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Excerpt
So exhausted that he lacks even the strength to drive, the big man surrenders the keys to his wife, a woman who has always tried to keep him in line and care for him, who saw potential and goodness where some saw laziness and complacency. Bathed in sweat, he lets out a little groan and slides awkwardly into the passenger seat. This simple act takes all his energy and leaves him gasping for breath. Finally he settles, slumped against the door, a short tangle of dreadlocks spilling over his forehead, his thick legs curled beneath the dashboard.
“Hang in there, baby,” she says. “We’ll be there soon.”
He moans, mumbles something beneath his breath.
“What’s that, honey?”
“I’ll be all right.”
As the flatland of central Ohio whizzes past in a blur, the big man drifts away. His wife talks to him, tries to keep him awake and alert, but the struggle is lost. Funny, isn’t it, that a man who made his living as a fighter—who once, precisely once, battled like no one before—hasn’t an ounce of fight left in him? It’s been that way for months now, maybe years. James “Buster” Douglas was, for a very brief time, the heavyweight champion of the world. He was the conquering hero, the man who beat the unbeatable. But that was more than four years ago. The man in the front seat of the car bears almost no resemblance to the Buster of 1990, the Buster who stepped into a ring in Tokyo, Japan, and provided boxing with the greatest upset it has ever known.
Then he was a sweet-tempered journeyman who preferred basketball to boxing . . . a 42 to 1 long shot (if you could actually find a gaming establishment, legal or otherwise, willing to take your bet) . . . who somehow dismantled and humbled a brutal young fighter almost preternaturally suited to the role of champion.
But now?
James Douglas tips the scales at a Sumo-esque four hundred pounds, his belly so swollen that it would snap the championship belts he once owned. His eyes are slits barely visible through veils of flesh, and there is an odor hanging in the air, the sweet, sickly smell of fruit gone bad. It is the smell of diabetes, of a quiet killer shaken from its slumber. By the time they reach the hospital in Columbus, Douglas is unconscious, having lapsed into a diabetic coma.
He dreams . . . and in the dream, he will later explain, his wife, Bertha Douglas, is gone. So is everyone else he knows and loves. He imagines that he is alone in the back bay of an ambulance, strapped to a gurney. In the front, a nurse sits in the passenger seat; an orderly in a crisp white uniform is behind the wheel. They are silent, stoic. It’s dark outside. Rain is falling. Buster struggles to lift his head from the gurney; he peers out the window and sees a light at the end of a long mountain road. They are climbing now. Slowly . . . steadily. He hears the groan of the engine as it strains against the incline, and the rhythmic clicking of the wipers against the window. His head falls back and the dream dissolves away.
Meanwhile, two hundred miles down the road, in Plainfield, Indiana, the most famous resident of the quaintly named Indiana Youth Center—inmate No. 922335—passes another day in captivity. Now more than two years into his sentence for a rape conviction, he has become, by most accounts, a reasonably docile and cooperative prisoner. No more disputes with the guards, no more confrontations with other inmates. For the time being anyway, the bad has been removed from the self-proclaimed baddest man on the planet. Word is that he’s found religion, that he spends peaceful, solitary time with the Koran, and that fighting no longer captivates him the way it once did.
Maybe.
Despite its cheery moniker, which evokes images of robust, energetic kids playing ball under the tutelage of thoughtful, well-meaning mentors, the Indiana Youth Center offers few outlets for the fighter. There are no boxing rings, no gloves, no speed bags or heavy bags. Nothing to promote testosterone and aggressive behavior. So inmate No. 922335 eats, sleeps, and prays. He takes classes in the hope of earning a high school equivalency degree. He tries to stay fit through calisthenics and jogging. Mainly, he says, he reads, grazing endlessly and somewhat aimlessly from a literary buffet table that includes Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Ashe and Mao Tse-tung (the latter two will be paid tribute through tattoos on the fighter’s biceps), among countless others. Like his counterpart in Columbus, he’s bigger now than on the day they met in the ring. Not really overweight, as he was when he entered prison (at 250 pounds), but thicker. The teenage fighter who used to stand nearly naked in front of a mirror at a dusty, spartan gym in a small town in upstate New York and marvel at his own lines, at his youthful, clean-cut musculature, is long gone, replaced by a grown man hardened by time and circumstance and his own penchant for self-destructive behavior.
Things will get worse, too, before they get better for inmate No. 922335, also known as Michael Gerard Tyson. There will be another “bid,” the counterintuitive term that convicts sometimes use to describe their time behind bars. There will be comic and tragic incidents of rage, snapshots of a life and career gone horribly wrong: a bloody chunk of a human ear, ripped from an opponent in midfight and spat with disdain upon the canvas; a seemingly insane and full-throated promise to eat the children of another fighter; bankruptcy, assault charges, multiple lawsuits, and, ultimately, a series of pathetic encounters with boxers so lacking in skill that they once wouldn’t have dared even step in the ring with him.
In August 1986, at barely twenty years of age, he had become the youngest heavyweight champion in history. By the time he met James Douglas, on February 11, 1990, the erosion had begun, although few people recognized it at the time. He was still undefeated then, a vicious puncher with stunning speed and technical acumen and an almost primeval taste for blood . . . a terrifying fighter who threw every punch with bad intentions, and who seemed worthy of comparisons to the great ones: Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, and Sonny Liston—especially Liston, as it turned out, since his, too, was a life and career punctuated by violence, sadness, and chaos.
And then came Buster, and a single night (afternoon, actually, since the fight, broadcast late in the evening to an American television audience, was fought at lunchtime in Tokyo) that altered the lives and careers of the combatants. In many ways, the most memorable night that boxing has ever known.
They are linked in the public consciousness, Tyson and Douglas, as surely as Louis was linked to Schmeling, Dempsey to Tunney, Frazier to Ali. It is Independence Day, a time to celebrate hard-earned freedoms, and the sad, unmistakable irony is that each man is at this moment a captive, confined to a prison of his own making.
But there was a time . . . Copyright © 2007 by Joe Layden. All rights reserved.