BIG IDEAS

By now a little bit of everybody has a Mike Tyson in person story. My sister-in-law has one where he grabbed her butt, but I wasn’t an eyewitness. Here’s mine for whatever it’s worth.

So back in my Jesse Jackson press aide days, the boss gets a call from the show “A Different World” to do a guest appearance as a lecturer at the fictional Hillman College. We go to the set early so I can drill the Rev. on his lines, and who’s there hanging around the dressing rooms but the then recent champion, Mike Tyson.

I strike up a conversation with Kadeem Hardison and find out that Mike is a constant presence on the set, driving up in his Ferrari, asking everybody if they want a ride and letting people drive. Basically being not a complete pest, but an interesting and quizzical distraction, something I imagine happens in Hollywood a lot.

So inevitably Mike comes up to Jackson’s dressing room to talk to us and the guy is (drumroll) - brilliant. He starts talking about the boxing films he watches and is analyzing not just the fight skills but the mental acuity of every fighter he mentions - Patterson, Louis, Schmelling. It’s amazing, My jaw was open the whole time. He seemed like just the big overgrown kid in a first grade classroom who just needed a friend.

Then Jesse hit him up for money, and I tuned out after that…  So much for my story.

One of the toughest adjustments being a Dad of young kids is that I don’t get to the movies much anymore - unless they have talking animals in them. So it was until recently that I caught the movie, TYSON, on pay-per-view. I watched it with two women who I expected to ask me to shut it off after a few minutes. But we were all riveted. It was, in a word, fascinating. Morality play, character study, portrait of a beast, a public cry for help - it was all those things at once. By the end you have to at least feel for the guy.

I guess Oprah saw it too. What else would lead her, at this moment, to have Tyson on? Now she’s having Tyson and Holyfield on together, something I was hoping never to see. I saw that fight and I think Holyfield was completely in the wrong. If you’ve ever been head-butted, you have to think that an ear bite for a head butt is a pretty fair trade if you’re going to fight dirty. A bitten ear might hurt but head to head trauma can blind you, render you incapacitated or, indeed, kill you.

I’m just hoping that if this is a bartered apology, that the apology is mutual.

After more than 14 hours of discussion, the heirs of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. reached a settlement late Monday that will keep the family from a public jury trial.

Martin Luther King III, Bernice King and Dexter King had aired their grievances in open court for more than a year. The siblings began negotiations Monday morning as the threat loomed of a civil trial that was expected to reveal personal and financial details about King Inc.

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While the argument over Chicago’s loss has ratcheted up, you have to think that anyone with a real sense of the world thought Rio had it in the bag from Day One. The IOC is made up of men, for goodness sakes. If you were on the IOC, where would you want to be for two straight weeks?

Oddly enough, given Chicago’s fairly enclosed business environment, chances are that U.S. businesses who aren’t “connected” but wanted in on the economic action might get a better shot at getting involved in Brazil than they would have in Chicago.

You know, I have to say I’m not particularly bothered - or surprised - by the revelations of David Letterman’s dalliances with staffers. He had a fairly open relationship with one of his writers, Merrill Markoe, years ago, so it should have been expected.

What I am surprised by, as I tend to be with all these guys who get caught in sex scandals, is what poor taste these famous guys have in women. None of these guys seem to have affairs with smart , powerful, astounding beautiful women. It’s always subordinates or sycophants. To me, that shows a fundamental need to be admired and adored, and it’s not about sex at all. One again it goes to my point about famous people. The need for fame is connected with low self-esteem, not the confidence that we assume.

I’m just sayin’.

Photo by Sam Devonish

With only a couple of days notice, at least 100 of Washington DC’s Black political and social elite ponied up $250 to get out of work on a Friday afternoon, tilt back a few drink, eat sushi and wait patiently for the appearance of Jeffrey Wright and the main draw, Maxwell, who was playing at DC’s Verizon Center hours later.

The occasion was a quickie fundraiser for Wright’s Taia Foundation, which funds infrastructure development in Western Africa - specifically and 18 mile stretch of road that will facilitate the transport of good and services and spur economic development.

Not that anyone knew that before they gave the money. But it was Friday, it was in the middle of the day and it was Maxwell. And in DC, that’s reason enough. In that city, if you want to stay on “the list”, sometimes you just write the check.

…She goes and takes all that credit back. That there is a contingent in Hollywood defending Roman Polanski for his admitted statutory rape simply because he made some good movies is, frankly, just ridiculous. You’d expect it from the morally bereft, like Woody Allen (laughable) and Salman Rushdie. But now, Whoopi?

Follow this link to JEZEBEL for the clip from the view. Says Whoopi “it wasn’t rape-rape..”

Say What?

Not apparently from post-racial America’s Fashion Week, but from pre-racial Spain’s Fashion Week going on this week. Something in the meaning of this outfit I imagine suggests something very deep and poignant about the state of race. But that is obviously also in Spanish. For now, without any translation, it’s just Blackface.