ass. Our monsters are forgiven for their perceived monstrosities—Ted Williams’ dickishness is forgotten, Jim Brown is lionized, Ron Artest goes from “dangerous” to “quirky.” At some point in the near future, Pete Rose will record his blustery, apologetic confession on SportsCenter and baseball will determine that he is sincere and we will see him next at Cooperstown, where a gallery of fans will give him the longest standing ovation in the history of Upstate New York.

Only Mike Tyson, heavyweight champion of the world, convicted rapist and lowbrow comedy star, exists outside of these normalizing trends. It has been eight years since his last meaningful fight. The generation of kids who know Tyson as the tiger owner in The Hangover have excised him from the images we have of Mike Tyson in a grey suit and handcuffs, the images of Tyson with his arm around Robin Givens, staring incredulously as she details her daily terror. Most of us old enough to remember these things have also forgotten them. This in itself does not deviate from the normal trend of forgetting and time-fueled redemption, but what’s odd about Tyson is just how quickly we have forgotten and how the process of forgetting has not just obliterated his indiscretions, but also his triumphs.

The completeness of this evacuation of Mike Tyson’s history must be attributed, at least in part, to the violence of boxing itself. It’s hard to ratchet a man’s legacy to images if those images involve him brutally beating another man. Even the sport’s most iconic image—Muhammed Ali standing over Liston—only passes because we cannot see Liston’s face. So, yes, given the particular brutality of Tyson’s early string of KOs, it’s understandable why there is not much in the way of a visible record—we can watch Kirk Gibson limp around the bases or Dwight Clark leaping into the air, arms outstretched, but we cannot watch Marvis Frazier’s eyes get knocked out of their sockets without thinking there might be something wrong with us.

And yet, we keep him around, not as a flawed, great man whose story awaits its epilogue, but rather as a cautionary tale against our peculiar American excesses. Because this particular cautionary tale is told in a child’s terms, and because we have known about Tyson for decades now, the details of his past greatness are no longer necessary to define—just as the Emperor is simply the Emperor and Job is described as nothing more than an “upright man who feared God,” Tyson's legacy, long since stripped of its triumphant images (what would those even have been?), has been laid flat with non-evocative, ultimately inert words. All that's left, really, is a video game and the title of former champ. The spectacle of his downfall has already been dissected and discarded, plucked of its easiest metaphors and life lessons. All that’s left is Tyson, himself, and the fact that he fell from great heights down into unimaginable suffering. And just as God used Job to prove man’s resilience and faith, perhaps Tyson stays in the public’s eye because he signifies the grotesque side of that devotion to life, that indomitable spirit.

Watching him give interviews, listening to his conception of pain, hearing his contrition over his past life, brings to mind something somebody once said about JD Salinger, that he lived his life with his eyes a bit too wide open to the suffering of the world. Indeed, Salinger, a devoted Zenny man, devoted much of his post publishing career to trying to understand the first of the Four Noble Truths: All Life is suffering. For Tyson, who seems to be borne of that same handicap of over-seeing, there is no escape to New Hampshire and once God makes his point, there will be no cessation of suffering and a restocking of his riches. Where could he even go for peace?

This is the first part of a multi-part essay on Mike Tyson.


I

At the age of ten, after successfully clunking through Minuet in G at the Josiah Haynes Elementary’s annual piano recital, my parents walked me out to their station wagon. A box whose size I knew too well was sitting in the back, disguised, uselessly, really, in silver wrapping paper. There was a small rectangular tumor poking out at the top of the box and for a second, I panicked, before recognizing the shape of the growth. As it so happened, on that day, I was not to be disappointed, as the box, indeed, was the box for a brand new Nintendo Entertainment System and the tumor was a game: Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. In some bizarre occurrence that has been obliterated by the collective nostalgia for these 8-bit moments, my NES did not come with Duck Hunt or Super Mario Brothers. Instead, it came with a glossy, 200 page strategy guide for all the games that I did not own.

For the next three years, my parents steadfastly refused to buy me any more games. By the time I inherited the collection of a friend’s brother whose mother had had enough, I could beat Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out three times through without ever getting hit. My mastery of the game was so complete that it began to take on a hard-Zen aesthetic edge that lost touch with the usual demands of that virtual world—there are moments, even now, when I wonder if there truly is a way to get through the entire game without any damage. The mahareshi who stands in the way of that perfection is Great Tiger—there is simply no way to get past him without blocking his infamous, and comically ineffective spin punch. Every time you block a punch, a tiny sliver of health is sacrificed and the dream of perfection is shattered.

I have always maintained that Mister Sandman is the toughest motherfucker in the game. Again, I do not speak from the perspective of someone who is ever afraid of losing, or even really being hit more than once. Rather, once one has mastered Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, the measurement of difficulty comes from randomness. Mike Tyson himself is completely predictable—the only hairy moments in the Dream Match come at the start of the second round, when Mike comes out and just starts jabbing. Mister Sandman, with Juan Manuel Marquez’s sleight of hand, will sometimes slip in a random jab. There were times when I would play the entirety of the game, smashing fools, cursing at the impossible riddle of Great Tiger, and as I advanced as steadily and confidently as Ender Wiggin, I would be aware of a dread forming at the back of my head: will Sandman throw in that jab?

