Boxing: Tyson's bizarre change of mind keeps show on road

The wild life of Mike Tyson was heading for another convulsion last night when he ordered up a private jet to fly off to Memphis for a fight which had been officially cancelled earlier in the day.

Against the advice of his latest trainer, Freddy Roach, who had told the world that his fighter was too sick to get out his bed in his Las Vegas mansion, Tyson said he intended to be in the ring against Clifford Etienne on Saturday night. Tyson said that he could knock out the journeyman Etienne in any circumstances. But these, even by his own uproarious standards, were bizarre.

Speculation about how Tyson's career would finally end has always been bleak, and some thought that the battering administered by Lennox Lewis last summer in the same Pyramid venue beside the Mississippi where he is due to fight on Saturday was the appropriate consequence of years of self-induced erosion of all his fighting gifts.

But the decision to fight Etienne, and claim a re-match with Lennox in June, kept the gaudiest show in sport just about on the road. Until yesterday afternoon it seemed that we had returned to the final downward curve of his career. Certainly, it appeared to be ebbing from the moment of defeat implied by his decision to lie in bed with half his face scabbing up from the tattoo which boxing insiders were saying was Tyson's own statement that it was all over.

It was 12.45 pm on Monday when Roach called the promoters to say that the fighter was still in his bed in his house on Las Vegas's up-market Spanish Trail, and showing no inclination to get out of it.

The plane was scheduled for 1.30. It was then that the long-suffering Jay Larkin, head of Showtime TV and Tyson's paymaster and creditor, resignedly pulled the plug on a fight that had been in high jeopardy from the moment Tyson went off his tranquillising medication last week and sought out his tattooist.

The formal job order was African tribal marks. But the real purpose, no one is in much doubt, was to sabotage what was seen as Tyson's last opportunity to remain a significant factor in big-time heavyweight boxing. But last night Showtime was rushing out a statement that the fight was back on. The objections of Etienne, who said that he was not going to jump whenever Tyson changed his mind, were considered not to be a serious problem. Earnings of near $1m (£628,00) would, it was felt, soothe bruised feelings sufficiently. No one can really say what happens to Tyson now. His manager, Shelly Finkel, is said to be on the point of walking away. A boxing man who has got closer to Tyson than most, and who was invited into the gym in Las Vegas shortly before his latest unravelling, Finkel reports: "For a little while it was the Good Mike, polite, amusing, making sense – then it was the other one, the one off the medication, off the graph.

"That one emerged a bit nearer the fight. Maybe he said to himself: 'I just don't want to fight anymore.' Maybe he turned himself off. Now perhaps he has turned himself back on – but for how long, who knows?

"The Mike Tyson who went into last year's fight with Lennox Lewis was a zombie. Maybe they had to give him something to keep him down because of the pressure of that fight got so great in his mind... You have to believe it's over now, whatever happens or doesn't happen on Saturday night."

For Terry Atlas, one of the early trainers, who pointed a gun at the teenaged Tyson after he bothered a girl in the upstate New York town of Catskill, all this chaos was written in the sky many years ago. Atlas said: "The time for somebody to make something of Mike Tyson, and for him to make something of himself, is long gone. Back then when I pulled a gun on him and appealed to Cus D'Amato to apply some real discipline he was reclaimable, but Cus didn't really want to know."

According to Atlas, D'Amato, the old fight man who brought Floyd Patterson to the world title and "rescued" Tyson from the youth correction system, was too obsessed with the idea of having another world champion. "He saw Tyson as his final statement in boxing and he didn't want to know that the kid was running wild. He just took him back in whenever he stepped over the line. The idea that Tyson was a deprived street kid had become a myth. He was pampered by Cus, and after returning to the streets for a little while he knew he could come home to the big old house overlooking the Hudson River. That's really where it all started going wrong."

Recently Tyson said: "I'm in the best shape I've been since I came out of prison. Boxing has never been a problem for me. I can always focus on a fight. It's what I like to do."

Not this week. This week a fight that would have preserved his multi-million dollar earning capacity was allowed to die. Then it was shaken back into precarious life. His trainer said he was nursing the flu and he just couldn't get out of bed. Boxing shrugged. It knew that Tyson's real problem went somewhat deeper than the preventative power of a jab. Yesterday's development was, it was hard not to believe, just another lurch into the dark.