LONG distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee.
Hello, Memphis? Mike Tyson wants to fornicate with your women and stomp on your children’s testicles. Are you still sure you want him coming to town to fight Lennox Lewis at the Pyramid on June 8?
Do you really want him setting up housekeeping in your hospitable southern city for 10 days or so before the fight? Those are generally the most dangerous 10 days of all, because as the fight gets closer, Tyson usually becomes more and more ornery.
You think he was in a bad mood last week in Maui, with the fight still more than a month away? Just wait until you get a load of his fight-week act.
“Everything is on go,” Memphis Mayor Dr. Willie W. Herenton told me by telephone yesterday. “We’re looking forward to hosting this event and to affording all of our guests a great time in Memphis.”
I reminded the mayor of a few of Tyson’s more, um, controversial statements from last week, when he first made fornication a prerequisite for granting an interview to a female TV reporter, then later requested oral sex from her. He also expressed a desire to smash the skulls and stomp on the testicles of the children of reporters, in order to afford them a deeper understanding of the kind of anguish he is forced to live with on a daily basis.
“If you are asking me, do I or the citizens of Memphis condone the type of statements attributed to Mike Tyson, the answer is no,” Mayor Herenton said. “If you are asking me if Memphis is having any second thoughts about hosting the event, the answer is also no. Listen, we knew from the outset there were some elements of risk in hosting this event.”
Of course, there also was an upside. According to the mayor, Memphis will reap a $4 million windfall on the sales tax from ticket sales alone. “This will be the largest tax-generating event in the history of Memphis,” he said, with the kind of glee only a politician could muster from the subject of taxes.
“I regret that those statements were made,” Mayor Herenton said. “In Memphis, we respect women and children. We don’t condone inappropriate behavior or language.
“However, we are still looking forward to hosting this great event.”
Mayor Herenton sounds like a well-meaning man of intelligence and sincerity. No doubt, he wants the Tyson-Lewis fight to go off without a hitch, or at least without the kind of scandal that would be embarrassing to him or his city.
And yet, the truth is Memphis is having no second thoughts about the Tyson-Lewis fight because it had no first thoughts about it.
Unlike Nevada or Texas or Georgia or New York, for that matter, there was no real human element involved in the issuance of a boxing license to Michael Gerard Tyson, former heavyweight champion, convicted rapist, ear- and leg-biter and habitual threatener of women and children.
After much trial and error, Tyson’s advisors found their Shangri-la in Tennessee, a state with a venue – the 20,000-seat Pyramid – large enough to host the fight, and no real boxing commission to raise any reasonable objection to its taking place there.
In other words, the quintessential faceless, mindless bureaucracy.
All Tyson needed to do was file a two-page, six-question application along with a check for $50.
“As long as the forms are filled out in accordance with our laws, we grant the license,” said Marilyn Elam, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Dept. of Commerce and Insurance. “We don’t have a body of individuals to subjectively decide on the merits of a license application.”
In short, it was a rubber-stamp job.
“I guess you could couch it that way if you wish,” Elam said. “There really is not a lot of subjective discretion at our disposal.”
I asked Elam for a subjective appraisal of Tyson’s Maui musings. “A lot of what we read and hear is nothing but rhetoric and hype,” she said. “It is not our intention to make any of our administrative decisions based on rhetoric and hype. I’m sure a lot of what was said was done so to help sell the pay-per-view.”
Interesting sales technique of Tyson’s, trying to ingratiate himself with potential customers, at a record $55 a pop, by threatening to turn their sons into their daughters.
It raises the question of whether such a man should be led not into a boxing ring but a mental hospital.
“I’m not one to make judgments about the fitness of Mr. Tyson to fight here,” Mayor Herenton said. “That judgment has already been made.”
So has $4 million in tax revenue along with hundreds of plane and hotel reservations.
The fight will go on. Women and children of Memphis, be warned. And be careful.