I only mention all this because I recently noticed something odd—as a child, when I battled Mike Tyson at least once a day, when his name was always around and his 8-bit image was burned into my brain, I never really thought of him as anything but the anti-climactic end to the only video game I owned. And yet, I wonder if all those encounters with Mike, the uncharted space he inhabited in the still-hazy spaces of my “virtual” life, were unconsciously soliciting my sympathies (how do you not sympathize with a man whose ass you kick on the daily?). Because now, at the age of thirty, my once legendary Punch-Out skills long gone (I can’t even get past Soda Popinski anymore—although, officially, I blame the controller), there is never a time when I think about sports without thinking about Mike Tyson. He has become the touchstone for everything—this blog, for example, while being about Rashad McCants and misunderstood athletes, is really about Mike Tyson, because there’s no way for me to understand Rashad McCants without first referencing Mike Tyson.

I don’t think it’s much different for any of us who were born between 1970-1985. Tyson was the dominant champion of our childhoods, the hero who evoked terror in our parents, the one athlete who begged the question: how can an invincible man be so complicated? And after it began to all unravel in that bout in Japan (here’s a testament to Tyson’s wild popularity at the time—even the who beat him got his own video game), he became the enduring and incalculably tragic figure of our young adulthoods. Whenever he shows up on television, whenever some talking head or talk show radio host dismisses him as a “nutjob” or a “madman,” I experience a spike of emotion that far exceeds the appropriate limits of what a sports figure should inspire in a grown man. Absurdly, I feel the need to protect Mike Tyson, the same man who destroyed Leon Spinks in 91 seconds, the same man who I knocked out every single day of my childhood.

zomfg!

Why does Happy Gilmore Exist?

“I am not a role model,” while an admirable sentiment, was always beside the point. Sure, parents should never raise their kids in the image of a man who has done nothing but grow really tall and ball really well, but, over the years, I’ve come across enough bad parents to fill a Tolstoy novel (I worked for a while as a teacher at a private school, in San Francisco, no less), and have never met one who pointed at Stephen Curry or Ronnie Lott or even Kurt Warner and said, “Son, live your life as he does.” It’s possible, I suppose, that Charles did help vacate some vague responsibility for athletes, but whenever I hear someone call up to a sports talk radio show and bitch and whine about how some athlete is making it tougher for the caller to raise his kids (a funny paradox: anyone who calls into a sports talk radio show should not have kids to raise…We’ll pass the verdict on pretentious basketball bloggers later), I never really believe him. In that scenario, it’s always clear that the caller who worries about his children simply sees something ugly in the athlete that he can identify in himself, and, therefore, questions his own ability to raise his kids (half the time, I don’t even believe the caller has kids at all and is just evoking “the kids,” Helen Lovejoy-style just to bask, at least for a little while, on the stoic, macho, Bro-han side of things). Nothing else makes sense.

On a somewhat related note, I have found myself wondering over the past few years why there have never been any real changes to my list of favorite athletes, only minor renovations and rearrangements—McCants replaces Vernon Maxwell, Rasheed and the Glove swap places and then swap back. And while I won’t bore you with my own personal exodus in the years that have passed since I saw Rasheed strolling around the courts at Granville Towers, just know, those traits of dysfunction that made me identify with him have all been rationalized away and suppressed, as has the dickish bravado that turned Sam Cassell into one of my heroes. Still, even after watching both those guys play out an entire career, the guys who have lined up to replace Rasheed and Sam-I-Am are just Rasheed and Sam-I-Am all over again.

During the World Cup, my least favorite player was Uruguay’s Diego Forlan. I was in Mexico City and had caught La Seleccion fever (Uruguay was in the same group with my two rooting interests: South Korea and Mexico), but I didn’t have the same problem with Luis Suarez or equally obnoxious strikers on other squads. After Uruguay beat La Seleccion, it became clear that I hated Diego Forlan because I hated his stupid face and that goddamn hair. It doesn’t need to be said that any hatred of face and hair is racialized, especially on a stage like the World Cup, and I was in the company of one of my favorite people in the world, a man who does not apologize for always rooting for the underdog: racial, civic, economic or otherwise, and it felt right to root against the blonde, attractive guy.

I think the sports talk radio caller exists on the other side of the spectrum, not politically, exactly, but in how he processes the athlete. When confronted with a “troubled” athlete, some of us root for him because we can identify the same traits in ourselves and want to see an example of society’s acceptance, but also because we want to cut down the guy who is ahead of us in the pecking order. When that usurpring desire gets too uncomfortable, the tendency is to flush out that discomfort with liberal sentiment, all of which serves to prove that while we might hate Diego Forlan because of his stupid face, we are not racist. The talk show radio caller has the same experience of identifying the trouble within himself, but instead of washing out the resulting ethical discomfort with liberal sentiment, he simply closes his eyes and identifies with the man in charge, the man who always smiles, prints money and worries about the welfare of women and children, the man who, of course, is not him.

