Mr. Turner,
I hope you receive these posts, because I am only responding to applaud you.
Mike Tyson's voice is silly and cartoonish. That's truth.
It has caused the media to pile on and exploit it, and paint tyson as a doltish, uneducated, unintelligible nit, which 99.99% of the world has bought into.
The funny thing is, as hard as it is for anybody to believe, Mike Tyson isn't just intelligent,he is HIGHLY intelligent.
The man is articulate and insightful,and was this way even dating back to his early interviews as a teenager.
He is rattling off sentence after sentence in stream of consciousness throughout the entire 90 minutes, and everything is coherent, his breadth of vocabulary is vast, and i'm guessing the interviews were done in just one take.
It's sad that not many people understands this. It's the general public that's dumb, not Mike Tyson.
I always think back to his famous quote: "My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable".
Everybody makes fun of that quote, thinking it's imbecilic for some reason. That isn't idiocy, it's poetry.
I loved that the documentary showed that he was a true student of the sport, toiling away with endless hours studying footage of the greats and the obscures, reading, watching, and studying his craft.
We have been led to believe that Tyson was born an uncaged animal, and is just a physical freak who's genes enabled him to hop in the ring and pummel opponents with only a marginal amount of preparation. That simply wasn't true.
If nothing else,I certainly hope this documentary opens a few people's eyes and rids them of their media-driven misconceptions about Tyson.
He is a complex, fascinating, brilliant man who had every right and reason to trust virtually no one throughout his life and career.
Some critics simply just didn't get it. I'm glad to see that you did.
I'm a Tyson fan, so my opinion of the film is possibly biased. I thought it was a very good documentary, offering Tyson's insight and comments on key events in his life and career. What has always struck me about him as a boxer is his honesty and purity, illustrated by his unfussy boxing boots and the manner in which he always entered the ring. "What about Hollyfields ear, that wasn't honest?" you might say. Go see the film to hear what Tyson says about that - it was the wrong thing to do, but I can understand what drove him to it (and it wasn't because he was losing!). The interview after his last defeat showed him to be a dignified man, who admitted he was only fighting for the money and no longer had the desire to box again. He was an incredible fighter, who made mistakes in his young life, just as many people do, but how many of us would have been able to hold it together as a rich, world famous 20-year-old (without strong family connections) surrounded by people who hung onto us for their peep-show entertainment rather than to help us stay focussed on what put us in that position in the first place?