Makeup hid the facial tattoo, but there’s no disguise for Mike Tyson.
Never will be.
Tyson’s guest appearance Wednesday night on Law & Order: SVU has been called competent by television critics, who know a lot more about the performing arts than anybody in a ringside seat. Tyson plays Reggie Rhodes, a death-row inmate and victim of multiple child rapes.
Tyson’s role is complicated and controversial, mostly because of his rape conviction in 1992. From this ringside seat, there’s nothing new about that. He’s always been complicated and controversial, regardless of whether that role has him between the ropes, on stage, or in prison.
Like boxing promoters, that’s what Law & Order: SVU was selling. Complications and controversy attract an audience. No secret in that formula. Tyson wears both better than ever. Like the Maori tattoo he got in 2003, they look as if they’ve always been there
When NBC announced the episode a few months ago, there were predictable condemnations and a Change.org petition with more than 15,000 signatures demanding that Tyson be removed from the cast. No chance of that. Promoters and producers, alike, understand the value of publicity, controversial or not.
No matter what you believe about Tyson, his new found life on stage is as fascinating as his former one was in the ring. It’s also another contradiction among many in a personality that is predator, prey and everything in between. Tyson can’t act. He just plays himself. Few do it so well. It’s the genuine in him, I think, that makes him so compelling.
In the Rhodes role, Tyson appears in the prison garb he has worn and looks out from behind the bars he has seen. Early in the show, the predator’s anger flashes when he tells detective Fin Tutuola, played by Ice-T, to get the hell away from him. The prey’s vulnerability is there when he tells an attorney and detective about growing up as an abused kid. In the end, he hugs the attorney and a detective who saved him from the executioner’s needle. Within an hour, it’s Tyson in a shot glass, 180 proof.
There are some subtle touches. The Rhodes character is an inmate in an Ohio prison, which is the state where Tyson’s former promoter, Don King, served almost four years on a manslaughter charge committed in Cleveland during the 1960s. The Rhodes character was convicted for a murder in Cleveland, King’s hometown.
Since Tyson’s release in 1995 after three years in an Indiana prison for rape, he has always said he was innocent of the crime. Believe what you want about his conviction. I have no way of knowing what happened on that night in Indianapolis with Desiree Washington.
I do know this: As a writer for The Arizona Republic, I reported in 2001 that Tyson underwent a polygraph in Phoenix that showed he was being truthful when he said he did not commit rape. At the time, he was being investigated for sexual assault in Big Bear, Calif., where he had been training for a victory over Brian Nielsen in Denmark.
According to a transcript of a polygraph conducted on Aug. 8 of 2001, Tyson answered four key questions. Three asked whether the alleged victim was forced into sex, whether she was harmed and whether she was restrained. Tyson answered no to each. In the fourth question, he was asked whether the sex was consensual. Yes, he said.
On the polygraph chart, Tyson scored +24. According to a scale devised at the University of Utah, he needed a +6 to be truthful. A -6 would have judged him a liar.
About 10 days after the polygraph, the San Bernardino (Calif.) County Attorney’s Office dropped the investigation of an incident alleged to have happened in Big Bear in mid-July.
Then, there is Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who cast doubt on Tyson’s 1992 conviction in his 2004 book, America On Trial, Inside The Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation.
Dershowitz writes that evidence was withheld from the jury. Meanwhile, the jury also heard evidence that Dershowitz says was false. The professor also writes that three witnesses were not allowed to testify. He argues that their testimony would have kept Tyson out of a jail.
If this sounds familiar, it is. Wednesday’s fictional plot includes withheld evidence and altered evidence in a rigged process that resulted in the death penalty for Tyson’s character.
Coincidence? Maybe.
But Tyson’s life has always imitated art.
