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.

Who Will He Be?

In recent interviews, Rashad McCants has said he would like to return to the league as a sixth man. While it's impossible to tell if this is the modest ambition of a humbled man, or, if Rashad is snake-charming us again, the possibilities of Rashad-as-bench-scoring-dynamo seem to match up with the best scraps of hope we have left for the man and his game.

He is, at times, a preternaturally gifted scorer. He can defend, when motivated. A bench role with the right coach, in the right system, with the right veteran leadership, could channel his particular brand of intensity into a dynamic weapon. But where? And, more importantly, if he did come back, who would he be?

Over the next few days, I’ll weigh some options for Rashad…

OPTION ONE: NEW YORK KNICKS
The Roger Mason signing complicates this a bit because it gives the Knicks two shooters at the off-guard position. (Azubuike is the other) Still, assuming that he would come back into the league as a role player, the Knicks seem like an ideal fit. His offensive game would flourish in D’Antoni’s system, he would be reunited with Ray Felton (who knows if that’s a good thing, though) and he would have Anthony Randolph around as a foil in temperament.

There’s an argument to be made that Rashad shouldn’t be in New York, but let’s remember, the man has never been in trouble with the law or been at the center of any sort of off-court controversy. Also, the Marshawn Lynch theory that pro athletes are more prone to get into trouble in boring towns keeps proving itself over and over again.

Most importantly, playing in the Garden would allow Rashad to channel the man he was in a past life.



John muthafuckin’ Starks, baby!

Could any of us hope for anything better than Rashad going to New York, honing all that volatility into competitiveness and becoming the second coming of #3? He and Starks are almost the same height and build. They play at a similar speed. McCants is a better shooter than Starks ever was. Starks had more bounce. The real thing that separates them is that Starks had an entire lifetime of being overlooked to burn off as motivation. McCants, in the terms of the basketball world, had everything given to him: freshman starter at Carolina, National Championship, first round draft pick. Now that the months out of the league have dragged out into years, could he dig deep and find that Starks-intensity? Could he build himself back up from fallen Carolina blue-blood (sorry) into Starks 2, self-made man?

FREE RASHAD

Is it because my car is nice, clothes are nice, because I listen to Jay-Z, cuz I'm kinda cute? Or is it just "jealousy"? This has got to be the weakest emotion that anyone can have. To be jealous that I have what you don't have. But what I don't understand is why hate on just me? Then I thought, ain't no one fresher than me, no one flier than me, no one realer than me. So I am the reason people hate, prime reason you should hate anyone like me. I think it's cuz I was "BORN 2 BE HATED.”- from the diary of Rashad McCants

ON FEBRUARY 10 2004, UNC sophomore Rashad McCants entered the second half of a game against Georgia Tech having only scored three points. The Heels, struggling along with a 4-6 conference record in Roy Williams’ first year as coach, trailed by five. The half started with a quick Georgia Tech run that expanded the lead to ten.

Over the next sixteen minutes of game time, McCants put on one of the most dazzling one-man shows in Tar Heel history, scoring twenty-eight points, draining three after circus three. Unfortunately for the Heels, McCants’ performance on that night was matched by Tech’s BJ Elder, who scored twenty-four in the half, and Carolina ultimately lost the game 88-77, a star was born in Chapel Hill. But here, finally, was the remedy to the Joe Forte blues—the explosive scorer and charismatic dynamo who could lead Ol’ Roy’s Heels back to the Final Four.

Back then, when a defense of Matt Doherty was enough to start a fight at Spanky’s or Woody’s or He’s Not Here, we were desperate. Perhaps we overlooked some early warning signs with McCants. There was never any official reason behind the Doherty firing; the accepted story in Chapel Hill was that Felton, May and McCants, offended by Doherty’s suggestion that they might need a psychiatrist, incited a mutiny that cleared the way for the Roy Williams era. In retrospect, the sports psychiatrist story only seems relevant in the context of McCants.

