AFTER THE BITE

By Richard Lacayo

Mike Tyson, who may have earned $140 million since he got out of prison two years ago, spent his 31st birthday begging. Two days after he sampled Evander Holyfield's ear, threw away their championship return bout and maybe also the rest of his career, Tyson was standing before a microphone pleading not to be barred from boxing. "I only ask that I not be penalized for life for this mistake," he said. He added that he had sought professional help "to find out why I did what I did."

Holyfield spent time last week in Atlanta being treated finally with the respect he keeps earning but never quite gets. "I would like to help Tyson," he told TIME. "But you'll never really get healthy until you talk to yourself." From a distance, the crescent-shaped bite made by Tyson's incisors is barely noticeable. And from close up, neither is Holyfield's resentment, if he feels any. He has no plans to sue Tyson, who is facing penalties from all directions. "His attitude," says Holyfield, "caused him to lose everything he'd gathered."

Just what "everything" means will be decided this week by the five members of the Nevada Athletic Commission. The state attorney general's office has recommended that Tyson's boxing license be revoked, a step the state has never before taken, and that he be fined $3 million, the maximum 10% of his $30 million purse from the fight. Tyson could apply for a new license after a year, but Nevada law allows commissioners to refuse to grant it as long as they wish. Nevada's decision, whatever it is, will be honored throughout the U.S. Tyson has already said he will not contest it.

All this puts the commissioners in a delicate spot. Nevada Governor Bob Miller was on the phone to them last week. So were a lot of fight fans, pro and con Tyson. "This is the toughest thing I've ever had to deal with in my life," says commissioner Luther Mack. Enforcing civilized standards is never easy in a sport where acceptable behavior is to beat your opponent to a pulp, and where unacceptable behavior has never been bad for the gate. Holyfield himself once bit an opponent, "Jakey" Winters, during a Golden Gloves bout in 1980. Holyfield, who gnawed Winters' shoulder during a clinch, says he still had his mouth guard in at the time. Winters insists Holyfield spit it out first.

Still, the commission is under pressure to hand down a meaningful penalty, if only to sustain the hope that boxing is an industry that can contain its own pollutants. But driving Tyson out of the ring for good at a time when boxing is desperately short of star power would be very bad for business. Even a diminished Tyson remains an invincible money magnet. The fight with Holyfield brought in a record 1.8 million viewer buys and $90 million in pay-per-view revenue for the cable channel Showtime. The previous record holder? Tyson's previous fight with Holyfield.

"My instinct tells me there'll be continuing interest and curiosity about Tyson," Jay Larkin, a Showtime senior vice president whose instincts are hard to argue with, told USA Today. Nor will Holyfield rule out a return bout. "I wouldn't say never," he says.

A U.S. ban on Tyson could be a bit like putting trade sanctions on China for human-rights abuses: if American companies can't enter the market, foreign competitors will. In an age of worldwide satellite broadcasts, Tyson can easily take his salable furies offshore, featuring himself in Thrillas from Manila for however long it pays. "We have to do what is best for the state of Nevada and for boxing," says commission chairman Elias Ghanem. It's a statement open to many interpretations.

No matter what Nevada decides, Tyson's career is in deep trouble. For the first two rounds of the return bout with Holyfield, Tyson was plainly and simply outboxed. And it wasn't the first time. Before he went to prison in 1992, and especially after his 1990 loss to Buster Douglas, the decline of his skills was the talk of the boxing world. What had made Tyson invincible was sheer power. When he couldn't cancel opponents within the first four rounds, he was out of ideas. When Tyson was in his mid-20s, a consensus was growing that he had no jab, no combinations, no defense. After prison he managed four wins over the fight world equivalent of crash-test dummies before he was knocked out last November by Holyfield, a boxer with solid but less than historic gifts. Then came the fight that reduced him to tearing off bits of the other guy. "He wasn't up for another beating," says Holyfield. "He realized he couldn't whup me, and he got frustrated."

Now the decay of Tyson's abilities is matched by the collapse of whatever remained of his reputation. For years, maybe too many years, Tyson has been boxing's feral child. Almost from the time that Cus D'Amato, his onetime trainer-father figure-psychic engineer, found him in upstate New York, the larger world has tried to put into some kind of balance the feelings Tyson inspires: awe, admiration, pity, disappointment, fear and loathing. By the time the sportswriters, columnists and comics were done with him last week, the balance was tipped against him more completely than ever. At the Hollywood Wax Museum in Los Angeles, Tyson's effigy was moved from the Sports Hall of Fame to the Chamber of Horrors. He now stands near Hannibal Lecter, the carnivore from Silence of the Lambs. For a man undone by some indigestible thing within himself, maybe that's just the right spot.

--Reported by Greg Fulton/Atlanta and James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by GREG FULTON/ATLANTA AND JAMES WILLWERTH/LOS ANGELES