Last night my mother says, "Oh. You need to watch Oprah. Mike Tyson was on there and it was really good. I mean he was crying and everything. He really surprised me." Uhhh, okay. My mother is now specializing in random outbursts, I thought. I decided to watch it anyway, in part because just last week Netflix had recommended the new Tyson documentary to which she replied, "Nuh unh. I don't want to watch that crazy man." I also decided to watch it because she never says Oprah is good anymore so I knew it must've been something.
So I asked her why the change of heart, and she said because she felt that from his interview with Oprah and the snippets of the movie she was able to see on the show he revealed himself in a way that was startlingly honest.
Like Billy Joel "honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue" honest. She said, "He actually said all the things that you want a person to admit, but they never do. How he wanted to hit that Robin Givens during the Barbara Walters interview - he didn't, well he didn't that time I guess but he said he felt like it because she was putting on such a show - but how he wasn't really sorry when he bit that other man's ears off and he, well he just said a bunch of things that were painful to hear but he was just so honest and I liked that."
I like honesty, too, and even moreso I love redemption. I don't think any of Tyson's sins or actions are by any means pardonable, but I do believe a person, given the time and space required, is able to redeem themselves. For intensely personal, familial reasons I believe this, but it's helped me to exercise patience which has allowed me to see things differently, and I feel that way about Mike Tyson now and it's nice.
She was right; it was a good interview. Much more honest than the Whitney interview was, and I realized that, as is the case with a few other celebrities, I had taken the easy road to writing him off as completely batshit crazy. I never wondered about how he got that way or why he behaved so badly, and while the interview touched on his past - losing his mother as a teenager, not having a father figure until boxing, being bullied - I was more impressed by how in his responses he spoke mainly to the present. He didn't try to justify his past actions; he just admitted he was wrong. Wrong for not understanding what it meant to be married (i.e. marriage = monogamy), wrong for not recognizing that his actions bore consequences and that people have boundaries that he violated and crossed (i.e. with the charge of rape, womanizing in general, taking money from drug dealers and not paying them back).
In his boxing mentor, Cus D'Amato, he found the closest thing to a father figure in that Cus enabled him to gain self-confidencethrough the discipline that boxing requires; he allowed Mike to see his potential as a fighter. And while he didn't articulate it in the interview, he admitted that his relationship with Cus was about boxing and him becoming the greatest fighter of his time. It was about making him into a god, someone to be feared inside and outside the ring, and because Mike had no one else and no solid upbringing to frame Cus' influence in his life he wasn't able to establish the necessary boundaries that a man needs to establish between being inside the ring and living a life outside the ring. I also never realized that he was so young when he made it big. That only exacerbated his problems I'm sure because he received all glory and no one was there to ground him.
I was surprised to see how many times he became emotional - literally choked up to the point where he would keep talking and I would wait for him to just burst into tears. He just kept talking through the tight bursts of breaths, almost burping the words out to keep from crying. The one thing that absolutely got me though was when he talked about his daughter Exodus (who recently died when the power cord to an exercise machine got tangled around her throat and she was strangled). He just said that he didn't want to know what happened, that he couldn't know because knowing would mean there would be someone to blame and if there's someone to blame then he was going to have a problem with that and so he'd just rather not know. All he knew was that she was gone and he needed to handle her burial and whatever and that's what he could control and so he handled it.
It was his acknowledgment that he knew he wouldn't be able to control himself - his temper or whatever - if he knew what had caused that child's death. I just loved that he said it and how he said it, because you can still see that he's volatile. I don't think that fieriness will ever die, but for him to recognize his vulnerability just showed such self-awareness and humility. I actually enjoyed the revelation, and wondered why other people couldn't be that honest. He expressed himself so simply.
He admitted that he wasn't actually sorry when he made the public apology for biting Evander's ears off without a trace of shame or guilt. At first I thought he was a bit too flippant by saying it as he did, but he was just being honest. Everybody around him got on his nerves so much about apologizing that he did it - not because he was truly sorry - but because he just wanted everyone around him to shut up. Wouldn't it be great to find a scandalous politician who could admit to that?