I watched four Netflix biographies over the weekend: Norm Macdonald, Lorne Michaels, Martin Mull, and Mike Tyson. Of the lot, Tyson’s summarized wisdom is most impressive: “I don’t know anything.” Humility is implicit in the honesty, forged by hard life lessons. Massive fame and wealth, an unwieldy, seesawing ego, and repeated rags-to-riches cycles couldn’t put it any more eloquently. Love, sex, prison, tigers, pigeons, and being anointed the Baddest Man on the Planet are all the credentials his words require. “I don’t know anything.” Doubt them like you would his right hand—at your own peril.
At the end of the documentary, he takes a supervised trip on DMT—the Sonoran toad venom, an ego-obliterating drug. For another subject this would feel more sensationalized than appropriate, but for Tyson it’s where the preceding hours naturally lead. He’s apparently done it more than a hundred times. When he comes around again there is a brief sense of warmth and perspective, followed by the immediate realization of why once was never enough. None of us knows anything.
Tyson saw release and relief in pigeons as a young boy in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he grew up “Dirty Mike” and was picked on relentlessly. Some neighborhood tough guys who flew the birds for hobby and sport suggested he join in. One day, one of Dirty Mike’s tormentors pried his favorite pigeon from his grasp and snapped its neck in front of him. This was also the day the world discovered that Tyson, ten years old, had a particular proclivity for throwing a punch. Hell hath no fury like a dirty, bullied boy sitting on a devastating left hook and right uppercut. History failed to log the name of said neighborhood neck-breaker, but to quote Tony Soprano to Richie Aprile upon becoming engaged to his sister: “Oh you poor bastard.”
But youth, like freedom, is fleeting, and Mike had a long road in front of him to tame the first and find the second. He may have broken the chains of being bullied that day in Brownsville but he set in motion fifty years of having his ass kicked by life. And in fact, this is the conclusion he reaches in evaluating each of the rare losses in his boxing career: “I got my ass kicked.” He may know nothing, but he also seems incapable of anything short of honest evaluation.
Encountering the elusive nature of freedom may not be an experience exclusive to Mike Tyson, but something about the scale of his journey is indeed impressive. I’m not sure if he’s familiar with Kris Kristofferson’s insight, that it’s “just another word for nothing left to lose,” but one senses he’d get it. The paraphrased wisdom “everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth” is often attributed to Tyson. Somebody needs to weave that one into a country song.
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