McCants, perhaps in a first-ever in the history of lazy sportswriters using the word mercurial, actually kind of was, well, mercurial. His antics on the court were always strangely anti-Carolina. Instead of taking on any leadership responsibilities, McCants seemed to orbit around the team’s gravitational center of May, Felton and Jawad Williams—never quite engaging, but always nearby, always doing his own thing. McCants flashed the Roc-A-Fella Domination sign after dunks, he saluted the cameras, he popped his jersey and preened for the crowd. To his credit, his theatrics were acts of exultation—unlike other “emotional” players, Rashad never argued with refs, he didn’t bicker with teammates during time-outs or on the court, he was never cheap or violent. Those of us fans who count Rasheed Wallace among our all-time-favorite Heels were happy to see that Ol’ Roy hadn’t brought the stuffier parts of Ol’ Carolina Way with him to Chapel Hill.

Yet he also played with a detached, but fully-formed intensity somewhere outside the usual jocularity, sportsmanship and precision one usually associates with Tar Heel Basketball. Watching him play was sometimes like watching Mike Tyson tell a joke—you love the man, the commitment, but you sometimes wonder what the fuck might be going through his head, and if what you are witnessing is the charming mechanics of a serial masochist.

Nothing that has happened to McCants over the past few years comes as any surprise to those of us who watched his career at Carolina. College, especially college in Chapel Hill, is a cocoon. Once Rashad was fed to the wolves and every quirk, every mysterious story was exposed for what it was, once he quit being Rashad McCants: eccentric and lovable dynamo for our Tar Heels, and, instead, became Rashad McCants: public property, what would happen to him? He once equated playing at Carolina to being in jail and longed for his “freedom.” What would that freedom entail? Although nobody really talked about it, Carolina fans had already seen what was odd with Rashad.

It certainly seems telling that the last image of McCants as a Tar Heel comes right after the final buzzer sounds in the 2005 National Championship. Felton, May, Marvin and Jawad mob one another under the basket. McCants is nowhere to be found. The camera finally finds him standing alone at mid-court. He has taken off his Carolina jersey and, with a smirk, presents it to the television audience.



SOCIETY-IN-THERAPY rarely extends its graces to the professional athlete. Ricky Williams is equated to Benedict Arnold; when Milton Bradley took some time off this spring to tend to some very obvious emotional issues, sportswriters piled on the usual absurd, man-in-a-foxhole metaphors. No matter how much Zack Greinke achieves on the mound, he will always be defined by the depression that caused him, God forbid, to question if he really wanted to pursue a life as a professional baseball player.

Although our post-racial language will not allow such an easy categorization, there exists a perception of a “Black depression,” that differs from its counterpart, “White depression.” Each iteration carries its own bag of causalities and images—White depression elicits bathtubs filled with blood, minivans, Mary Kay, Sylvia Plath, Edward Scissorhands, whereas the prevailing vision of Black depression is laid out along the narratives of economic hardship, limited opportunity and the ghetto operatics that much of America uses to define the totality of the African-American experience. In neater terms: White depression is The Virgin Suicides, Black depression is the fourth season of The Wire.

It certainly doesn’t need to be said that all these differentiations are myths, and dangerous ones at that, but the way they are processed seems paradoxical to certain core American values of responsibility. Why are we quicker to forgive White athletes for lapses in mental health? Why do we turn a blind eye to Josh Hamilton’s relapse, but pile on Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry? Why are there glowing Sports Illustrated cover stories about the miracle of Zack Greinke’s recovery from anxiety and depression, but none about Michael Beasley? In the most essentialist vision possible, which also happens to be the touchstone for almost all discussion of sports in America, shouldn’t America (titanic) be more willing to forgive the kid with the tough ghetto childhood than the kid who gets bored with his privileged, suburban life? Why did society-in-therapy, so eager to embrace everyone that it produced a show about a mob boss and his psychiatrist, create a state of exception for the Black athlete?

Perhaps, ironically, it is exactly the self-evidence, and, in some ways, the simplicity of the causality of Black depression that creates the very narrative used to dismiss it. Because Black depression, again speaking in as essentialist terms as possible, is perceived as being the result of economically depressed living conditions, whereas White depression is written off as chemical imbalances, treatable by any number of medications, when a Black male becomes a visibly wealthy member of society, he is subjected to this catastrophic logic: Because he is rich now, the reasons for him being depressed are now gone. Therefore, he should no long show any symptoms of any mental health problems. If he does, he is simply not appreciating what he has been given.

