Down but not out in Paris, Iron Mike is wiser and a little less wild

MIKE Tyson has had to cancel his trip to London because of his 1992 rape conviction, and is at the French capital's Raffles hotel.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson appears on French TV channel Canal Plus on the show Le Grand Journal.

MIKE Tyson is the baddest man in Paris. The planet is a thing of the past now that Britain has barred the former heavyweight boxing champion. It is another slight to add to the well of self-loathing that is evident from just looking at his defaced visage. Five billion people and he says he could beat them all in a fight. All except one.

"Whenever someone comes up and says, 'You're the greatest,' and I start to think, 'Yeah, I'm a hell of a motherf . . ker,' the very next thought is about my flaws and then I start to despise the person for saying that," he says. It is the same with the ultimate champion. "Whenever I get confident, God says, 'Who the f . . k do you think you are?' He knows I can't handle this shit, which is why he throws it at me. It's a challenge."

Tyson has had to cancel his trip to London because of his 1992 rape conviction and so he is at the Raffles hotel in the French capital, a reminder of the glory days, before he blew $US300 million and when he still had 2.1m-high statues of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan in his Las Vegas backyard, marshalled by his white tiger Kenya. He says he felt like Tony Montana in Scarface, but was never happy. Later he scarred his face with a tattoo. "I wanted to deface myself," he says.

The easy story is that the American, now 47, has fought his way back and is a new man. That is the billing for his stage show, Undisputed Truth, and his book of the same name. When it emerged that Tyson could not come to Britain, Piers Morgan took to Twitter.

"He is a reformed man with a powerful message," the broadcaster thumbed. Tyson's four million followers lapped it up.

That message? "You can go through anything in life and you don't have to kill yourself," he says. "I'm very responsible now. I'm not going to go over there (Britain) to start harassing women or start fights, but I know people would only be happy if I was in a wheelchair or prison."

Or do they merely want to keep a convicted rapist out? "Look, I got in trouble with that stuff in 91," Tyson, who has always denied the offence, says. "The last five years I have been living my life sober. You have to go back 22 years. It's not about redemption; it's about observing how people are living their life now."

Some have asked why we should care what he thinks, given that he has been a sex offender, an alcoholic and a drug user. Yet he was also the youngest heavyweight champion in history. He wanted to kill people in the ring, because he "had to think that way to win", and so is perhaps the most powerful tool for the anti-boxing lobby, a man who could not divorce villainous violence from civilian life. He was an icon long before he was an iconoclast.

The sexual outlook appals. "Either I'm a henpecked bitch nigga or I'm going to start brutalising the woman," he says in his book. He elaborates as Laura, the PR manager, brings in some croissants. "My relationship with women has been 50-50; they kicked my ass and I kicked theirs. I didn't end up victorious, but nobody wants to hear that. You know, women kill people too. Women ain't better than men. We're supposed to be on equal terms. Ain't that what they want?"

Sex and drugs and rigmarole about a fake penis to dodge dope tests have all been in the papers, but Tyson is also about sport and is at his most sentimental when talking about old boxers. At one point, he commissioned a $US100,000 mural. It included Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano and Jimmy Wilde, the Welsh wisp.

"Ah, Jimmy Wilde," he says. "You know he was so small he had to spar with his wife; 96 pounds (43.5kg)." Another on the mural was Joey Maxim. At the height of Tyson's fame, he noticed Maxim working as a greeter at a Vegas casino and regularly visited him to talk about his career.

Ask about the dreadful day Ali lost to Larry Holmes and he says quickly: "October 2nd, 1980. I never looked at those guys as old; I just looked at them at their most exalted. I still like boxers; I just didn't like boxing."

He is rejoining that world as a promoter. He says he will look out for boxers in a way others did not. Don King, the most infamous, is damned as "a slimy, reptilian motherf . . ker", while Frank Warren has threatened to sue over the suggestion Tyson was on drugs when he fought Lou Savarese in 2000. "I was doing some blow before the fight and smoked some pot," Tyson wrote. Now he and Larry Sloman, the co-writer, say he only smoked "a joint" before a different bout. "There's been a misconception," Sloman says. "He never said he fought high."

Tyson says he has "nothing bad to say about Mr Warren" and that he did not take cocaine before the Savarese bout. "I'd smoked a joint and it stays in the system for 45 days, so you can be clean and it comes out dirty." It sounded like back-pedalling.

Hearing Tyson revert to his background is shocking, a pimp for an absentee father and an alcoholic mother who slept with men for money and beat him so hard that the corners of a room bring back bad memories. Would it have been different had Cus D'Amato, his trainer, not died the year before Tyson became world champion in 1986? "Yes," Tyson says, "We'd have given the money away to the Salvation Army instead. Money meant nothing to him. Modern boxing is all about money."

He is more enigmatic than some would have him, gentle talk of family seguing into self-hate that came from "being a peacock, arrogant, humiliating people". Yet when reminded some regard him as an animal, he grins: "That's what I wanted. That's orgasmic to me."

With such sad goals, can he see a happy ending? "I hope so," he whispers. "I have a lot riding on it." Yet he talks of days when he feels like blowing someone's head off. What does he do to stop himself? "I don't know, but I just haven't done it yet."

He states he was born in hell and is going back there, albeit he is first going back to the US and, he hopes, Britain in the spring for his stage shows. "Listen, this thing is so hideous. If Nelson Mandela hadn't died he would not have been able to go there too." There follows an aside about TV pictures of war on the day of Mandela's memorial service. "What did Machiavelli say - 'man's a sorry lot' when it comes to love."

Down but not out, in Paris but not London, he is at least seeing some things clearly now. "It's four months on the 14th," he says of his sobriety. "I'm not saying I won't ever drink again because I'd be the lyingest son of bitch on the planet. As soon as I get the urge I will and, boom, boom boom. I can't win. It's the only time I can't win."