WE who were abed in England when Mike Tyson had his latest battle in Memphis won’t think ourselves accursed like the absentees on Saint Crispin’s day. Agincourt on the Mississippi it was not. Whatever Tyson may have done in the ring with Clifford Etienne in the small hours of this morning (shortly before midnight on Saturday in Tennessee) cannot be expected to halt the process by which the former world champion’s capacity for generating mind-numbing tedium is increasing as relentlessly as his fighting talents are eroding. Nobody in boxing history has had a more protracted or more lucrative second coming as a has-been. That in itself is unobjectionable. To my mind, all fighters are entitled to as much money as they can prise from their predatory milieu. But that supportive reaction doesn’t come naturally in Tyson’s case. The prolongation of his earning power past his 36th birthday is based on such an unedifying combination of squalid myths and morbid public appetites that it sets new standards of degradation even for the fight business.

For years, with his validity as a great heavyweight long gone, his principal marketing asset has been the exhibitionist depravity of his behaviour inside the ropes and beyond. If that were the extent of the offensiveness, it would be bad enough. However, certainly as far as I am concerned, the remorseless peddling of his soiled wares through comeback after dubious comeback has a further excruciating dimension. His freak show has become paralysingly boring. And the effect is mercilessly compounded by constant demands on us to acknowledge that, in spite of everything, we must find him irresistibly fascinating.

“Mike has everybody captivated,” said one of the voices summoned to offer television punditry on the farrago of sleazy nonsense that preceded this morning’s action: the accounts of training interruptions caused by indiscipline and illness, the reports that Tyson had pulled out of the Etienne fight only to reappear, complete with extravagant tattoo around an eye, announcing that reassurance over financial terms had miraculously restored both his health and his hunger for combat. Captivated? Allow me to register polite dissent. Tyson’s achievements in selling televised fights are unrivalled but I hit the pillow last night feeling little but sour indifference about whether he would do well or badly at the Pyramid arena.

When the shabby remnants of Iron Mike were pitted against Lennox Lewis in the same location last June, I expressed the hope that Lewis would do all of us a favour by dumping the mountain of garbage that had already accumulated around Tyson’s career into the capacious bin of oblivion. The reigning master of the heavyweights seemed to have obliged when he obliterated his opponent’s credibility during eight devastatingly one-sided rounds. Yet there was the discredited bogeyman back in the Pyramid in search of some fragment of justification for a rematch with Lewis. He had returned after last summer’s slaughter with the tiresome trappings of his roadshow alarmingly intact. Most depressing of all was the familiar indefatigability of his ranting. For longer than most of us care to remember Tyson has been relieving himself sporadically of stream-of-sewage monologues, interminable outpourings of random irrationality and self-contradicting declarations of his philosophy.

The lurid happenings of his life always have the aural background of that high, piping voice, like muzak in a brothel.

What never ceases to amaze is that he is able to persuade so many journalists and others that his frequently obscene ramblings have any relevance other than the masturbatory release they afford him. After the press conference that made the resurrection of the Memphis promotion official, one kindly chronicler likened the man at centre stage to a steel shaft of honesty. It is hard to believe Tyson would recognise a steel shaft of honesty if he sat on it. He doesn’t appear capable of understanding the truth about what is going on in his own head, let alone anywhere else. Though he complains about all the people who have benefited from portraying him as disturbed, the chief exploiter of that portrayal is himself. He has made an industry out of mental instability.

A reminder of his sharp awareness of the commercial value of being perceived as mad, bad and dangerous to know came when he compared his circumstances with those of Roy Jones, the brilliant super-middleweight who will seek to rise above a mass of historical evidence by trying to give stones in weight and a beating to a fully-fledged heavyweight, John Ruiz, in Las Vegas next Saturday. “Roy Jones is probably the best fighter in the world,” said Tyson. “But a little white woman going into Dairy Queen with her grandson wouldn’t know who he is. If it was me, they’d say, ‘Get those kids away from him, that’s Mike Tyson’.”

His psychological problems are genuine and deep-rooted and the more extreme examples of losing control are not faked. But he never loses sight of the fact that there are big bucks in violent abnormality. He does not struggle to subdue his demons. He rides them to notoriety and riches. Is he a true tough guy or an ultimately weak, if terrifying, narcissist? Tyson is a convert to Islam but his real religion is self-indulgence.