And in honor of the special day:

Man, that’s timeless.

It’s an exciting time to be a woman… because Mike Tyson would like to smash your face in. On “Mike Tyson’s World Tour,” Mike is entertaining the notion of fighting women. And I think right now is as good a time as any to mention that I think within the next five years, we’ll see Mike Tyson doing porn.

And when I say “see” him doing porn, I don’t just mean that it’s going to happen. I mean you will actually see it, because I’m going to put it on this website via YouTube. I think Mike Porn’s career will start out as a novelty, being marketed like, “See Mike Tyson give out a vicious pounding of another kind,” and it might make some money for a while… but eventually the novelty will wear off, and it will be more like, “Hot Interracial Action, Volume 6: Starring Jack Blackcock, Hank Shadowmeat, and Mike Tyson.”

Anyway… kinda got sidetracked there. Back on the subject of Tyson fighting women…

“She’s such a prominent, dominant woman in the boxing field,” Tyson said.

When asked if he was joking about fighting women, Tyson said, “I’m very serious.”

Russ Young, a promoter for Wolfe, said such a bout will never happen.

“That’s the first we’ve heard of it,” Young said. “No state would sanction that. She would be outweighed by 60 to 70 pounds. Ann would never entertain the idea.”

Eh, that doesn’t really sound like a clear-cut ‘no’ to me. We’ll leave the door open for future discussions.

Let’s take a look at the best and worst case scenarios for Mike Tyson fighting a woman:

Best case: The event is first protested by all sorts of women’s groups, anti-domestic violence groups, groups that are for basic human decency, etc. But the fight goes on, last four rounds, and has no real entertainment value. Mike doesn’t really try, and it’s just a sad little show that can’t help but depress anyone with the misfortune to watch it.

Worst case: Protestors actually get into the ring, bludgeon Mike with signs and rotting fruit, until security drags them out of there, leaving Tyson sitting on the stool in the corner, chewing on his mouthpiece and crying. Fans begin to boo, because Tyson doesn’t want to fight anymore. One guy in the front row keeps screaming, “Fight, you pussy!” at Tyson until he eventually gets up, wipes his tears away, and starts to fight. In 30 seconds, he has broken all of Wolfe’s ribs, knocked her unconscious, and raped her in front of 5,000 people, some of whom are vomiting, some of whom are crying, and some of whom are cheering him on.

So yeah, this seems like a fantastic idea.

The first stop on Mike Tyson’s World Tour is coming on October 20th in Youngstown, Ohio. A four-round sparring session with Tyson’s pal Corey Sanders is available on pay-per-view for $30. If you were going to buy it, don’t… just send Mike a check for $30 instead.

From the “Scene and Heard” part of this article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, via BenMaller.com…

More on Mike Tyson’s bizarre go-go dancing marathon at OPM (Forum Shops at Caesars), that ended at dawn Saturday. Tyson “borrowed” about two dozen bar towels to hand out as souvenirs. He’d towel off the sweat and toss the keepsakes into the crowd of female spectators. After leaving the club, my spies say, Tyson became enraged and threatened to pulverize three guys before security intervened. Then he grabbed a female tourist who was snapping some photos, and the slurring ex-champ invoked his four favorite words, which began with “Show me your ….”

YES. He’s still got it.

That’s my man. Still doing that smooth thing the way only he can. And how lucky are those people that got the bar towels that Mike Tyson used to wipe the sweat on his forehead that accumulated while he was in the midst of a go-go dancing marathon. If you were going to list one of those on EBay, how would you even begin to give the listing a title?

I really want Tyson to fight again … not in the traditional boxing sense, but … I dunno. For example, I’d really like to have seen him beat the hell out of the afore-mentioned three guys. I know he’s done as a traditional boxer, and him getting in the ring again would be a disaster, but why couldn’t Fox, like twice a week, just put Tyson in the ring with some average guy off the street?

There’s gotta be a lonely accountant out there somewhere who would take a savage bare-knuckles beating from Mike Tyson for a couple hundred grand. And it’s not like this is below FOX or something. They show worse things on any random Tuesday night. They should make this happen.

If it were to happen, I’d have to assume that this wouldn’t be on pay-per-view, but on FOX, as a lead-in to Temptation Island or something. Tommy Morrison, who tested positive for HIV 10 years ago, wants to get in the ring against Mike Tyson. And he also says that he’s no longer HIV positive. Thanks to BenMaller.com for the heads-up…

If you’ve heard of Morrison at all, it’s probably because he inexplicably starred in Rocky V, one of the worst movies in the history of cinema. He hasn’t fought in quite some time, and understandably so; no one’s really excited about a guy with the Hiv to be bleeding all over them. But I’m really glad that his time away from boxing has been productive… finding a cure for the HIV virus is no small feat. It’s also great news for those of you who were considering having unprotected sex with Tommy Morrison. Go ahead. Have at it. I dare you.

But yeah, at the age of 37, he wants to resume his boxing career, and he’d like to have a go against Mike Tyson. He says Tyson lives right down the road from him, and they’ve spoken about it. And despite the fact that it would be a fight between a guy who tested positive for HIV and, well, Mike Tyson… I’m sure they’d be able to find someone to sanction and promote it. Even sadder, though, I’m pretty sure I’d want to watch.

At the age of 43 and fresh off of an embarrassing comeback attempt, Evander Holyfield wants to get back in the ring. After his last fight, the state of New York was indefinitely suspended for “poor performance,” which means that the New York boxing officials didn’t feel like he could get in the ring and prevent himself from being beaten into a coma.

