Mailer made boxing a literary event

Published Jun. 18, 2009 9:03 p.m. ET

foxsports

Don King greeted us with the voice of an arch villain. "Heh, heh, heh," he said. "Here they come: the boss scribes."

He was mocking us, of course. We were nothing but newspaper writers with East Coast deadlines. A weary crew, metabolically conditioned to rise with caffeine and fade with alcohol, we had arrived for an audience with a profoundly confused, if preposterously profitable bully named Mike Tyson. I don't remember a word Tyson said that day in Vegas. But we all got a kick out of the boss scribe bit, repeating the line all day and into the night. What a voice is King's: the Penguin meets the Joker in a blaxploitation flick. Heh, heh, heh.

King was a hustler and a killer, qualities Tyson greatly admired. But his real genius lay in his capacity for comedy. After all, that's why we were there. At least I was. The days leading up to a big fight were a mating ritual for comedy and tragedy, a festival for reporters like me to mine high drama from low life. Boxing may be the worst of sports, but it's the best to write. That much I learned from the bossest scribe of all, Norman Mailer, who was for a time in the realm of letters what Tyson was supposed to be in the ring: Baddest Man on the Planet.