That it's also addictive is down in part to Tyson's co-author, Larry Sloman. The autobiography grew directly out of that show and even if it is not, as Holdengräber claimed, up there with St Augustine's Confessions, it's got a lot more fighting.

Tyson played himself, naturally, a role he reprised for a one-man Broadway show that was then filmed by Spike Lee. Undisputed Truth is the latest and biggest bounce in a bills-to-pay comeback that began with James Toback's intimate documentary, Tyson, and continued with an acting role in The Hangover. And so, after being a god, Tyson has ended up like thousands of other literary contenders: on the promo circuit with product to hustle.

Maradona and Tyson fell – and fell prey to pretty similar temptations – while avoiding a fatal Senna-esque collision with destiny. Tyson's were 'Came, saw, conquered, got conquered, bounced back.' The ungodly twist is all in the last two. Holdengräber begins his interviews by asking guests to define themselves in seven words. When Tyson, at the library, said that he had been a god this seemed a self-definition that even Richard Dawkins might allow.

In Naples there are still shrines to Diego. Paul Gascoigne was an amazing footballer and Ben Johnson ran extremely fast but Maradona's and Tyson's life stories place them in a different realm. But everything that had made Tyson famous and infamous – the fact of his body and its capacity for violence – was there in the room.Īmong the living only Diego Maradona (whom I also saw once, in an equally improbable setting, as he emerged from the Oxford Union) has risen to comparable heights from such depths – and then plummeted back down again. They are interesting, admired or even loved on the basis of stuff they have created, that is external to them. This would never happen with the writers and intellectuals who usually grace this august stage. A collective gasp and we were on our feet – not as an expression of admiration, more a recoil from sheer physical and psychic proximity. His mentor, Cus D'Amato, had assured the 15-year-old Tyson that one day, when he entered a room, 'people will stand up and give you an ovation'. N othing in his subsequent exchanges with Paul Holdengräber could quite live up to the moment when Mike Tyson took to the stage last month at Madison Square Garden – sorry, I mean the New York Public Library.

Tyson undisputed truth