Of Murderous Intentions

By Tom Callahan

So Muhammad Ali did not take boxing with him after all. Just as Joe Louis had not after all. Just as Jack Dempsey could not after all. They left it to Mike Tyson, a primitive without stockings, who carves a hole in a towel and calls it a robe. Like boxing, he is an anachronism, a dusty old museum piece of 20, a black from Brooklyn's worst circumstances, an orphaned street robber found handcuffed to a reform-school radiator, and the youngest heavyweight champion of the world.

He was bequeathed to the sport by the old trainer Cus D'Amato, who died a year ago lost and lonely, three decades after standing up to the cowardly little mobster Frankie Carbo. Maybe lonely is wrong, though Cus never married in 77 years, admitting only one passion. As the legal ward of D'Amato, Tyson was kin to Floyd Patterson, the youngest champion until last week. A Tyson left hook in the second round sent the World Boxing Council's Trevor Berbick bouncing across the ring and almost through the ropes. That made 28 victims in 28 fights, 26 by concussion, from "hydrogen bombs" thrown "with murderous intentions." Tyson also said, in a gentle lisp so becoming and contradictory, "Look at me. I'm just a boy, and I got this belt on my waist."

The property of Film Collectors Bill Cayton and Jim Jacobs, Tyson is the only fighter of this century who could knowledgeably declare, "I always wanted to be like John L. Sullivan." Through his managers' remarkable archives, including Tom Edison's 1894 kinetoscope of Gentleman Jim Corbett, Tyson is conversant with a day when boxers soaked their faces in brine and their hands in walnut juice. Fighting twice a month, at first in an Albany cracker box suitably called the Egg, Tyson has seemed to be of that day.

About Sullivan's height (5 ft. 10 1/2 in.), and Jim Jeffries' weight (220 lbs.), Tyson is a square, two-fisted hulk with a short man's proclivity for uppercuts. His urgency suggests Rocky Marciano. "A lot of comparisons are made," he says, "but I can't see them. Maybe if I could stand outside myself. Cus used to tell me that every fighter felt some nervousness just before he fought. But that's when I'm most at ease." D'Amato's surrogate, Kevin Rooney, does the training now, literally by the numbers. "Seven-six- two," he barks from ringside, ordering combinations of punches. An inactive welterweight, symbolically unretired at 30, Rooney has a fighter's mask featuring a wide and prideful nose that once made the short acquaintance of Alexis Arguello. Rooney recalls the day Tyson appeared in the gym at 13. "He looked like a big liar," the trainer says. "He looked old."

If Tyson still has "his 20-year-old days" (a bachelor, he proclaims his accessibility to women), Rooney considers him "a mature fighter, a very elusive boxer -- smart. He doesn't have a high school diploma, but he's on the verge of a master's." Studying the old films, Tyson likes "to look in the background and see all the people who are dead." But he also noticed the way Joe Frazier sometimes bent forward into Ali's flurries; when Marvis Frazier did the same thing, Tyson flattened Joe's son in 30 seconds. "I really believe, deep down in my heart, that I'm the best fighter in the world."

The world is troubled by fighting, of course. "Uncivilized man may have been bloodthirsty," observes the Journal of the American Medical Association, not referring to the glistening eyes and panting gills of Las Vegas. "Boxing should not be sanctioned by any civilized society." On the other side of the ring, Ali's old corner physician, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, points out, "You need ! only to turn on the box on Sundays to see an amazing number of stretcher cases being dragged off the field." But then, football is a game.

Because boxing is so hard, nobody thinks of it ever being done by choice or for pleasure, just for the money or the hope of some, by miserable circumstances and for rotten money. Both of boxing's big camps -- those who like despising it and those who dislike loving it -- are unsurprised whenever Roberto Duran or George Foreman comes back again. But they wonder how a bright person as prosperous as Sugar Ray Leonard (Ray Charles Leonard, namesake of a blind man) could return from retirement and retina surgery to fight Marvin Hagler at any price. "Ray doesn't spend in a year what his investments earn in a year," says Leonard's attorney, Mike Trainer. "It isn't money. Boxing is what gets him up in the morning. It's what he is, and there's nothing wrong with that."

Just a few days after losing his world championship last summer, Irish Featherweight Barry McGuigan was reviewing his 25 years in the crossroads town of Clones on the Fermanagh-Monaghan border. He is a Catholic married to a Protestant. Their home is near enough to the line to be supplied its telephone from Northern Ireland and its electricity from the Irish Republic. "It's a bloody joke, isn't it?" he said. Coming from where he does, a literal battleground, McGuigan would seem a good man through whom to try to understand fighting.

"I used to knock guys stone cold, as dead as Hector -- one punch," he reminisced. "I traveled all over the place to get fights. They would put me on last of all, and the people would be screaming when I came in." In 1982 he knocked a Nigerian named Alimi Mustafa dead as Hector. "I cry now whenever I think of that wee man, and sometimes when I swing on someone, there he is in front of me. His wife was pregnant, as mine was. Well he never knew it, but he had a son. I don't know why I fight. It's a fire in my gut. But I'll tell you something." His tone grew hushed, as he finally could give personal testimony to an ancient warning. "It damages you up there. I know after that last fight I've been damaged. I've lost some brain cells."

On the eve of Tyson's bout with Berbick, the winner of Muhammad Ali's last battle in 1981, Ali received two old newspaper friends in his hotel suite. He only faintly remembered them and vaguely introduced his fourth wife. He performed his card tricks as if they had never seen them before, and once more stuffed the disappearing handkerchief into his plastic thumb. "I'm good, I'm free," he said with an animal effort, a coughing rumble and a low growl. "I stay so busy, I'm in another world. All my boxing, it was all for this." Painstakingly, appearing unable to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, he resumed autographing sermons, and his visitors quietly left.

Tyson next fights in March, meeting the winner of a Tony Tubbs-Tim Witherspoon match for the World Boxing Association title. The International Boxing Federation's Michael Spinks is standing by to face the survivor in May, without noticeable enthusiasm. Then there will be one champion.