THE WALK
into the wall and punched right through it. He had been feeling to see if it was plasterboard and what wasn’t concrete. When his opponent saw what Tyson did, I knew the fight was over. And that’s what he did with Spinks. Punching that hole for Spinks was his ring walk. That was the greatest ring walk he ever had. When he walked into the ring for Spinks, I saw Queens. Everyone thought they were seeing something for the first time. I’d seen it before.” Tyson’s most recent biographer, Mark Kriegel, author of Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson , described the significance of a ring walk like this: “The ring walk is supposed to be like walking a gang plank: the fighter alone, communing with his fear. Now it’s become a demonstration that he’s not afraid at all, and like just about everything else, an exercise in overproduced grandiosity. That said, for a while, I got a kick out of Tyson Fury’s entrances. Canelo’s, by contrast, seemed clunky and humorless. I fondly recall Naseem Hamed coming in on a magic carpet and Mayweather being carried in on litter by centurions. But the most famous ring walks were organic, just a lot of humanity on the march – Ali in Zaire, Tyson in Atlantic City for Spinks.” Randy Roberts – professor of history at Purdue University and author of books on Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey and Ali – helped me go back to July 4, 1910, “The Fight of the Century,” for arguably the most consequential stakes involved in any professional boxing contest. Johnson’s victory over James J. Jeffries, the undefeated, so- called “Great White Hope,” would lead to widespread racial violence, including murders and lynchings, along with riots across the country. On that sweltering Independence Day in Nevada, Johnson walked to the ring first through a deeply segregated, overwhelmingly white audience, estimated at nearly 20,000. Throughout his career, Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, had not merely fought opponents, but entered arenas charged with profound racial meaning.
Just by his appearance itself, he offered a public spectacle imbued with hostility. Bands played hideous songs like “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” Yet books describe Johnson smiling “his golden smile” to the crowd in defiance. “What Jack Johnson faced was unbelievably bitter,” Roberts explained. “The hostility was overwhelming. But he was brilliant at deflecting. He never got upset. That he was not assassinated in the ring is to me one of the most incredible things. He repeatedly received letters threatening to kill him. “Johnson was so audacious. He took a certain enjoyment out of this. And it had an impact on champions later on, like Joe Louis. Louis’ management team were determined to have Louis be the anti-Jack Johnson.” I asked about Jack Dempsey’s ring walks. “Dempsey definitely had a swagger. But I think Dempsey came in and he just wanted to kill people. Nothing theatrical. Dempsey scared the hell out of opponents. He arrived ready to fight. Mike Tyson, we know, took his approach to the ring from Dempsey. He stole his haircut!” Muhammad Ali biographer Thomas Hauser attended the next “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden as a 25-year-old fan. I asked Hauser about ring walks that night. “I will read you something 95-year- old Jerry Izenberg told me about that ring walk that sums it up,” Hauser said. “Izenberg told me, ‘I’ve covered sports for half a century. I’ve been to every kind of championship and seen every great athlete of the past 50 years. No moment I’ve ever seen had the electricity of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier coming down the aisle and entering the ring the first time they fought. The sound of the crowd changed. It had been a low buzz during the break before the main event. Then it became something different. First it got louder in the back of the arena. Heads turned. The buzz spread and it kept getting louder and louder until it was a roar that told everyone that there were two champions in the house.’”
When I got two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod on the phone, the subject of ring entrances immediately brought him back to Tyson and Spinks in Atlantic City. “I saw [the closed-circuit broadcast] at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta,” Junod recalled, the awe from the event still apparent in his voice 38 years later. “It was the most efficient destruction of somebody in the ring that I’d ever seen in my life.” I mentioned rewatching the Tyson ring entrance and how eerily it felt almost like a Hitchcock murder sequence. Junod laughed: “I just watched The Birds recently and was still amazed after all these years how shockingly terrifying it is. There’s a lot of short-lived fights, but I can only think of two that gave people exactly what they wanted: the rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and Tyson-Spinks. Poor Spinks. I have no idea how he turned out to be such a sacrificial lamb in that fight. And it wasn’t even that you were rooting for Tyson. You just wanted there to be some sort of cleansing and Tyson was the guy to do it. And that ring walk before it happened meant everything.” B ack to 11:23 p.m., the Atlantic City Convention Hall, on June 27, 1988. With Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It” still playing, HBO cameras display Michael Spinks awkwardly raising his arms to wave ( Goodbye? , reporter Wally Matthews wonders from press row) and curiously bowing to the crowd as his glittering, undefeated record is displayed on the screen. As Spinks embraces a bespectacled Ali in the ring, his bizarrely cheerful entrance theme song abruptly stops. An ominous drone emerges in its place. The arena suddenly feels demonically possessed. Behind the drone, distant metallic clanging offers a ghoulish percussion. Cameras zoom ever uncomfortably closer to Spinks as he paces nervously across the ring. As we spend the next 28 agonizing seconds looking at Spinks, the footage begins to resemble a proof-of-life hostage video.
