Boxing: Will Tyson be the boxer or the beast?

Champion's return: Former world title holder is back in the ring tonight after 18-month suspension for biting

ONE THING that fame, American-style, does is create monsters. Or, to put it generously, seriously damages people. Just look at them. Scott and Zelda. Sinatra. Mantle. Jackson Pollock. Marilyn. Elvis. Kerouac. Charlie Parker. Drugs, booze, brawls, untidy deaths. They outnumber the Ellingtons and the Updikes and the Jordans by a zillion to one. Tonight we may finally get to figure out whether Mike Tyson is one of the monsters.

As if, after his display on 28 June 1997, when he dined out on Evander Holyfield's ears, we didn't already have evidence enough. As if we hadn't recoiled time and again from his rage, his obscenities, his serial sexual misbehaviour, his infantile self-pity. (Last week he remarked: "If the sleaziest tramp in the history of the world says that Mike Tyson raped her then society would believe her.") As if we weren't grown up enough to deny ourselves the guilty pleasure of observing, from a safe distance, the sight of a man tearing himself to pieces.

And you can always sell tickets to a show like that, particularly when the featured attraction is as volatile and unpredictable as Tyson, who could once beat any man in the world but went down to his first defeat against a fighter rated as a 42-1 outsider, Buster Douglas. The appeal of tonight's fight benefits from that uncertainty. Tyson may be the clear favourite to defeat Francois Botha of South Africa, whose odds are a conservative 7-1 against, but who can be sure that some completely unexpected incident will not transform the course of the evening?

The MGM Grand Arena may or may not be filled to its 14,000 capacity tonight, thanks to a variety of incidental factors, but Tyson will still earn the pounds 7m - the official figure, announced yesterday - that he is taking away from Las Vegas, thanks to his appeal to the television audience, which in America is shelling out somewhere in the region of pounds 30 per household to watch the fight on pay-per-view cable channels. And more than 600 media people are covering the fight, which Jay Larkin says is a record for a boxing match.

Anyone who wants to understand Tyson's continuing significance could do worse than listen to Larkin, a senior executive at Showtime, the pay- per-view company distributing the broadcast, and an astute observer of the boxing scene. Larkin's point is brutal in its commercial simplicity: just look at what happened while Tyson was away, serving an 18-month suspension.

"Look at 1998 as a pay-per-view year," he said this week. "It was the worst year of the decade. There was an enormous slump, while 1996 and 1997 were record years. Without Tyson in 1998, the whole industry turned over. It's always been said that as go the heavyweights, so goes boxing. You can take it to the next step and say that as goes Mike Tyson, so go the heavyweights.

"Right now, without a belt and fighting a 10-rounder, he's still the most compelling event on the street. Holyfield-Lewis is a phenomenal fight that fight fans all over America, all over the world, can't wait to see. But it's a fight fans' fight. This fight goes off the sports pages and onto the front pages. And that's Mike Tyson. That's the ongoing mini-series of his life."

Larkin noted the effect of a change of personnel in the Tyson camp, following the dismissal of Don King and his acolytes, John Horne and Rory Holloway, replaced by the milder temperaments of Shelly Finkel, Tyson's new adviser, and Tommy Brooks, his new trainer.

"The anger is not dripping from him as it used to be," Larkin said. "You can draw your own conclusions from that. The hatred that used to be around him is not there." In place of anger and hatred come the serenity and civility conveyed by Brooks, a 44-year-old from San Diego who was in Holyfield's corner for his two fights with Tyson but joined the latter's camp in November and has been working him hard.

"We've been teaching him to put his punches together, teaching him to move around guys, getting him to start moving his head again," Brooks said, and observers at a public work-out last Monday were shocked to see the trainer giving the former world champion what looked like lessons in the most basic elements of the fistic art, things he must have been taught by Cus D'Amato when he was 12 years old.

"Mike had got away from the things that had got him to the heavyweight championship in the beginning," Brooks explained. "He was squaring up, he was stationary. He was loading up for a one-punch knock-out instead of putting his punches together, walking the guy down, being elusive, being all around the guy. He's a tremendous puncher and he has blazing speed, but if you're not putting your punches together, it's just not going to happen, especially if you're up against somebody who's not afraid of you.

"It took 10 years for him to create those bad habits, and I'm hoping that it won't take 10 years for him to get out of them. From the two months that we've been working together, I can see that he's really trying, and it's been working for him."

