By now, most of you have heard or know of the child eating/rampaging/soul crushing Tyson. but what about his more gentle side? I present to you the follow quote:
"Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It's like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can't control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn."
Let's break it down. It starts off with an FDR-esque statement: "Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy." So far, pretty good from MT. There's no references to ingesting anyone's offspring, fornicating, or stomping children's testicles.
Next, we get to the heart of the metaphor: "It's (fear) like fire." Excellent, if a little cliched. Iron Mike now begins to wax like a Native American mystic. Fire when controlled is beneficial; uncontrolled it's devastating. A+ for Mr. Tyson in this creative writing class...but wait, the quote goes on?
"If you can control your fear it makes you more alert..." Very true. You become more focused, intense, in control. Now what would be a good image to convey the ultimate alert being?
"Like a deer coming across the lawn." !!! What? Mike? What happened? I envision a scene of peace, calm, and non-alertness; I see a family of deer grazing across a dewy lawn in the early morning. Sure, deer are edgy critters but this is one of the few instances where they are generally safe from predators. I knew what he was trying to convey--the ever-aware stance of any prey animal is a decent simile. So why use gentle Bambi as your example?
Implied here, to this writer, is that Tyson would regularly stalk and attack deer on his own lawn, sort of like Rocky except the slab of meat he's aiming to punch is still technically alive. Woe be to the poor animal hoping to graze on this bad mutha's lawn! Again, even when he almost makes a morsel of sense, we get a glimpse of something just under the surface: Mike Tyson outletting his rage on harmless ungulates.
But what do I know? In the words of MT: Most writers, in my opinion, are dysfunctioned derelicts. Perhaps true!