But he protested the decision, passed some medical tests, and now, the state of Texas is letting him fight. And I’d love to poke fun, but it’s just too sad. Boxers, moreso than any other athletes, can’t turn the page. They can’t walk away when it’s time. Not speaking of Evander specifically, but when a guy becomes a boxer, it’s usually because he has to; he doesn’t have a lot of other options. And it becomes all they know, all they depend on, and a life that doesn’t involve boxing gets more and more distant. A lot of them seem unable to adjust to the idea of not being a fighter. It even works with actors who play boxers… for example, see Rocky VI.

Maybe this wouldn’t happen if there were some bad-ass heavyweights out there… some big, bruising, bastards who were scaring the hell out of everyone. But no one like that exists… it’s wide open, so Evander thinks he has a chance to become the champion of the world again. And in the unlikely event that he does… I just can’t see myself being that happy for him. I’ll be thinking something like, “Okay, you can quit now, right?”

I just want him to get through this thing without getting killed.

The good news is that Mike Tyson wants to get involved with a boy band. The bad news is that he doesn’t want to beat the piss out of them.

Iron Mike, as noted this morning on BenMaller.com, wants to get involved with a boy band called “Westlife.” He says he wants to cut a song with them. Seriously. He wants to sing with them.

I’ve never heard of these Westlife characters, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that they are an embarrassment, and to call them musicians would be akin to calling Craig Stadler an athlete. It’s not my concern that Mike Tyson is going to be a part of a terrible song… that’s pretty much a certainty. My concern is that there’s just no limit to what Mike Tyson will do for a few bucks, no matter how embarrassing it is, and I just don’t want to see this keep snowballing. Porn just seems inevitable at this point, doesn’t it?

I watched about half of the national championship game. USC started pouring it on, some friends and I did some channel surfing, and on ESPN… there was greatness.

Muhammad Ali vs. Check Wepner in 1975. It was an amazing spectacle. Maybe some of you had seen it before, maybe you know what I’m talking about, but if you aren’t aware of Chuck Wepner… check it out. People talk about toughness among athletes all the time, but if you haven’t seen this Wepner/Ali fight, you haven’t seen tough. Not even close.

Chuck Wepner was about 6′5″, 240… and born to fight. Not box, but fight. To say his hair was thinning would be a bit of an understatement, but what was there was long, brown, sweaty, and flopping all over the head. He had a classic cheesy 70s mustache. His face looked to be made of well-worn pasty white burlap.

Ali was infinitely more skilled, in infinitely better shape, and ten times the boxer Wepner was. But rating them as pure fighters, you’d have to call it close to even.

The fight was classic Ali. He let the bigger guy whale away, blocking and dodging everything, rarely punching, but when he did, he snapped Wepner’s head with precision on nearly every punch. This went on for the entire fight.

Chuck Wepner’s face took a savage beating. For 45 minutes, Muhammad Ali tortured this man’s face. His eyes were cut. His face was swollen. What was a thoroughly ugly grill to begin with was made positively gruesome. Round after round, Muhammad Ali connected with his best shots. Wepner rarely connected with anything, but still swung wildly. All night long, nothing changed. You know how you watch a boxing movie and say to yourself, “All right, that’s ridiculous. No one could take that many shots like that to the face, and keep going.” Wepner did it.

We couldn’t take our eyes off it. At one point in the 13th or 14th round, Ali landed about three straight punches, all of them square, all of them hard, all over this guy’s face. He took it, and he raised his arms out to the side as if to say, “Bring more, baby. I am Chuck Wepner.”

For 44 minutes and 41 seconds, Muhammad Ali treated Chuck Wepner’s face like a punching bag, and Wepner took it. He didn’t go down, until there 19 seconds left in the fight. And even then, he got up.

Chuck Wepner was the toughest son of a bitch any of us had ever seen. We started speculating on what Check Wepner’s life was like outside the ring.

I guessed Chuck Wepner fought in bars just about every night of his life. There was probably no one in the world that Chuck Wepner would not destroy in a bar fight. He just looked like a bar fighter. If there had been an empty Budweiser bottle sitting on the turnbuckle, I have no doubt that Wepner would’ve picked it up and used it.

This man had to have taken so many beatings in his life to establish that kind of toughness. I just know that this man had been hit in the face with barstools, Louisville Sluggers, two by fours, pool cues, boards with rusty nails in them… anything. He could take it.

And his stamina was unbelievable. I bet to train, he ran about 30 miles every day, with someone running right next to him the entire way, punching him in the face as hard as he could. Every mile, it would alternate, and someone fresh would run next to him and punch him in the face. I can think of no other way to develop that kind of stamina and toughness.

Someone guessed that Wepner was the inspiration for Rocky. As it turns out… he was. We really had no idea of this fact, we just guessed it, and it was true. Stallone watched Wepner, grabbed a pencil, and wrote Rocky.

I also speculated that after the fight, he made a living by touring the country and betting people in bars that they couldn’t knock him down. They’d bet $50 on it, the guy would get to hit Wepner with anything he wanted, baseball bats, bricks, Chevrolets, whatever, and if Wepner didn’t go down, the guy paid up. I guessed that he also fought animals for money, and guess what… he did. After the Ali fight, Chuck Wepner fought a damn grizzly bear. Seriously.

He also unfortunately developed a mean coke habit, and couldn’t stop boozing and whoring. He should’ve gotten paid for the Rocky movies, but it didn’t work out for him. Given a choice between $70,000 up front, or a percentage of future proceeds from the movie, Chuck went with the $70 Gs. Good call. That decision only cost him about $7,930,000. Stallone actually wrote a part for him in Rocky II, but Wepner showed up drunk and with hoez in tow, and the scene never got in the movie. Wepner has recently sued Stallone for some Rocky proceeds.

Chuck Wepner joined the list of mjd’s all-time favorite athletes.