Boxing: Tyson's big payday will merit no credit

For quite some time Mike Tyson has been declaring his ambition to return to at least some of the roots of his success as the most dynamically disturbing young heavyweight in the history of boxing.

However, at Washington's MCI Centre today, it seems he will reach back even further than that.

His plan is to perform a mugging and, if it is as successful as it has been so coldly calculated, all he will lack from his street days when he goes into the ring with Irishman Kevin McBride - at 6ft 6in a towering, affable monument to pugilistic futility - is the old ski mask.

However, if that sounds like a sneer, the joke is certainly not on Iron Mike.

Tyson-McBride is not a fight but ceremonial exploitation. It will end quickly and harshly and few will doubt that it has served one of the oldest purposes of professional boxing - to help retain interest in the man who performs the ritual of a one-sided victory.

Tyson picks up US$2m ($2.8m) of "walking around money" - plus a guaranteed minimum $3m ($4.2m) to set against his debts - for work that needs to last not much longer than three minutes.

McBride has already been categorised as a "tomato can" by Tyson, which means he has to be crushed not as any spectacular achievement but merely as some token justification for the aura of extreme violence which continues to make the former undisputed world champion the most compelling figure in boxing.

The reality of this match was never in question. Its basic, brutal imperative was for Tyson to emerge from the disaster of his defeat by Britain's Danny Williams last summer, when he claims he was ambushed by injury, with some remnant of his ferocious reputation.

However, Hasim Rahman, whose finest moment came in the Johannesburg dawn when he threw a disabling punch at the chin of Lennox Lewis, is saying Tyson's most valuable asset died in the Louisville ring 11 months ago. "Tyson can't frighten anyone any more - he can't just intimidate them with his presence."

Tyson rails at such talk and this week angrily rebutted the suggestion that his fight with McBride is a "fiasco and a circus".

"I'm not interested in whether I intimidate guys before they get in the ring... I can't control my aura, it is what it is.

"But, you know, I've always felt the best way to intimidate someone is to hit him very hard in the face."

The promoters say that it will be a near sell-out and Showtime, the cable TV company which has clung to Tyson through so many storms and ambivalent public reaction to the worst of his atrocities, believes pay-per-view sales will produce a healthy profit.

But when you consider the kind of fight it will be you cannot help but see it as something from the old Colosseum.

Tyson's declaration that he will gut McBride as though he is a fish was a terrible, if appropriate, image.

Then if it should just prove a grotesque fallacy, if McBride so improbably lands a big, decisive punch, there will be just one certainty.

It will be that there will be no more use for the ski mask.

- INDEPENDENT