Mike Tyson: What a charming a**hole

I was totally engrossed by the movie Tyson, which I watched last night on demand.


A sober, crestfallen Mike Tyson narrates footage of his life in and out of the ring over the past 20 years.  It's very tender, even with the sentimental parts juxtaposed with the macho, obscenity-slinging/fighting-machine parts.  He tears up reminiscing about his mentor Cus D'Amato and then you watch him say he wants to rip out Lennox Lewis's heart and feed it to him.  Touching moment, then scary moment, back and forth...


Just when you think you've got him figured out he says something like:  "I'm a historian, and that freaks me out."


It makes you wonder if he even knows what he's saying?  Or how funny and poetic he is?  To me, this is his most remarkable attribute: the way he expresses himself.  I put together a few quotes that really stand out.  (It is essential that when you read these, you are envisioning his demeanor and imagining his voice.)


Mike's Metaphors

• Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.
• Money, it's like paper blood
  

Malapropisms that are, well, appropriate 

• Anyone with a grain of sense would know that if I punched my wife I would rip her head off. It's all lies. I have never laid a finger on her.
• On the future of his career after the Lennox Lewis fight: "I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
• Telling ESPN's Pedro Gomez about his latest comeback: "The knee feels fine, I’ve been training Confuciously."

Fantastic Trash Talkin'/ I think he uses a word-a-day calendar

• Lennox Lewis, I'm coming for you man. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious.
• I could feel his muscle tissues collapse under my force. It's ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm.  
• I know the art of skulduggery.
• I've lived places these guys can't defecate in. 

Miscellaneous Mike-isms

• “[He] called me a ‘rapist’ and a ‘recluse.’ I’m not a recluse.
• I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them. 
  
• I may have smoked too much weed, but I wasn’t taking drugs or anything.

Here's the HD version of the trailer for Tyson: