SAVAGED BY THE BELL

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

It is a cherished tenet of sports mythology that the champion possesses kinetic genius matched-perhaps even exceeded-by an untrammeled yearning to win. The most captivating figures in our pantheon are those who fulfill their athletic promise through their passion.

But then there is an anomaly named Mike Tyson. A TV movie about the wayward boxer's life, which airs this month on hbo, deftly portrays the former world heavyweight champion as a ruined young man devoid of the sportsman's archetypal inner drive. Witness an Iron Mike without an iron will.

Born in a Brooklyn ghetto, Tyson was arrested dozens of times as a child. His talent was first recognized by celebrated boxing trainer Cus D'Amato when Tyson was serving a sentence in a juvenile-detention center. It was D'Amato (played by an absurdly dictatorial, aphorism-spouting George C. Scott) who was determined to make a champion out of the delinquent. Tyson is played with an eerie emotional vacancy by newcomer Michael Jai White. Intriguingly, the actor is not given much dialogue, which serves to emphasize Tyson's position as little more than a pawn of handlers like promoter Don King, whom Paul Winfield plays as a man of charismatic turpitude.

What Tyson fails to do is offer us any insight into the boxer's complicated psychology. Tyson's rape of a 19- year-old beauty contestant, the crime for which he has just finished serving three years in prison, is dramatized only briefly at the end of the film. During the course of the story, though, he is depicted as a belligerent suitor who chases young women down dark streets and yet, incongruously, is so shy that he hangs up the phone the first time he calls Robin Givens (Kristen Wilson), his future wife, to ask her out on a date. Fallen heroes always retain a certain mystery, but they needn't be this inscrutable.