I’d rather be writing than fighting — especially at 58

Last week, about 27 hours and 1,600 miles apart, two 58-year-old men who make a portion of their living in boxing commanded my attention.

I shouldn’t have to tell you who one of the 58-year-olds in question was. On Friday night, the focus belonged to Mike Tyson — not just for me, but for an announced 72,300 people in Arlington, Texas, and some 60 million households around the world.

The previous evening, it was my friend and former podcast partner Bill Dettloff who was in the spotlight — not just for me, but for about 400 folks in a ballroom in the north Jersey town of Garfield who were attending the 54th annual New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame induction and award ceremonies.

Bill and “Iron Mike” were born six months apart. Their ages and their passions for boxing history may be about all they have in common.

Bill has, as far as I know, never made tens of millions of dollars in a single night, never threatened to eat Lennox Lewis’ unborn children, never raised pigeons, and never shown his bare ass on a live international broadcast. (He did show his ass in the figurative sense on our podcasts with great regularity, but that’s not the same thing.)

And here’s another big difference between them: When a boxing writer gets celebrated with a Hall of Fame induction, it doesn’t mean his career is over. It’s an acknowledgement that he’s done great work, but there is usually more left to come. For Dettloff, who was the senior writer for The Ring magazine for a decade-plus, who has been the editor-in-chief of Ringside Seat almost since its inception, and who has written three boxing books, there’s every reason to believe his finest work could lie ahead of him and that he’ll continue to be productive at the same level for another 10 or 20 years.

When a boxer is inducted into a Hall of Fame, he’s only eligible because his career is over. As Tyson — and others before him, most notably Sugar Ray Leonard — reminded us, that career can restart post-induction. But by that point, invariably, the things they once did that made them a Hall of Famer are no longer accessible. A boxer’s Hall induction is intended to be the end of his story as a boxer.

It’s not fair, but it’s the reality of making a living primarily with your body as opposed to primarily with your brain. A boxer’s shelf life is limited. He reaches a point where he can only get worse at what he does, then a point at which the decline becomes precipitous, and then a point at which the risks of this violent sport are objectively not worth taking.

It’s simple biology. It’s how aging works. Of all the ridiculous things I heard and read leading up Tyson’s fight with Jake Paul, the most preposterous was a notion that the worst version of Tyson was the one we saw against Kevin McBride in 2005, a couple of weeks before his 40th birthday, and he would be better than that against Paul at 58. Seriously. This was an opinion humans expressed publicly. To think Tyson would fare better against Paul, because of the YouTuber’s shortcomings? OK, that’s garden variety poor punditry. But to think he would be better? That requires an extraordinary lack of understanding about the human body, mixed with some youthful naivete, perhaps — it’s a possibility only someone whose body has not yet begun to betray them could conceive.

Elite professional athletes are the envy of us all when they’re young and famous and raking in staggering amounts of money and dating Hollywood starlets. But there’s nothing to envy about the transitional phase that follows. Whether it’s age 30, age 35, or age 40, no matter how great a man was at boxing, he has to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

Boxing writers go through existential crises, too. “Does this pay me enough to make it worth my while?” “If one publication I work for folds, can I find a replacement?” It’s a challenging way to make a living, or to supplement the living you make doing something else. But it’s nothing like that crossroads a boxer reaches when he can’t fight anymore.

Tyson slammed into it hard. In 2005, USA Today quoted him saying, “My whole life has been a waste — I’ve been a failure.” He was lost. But, slowly, he seemed to figure it out and to find peace. He played himself in the Hangover movies. He put on a one-man show that started in Vegas and went to Broadway and HBO. He made money in the legal marijuana business. He started a podcast.

And despite all that, he found himself in a place where he thought he had to do this at age 58.  

Mike Tyson is the exception to many rules. There is no other athlete in his age range who continues to fascinate the public like he does, no other fighter over 50 who would ever receive an eight-figure offer for a bout against a social media star. Floyd Mayweather is the only other retired boxer who could attract a similar payday to fight Paul. Active champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez probably could as well. And that’s it. That’s the whole list.

Anyway, Tyson was not really looking to box again, it seems, but they dangled so much money in front of him that he said yes. His transition to life after boxing is more complicated than most because the market for his services as a boxer never quite went away.

At the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame dinner last Thursday, three living ex-boxers were inducted, and two of them were in attendance. Joey Gamache, who happens to be 58 years old too, was not there. Imamu Mayfield, age 52, was there, and he looked and sounded great. Tomasz Adamek, age 47, was also on the dais at the Venetian ballroom and looked almost exactly as he did in his fighting prime — and delivered one of the most charming speeches of the night, declaring in his limited English, “I am grandpa — I am young grandpa,” as he acknowledged his kids and their kids seated at a table near the front.

Fighters like Mayfield, Adamek, and Gamache are why regional Halls of Fame exist. None of them have a chance of induction in Canastota. So places like the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame offer a way for their achievements to be acknowledged.

But while it’s boxers who make this sport go ‘round, I couldn’t help but notice they represented a clear minority of the honorees Thursday evening. There was a trainer, a cutman, a manager, a public relations director. There were no fewer than three writers/historians: Dettloff was seated on the dais next to Don Majeski, and next to him sat Tom Hauser. My friend Bill is the young pup of that trio — the other two men are in their 70s. But they all got to enjoy a Hall of Fame induction while able to continue afterward doing the very things that earned them the inductions.

If we didn’t know it definitively prior to the opening bell on Friday, we surely know now that Tyson can no longer competently do the thing that made him a 2011 inductee of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. That he tried to prove otherwise means we have to live in a world in which Mike Tyson has a loss to Jake Paul on his official record. And possibly even worse than that, we have to live in a world in which Jake Paul carried Mike Tyson.

I guess we can take some solace in knowing that following the fight, hardly anyone was talking about Paul (except the Gen-X-and-older folks I ran into over the weekend who are not boxing fans and didn’t watch the fight and asked me, “Who is Jake Paul?”). But that’s the smallest of consolations.

I mentioned that Dettloff has written three books. One he co-authored with Joe Frazier. One was a biography of Ezzard Charles. And the most recent was a biography of Matthew Saad Muhammad — unquestionably one of the two finest biographies of Saad published in the last couple of years.

On page 148 of Matthew Saad Muhammad: Boxing’s Miracle Man, Bill writes of the aftermath of Saad’s title loss to Dwight Muhammad Qawi:

“In the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a 15-year-old amateur heavyweight watched in horror as Matt took his beating. He cried and snapped off the TV. A little while later, he caught a ride to the Bronx, where he was scheduled to fight in a smoker. He cried the whole way. When his bout came up, he went in and stopped his man in the first round. As soon as he got back to the locker room, Mike Tyson started crying again.”

Nearly every great boxer gives his fans a reason to cry over him eventually. We writers have the easy job. Maybe it doesn’t make us rich, or loved, or feared. But we don’t have to give it up the minute our reflexes start to go.

Boxing writers don’t retire because of whatever truth there is in that old cliché that “Father Time is undefeated.” We keep going — at least until our editors stop giving us work because they’ve noticed that all we have left in our writing arsenals anymore is cliches like “Father Time is undefeated.”

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].