MT: No. A lot of stuff happened out of this tattoo, a lot of good stuff. Other young athletes come to me and said, It’s because of you they call it the Mike Tyson. People have to register their tattoos. You have to have the likeness of your tattoo.
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The American former boxer Mike Tyson has four tattoos of note. Three—at least two of them prison tattoos —are portraits of men he respects: tennis player Arthur Ashe, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The fourth, a face tattoo influenced by the Māori style tā moko, was designed and inked by S. Victor Whitmill in 2003. Tyson associates it with the Māori being warriors and has called it his “warrior tattoo”, a name that has also been used in the news media.
Suddenly the sideshow was a star. Only in Zhang’s camp, it wasn’t sudden. “Nobody wanted to trust the process,” says George. “Everybody thinks he just figured out how to fight. That’s not the case. Zhilei knew how to fight a long time ago. He’s like a giant that just needed to be provoked.”
Zhang closed as the -150 favorite against Wilder, according to ESPN BET. He is ESPN’s No. 6 heavyweight, and Wilder entered the ring at No. 7. Zhang won a silver medal as a super heavyweight at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing while Wilder claimed bronze in the heavyweight division.
Zhang (27-2-1, 22 KOs) blasted home a heavy right-hand shot to the jaw of Wilder in the fifth that forced him to spin 180 degrees into a corner. Quick as a flash, another right landed flush and the American just melted to the canvas and lay flat on his back. Always brave, “The Bronze Bomber” found his feet, but the referee had no choice but to wave the fight off.
But can skin really count as a “tangible medium?” Yes, according to James Silverberg, director of litigation for the Intellectual Property Group, PLLC, which represents professionals in the art, design, entertainment and media fields. “Since 1976, under Title 17 of the United States Code, which outlines U.S. copyright laws, any artwork that is put down on paper or some other canvas automatically has a copyright,” he said.
Tyson trained heavily for a rematch with Holyfield, and on June 28, 1997, the two boxers faced off again. The fight was televised on pay-per-view and entered nearly 2 million households, setting a record at the time for the highest number of paid television viewers. Both boxers also received record purses for the match, making them the highest-paid professional boxers in history until 2007.
“When was in the room with Mike, her eyes just lit up. … She just has this look on her face like, ‘Wow,’” Boatwright said. “We were all young. We were silly girls and most of us never had an opportunity to be that close to a celebrity.”
On July 9, 1997, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revoked Tyson’s boxing license in a unanimous vote and fined the boxer $3 million for biting Holyfield. Several months later, Tyson was dealt another blow when he was ordered to pay boxer Mitch Green $45,000 for a 1988 street-fighting incident.
Rachael A. Carmen et al. in the Review of General Psychology posit that Tyson’s face tattoo may be an example of “body ornamentation as a form of intimidation”. Charlie Connell and Edmund Sullivan in Inked describe it as having become “instantly iconic”, while Vice’s Mitchell Sunderland ranks it as one of the two things Tyson is best known for, alongside biting off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Marie Hadley, in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, writes that the tattoo “has been described as one of the most distinctive tattoos box in yahoo.com North America”. Its stature has increased over time, aided by Tyson and the 2009 comedy The Hangover, in which it is prominent on Tyson, who appears as a fictionalized version of himself. The tattoo has become strongly associated with Tyson and has made his persona more distinctive.
Tyson has also said that the tattoo was meant to honor the Maori of New Zealand, although Maori representatives have not responded kindly to such use of an ancestral moko, especially since it was used in The Hangover, and doubly so because Perez says that it’s his original design. “The tattooist has an incredible arrogance to assume he has the intellectual right to claim the design form of an indigenous culture that is not his,” Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku said in the New Zealand Herald.
The more George watched, the more he liked. Zhang had size, sure. But he also had speed. Athleticism. Slashing power. After the meet, the Chinese coaches invited George to a camp in the Poconos. “They liked my philosophies,” says George. With the 2010 Asian Games around the corner, the coaches asked George to come to Beijing to work with their top prospects.
