The End of Boxing - Mike Tyson

When Mike Tyson failed to resume his seat in a Las Vegas committee room on Tuesday night to hear the members of the Nevada State Athletic Commission announce their decision to deny him a licence to fight Lennox Lewis, it was as though the sport of boxing itself had left the building. For Tyson, the uncontrollable recidivist, the thug and rapist, represented the last figure in the fight game with any sort of a hold on the public imagination.

Whatever the two protagonists may be saying, the commissioners' refusal seems likely to have put paid to the plan to stage a $100m fight between the present and former undisputed heavyweight champions of the world. In so doing, it may have dealt a vital blow to the sport itself. For who, quite honestly, wants to watch anything else?

Besides being potentially the richest fight in history, this was a contest which supporters of the two men believed would define both careers for posterity. But coming at a time when attitudes to boxing have been affected by a widespread understanding of the medical implications of repeated punches to the head, combined with a recognition of the sleazy forces at work inside the promotion of the sport, it may also preface the end of a general interest in prizefighting, at least on the scale to which the top boxers and their connections became accustomed throughout the last century.

Lennox Lewis, the reigning champion, is a nice guy and an upstanding fighter. He has negotiated the dilemma of owing allegiance to three countries and their cultures - Jamaica, his parents' homeland; Britain, where he was born; and Canada, where he grew up - with no little dignity. He is not the most eloquent of men, or the most spontaneous in his actions, yet he has been a decent champion, who reacted to his unexpected dethronement last year by flattening the usurper at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately - and this is something to do with his natural circumspection, which can affect his ability to put up an exciting fight as well as an effective one - his deeds rarely stir the blood.

So if Tyson needed Lewis to set the seal on his umpteenth climb back to the summit of the sport, Lewis needed Tyson far more. When he was accounting for a procession of undistinguished and practically unknown challengers such as François Botha and Michael Grant, who really cared? And who will put themselves out to see him fight Wladimir Klitschko or John Ruiz? Virtually alone in the field, Iron Mike's presence in the ring was a guarantee of significant mayhem. When he emerged from the opposite corner, something definitive was bound to occur - even if it was only the sort of outrageous conduct that set new standards of disreputability in a sport notionally bound by the rules established by the eighth Marquess of Queensberry in 1865.

Tyson, who held the undisputed championship from 1987 to 1990, was a box-office magnet from the day he first stepped into a ring. And when he lost his title, he became even more of a draw. For the last dozen years, since the night he unexpectedly crumpled under a blow from the unfancied James "Buster" Douglas in a Tokyo arena, his comebacks have provided professional boxing with its principal - some would say its only - narrative tension.

Until the moment he fell to Douglas, the general belief in Tyson's pre-eminence had provided boxing with a reason to insist on its own continuing legitimacy. He had won the world title at the age of 20, the youngest heavyweight champion ever. And as long as the title was in the hands of such a gifted and dominant fighter, one whose prowess rivalled that of any of history's legendary figures, from Jack Johnson through Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano to Muhammad Ali, how could it be claimed that the sport was without value?

Once he lost his titles, the questions surrounding his future quickly overpowered all other issues. Would he ever regain his early form? Would he regain it again after emerging from jail? Would he regain enough of it to allow him to get his titles back, first from Evander Holyfield and then from Lewis? And should any of this be allowed?

In professional boxing, nothing is impermissible or impossible - as Lewis found when he won the titles offered by the three most significant licensing authorities on a single night by beating Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas, and then discovered one of the belts had been taken away on a spurious technicality even before the wraps had been cut from his fists. Tyson's renaissance was studded with setbacks and outbreaks of random violence, but nothing was allowed to stand in its way - until he met the five Nevada commissioners, who finally decided that they had heard one empty promise too many and cried enough.

Now, surely, Tyson is finished as anything but a circus sideshow, and with him go the tarnished glamour and the sense of danger that traditionally drew an audience to the sport. His existence gave us echoes of Jack Johnson, who lived a sporting life before the first world war and ensured the inevitability of his own demise by squiring white women and driving cars larger and shinier than his patrons could afford; of the destructive power of Joe Louis; and of the fear engendered by Sonny Liston, "the big black negro in every white man's hallway", in LeRoi Jones's phrase.

As we saw when he directed a stream of obscene invective at a reporter who insulted him at the notorious press conference last week, he lives in what seems like a parallel universe, in which a different set of values and conventions obtain - or so it seems to those of us who did not grow up in a Brooklyn tenement, hammered out of shape by poverty and crime, with trash-talking as a first language. And he may yet share the fate of Louis and Liston, who went to their deaths via a calvary of drugs and humiliation.

When Amy Ayoub, the only woman on the panel, remarked on Tuesday that his career earnings of $200m made her doubt his entitlement to call himself a victim, Tyson responded with the most memorable speech of the hearing. "You don't know me, miss," he told Ayoub. "You don't know nothing about me. You only know what you read. You don't know my horror stories. You don't know if I'm a victim or not." It may even have been true, but it sounded like the last dregs of pathos being squeezed out.

And while Lewis muses on the possibility of suing his erstwhile challenger, and his managers look around for anodyne opponents to provide a last payday or two, Tyson is doing his best to maintain the huckstering tradition. "I think Lennox is a coward," he told reporters in the parking lot outside the commission building, shortly after the thumbs-down had been delivered in his absence. "I'm going to fight him any time I see him in the streets." Pretty soon, even that might no longer draw a crowd.

richard.williams@guardian.co.uk