The Difference Between a Hero and a Coward

I’m no movie buff, but once in a while I go on a scouring mission to video libraries in my neighbourhood for something unique. And last weekend I returned home with Tyson, the 1995 movie about the highs and lows of the former heavyweight boxing champion. I was so earnest to see if this movie would validate my offering in this column last Sunday that we ought to approach life like boxing pros approach a bout. 

“I was just a kid when I first got to see Muhammad Ali,” the movie opens with Mike Tyson (Michael Jai White) saying. “I saw the way people looked up to him, I saw their smiling faces, and I said to myself, ‘that’s what I wanna be –I wanna be the champion of the world!”

I had to hit the pause button and savour these words! One has to have something to stir him, for which he has to begin striving for early in life to get to the top. For Mike, it was watching Ali doing his thing, though it really was Constantine “Cus” D’Amato (George C. Scott) that completed Mike’s metamorphosis from the notorious street purse-snatcher to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  D’Amato is the man who discovered Mike, adopted and mentored him.

My most memorable lines in the movie is when he tells his protégé about heroes and cowards: “What’s the difference between a hero and a coward?” he asks one morning, and provides the answer before Mike could speak. “There ain’t a difference. Inside they are both exactly alike. Both scared of dying or getting hurt. But it’s what the hero does that makes him a hero. What the other guy doesn’t do that makes him a coward.”

As Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. D’Amato agrees, telling Mike never to worry about getting scared going into a fight because “fear is a friend of every good and reasonable athlete” but that he has to turn that fear into fire, into a gun! Mike relied largely on that to knock out most of his opponents.

American boxer Rocky Marciano retired in 1956 with a record 49 wins and no losses, becoming the first heavyweight champion in history to retire undefeated. Here Marciano takes Roland LaStarza to the ropes in 1953

And like Rocky Marciano, one has to be tenacious and refuse to accept the prospect of losing, or the concept of defeat to enter your mind. This is as real in boxing as in life for one to win, no doubt!