2 days Ago By Colby Cosh
In 1987, at a fashion designer’s party in midtown Manhattan, the notorious prizefighter Mike Tyson was seen aggressively manhandling a young model named Naomi Campbell, then 17 and on the verge of exploding into world fame. One of the other guests — the renowned English philosopher Sir A.J.
(Freddie) Ayer , aged 76 — intervened on the teen’s behalf. Tyson is supposed to have sputtered “Do you know who the f–k I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer is said (by his stepdaughter; caveat emptor ) to have responded “And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic.
We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.” The two sauntered off to chat, leaving Miss Campbell to make her escape. I thought about that story a lot over the weekend, before and after Tyson had made his pathetic final bow in the ring on Netflix against boxer/YouTuber Jake Paul.
Did Ayer, in his conversation with that young man, open some sort of strange psychic portal to existentialism? Nobody, I suppose, doubts that Tyson at the peak of his combative glory and personal chaos would become improperly aggressive upon his first viewing of Campbell. The surprise has been the older Tyson’s transformation into an odd, unpredictable sort of American sage as he struggles to put his own unique life — pockmarked by impossible triumph, calamity and absurdity — into perspective. On Thursday he gave an interview to a precocious teenaged interviewer that reminded everybody of his unrivalled unpredictability.
Jazlyn Guerra couldn’t have known what would happen when she asked Tyson about what kind of “legacy” he wanted to leave behind — but it’s possible, I’d say nearly certain, that her interview will survive longer in the collective memory than the subsequent Tyson-Paul boxing match. Any other retired or quasi-retired athlete would have used the opportunity to promote a favourite cause, to encourage the young or to pad his own ego. American sportsmen are positively required to worship at the temple of “legacy” — the notion that their feats will secure some form of immortality, or at least that celebrity power can be used for great good.
We can be sure that Tyson, now a petrified 58, will be remembered as long as there are professional combat sports of any description. (I doubt they will still take the classical form of 20th-century boxing for too much longer. The announcer at the end of Tyson-Paul should just have gone ahead and said “Annnnd the winner is .
.. mixed martial arts!”) But Tyson wasn’t having any of it.
He told Jazzy that legacy is “another word for ego...
. That’s just some word everybody grabbed onto. Someone said that word and everyone grabbed onto that word, now it’s used every five seconds.
It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’m gonna die and it’s gonna be over.
” He carried on about the looming void in this vein for a few more seconds. The clip circulated widely on social media with endless comments like “LOL, Tyson forgot he was talking to a kid,” but it is extremely clear he did nothing of the kind. It is much more likely that he spoke this way because he was talking to a young person.
And, of course, he’s got an inarguable point. Normal people don’t ask each other about their “legacies” unless they’re probate lawyers. “Legacy” is absolutely an interviewer’s hollow verbal cue, an invitation to a public figure to wallow performatively.
As for the immortality promised to young athletes, that’s a pretty fast-expiring tub of cheese. Even someone who dominates American culture like Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali leaves behind no more than a bare wisp of an image in the long run. This is perhaps less true of former Wykeham professors of logic, whose philosophical writings can carry on fighting in the arena after they are gone.
But I find myself awkwardly unsure that Sir Freddie Ayer was the truest philosopher among the guests at that long-ago party. National Post.
