It’s not often people sympathize with Mike Tyson. Truth is, there’s never been much reason to. Until now.
The shocking, heartbreaking death of Tyson’s four-year-old daughter, Exodus, after the youngster caught her neck in a treadmill cord is just another sad chapter, albeit the most devastating, in the former heavyweight champion’s troubled tale.
It doesn’t matter what you think of Mike Tyson. The untimely death of a child always rips at the heartstrings, but this tragedy hit just as Tyson seemed to have his life turned around. Livin’ in the ‘burbs, finally finding love far away from the leeches that helped him blow over $300 million in his boxing career, the onetime self-proclaimed “baddest man on the planet” at last seemed to have found peace with himself.
Gone, like the ghost of Cus D’Amato, were the demons that seemed to always be riding shotgun with Tyson, those who were more than willing to give a little nudge just as he appeared to be going over the edge. The shocking knockout at the hands of Buster Douglas that cost him his heavyweight strap, a nasty split from Robin Givens, the rape conviction, tearing off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear with his teeth, the failed comeback, the coke bust, the….well, his was a story that never ends. A runaway train just looking for a place to derail.
There will be those who find it hard to sympathize with Tyson in spite of the man himself. Grieving for a baby girl is one thing – feeling sorry for a man who once told the world he wanted to eat Lennox Lewis’ children is quite another. But Tyson, a man who was never pointed in the right direction, was trying to turn his life around before it was too late. Sober for more than a year, he finally realized what was important in life, what it was like to at last grow up.
No one can imagine what must have been going through Tyson’s mind as he stood at the foot of his broken little girl’s hospital bed, holding her tiny hand and whispering in her ear, begging her to hold on as she fought for her last breath. A father is still a father, no matter how bad he once was, how fragile he still is. And when that moment came for Mike Tyson to say farewell to something he has never loved so much, to face that moment every parent dreads, who knows what he was thinking. The memories. The regrets. The anger.
So, yes, as a father, we should be cheering for Mike Tyson to get up from this most devastating roundhouse punch. The man, after all, is still a father, and the death of his daughter may be enough for that final push, the one that finally catapults him over the cliff. And regardless of what you think of Mike Tyson, no matter how much hatred you harbor for what he’s done, who he’s hurt, no good can come from watching that train derail for good.
What Mike Tyson did yesterday shouldn’t matter. Not right now.
Today, he is just a broken daddy getting set to bury his little girl.
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