I hope we get Mike Tyson. Oops, let me rephrase. (You can’t be too careful with words around Iron Mike and his entourage.) I hope an intrepid local promoter succeeds in his bid to bring a title fight between Tyson and Lennox Lewis to Music City.

Right now, of course, the bout is nothing more than a buzz. It was supposed to happen in Las Vegas, but you’ll recall that Mike unfortunately chomped at the bit, so to speak.

At the weigh-in, he went a wee, widdle bit nuts. He flailed at Lewis and his bodyguards. Remaining true to his recent fighting style, he allegedly bit Lewis on the leg. (Lewis’ guys say the champ was treated for the wound; there was no word on rabies shots.) Somewhere in the melee, the boxing federation president got knocked out cold.

In a strange and sudden concern over integrity, Nevada’s Boxing Commission refused to grant Tyson a license to fight in the Casino State, opening the door for Nashville and a handful of other contending cities. Mind you, there’s no guarantee there will even be a fight now—though with some real serious whipout at stake, you don’t want to bet against it. And, in any event, Nashville is only a long shot as the host city. Tyson is more likely to wind up in Texas, which has a tradition going back well before statehood of providing havens for outlaws. Still, a lot of folks here are keeping their fingers crossed.

For selfish reasons, of course, it would be great fun to see the Mauler with the Molars come to Adelphia or the Gaylord. Who wouldn’t savor the prospect of being at the press conference, and throwing out a question (preferably, from the back of the room) about whether the promoters had taken the precaution of bringing any straitjackets, just to see if Tyson would launch into another tirade loaded with racial slurs, as he did last month. It’s the kind of living-dangerously thrill you’d get from throwing rocks at Boo Radley’s house, or banging on the glass of the lion’s cage at the zoo.

I know some of you deacons out there are concerned about Nashville’s image. It pains you to allow into our fair city an institution that’s populated with unsavory characters and so riddled with corruption that, some say, all the important outcomes have been pre-ordained by fixers. I sympathize with you. I, too, hate having the General Assembly in town. Hosting a Tyson title fight would provide a welcome distraction for all of us from the doings of our state government, and would probably be more wholesome.

On this level, at least, granting a Tennessee boxing license for Tyson should be a no-brainer. (Sorry again, Mike. Bad word choice.)

Still, I’m kind of ho-hum about the bout. Having a heavyweight title fight, especially one featuring the two biggest names currently active in the sport, would be unprecedented for NashVegas. But, really, those same factors that make boxing a brilliant fit for our city also mean that we’ve seen this all before. Just about everywhere you look, there are parallels between boxing and Nashville. To wit:

Boxing is a sport where aspiring contenders are savagely exploited, sometimes even maimed for life. Nashville, for its part, has Music Row.

Boxing has Don King. We have Trinity Broadcasting, where the gravity-defying hairdos furnish proof that the Age of Miracles is not yet ended.

Most of all, Nashville has a long history with professional wrestling. We don’t need Mike Tyson to see insane, vamping villains.

OK, maybe that’s an unfair comparison on a couple of counts. Most of the bad guys in wrestling only pretend to be psychos. And professional wrestling, unlike big-time boxing, is honest entertainment.

That’s boxing’s biggest problem—and the reason why the desperate sport desperately needs Tyson, with or without teeth.

The Ringside Analyst Geniuses, all decked out in their spiffy tuxedos, fret about restoring the “dignity” of boxing. (That they can say this without betraying even the hint of an ironic smile should tell you never to play poker for money with these fellows.)

Wrestling never had any dignity to restore, which is one of its cardinal charms. It doesn’t really expect you to take it seriously. I’ll take the WWF over the WBF for the same reason I’ll take Terry Bradshaw screeching with Paul McCartney over the usual Super Bowl halftime extravaganza. I prefer genuine schlock over faux grandeur every time.

These days, big-time boxing is heading the way of Big Tobacco. There are still plenty of addicts who’ll pay hundreds of dollars to see the title-holder knock out some palooka in the first round. But the sport, like smoking, has lost much of its allure.

There are no more Alis, no more Fraziers and Foremans, nor even any Sugar Ray Leonards or Hit Man Hearnses. All we’ve got these days is a Briton and a sociopath, which is kind of like having only a hacking cough and dessicated skin to show for years of sucking on Marlboros. Without any of the old luminaries to divert our attention, suddenly the brutality and corruption within the sport occupy the center of the ring and refuse to go to their corners.

Pro wrestling, by contrast, has become our sporting equivalent of Nicoderm or the patch. It can satisfy our cravings for physical confrontation and smackdown without anyone getting seriously hurt (if you don’t count the steroids) and without expecting any full-witted person to take it seriously.

Given such circumstances, Tyson represents the Great Bite Hope for boxing. He can posture like the Undertaker, only he could really kill someone. He can talk trash like Steve Austin, but he’ll really knock you stone cold. Until another Ali or Sugar Ray comes along to give people someone to root for, and until Don King goes away, boxing’s only real strategy is to keep Iron Mike in the ring and out of prison—and hope that fans will stay tuned long enough to see what havoc he wreaks next.

Personally, I’ll take Monday Nite Nitro. But if the square-ring circus does come to town, my dream would be to pony up the Benjamins for a front-row seat. In this fantasy, I’d get the ex-champ’s attention, hold up a sign that reads “Bite me, Mike,” and then run like hell.

It’s not easy to root for the über-anal Germans in the Olympics, or the French in anything, but NBC’s coverage of the Winter Games almost gets you there. Not even Fox News could have shoved such homer-y swill down our throats.

In providing what it thinks the viewing public wants, the network (as it has in covering other Games) seems to acknowledge only grudgingly that the rest of the world exists. Outstanding European Olympians were shown largely to create a sense of drama as young Americans competed against them.

In many events, viewers got false perspectives, teased by the Peacock People into thinking that American athletes who ultimately didn’t even finish among the top 10 might be headed for medals. So flag-draped was the show over the weekend that NBC almost managed to suck the excitement out of the genuinely rousing gold-medal performance by U.S. snowboarder Kelly Clark.

The Olympic ideal has always been to salute the world’s best, strongest and fastest—and to forget, even if only for a couple of weeks, about the boundaries between nations. From what you could glean when the commentators weren’t blathering, the heavily American crowds observed that ideal, cheering loudly for their own but also warmly applauding for the victorious German speed-skaters and Austrian skiers.

But that’s not the picture you’d get from NBC. If you were a foreigner whose impression of America was shaped by the network’s Olympic coverage, you might conclude that we’re all self-centered, arrogant and oblivious to everyone else. Especially after September 11, you’d think that nominally flag-waving NBC would be patriotic enough to be more conscious of our national image.

How It Looks From The La-Z-Boy

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