From the expression on Spinks’ face, one can imagine pinned insects writhing in agony unwilling to change places with him. For the next 92 seconds, we get to identify with Spinks awaiting Tyson’s arrival for dinner while Spinks gets to contemplate being paid $13.5 million for the unique honor of being the sole dish on the menu. HBO cuts to a procession of blurry faces, almost pressed up against their cameras, urgently marching toward us. As this phalanx somewhat comes into focus, they appear to be security staff and uniformed policemen. We’re furiously waved away as our gaze attempts to penetrate this hoard to see what forbidden cargo is being transported. As the cameraman is nearly trampled and the frame jerks around, lurking behind a series of mountainous swaying broad shoulders, the ominous blank expression on Tyson’s face can briefly be identified. Suddenly it vanishes as the cameraman gives up and presumably takes refuge. Everything about this scene feels less like trying to catch a glimpse of the youngest heavyweight champion in history and more like watching the Minotaur eagerly turning a corner in his labyrinth after picking up the scent of a freshly delivered maiden. The view shifts to the rafters, an angle evoking something of Hitchcock’s looming, elevated perspective in Psycho , now with maybe 10,000 people in the frame, but not one face distinguishable. A constellation of lights in the corner. Pools of shadow are spread out over the crowd. We slowly drift closer until a dissolve puts us immediately behind and above the back of Tyson’s head as he’s led to the ring surrounded by his protective entourage (Martin Scorsese uses the same shot for his ring walk in Raging Bull ). If nearly all of Tyson’s life leading up to his introduction to boxing had been presented in the media as an almost living crime-in-progress outside the ring, now we see he is receiving a police escort in order to inflict the same malevolence for instantaneous generational wealth. How on earth can
Despite all the pre-fight hype, Spinks lasted a mere 91 seconds.
shadow. Tyson paces directly toward us as we look on, from a slightly overhead angle. Someone from the crowd slaps Tyson on the shoulder and he reacts like a bull twisting his neck to rehearse using his horn. For a split second, Tyson pulls his head back an inch and exposes his eyes glaring ahead toward Spinks in the ring. After just two minutes, at last Tyson locates the steps and begins his climb. He slides under the ropes to meet his destiny. Is there anything so frightening as a labyrinth with no center? We’re about to find out. And after 91 seconds of work obliterating Michael Spinks, it was the final understated gesture of victory Tyson displayed to the world that writer Jack Newfield recalled: arms outstretched, palms of the gloves held open. “That look of frustration in his eyes. It was as if he had climbed the highest mountain, kicked in a door, and discovered the room was empty. The look seemed to ask: Is that all there is? Tyson began to resemble a Greek tragedy searching for a stage.” That search didn’t take long. From that night in Atlantic City to losing in arguably the biggest upset in sports history in Tokyo against Buster Douglas, Tyson’s Greek tragedy took only 594 days to locate its stage.
we justify paying for such a thing? Easy: try to look away. We dissolve back to the bird’s-eye view of the frozen crowd, gently zooming into its heart until you can detect a narrow stream of movement slithering through the crowd from right to left. From this distance, maybe half a football field away from Tyson, I immediately get queasy. I have been terrified of needles all my life and have never been able to watch routine injections. I’m queasy in the same way I was the first time seeing Quentin Tarantino’s majestic close-up of Vincent Vega injecting heroin in his vein or awaiting Sean Penn’s death by lethal injection in Dead Man Walking . And, on this night, whatever drug it is Tyson represents, there is no drug in all of entertainment that America is more hopelessly addicted to. Finally the procession makes the last final turns toward the ring and we cut to a frame limited to maybe 75 people with Tyson dead center. We zoom into his face, but like in The Godfather , the top-down lighting and Tyson’s heavy brow restrict any access to his eyes. The eyes are perpetually veiled in enigmatic
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