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This is the same guy who was quoted at length in the Washington Post this week talking about how the small home he's been living in with his girl friend while training in Phoenix has been "utopia.'' The same guy who said "When I was younger, life was about acquiring things but as I get older I've realized life is about losing. In the fight of life, I'm a pug. I'm a palooka.''
Perhaps this entire exercise is now about self-revelation. Rock Newman, Riddick Bowe's former manager, has been involved in the McBride promotion from the outset and says of Tyson's latest transformation, "Sometimes the light comes on.''
Yes it does. Sometimes. Then again, sometimes a guy is conning the world ... and himself.
Tyson, one must never forget, was once a legendary pickpocket on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Pickpocketing is a game of deception. It is slight of hand and he was adept at it.
Throughout his long public life, Tyson has been a chameleon, someone who gives to you whatever you want to see. Humbled by his bankruptcy and his loss to Williams, Tyson knows he needs, at the moment, to convince the public he is a new man. But he also needs to convince them he's the same old fighter he was back in his heyday, which may be the more difficult task at this stage of his life.
Destroying Kevin McBride in a round or two will not prove a thing but it will get many fans exorcised about his future. The $5 million he'll earn won't settle anything, but it will help pay some bills. Neither will politely saying of the Williams loss, "I was embarrassed to lose to a gentleman of his stature.''
Anyone can change, of course. Anyone can have a revelation, a permutation. Anyone can have an epiphany, as Tyson seemed to when he reiterated a statement he's made many times in recent years by commenting on life experiences by saying, "Old too soon, smart too late.'' That could be his epitaph but he and Newman insist he is a changed man, a calmer man, a man who now understands himself, or at least is beginning to.
That well may be, but at a press conference Wednesday the old Tyson surfaced when he tried to intimidate McBride's promoter into sitting down and later said, "People call this a circus and some reporters call it a fiasco but you have to understand that these people aren't here because I'm a circus. They're here became I'm an icon, an international star.''
That didn't sound like a guy who's been humbled much. It didn't sound all that different from the Mike Tyson whose life turned into a train wreck and took his career with it. That guy would say of McBride, "I'm going to gut him like a fish.'' As things turned out Wednesday, the new Dr. Phil version of Mike Tyson said the same thing.
So where does that leave anyone who has observed Mike Tyson for much of his life? Is he a new man struggling to right his sinking ship, both financially and emotionally? Or is this just a grand illusion, a show for a public he needs to court at the moment?
No one, not even Tyson, can claim to know that for sure. But he has cited the ''old too soon, smart too late'' lesson of life many times as the opening for a lot of other such pop psychology comments. One of them may apply here and anyone observing and commenting on the latest version of Mike Tyson should remember it.
Tyson's old guru and first trainer, Cus D'Amato, always used to say if there's one simple truth in life it's this: "Guys born round don't die square.''
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