ON PLANET X ...

HOUSE WORK

This has been a sorta full weekend, helping AKA and her Pops out with the yard work. It was neat, following instruction and making the vision take shape. It reminded me of what I would look for in a partner, someone who doesn't mind taking the lead, when they know what they are doing. I never 'saw' what we were doing until we were finished.


It was a little tough work, taking about 6 hrs. of work, and getting dirty. I kept telling myself that, '...if you didn't really like her, you had better consider it!', cause for me to get messy in that way, had to be for a good reason! But the neighbors even said that it looked nice (whatever it is we did!!), and Ma and Pa were cool with it. That made me happy.

The fascination with Mike Tyson is one of the more persistent stories in sports. There is a new documentary out about him, and I am looking forward to it myself. I have NOT A DOUBT, that he is misunderstood. That is prolly why filmmakers find him so enthralling a subject. You can never get enough of someone who offers himself up without any guile.


I say that, because if you aren't aware of what he is capable of, then you must have been in a cave. One of the things that I have wondered about him is, the so-called second chance he got with Cus D'Amato, who took him out of the juvenile system.


Mike was what for lack of a better term, 'a lost boy', an erratic, moody, looming threat until his misbehaviour got him 'put in the system'. His home life was higly irregular, no father AT ALL, and a Mother who was beset by her own demons. I am sure that somewhere in his mind, he began to see the score for him.

Someone in the facility, a former boxer who knew Cus, saw Mike giving someone the 'ol' 1-2', and he urged Cus to take him on. And that is what he did. Also, this is where I think his problems REALLY began.


TRAPPED IN A WORLD HE NEVER MADE

I think that if you took some of Miss Alaineus students and put them out in Cranbrook, you would lose a high number because of the different environment. That is something that I have always felt was at play with Mike Tyson, that things were never as smooth as they were put out to be.

First, I had an encounter with him at an Ohio State Fair, where they do a huge boxing show. Then there was what I heard about him out in Colorado Springs, getting the '84 team ready to box in the Olympics. When I was in the service, and they were selling him as this grand reclamation project of Cus D'Amato's, I was so 'WTF!! That is NOT who this guy is!!' At first, people poo-poohed me as being jealous ... and it wasn't that. It was more that I knew he was more of an 'Eliza Doolittle' as people were led to believe.

Where Mike came from, spiritually and emotionally, money and fame didn't matter. He was a pup saved from the shelter, and he was willing to do what ever anyone who showed him attention wanted. He never was an athlete, so he wasn't boxing for the competition. He was boxing because the missing pieces of life, however crooked (because Cus wasn't wrapped all that tight himself, dontcha know) they were, they'd be better than nothing.

Whenever people would look at his 'style' as being nothing but a brute, they did not give him credit for the great skill it took to fight the way that he was taught. One of the reasons, the main reason if you asked me, that he went down so suddenly had little to do with people overcoming the intimidation factor. It had all to do with losing his last connection with his 'sensei'. When Don King took over, everyone from the 'Castskill era' of his life was swept out, including training personnel.

Much like in the kung fu movies, having someone who is spiritually in tune to what you do, is vital when you are relying on a style as well as your physical skills. That is what set Tyson up for the losses he would suffer beginning with the Douglas fight ... could Tyson have gone unbeaten? At least threaten the record of Rocky Marciano? Perhaps, but without anyone skilled to prepare him, he may as well have been a trained animal in a road side circus.

The timing, the combinations, the angles, all the things that made him such a feared fighter on the way up, were neglected ... not only that, no one had a clue on how to keep him 'sharp'. Not only weren't anyone interested in Mike as a person, they couldn't keep their cash cow ready to perform, preferring to let his antics and controversy do the heavy lifting of making him marketable.

But that no one was truly interested in his humanity, in my eyes wasn't new. I used to think that part of his problem was that even with Cus, who I think saw him as the crown jewel to his boxing legacy, didn't care much about Mike as a person. Then I realized that maybe he wasn't finished when he was called on ... and he was certainly the link to a lot of the positive experiences in Mike's life.

Yet there were stories of him causing trouble and being the part sociopath that many folks from the ubran underclass, are. Maybe he'd would have continued to mature and fill out as a person, had Cus been around a little more?

NEXT: HE ISN'T A VICTIM, BUT I AM JUS' SAYING ...