In his pre-draft interview with the Miami Dolphins, Dez Bryant was asked if his mother was a prostitute and if she “still did drugs.” When brought in for a workout with the 49ers, Matthew Stafford was asked to discuss his feelings about his parents’ divorce. When he said he wasn’t going to talk about it, the 49ers brass downgraded him on their chart.

What is the expected answer? What could Matthew Stafford have said to convince Mike Singletary that he was mentally healthy? How was Dez Bryant supposed to react to a stranger asking him if his mother was a drug addict/prostitute? It is impossible to believe that anyone, much less a front-office employee of a professional sports franchise, could make a determination of psychological health based on these sorts of scattershot, shock-jock questions. So why ask them? What Superman is being constructed? And what, for fuck’s sake, do we expect Superman to say?

Even if we do not know, exactly, who Superman is, we know who he is not, and he is not Rashad McCants, or any of his looks of exasperation, disinterest or anger. He is not the tattoos he sports on each arm: “Born to be Hated,” and, “Dying to be Loved.” He is not the poetry McCants has written or the mostly unexplained hiatus he took from that 2005 championship team. HE is not his moodiness or his outbursts. In fact, the only NBA-ish thing Rashad McCants has done in the five years that have passed since he left Carolina, was briefly date a Kardashian.



IT IS NO SECRET THAT THE NBA has lost its personality. In this post-Gil-era, the mold of NBA superstar is more blank, unobtrusive and corporate-friendly than it’s ever been. Kids no longer run up and down the court with a specific player’s demeanor in mind, but rather, professional basketball has become a TV show in which every character aspires to be the bland, beautiful straight man. Of the top ten players in the league, only Kobe has a distinct personality, a set of easily codified traits that define who he is. What, really, do we know about Dwight Howard? When he came into the league, he was a shy, Christian kid who was so naïve that he once said that there should be a crucifix on the NBA logo. Now, he is Dwight Howard, smiling, corporate superman, stripped, with Mao’s efficiency, of any religious ornamentation. Howard’s quirks are so calculated, predictable, that he comes across as a gigantic Katy Perry. Kevin Durant is celebrated for his candor, but only in contrast with the clamminess or meanness of his fellow players Dwyane Wade is not much more than a collection of commercials, post-hipster glasses and velveteen suits. As for the league’s self-appointed King, part of the shock and rage over Lebron’s Decision Summer came from the fact that we are simply not used to such disturbances of our expected boredoms, especially from a guy who has Jordan-monotoned the cameras since his freshman year in high school. Even his recent twitter vendetta seems staged—the virtual flailings of a desperate, and, ultimately, blank man.

While it’s undeniable that a culture of sameness has arrived, one has to wonder if this is a product of the league’s relentless push into international markets (strip the game of the “Americanness” that might offend people in Europe and Asia, and watch it grow!), or if it is truly a reflection of something much more ominous: a society that has built up an industry of mental health to tamp everyone down into a docile vessel. Is there so much difference between McCants and Charles Oakley? Is he more polarizing than Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf? The NBA once was a place where volatile personalities were used as weaponry—players like Lambeer, Oakley, Mahorn, Andrew Toney and Mourning played not so much as individuals on the court, but as embodiments of their unchained egos.

What I am trying to ask is this: in the arena of sports, are we still willing to accept eccentricity?



FREE RASHAD is for all of us head-cases, the misunderstood. It is for all of us who wanted to walk the earth with Ricky Williams, for those of us who listen to Mike Tyson and see a vision what we might be like if we had lived through a similar chaos. It is for those of us who, like Rashad, have never quite been able to bridge the gap between our conception of self—no matter how catastrophic it may be—and the functioning world. It is not as much a movement to get Rashad McCants back in the NBA, as it is a lament for the league we have lost. We accept, as Rashad has, his shortcomings as a teammate, as a basketball player. We are not even saying that if we were the GM of a team, we would give our hero a spot on the roster. Rather, we ask for the league to FREE RASHAD in the hopes that it will restore a coliseum of volatility, a celebration of the eccentric, and, perhaps, in turn, delay the ever-expanding norm of the corporate, World-Wide National Basketball Association.

FREERASHAD! FREERASHAD! FREERASHAD!