THE news that Mike Tyson has begun serious training with a view to returning to the ring has, unsurprisingly, set the boxing fraternity abuzz — all the more so given the footage the former heavyweight champion recently posted on social media, showing him hitting the pads with the kind of explosive speed and power that was his trademark in his pomp. 

The good news is that his intention is not to return to top level heavyweight boxing, but to fight four round exhibition fights for charity, presumably and hopefully involving sparring gloves and headguards. 

As to possible opponents, Australian rugby league star Sonny Bill Williams, someone no-one in boxing has ever heard of but who, it seems, has fought a few professional bouts, is being lined up in what is being mooted as a pay-per-view match-up at some point towards the end of 2020.

Tyson spoke recently of how stem cell treatment has rejuvenated him, leaving him feeling as good as he was his prime. For a man who in recent years has embraced wholeheartedly the mellowing properties of cannabis — to the point that he runs his own cannabis farm in California, where it’s been legalised — it’s hard to know if a return to the ring will unlock the demons that produced the ferocity in the ring for which he remains famous, and the chaos outside the ring that brought him so much trouble. 

If so, it’s an enterprise pregnant with risk.

As if the news that Mike Tyson is coming out of long retirement isn’t staggering enough, Evander Holyfield has just announced that he too intends on returning to the squared circle — as with his former rival, to box in exhibition bouts to raise money for charity. 

But it doesn’t end there, because Britain’s Danny Williams, who defeated an on-the-slide Tyson back in 2004, has offered him a rematch. We also have the indomitable Shannon Briggs, who at age 48 has vocalised his interest in fighting the aforementioned, along with anybody else who’s willing.

Then we have one John Fury, father of current heavyweight king Tyson Fury, who a few weeks ago was called out by former bodybuilder and now boxing enthusiast Mick Theo. The result? You guessed it: plans for a bout to raise money for charity. 

However, this was before Mr Theo succeeded in raising Mr Fury’s considerable ire with the posting of another video recently, accusing him of going soft on the idea and calling him a chicken, throwing in an impersonation of the feathered fowl for good measure. 

Fury Sr’s response came in the form of a video of his own in which with volcanic anger he tells Mr Theo to forget fighting him in the ring in a few months’ time, and instead to fight him now in the field behind his house or at Billy Joe Saunders’ yard in London, shaking his fist at the camera and assuring his challenger that he’s going to “shatter” his “fucking jaw with it.” In the same video, Fury also challenges Mike Tyson, the fighter he named his son after, assuring everyone that he will “die in a fight.”

If by now your head’s spinning, you’re forgiven.

Obviously, then, we are talking here of a trend underway, one which depending on your stance will allow a new generation of fans to watch some bonafide legends of the sport in action in the here and now, while allowing those who were fans back in the day the opportunity to luxuriate in a warm bath of nostalgia.

For most people, however, such a scenario will no doubt and understandably smack of insanity. The prospect of middle-aged men, even former world champions, returning to the ring to trade blows is on one level about as reckless and unedifying as it gets, with the risks outweighing by some considerable margin any potential rewards.

But then what is life without risk? For a thinker such as Nietzsche it is reduced to bland existence, while risk and danger are the very lifeblood of a life lived to its fullest: “One should not dodge one’s tests,” he exhorts, “though they may be the most dangerous game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but ourselves.”

Yes, but when does the need to test ourselves end? Or is it the case that testing oneself is a lifelong enterprise? What is it that burns within men — fighting men — that disallows them the inner peace of retirement and a tranquil existence? Is it a need for meaning, glory, fame, money that motivates men such as these to once again risk permanent injury or worse? 

Perhaps it’s a question of identity. For boxers and fighting men, whose identities have been forged through fighting, the hardest fight they face comes with the struggle to lose one identity and forge another. Those who succeed in this endeavour retire happily and go on to find meaning and contentment in other things. Those who fail are condemned to inner torment and restlessness, unable to evolve and move on and thereby prone to contemplating just one more dance.

But this ain’t dancing, it’s boxing. And I don’t care who it is, whether Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield, at a certain age human reflexes diminish never to return. And you can’t train for reflexes either — leastways not to any great extent. They are innate and for a boxer the non-negotiable element in determining those who escape permanent damage in the ring and those who don’t.

Watching the Haye-Bellew rematch the other evening, it struck me how ponderous David Haye had been, as if fighting with his feet in mud. Just as when in his prime he fought Tony Bellew with his left hand held low and his head static and open, inviting Bellew’s shots with the clear intention, as in days of yore, of pulling his head back to avoid them before shooting the counter. 

It didn’t work. Bellew, the younger man and much fresher and more explosive of the two, found success again and again until closing the show in the fifth.

Haye’s mistake was in thinking he could fight the same way towards the end of his career as he did at the beginning and in the middle. His failure to adjust his style to compensate for the diminution of his reflexes, hand and foot speed, was his undoing. 

Fighters who fight on past their primes must adjust their style. Muhammad Ali and Bernard Hopkins spring to mind as fighters who did and who succeeded — though in Ali’s case his transformation from the fleet-footed elusive master boxer he was into the monument to adamantine determination, courage and attritional endurance he became was at terrible cost to his health.

“The noble human being honours himself as one who is powerful,” Nietzsche asserts, “who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness.”

Clearly, the German philosopher never took a punch from Mike Tyson.

John’s book — This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality — is available from all major booksellers.