But he can never regain the invulnerability he enjoyed in the early part of his career, before Douglas caught him unawares. "Well, he caused that himself," Brooks replied. "He wasn't in shape. If you're not doing something every day in the gym, you can't expect to do it in a fight. How can you point the finger at somebody else when it's your fault? You've got to be a man and stand up and say, `Well, I was responsible for that.' The fighter has the responsibility. It's up to him. He's the boss. Now he's trying. That's all you can ask of a guy, to try. And it's been working in the gym. Come Saturday, we'll see."

Trainers aren't hired to be rude about their fighters, and Brooks is no exception, but his unwillingness to be dragged into the Tyson camp's cultural vernacular - he wore a tweed sports jacket with collar and tie for this week's press conference - perhaps gives him a higher degree of objectivity than usual. "I got here thinking Mike was a spoiled, self- centred type of kid who cared nothing about nobody but himself," he continued, "but that was far from the case. He's a sweetheart. He's either treating me differently, or he's got a serious con game going on."

It's a fair bet that Botha - who weighed in at 16st 9lb to Tyson's 15st 13lb, and will take home a mere pounds 1.1m - will provide a more searching test than Peter McNeeley, whose trainer threw in the towel half-way through the first round when Tyson made his return to the ring after serving a three-year jail term in 1995. The 30-year-old from Witbank, now resident in California, has only one defeat in his 40-fight career, when Michael Moorer stopped him in the 12th round of their International Boxing Federation world title fight two years ago.

Botha had briefly held the title the previous year by taking a points decision over Axel Schulz on the German's home soil, only to be stripped of the victory when a drug test revealed traces of steroids. His trainer for the past four years has been Panama Lewis, who will nevertheless not be in his corner tonight. In the mid-1980s Lewis served two and a half years of a six-year jail sentence for removing the padding from the gloves of his fighter, a junior middleweight called Luis Resto. The offence was revealed after a fight at Madison Square Garden, when Resto beat up Billy Ray Collins of Tennessee so badly that Collins never fought again, took to drink, and less than a year later drove his car into a creek and died.

Lewis claims to have been a scapegoat in the affair, but the Nevada boxing commissioners are honouring the revocation of his trainer's licence by their New York counterparts, and he will watch the fight from a ringside seat while Botha's manager, Sterling McPherson, takes on his place. Botha is a fighter of resilience rather than subtlety or skill, and Lewis has been talking about the need for his fighter to survive the first five rounds in order to take Tyson into a part of the contest in which the lack of recent ring experience may expose a stamina deficit. On the other hand, the Botha camp may have dreamed up a scheme to jump right in and provoke Tyson into some sort of indiscreet reaction. "Mike's prepared for that," Brooks said. "We know Panama Lewis and we know Sterling. They're going to press his buttons."

It doesn't always take much button-pressing to bring down Tyson's red mist, as a couple of inoffensive US television reporters discovered this week when their interviews were abruptly terminated in a splatter of imprecations. For Brooks, the former champion's discipline will be the key. "We've covered a lot of information this week. I don't look for him to produce 100 per cent of it. If he can produce 60 per cent, it's going to be a four or five-round fight." Brooks is keen that Tyson should not underestimate his opponent. "Botha is durable, he has a good chin, and he's not going to lay down. Mike is going to have to make him quit. But a lot of people have the wrong perception. Mike is not going in to try and knock this guy out. Of course, if Botha's chin gets in the way, and he goes down, that's something else. But we're not looking to go in and run over the guy. I'm trying to get him to box, and that's what he's going to do."

Further questions surround the depth of Tyson's hunger, at 32, for another comeback. "I think for Mike it's a necessity," Brooks said. "I mean, I can't envisage Mike Tyson flipping hamburgers or tipping trash cans for a living. So he has to do it. This is the only way he's going to make the kind of money he needs. He knows that. And he's smart enough to realise that he has to have somebody behind him to teach him what he needs to be taught, and push him the way he needs to be pushed."

Not everyone is convinced by the notion of Tyson the dutiful student. Many people expect that the sound of the bell and the sight of Botha will be enough to reawaken the old instincts for mayhem, at the expense of science. And then just about anything can happen. But a stoppage in the fourth round, in Tyson's favour, seems the least unlikely outcome, along with a deferred verdict on the true nature of the man.