Hier ein Bericht über das Pressetreffen, Tyson mal wieder in Hochform:
MAUI, Hawaii - Met Mike Tyson. He talked my ear off.
Seriously! The man may be back there, sitting on the edge of his couch, a towel draped over his knees, gabbing away still.
He could be talking about Machiavelli. Or Jesus. Or Shakespeare. Or Don King.
He could be talking about slavery. Or pigeons. Or his mother. Or the book he wants to write.
He could be talking about Memphis. Or Las Vegas. Or prison. Or how much better he likes Maui now that he's single again.
Or, just for a change, he could be talking about the boxing, explaining what he'll do to Lennox Lewis on June 8 at The Pyramid.
"My main objective is to be professional and to kill him," is how he put it when I was still there. "That's really what he comes to. He'll want to kill me because I sure want to kill him.
"But still I love him."
Of course he does. Just as he loves the N-word and the Great Gatsby and getting high and strip clubs and John Brown and his Momma and white people, too.
Tyson said all this. All this and more. Maybe nobody sent him the memo explaining that the interview was supposed to be limited to boxing questions, only.
Scott Miranda, Tyson's public relations guy, brought this up at the hotel where the two dozen or so reporters convened.
There were to be no questions about Tyson's divorce. No questions about his case against King. No questions about the press conference-turned-brawl in New York.
"We are going to keep the questions to his boxing, not his personal life," Miranda said. "Anything else will quite frankly be a distraction to him."
Two vans then shuttled the reporters to Tyson's white, Mediterranean-style villa at the Fairmont Kea Lani. Tyson was sitting on the couch, next to a friend, ordering racing pigeons on the Web.
He looked fit. Hard. He wore black shorts and a simple white shirt. He said something jocular - OK, he was smiling, anyway - about how he should get up and kick everyone's (bleep).
And then he started talking. And talking. And, honestly, the villa runs for $1,100 a night, but it's a good thing the hotel doesn't charge by the word.
Tyson on Don King: "I know a guy for 10 years, I think he loves me. If I buy a Rolls Royce, he gets a Rolls Royce. All this time, he hates my guts because he's nothing without me. His whole identity, his whole existence is me. He has everything I have, but his actual existence is me. But he can't be me. So that makes him hate me."
(Deep breath)
Tyson on his heroes: "Forget Abraham Lincoln, John Brown is the most prolific white man fighting for our cause, and we don't even have a statue of the man. We don't even have a statue of John Brown! Ask someone in school, who the hell is John Brown? A honky. A Southern honky. They don't know that, but who am I to explain that this is a great man, the liberator of our people? A white man! A redneck! Who am I? I might be shot in the head for that."
(Deep breath)
Tyson on the press conference with Lewis: "He should have died that night, those guys putting their hands on me. But I wasn't with the right crew, that's the whole thing. I was with guys that probably just wanted to be seen. If I was with the right crew, all of them guys would have been finished, right there. They're punks."
(Deep breath)
Tyson on Machiavelli: "I think he's the most sophisticated writer I think since, um, the imposters guy - Shakespeare. I think he's a sophisticated writer. He's way ahead of his time. He's such a manipulative person, everything he accomplished he made from kissing (bleep)."
And on and on it went. If words were punches, the guy would have been exhausted. He was crazy. And profane. And offensive. And that was in the first 10 minutes.
Yet still, scattered in with all that were bits of truth, too, hard and irrefutable. Toward the end of the interview, someone asked Tyson if he cared about his legacy, if he cared about how he will someday be perceived.
Tyson eyed the crowd of reporters, two dozen men and women who had flown across the world to spend a single hour with him. He smiled and shook his head.
"I'm Mike Tyson, and I'll always be Mike Tyson," he said. "And when I die, you guys are going to make me bigger than I've ever been."