Tyson on Oprah: Running from the Devil

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↵The shrinks tell us that it is all about our childhoods, all the pain and fear and misplaced yearning that haunts our days and that we simply can’t understand, no matter how hard we try. The harder we try, the more it seems to slip through our fingers. We’re little boys and girls with such rudimentary mechanisms for processing the world, and it’s all so overwhelming, so frightening to us that when we’re hurt, we hurt with epic, wordless dimension, and blame ourselves because we are the nearest, most likely culprit for the pain. When we grow into men and women, all of those feelings remain locked inside us, the child’s wounds in an adult mind.↵
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↵I watched Tyson on Oprah yesterday expecting some gratuitous fluff and instead got way, way more than I bargained for. “I know what it’s like to go down that dark road and meet the devil, hang out with him for a little while,” Tyson said. “I don’t wanna do that no more.” Is this what it’s like every day on Oprah, I thought? It can’t be. ↵
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↵Tyson is now a bewildered, blubbering child in an overweight man’s body. He used to look so hard, and now he is so soft in every way. He used to be all about hurting others and now he is just so completely and utterly hurt himself that it’s almost hard to look at him. Tears were in his eyes from the opening bell, merely because he was on Oprah, I think, and he knew he was there to talk about his feelings, and “feelings” for Mike Tyson are some very heavy weather. “Even to this day, I’m very protective of my feelings.” And yet his feelings are all out there now, spilling from him with every attempted word, with every gesture.
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