Mike Tyson on Amateur Boxing
This is footage from an interview I did with Mike Tyson. It is mostly raw footage with only simple edits so it has both its slow moments and dramatic spots. The interview didn’t really work for the focus of the film so I cut it out and am posting it here as a piece of journalism….
In making a documentary, there are some interviews you seek out and it takes months and months of phone calls and painstaking navigation through all the layers of people that anyone famous has built up around them. This is not one of them. I was shooting one day at an amateur gym and one of the boxers there, Patricia Manual, casually said, “Oh yeah, Tyson is working out at the gym I work at…”
The gym of all places was Crunch in West Hollywood where Tyson was slumming it while in rehab after getting arrested for snorting coke off his car dashboard. Patricia set up the meet, Mike agreed to do it and then we sat down to talk. About 30 seconds into the interview, Tyson started shaking his finger at me and telling me he wanted to talk about amateur boxing and not about his life in amateur boxing. I realized at that instant that while I was prepared for his personality, I was completely unprepared for how thoroughly damaged he was by the media, both through their normal insatiable appetite for a person’s self-destruction and Tyson’s own love for self-destruction in front of the world’s cameras. He had learned to be completely guarded in most everything he said and was making an uneasy attempt at moving on past the Tyson of old that everyone loved to watch but made him feel like a monster even to talk about.
While I was ready to dive straight into the thick of Tyson as the conflicted and confused genius that he was, he was ready to put in a few words for the kids and jump back on the path of normalcy. So rather than ramble on endlessly about the old baddest man on the planet, I’ll leave the demons in the closet, post the short interview here and leave it at that.
