Boxing: Tyson's terrible punch preserves a grim allure

One moment of savagery in first round keeps alive the myth of 'Iron Mike' and the sport's last great meal ticket

Only Mike Tyson could bring a moment of order to his free-falling life with an act of supreme violence. It had seemed for an instant that the world shook as Clifford Etienne fell paralysed after just 49 seconds.

Only Mike Tyson could wrap illusion in such ferocity. Only he could be pulverising and paradoxical in one savage second and then declare – when asked what it said about him that he could behave so wildly outside the ring before showing compassion to a man he had just pole-axed – "it says that I'm a domesticated animal... operating in a crude, barbaric business."

In fact he remains about as domesticated as a wild boar on heat – a truth which he conceded almost cheerfully when his work of destruction was done.

"I just want to do what I want to do," he said. "If I have a woman, that's what I have – and it doesn't matter if I should be in the gym. I like getting high. I like hanging out with my kids – but I need to take care of myself before I take care of anybody. Man, I'm in a mess."

But then, so valuably, he can deliver the dark side of life on request and, in optimum conditions, hit a fellow human being with potentially fatal force. "It's just business, brother," he said when lifting Etienne up from the canvas," and later: "You guys say I'm crazy – but look at the business I'm in."

No doubt, he can still offer crazy business but the more serious form of it against Lennox Lewis?

Some may be persuaded by the force of a single punch. That, anyway, is the calculation of his sport. It is why boxing still clings to his tattered, blood-stained coat-tails so desperately in pursuit of, at least for the foreseeable future, its last great meal ticket. Last week he threw this last "fight" into jeopardy by absenting himself from the gym, having a tattoo and staying in bed rather than catching several planes – and maximised ticket sales and pay-per-viewers.

No matter that Etienne, who was swept away like a piece of flotsam on the rain-swollen Mississippi flowing past the Pyramid Arena, fought a fight that might have been expressly designed to preserve the formidable mythology of "Iron Mike".

Or that Lewis, who described the punch that ruined Etienne as a "great, great" right hand, will be an overwhelming favourite to repeat the thrashing he administered in this same ring eight months ago, when the now nearly certain – or as nearly certain as anything that involves Tyson can be – re-match is staged, probably on 21 June.

None of that, and nor Etienne's perhaps subliminal act of surrender when he removed his gumshield almost as soon as he jack-knifed to the canvas, could contain another surge of the old awe that comes when Tyson digs into the neglected armoury that once terrified most of his opponents before they stepped into the ring.

No, even as we saw the reality of Etienne's frailty against the power of Tyson – and heard from the former champion a stream of doubts about his ability to make anything of a fight against the "consummate professional" Lewis, we could not quite separate today's facts from yesterday's memory. It is Tyson's last marketable trick, this ability to throw a loop into the course of his relentless decline.

This was not Tyson's resurrection. It was a skillfully managed and brutally executed preservation of his grim allure. Tyson played his part – and so did Etienne. No one, however, could say anything had really changed. If you stand in front of Tyson, if you deny yourself even the rudiments of defence, you go down.

Tyson more or less admitted to his inability to launch genuinely sustained effort when he rambled into his post-fight performance. "I'm quite hungry but that's not enough to beat a consummate professional like Lennox Lewis. I'm not active enough to threaten Lewis at this point – I need more rounds.They say style makes fights, but it is not true. Morale makes fights."

Tyson's trainer, Freddie Roach, who earlier in the week had said that he did not think Tyson was fit enough to go into the ring, agrees that there is more much work to be done for Tyson to have any chance against Lewis. But, under the terms of the re-match, Lewis and Tyson are allowed only one intervening fight and Tyson's didn't last a third of a round. Television fight schedules are unlikely to be scrapped for the sake of Tyson's mental and physical rehab. No one wants to invest $30m (£19m) or so into such a shaky proposition. As the build-up to Saturday's fight proved so conclusively, you do not plan for more than the immediate future with Tyson. You take what you can get.

The best Roach can hope for is that Tyson will agree to move away from Las Vegas in favour of an authentic fight camp, possibly on top of Bear Mountain in California. But such a rigorous, distraction-free regime seems currently beyond Tyson's capacity. He talked wistfully of great professionals like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, who left their women and the night-clubs behind in the early hours and went running before sleeping and then long hours in the gym. "It's a long time since I've been a professional," he admitted. Some estimate that time at around 10 years.

Lewis's assessment of Tyson's performance certainly carried more than a hint of a serious level of proprietorial interest. It came by way of confirming the re-match – and justifying the risk of being stripped of his World Boxing Council belt by refusing to go through with a mandatory defence against the Ukrainian Vitali Klitschko. That particularly threat will probably be lifted at the WBC congress currently going on in Mexico, where Lewis's manager, Adrian Ogun, flew yesterday.

Ogun will probably find that the WBC, a body which made, at Lewis's expense, Tyson its No 1 contender the moment he emerged from three years in prison, will balance its title fight ratification fee from Lewis-Tyson II favourably against the need for strict adherence to something as inconsequential as its own rules.

Said Lewis: "The fight did not go on long enough to get any real sense of improvement in Tyson. But what I did notice was that he threw some great left hooks, and it was a great, great right that took out Etienne. I think he will always be a draw because of his unpredictability.

"He is still able to pull in the crowds because no one knows what he is going to do next. He is not able to hide his feelings. He is very honest with his feelings and says what comes into his mind. It's not a question of whether he did enough to justify a re-match. I entered into a deal with him with a re-match clause. So he is entitled to it legally."

Etienne's entitlement was a cheque only marginally the wrong side of a million dollars. He landed one decent right but Tyson did not seem to notice and at the moment of decision both men were throwing rights.

Etienne's never arrived and, when he pulled out his gumshield before the referee, Bill Clancy, had counted to two, he had taken up the most passive pose seen in a heavyweight contest possibly since "Buster" Douglas stared, listlessly, at the desert moon after being caught by a right-hand cross from Evander Holyfield. Indeed, Etienne's most animated moment came when he had to be detained by security guards after a "Caucasian" fan had called him a "pussy".

Tyson commiserated with Etienne, pointing out how far the average spectator was away from understanding the real nature of boxing. "There are guys out there sitting on couches with a beer in their hand who think they can beat me."

However, the odds are that their numbers decreased rather sharply when Etienne, like a floppy old duck coming into the sights of a hunter, was cut down. It was a terrible blow and it was hard for anyone not to wince. Except, perhaps, Lennox Lewis.