Tyson lost in paradise

Tyson's love of birds goes back to his childhood in the New York ghetto district of Brownsville, where he would sometimes sleep with his pigeons in a make-shift coup.

Tyson also professes a love of women, yet a conviction for rape, a history of promiscuity and his predilection for the company of strippers and lap-dancers suggests it is a shallow kind of love.

That suggestion, he insisted, has been perpetrated by the media circus that has followed his career from the moment, aged 20, he became the youngest man to hold a world heavyweight championship.

Tyson, now two months short of his 36th birthday and looking remarkably trim considering he was a career-heavy 17st 1lb for his last fight against Brian Nielsen in Copenhagen seven months ago, complained: "I'm tired of coming across as crude and crass."

Then, looking despairingly at his audience, he went on: "You guys have written so much damn shit about me I don't know when I last f***** a decent woman. You know what I mean?

"You guys chastise me and say I'm just a f*****-up nigger. I don't know no one but strippers and bitches because you guys put that image on me."

So will the real Mike Tyson stand up? He does just that to pick up some books lying on a window shelf. The biter of boxer's ears who also used his mouth to tell the world he wanted to rip out Lewis's heart and eat his children claims he is spending his spare time away from the gym here reading Machiavelli in Hell by Sebastian de Grazia - "the most sophisticated writer probably since Shakespeare" - and The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Mythology.

Indeed, he proceeded to talk with passion about writers that have inspired him, particularly Fitzgerald and Hemingway. "They were hip, they were cool," he said.

This is all a far cry from the popular image of the instigator of recent outrages, such as trying to break Frans Botha's arm, punching Orlin Norris after the bell, and hitting referee-John Coyle during his savage defeat of Lou Savarese in Scotland.

But, again, it is the media's fault for promoting that image. "You are going to tell I'm garbage or a piece of s***," said Tyson. "I'm so much more. I am a father, I was a husband, I'm somebody's brother, I'm many things. I'm a convicted criminal, I'm a felon, I was heavyweight champion.

"There are many things that I am, but people choose the worst that I am, and that is what you have made me out to be."

It was just as well that the fighter who hyped himself as "The Baddest Man on the Planet" was on good form.

"Anybody who is truly willing to be my friend will find I'm a good friend," he said. "But I'm a hell of an enemy. As your enemy I want your demise. I don't want you to exist no more. I am not in the mood where I am upset right now. But if you came and said something disrespectful about my children or my momma I might kill you."

That, alas, is what he intends to do to Lewis when the two men engage in the most lucrative fight in boxing history, one that could earn each boxer over £20 million.

"Lewis has got a fight on his hands," said Tyson. "Winning the world championship again will mean a great deal to me. But it will mean a lot to people who are in prison, who really don't believe in the system. I don't care if you are black, white, the Klan, Arian, a gang member, it will show that you can succeed, that you are not garbage.

"If I can overcome, if I can accomplish and I am just scum, then they can do.

"My main objective in the fight is to be professional but to kill him.

"But still I love him." Can such a man contain so many contradictions? It is doubtful. Tyson recently told Playboy magazine: "I know I'm going to blow one day. There's not much more of this s*** I can take."

Will the eruption occur before the fight, during it, or after it? The answer is unknown.

The only certainty is that it will occur, and when it happens the boxing world had better take cover.