King Plays Race Card, And U.S. Public Buys It

Tyson vs. McNeeley. There’s a lot more in those words than a headline for a promotional poster for what could be the highest-grossing pay-TV event in history.

It was there when Larry Holmes fought Gerry Cooney and when Muhammad Ali, after his forced retirement, took on Jerry Quarry. And it was there - at a fever pitch - when Jack Johnson fought James J. Jeffries 85 years ago.

Race has been a potent force in boxing, but at the same time, nobody wants to discuss it openly.

To deny that there’s added interest when a black fighter faces a white fighter in a highly publicized match is to deny that the phrase “Great White Hope” exists.

The race angle grows exponentially when the black fighter is a nonconformist, an independent man who stomps all over many of the rules, some unwritten, that govern American society.

Mike Tyson fills that bill, but as he has been whisked around the media circuit - his face has appeared everywhere of late, it seems - interviewers have done verbal tap dances to avoid the race question.

Tyson, of course, knows the race issue is there. He smells it, embraces it and, without being direct, blames it for his three years in an Indiana prison.

“They don’t dislike me because they think I’m a sexually promiscuous young man who can’t control himself,” Tyson said in a Wednesday night interview with Black Entertainment Television’s Ed Gordon. “They don’t like me because of the money.”

The former undisputed heavyweight champion knows it galls a lot of Americans, particularly white men, that a black man can come from an urban cauldron like Brownsville in Brooklyn and earn millions of dollars for a night’s work.

No college degree. No need to give up a little dignity and play the corporate game to succeed. All Tyson needed was his fists and some luck.

“It kills them,” Tyson said. “They hate that.”

Just as he knows when an opponent is wounded or weak, Tyson knew he was speaking to a predominantly black audience that night.

Though his overall message didn’t change appreciably from the one he had delivered through the mainstream media, the enigmatic warrior made sure his verbal jabs were well-placed.

Gordon did venture - ever so gingerly - into the minefield of race, asking if Tyson thinks society feels a need to bring down people like him, promoter Don King, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson.

“We’re targets,” Tyson said.

He said he and some other black celebrities start to believe that their status and wealth make them untouchable.

“We all believed that,” he said. “Sometimes you run into the real world. Sometimes the real world hurts.”

Tyson continued to maintain that he was innocent of rape, but he said he had reconciled himself to his fate because of the bad things he had done in his life. He spoke of being a more learned person, but not necessarily a better person, because of spending time in jail.

“I think I was a hell of a guy before I went in that hell hole,” he said. “Now I’m more conscious. They convicted me because they were afraid of me. They feared me.”

The ugly specter of hate crept in later that same night, when Tyson went on “Larry King Live” on the Cable News Network.

The crew of that show, because of its live call-in format, is adept at screening crank calls, but one guy was clever enough to get past the screening by pretending that he wanted to wish Tyson luck in Saturday’s fight. Then he proceeded to make sexual inferences about Tyson’s incarceration and was quickly cut off. One wonders how many similar calls didn’t get through.

Don King, the ultimate capitalist, encourages the racial angle because he wants just as many people as possible to pay up to $59.95 in hopes of seeing Tyson beaten as well as those who pay it in hopes of seeing him win.

“The race card has to be played, but not out of hatred but out of love,” said King, who could talk his way out of a sunken submarine. “Peter McNeeley has a 36-1 record with 30 KOs. He has the credentials to be in the ring, even if he is white.”