
As a boxer ages his sparring partners get younger, the game itself gets more desperate.’ So wrote Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing, her classic meditation on prize fighting. This little book came out in 1987. The following year, Oates published one of the greatest ever profiles of a fighter.
Her subject was Mike Tyson: the ‘psychic outlaw’ whom she shadowed as he prepared to fight Trevor Berbick (a contest that made 20-year old Tyson the youngest ever heavyweight champion of the world) and continued to watch as he blasted through James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith and Tyrell Biggs.