An Exerpt from ESPN RE: Tyson

Somethings make you laugh, some things make you cry, this did both... enjoy..

Say 'goodbye' to our little friend
By Bill Simmons



An hour after absorbing the worst beating of his career, Mike Tyson was sitting in his Memphis locker room, holding his baby daughter, his face swollen and chafed after eight brutal rounds with heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis. When ESPN's Jeremy Schaap asked him what the future held, Tyson smiled.

"I don't know, man," he said. "I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."

Of course, Tyson meant "oblivion," but "Bolivian" worked so much better, didn't it? It was the fitting conclusion to the Tyson era, one of those classic Tyson malapropisms that summed up everything. It's over. I'm done. Stick a fork in me. I'm fading into Bolivian. There were hundreds of comparable Tyson moments over the years, but this might have been his finest work yet. Can you feel sorry for someone as you're laughing at them? Apparently, yes. Just one of those goofy contradictions that made the Tyson era so absorbing.

We will miss him, won't we? Secretly? Has there ever been a boxing career that ended so unpredictably predictable? Was there a more interesting fighter in the past 20 years? Did any athlete generate more audio and video, more negative prose, more water cooler debates, more usable sound bites? Was there another pop culture figure from the past two decades who attracted more comedy, sarcasm, irony and disdain? For anyone between the ages of 25 and 35, Tyson was the memorable fighter of our generation. Nobody else came close.

And even if every historical sign pointed to Tyson's career winding down exactly like it did in Memphis, Tenn. -- with his considerable skills having completely eroded, with a superior fighter taking advantage and dismantling him, with a bloodied, disoriented Tyson rolling around on the canvas, with the pathetic ex-champ groveling for a rematch that nobody wants -- it still remained mesmerizing from start to finish. Close your eyes, and you can still see The Big Bad Bully of the 1980s in Memphis, struggling to climb to his feet, washed-up and humbled, battered and dismanted, headed straight for Bolivian.

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