COLUMN: Joe Hawk

     I don't profess to be a shrink, although I vaguely remember opening a psychology textbook once or twice during my junior year of college. Still, I don't think I -- or you for that matter -- would`ve needed to ace Psych 101 to realize former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson is one troubled man.
      If you didn't believe it before Saturday night, most certainly you do now. Only an angry, confused, desperate man would go so far as to place a Big Mac-sized chomp -- not once, but twice -- on the ear of an opponent, as Tyson did to World Boxing Association champ Evander Holyfield in the third round of their much-anticipated rematch at the MGM Grand Garden.
      While I can understand Tyson's confusion that he again was being outmuscled by the more aggressive Holyfield, and while I can even understand the desperation of a man who suddenly realizes that -- sorry, I can't resist -- he may have bitten off more than he could chew by stepping back into the ring with Holyfield, what I can't begin to fathom is his anger manifesting itself in such a crude, animalistic manner.
      Then again, maybe if I had paid a little bit better attention in psych class ...
      "I think it could be a combination of things: Mike already has been diagnosed with manic depression illness, but he also may be suffering from an impulse disorder, post-traumatic syndrome and/or a success neurosis," explains Dr. David W. Krueger, a national sports psychiatrist based in Houston.
      "Without talking with him directly, it would be impossible to know for sure. But he exhibits many of the signs that typify those disorders. ... Most certainly, he needs to get into a therapeutic setting where he can get out of the old story he's in and begin to create a new story for himself."
      A troubled, parentless childhood and his recent incarceration for a rape he argues he did not commit may have created a post-traumatic syndrome, Krueger says. Also, the celebrity status Tyson attained over the years only now may be proving to be more than he can handle -- thus, the success neurosis.
      But it is Tyson's apparent difficulty in dealing with emotional impulses that troubles Krueger the most.
      "Whereas in most people there is the ability to pause on impulse and consider the consequences of one`s actions, I don't see that with him," says Krueger, a noted author and former consultant to the International Women's Tennis Association.
      "With him, I don't see any delay."
      Dr. Carole Lieberman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and psychiatrist to numerous sports and entertainment celebrities, concurs.
      "I think he acts on his impulses in much the way a 6-year-old would. In this case, he wasn't getting his way" -- not succeeding in the ring, that is -- "so he had a temper tantrum and acted upon his basest instincts," Lieberman says.
      Lieberman adds that Tyson is briefly mentioned in her new book, "Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live With Them, and When to Leave Them," and he definitively falls into one of 12 classifications of "bad boys."
      "He's the same type as O.J. (Simpson): `the prince of darkness, the voracious vampire ... emotionally volatile with a hair-trigger temper.' ... He has all the telltale signs. I think we saw them in his relationship with (ex-wife) Robin Givens and in the rape case, that when he couldn't get what he wanted any other way he simply took it."
      Like Krueger and Lieberman, William Gayton, Ph.D., of the University of Southern Maine in Portland, has never met Tyson, but as a sports psychologist he has followed the fighter's rocky life through the media. He advises not to jump too quickly to any conclusions about Tyson, for there may be "some new things in his life that we're not aware of."
      Weight also must be given, he says, to Tyson's contention that he didn't bite Holyfield until he felt no calls were going to be made by referee Mills Lane on Holyfield's head-butting. Lane said after the fight the head-butting, which opened a cut above Tyson's right eye in the second round, was unintentional.
      "It became for him an accelerated aggression," Gayton says of Tyson. "The scenario is similar to that in hockey: When a player feels he's been checked too hard or is being mistreated he'll lose control and, on occasion, bring his stick over his head.
      "It's not acceptable, of course, but it's understood to be part of the accelerated aggression of the game."
      While I can see Gayton's point, as well as those of several people close to boxing who called Sunday to say that biting is and always has been part of the sport, I simply can't condone it.
      And I didn't need Psych 101 to teach me that. My mother taught me when I was 6 that biting just wasn't nice.
     
      Joe Hawk can be reached by phone at 383-0353 or by e-mail at Joe_Hawk@lvrj.com.