A Duel of the (Anti)Hero Iron Mics: Mike Tyson versus Jack Johnson

Last weekend we talked about Brothers Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali--two elder Gods whose teachings resonate into the present even though one is passed on and another has learned through fate's cruel irony that sometimes our greatest gift is stolen from us such that we learn to communicate in different ways. Indeed, Crom can be so cruel in his teaching.

Moving forward, the classic fantasy match up for Brother Ali is/was Mike Tyson. While the stuff of barbershop griot exchanges, I never found this fight very compelling. Ali would have destroyed Tyson because the latter, while gifted, never had the ring sense and acumen of the former. And being even more provocative, this fantasy bout would have ended early with Tyson laid out, face down in the fifth round, leveled by the prettiest fighter to ever enter the ring.

The more compelling pairing--at least for this student of the sweet science, that brutal sport of pugilistic beauty--was Mike Tyson versus Jack Johnson. Here the real fight would not be in the squared circle (again Johnson would have easily beaten Ali), but rather in how each embodied different types of impenetrable black masculinity. I would suggest that Jack Johnson, he who put gauze in his trunks to intimidate white fighters, and publicly caroused with many white women when such deeds would mandate him becoming strange fruit both below and above the Macon-Dixon line, was in fact irrepressible and unforgivable blackness that could not be equaled.

Tyson was more a force of nature. While Johnson was born of Jim Crow white supremacy, Iron Mike was a product of Moynihan's sharp observations on the black family, the failures of the neo-liberal order, and post-Fordist economies of scale and deindustrialization.

Both were bad black men and the bugaboos of the white imagination as they embodied the myth of the black rapist--all the while their bodies provided voyeuristic pleasures as simultaneous objects of the white gaze and black triumph in sports (with its obligatory intersections with national manhood).

Random thought: how do you like that Oscar Wilde run-on Homi Bhabhaesque wordplay?

A set of propositions.

Mike Tyson was an anti-hero and tragic figure, a symbol for the failures of black masculinity as caricature. Jack Johnson was a hero and trickster figure pushing outward the boundaries of black respectability all in the service of an expanded and more fully evolved black manhood.



Two questions.

Whose blackness is more powerful and compelling? And which figure, Tyson or Johnson was more hero than anti-hero?

So then, let's playfully enter the duel of the iron mic(s)...