The New Yorker:

The boxer’s rematch with Evander Holyfield was a war between aspiration and insolence, gospel and rap. But without Tyson there was no sense of danger, no interest, no hundred million dollars.

By David Remnick

The conventions of the ring demand that a fighter in training become a monk. For months at a time, he hardens his body on roadwork and beefsteak, and practices an enforced loneliness—even (tradition has it) sexual loneliness—the better to focus the mind on war. Mike Tyson’s monastery in the Nevada desert is a mansion next door to Wayne Newton’s mansion, and it could be said to lack the usual austerity. There is a chandelier worthy of Cap d’Antibes. There is a painting on silk of Diana Ross. There are books, magazines, a big television, leather couches. But the diversions are not what they could be. When Tyson is not preparing for fights, he keeps lions and tigers around as pets and wrestles with them. “Sometimes I go swimming with the tiger,” he told a visitor. “But, personally, I’m a lion man. Lions are very obedient, like dogs.” Tyson was keeping his pets elsewhere, though. He has estates in Ohio, in Connecticut, and off a fairway on the Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Maryland. The big cats are most often in Ohio. The Nevada mansion is surrounded by life-size statues of warrior heroes whom Tyson has read about and come to revere: Genghis Khan, Toussaint-L’Ouverture, Alexander the Great, Hannibal. “Hannibal was very courageous,” Tyson said. “He rode elephants through Cartilage.” In a week’s time, Tyson himself would be going through cartilage, too.

After spending three years in an Indiana prison for raping a teen-ager named Desiree Washington, Tyson went back to fighting in 1995. He denied to the end that he had ever raped anyone, but he said he was a better man now. Tyson converted to Islam—indeed, the bumper sticker on his Bentley reads “I ™[heart] Allah”—and he told his visitors in jail that he had spent his time studying the Koran, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Dumas, the lives of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, “and a lot of Communist literature.” He ordered up icons for his shoulders, a diptych tattoo: Arthur Ashe on one side, Mao Zedong on the other. He declared himself ready to regain his place in boxing. He would reclaim not only his title but also his image of invincibility. Iron Mike. Kid Dynamite. Once more, he would be the fighter who had expressed only disappointment after a knockout of one Jesse Ferguson, saying, “I wanted to hit him one more time in the nose so that bone could go up into his brain.”

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