Head Games
To regain his license in Nevada, Iron Mike had to give up his mind
Posted: Tuesday October 20, 1998 05:59 PM
By Richard Hoffer
Now what
was it Mike Tyson was applying for? An airline pilot's
license? An Amway distributorship? Scuba certification? It
must have been a position extremely critical to public
safety or the Nevada State Athletic Commission
wouldn't have set these degrading
events into motion. You don't release a guy's psychological
profile to the Web—he has problems spelling? he don't
read so good? he has "executive control"
deficits?—unless you absolutely have to. Surely
you
wouldn't humiliate a man, lay him out for all
the boys at
SportsCenter to jeer, just for a
boxing license. You
wouldn't demand the most sensitive of
medical records, knowing that they would become public,
just to reassure fight fans he would never bite another ear
(but would break a nose). It's one thing to make a fighter
drop
trou at a weigh-in, another to expose every cranial
cranny.
Something else must have made necessary the psychological
strip search that culminated in the commission's 4-1 vote
on Monday to let Tyson back in the game. It's not like we'd
been tossing and turning nights, worrying over the
"constellation of
neurobehavioral deficits" (the report's term) that plunged
Tyson into his globally televised temper tantrum. Most of
us felt the suspension of his license had been curative
enough.
So why was it that the commission packed Tyson off to
Massachusetts General Hospital for five days of testing
before he was allowed to reapply? True, those commissioners
can be a squeamish bunch when it comes to fighters'
well-being (though they weren't
squeamish enough to protect
Tyson from Don King's jailhouse contract, which left Tyson
with just 50 cents on the dollar from his
$30 million bite-night take-home). But the commission's mental
mining expedition wasn't about protecting Tyson or his
future opponents. It was about protecting the commission
from
embarrassment.
We now know that Tyson has difficulties with "impulse
control, inhibition of behavior." (Aren't these the
very neurobehavioral deficits that qualify him to perform
in the ring?) What good is the public dissemination of this
news except to insulate
boxing authorities from the outcry that would follow another
Tyson breakdown? It's hard to imagine some other more
popular figure than Tyson being forced to undergo this
inquisition with less public outrage. Of course Tyson
cultivates villainy and has himself
to thank for the lack of support. But even men who
appropriate Sonny Liston for a role model deserve their
psychic privacy. Maybe especially those
men.
Issue date: October 26, 1998
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