In the Foxhole

For the professional athlete, no sin compares to the sin of being a bad teammate. It is a flattening, thoroughly destructive label to carry, and, as was discussed yesterday, its truth is completely unknowable. In a league filled with criminals, pastors and family men, all of whom are millionaires, one’s commitment to one’s team is, in some ways, the only way to delineate the good from the bad. This paradox, where the lines that divide are also unknowable and disseminated in vagaries and hearsay, brings up a litany of obvious, and, somewhat silly panoptic metaphors. Once he is tagged as a bad teammate, the athlete, despite the ability to access the media, is helpless, especially when his former teammates, fearing they, too, might get tossed into the bad half of a “divided locker room,” acquiesce and tow the company line.

Consider Ray Lewis, who, despite being acquitted of murder charges, has never been able to muster up a clear picture of what happened in that nightclub. Outside of Peyton Manning, there is no player in the NFL more lionized than Lewis. It seems as if in the estimation of sportswriters, fans and talking heads, Lewis’ very public displays of good-teamsmanship supersede any doubts about his bad-humanness. Similarly, when Kobe was perceived to be a bad teammate, whatever happened or did not happen in that hotel in Colorado was still relevant. Once Mitch Kupchak picked up Pau Gasol and the Lakers won the title, leading to an outpouring of Kobe-Gets-It speak, he was recast as a different sort of machine—the Kobe we had known, the one who was so singularly focused on excellence, had evolved into a Kobe who understood the joy of helping others. All was forgiven. When the sports world brought out its biggest stick to beat down Selfish Lebron, the most commonly evoked foil was Kobe.

Again, our military metaphors are to blame. Within the dying animal that is our macho sports culture, being a bad teammate is akin to ditching your squadron in a foxhole. In real foxholes, a lack of cooperation leads to death, and so, as long as the trust between men is assumed, one can conceivably turn a blind eye towards the indiscretions of his brother. In the military, such logic is necessary, and, I suppose, in sports, the comparison is apt, at least to a point. For any group of men to cohere into one unit, the paramount value that must be established is teamwork towards a common goal.

The logic we assume, then, goes like this: personal problems only hurt you, even if they hurt others, they only hurt the people you hurt. However, if you abandon the team, you are not only hurting all your teammates, individually, but you are spitting on the democratic ethic that binds us all together. If we draw out the military metaphor to its logical end, what we are saying is this: bad teammate, what you are spitting on is America. And in America, treason is punishable by hanging.
























I must admit, despite my inclination to say something damning about this sort of logic, there’s part of me that actually agrees with it. Outside of our allegiances to others and our commitment to a common goal, how, exactly, do we redeem ourselves? I’ve long maintained, mostly for the sake of barroom conversation, that if I was presented with two people: one who stabbed someone and one who serially cuts in line, and was asked to blindly choose one of them to be my friend, I would, without hesitation, choose the stabber. There are reasons to stab someone—maybe the victim invaded your home or threatened your kids—but there is no part of my brain that can understand or empathize with someone who continually cuts in line. His heart is the uglier one because it shows no concern for anyone but himself, and, in the process, pisses all over the unspoken contract about lines: hey, we are going to stand here and we will eventually get to the front as long as nobody cuts.

I do not mean to say that being a bad teammate is somehow worse than beating your wife or shooting someone outside of a club. Such calculations are absurd and generally irrelevant. But, I will say this: there is a cleaner logic to being a good teammate. The sin does not have the capacity to carry any mitigating factors. (even if you hate the coach and organization, you should still be a bro) As such, the violations of good teammate-ness (or line-cutters) dredge up an easily categorized, clearly distilled disgust. And if this question could be somehow abstracted from its many historical contexts, and if we weren’t talking about a game played by oftentimes disinterested millionaires to boost the profile of billionaires, I might even be inclined to agree: treason is the worst sin.

But because we rely on the mainstream media to tell us who is a good teammate and who is not and because these designations fluctuate wildly and seemingly on a whim (if Lebron had stayed in Cleveland, would those Adrian Woj stories have come out? All that stuff about him being a terrible teammate is reported as fact, and yet, it took Lebron acting like an ass for it to come out that he, in addition to being basketball’s Kanye, is also a bad teammate), and because of the justifiably huge sway it has on our opinions of a man, it seems catastrophically foolish to believe anything anyone says about whether someone is a good or bad teammate.

And yet, I still believe that Rashad was a bad teammate in Minnesota and Sacramento, and somehow, it still matters. I guess my need to impose myself and my morals onto the projected image of a basketball player trumps my understanding (opinion, really) that the metaphors and logic are both catastrophically dumb.

Does that side--the one that's really about me--ever lose?