In a shocking breach of network tradition,
Fallen Champ: The Untold story of Mike
Tyson (NBC, Feb. 12, 9-11p.m.) is something
rare indeed: a two hour documentary
on a commercial network that approaches
its subject with intelligent curiosity,
not exploitive criticism. Fallen Champ
is organized around the central question
of Mike Tyson's life: How, wonders director
Barbara Kopple, could the heavyweight-champion
boxer, a gifted athlete by any measure,
end up wasting the best years of his
career in jail, convicted of rape last
year at the age of 25? Kopple is an
in intriguing person to do such wondering.
The Academy-Award winning director of
1991's American Dream, a documentary
about the Hormel meat company's labor
strike, she's no jaded sports journalist
or tabloid headline chaser. Her earlier
work had demonstrated an understanding
of the difficulties of working-class
lives pushed into extreme situations,
which helps a lot when you are tackling
a subject as rough-and-tumble as Tyson.
Fallen Champ tells the story at a brisk
chronological pace; Kopple didn't interview
Tyson, but she has filmed scores of
conversations of people surrounding
the fighter through every period of
his life and has assembled a remarkable
amount of rarely seen footage-old training
films, home movies, various media interviews
with Tyson.
Kopple's taped chats with the boxer's
boyhood friends in Brooklyn reveal that
as a kid growing up strong and poor,
Tyson ran with pals who mugged and robbed
people. "It was so exciting!"
says Tyson in a startlingly cheerful,
frank film clip. A chorus of voices
testified to Tyson's weaknesses and
complexities. "He was cocky and
shy at the same time", says Ernestine
Coleman, Tyson's caseworker after his
law breaking landed him in New York's
Tyron School for Boys. 'He's easily
mislead," says one of his first
boxing trainers, Teddy Atlas. "He
needs love. He needs confidence."
By all accounts the turning point in
Tyson's life was his relationship with
his first manager, veteran fight trainer
Cus D'Amato, who became a father figure
to Tyson. D'Amato groomed his young
charge for boxing stardom and kept him
in line, and when D'Amato died in 1985,
the structure and hope in Tyson's life
seemed to die as well. This once idealistic
athlete is shown in a 1988 interview
muttering, "People basically suck-they're
always trying to screw you."
Champ details the way Tyson's life fell
apart even as he achieved greatest professional
success: his brief, troubled marriage
to actress Robin Givens, the vicious
battle between Givens and promoter Don
King to oversee Tyson's career; his
increasingly contemptuous attitude toward
women. Champ captures both the art and
savagery of boxing; whether you love
or hate this sport, you will be drawn
into it here. Kopple gives Tyson credit
for his talent and skills as a boxer
and provides a context for the violence
in his life, but she doesn't cut him
any slack for his rape of beauty queen
contestant Desiree Washington in Indianapolis
in 1991. The director also provides
the pop-cultural framework for Tyson's
conviction and the six- year sentence
he is now serving., including a chilling
clip form a rally in support of Tyson
in which Louis Farrakhan defends the
boxer by hectoring the women in his
audience." How many times, sisters,"
he shouts, "have you said 'No'
and you meant 'Yes'?"
NBC, so unused to presenting material
of this kind and doubtless petrified
that viewers are seeing the word documentary
will assume impending boredom, refers
to Fallen Champ, as a "reality
film". Let's hope the Nielsen ratings
for this reality film are high enough
to bring more such original, independent
work to the network again, and soon.
