Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a "so-called 'sport,'" and surely their logic is correct: if "sport" means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But "sport" can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action--in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise--defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one's own divided self. 
-- Joyce Carol Oates

Someday, they're gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It'll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.
-- Sonny Liston

As a child somewhere on the journey towards adolescence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were certain names that brought with them entire worlds. "Maradona" was one this little Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around football pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of players far more capable than he. "Schwarzenegger" and "Stallone" made for air machine guns, bandannas, throwing each other in the mud and learning to love the art of gratuitious bloodshed.

Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaughterhouse would name their dogs (and, eventually, their children). Tyson was huddled conversations under the bridge about sixty second knockouts, older cousins with cigarettes in their mouths, replaying the fist swings with a slow and sincere reverence. Tyson was in the playground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly moving amongst us, games of British Bulldogs suddenly turning to the heavyweight championship for inspiration. Seconds out, they'd shout, and the bricks were only ever those seconds away.

At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writing very smart and eventually legendary work on Tyson, contextualising him amongst the greats. But the rumble in the jungle, to us, was probably an episode of GI Joe. We were becoming vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same person but could not tell you the reasons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren't the word that made the world shake.

That word was Tyson.

I knew nothing of boxing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure distillation of the fight. Kid Dynamite transformed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn't the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pummelled. He was unbeatable because you can't beat rage like that. You can't beat the streets, and the prisons, and the anger.

You know what happened. Others have written it better. Those who actually know something about boxing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sentence. The comeback. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, faggot. Don King. The collapse. Dragging boxing down with him.

And always, at the center, that man, that strange, self-victimising madman with the motor mouth. With his mansions abandoned, he is reduced to that hoariest of cliches, the fallen heavyweight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a realisation there would be no triumphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.

"I think that he is so incapable of guile and of representing himself with intention one way or another, as opposed to just saying what's on his mind," Toback explains to me as he works the phones for the Australian release of the film.

"There is enough self-incrimination from him that one doesn't need to add to the mix in order for it to feel like a balanced portrait. In the way I edited the film, it was also without any effort to try to make him look good, it was just to try to make him look like what he is."

Earlier this year as I passed through Kentucky, I visited the Louisville museum built in honour of hometown boy Muhammad Ali. When I say museum, I mean shrine/motivational speech in the form of building. As I wandered amidst the children's handprints and soaring string-soundtracked documentaries about the audacity of self-belief or some such, I got to thinking a lot about the stories of the great boxers. The interesting stuff is never in what they achieved, it's in how they failed. It's in where these people who we invested so much hope and belief in, for the most basic and primal of abilities, acted as thugs. As fighters. As failures. That's the story I wanted from the Ali museum. It's the story you always want about the champ. "Find the greatness within"? That's hardly the story we're looking for.

Toback has been Tyson's friend for most of the two and a half decades that he has spent in the gaze of an often repulsed but always fascinated public. Toback himself has an interesting place in Hollywood history as a director who has never particularly lived up to the promise of his 1978 debut Fingers, a man full of great ideas for films that never quite come off. Just as I was beginning to study film, a decade or so after those playground head smashes, I came across a copy of his diary in an issue of the British film journal Projections. It documented his idea for a film that was sort of the remnants of an acid trip, something deeper and darker and more brilliant. But it was lost to his own unreliability, and to his procrastination. It's a strange, compelling slice of the creative self that I've always kept somewhere in my head. The film he was trying to make eventually became the much-derided Harvard Man, with Adrian Grenier starring (in place of the young Leonardo DiCaprio Toback was attempting to woo in his diary), and Sarah Michelle Gellar back when she could get roles in films. It was not the film he wrote around in a thousand different ways in those diary pages. Toback, in my Hollywood story, is genius and potential, almost always lost at the point of actual realisation.

With Tyson, he hits upon a perfect intersection of style and subject. To make Mike Tyson "look like what he is" is not simple — first one must figure out what Mike Tyson is. Toback might have a better idea of that than any other filmmaker. That "self-incrimination" he talks about is at the core of the film. Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Tyson tells himself many; he blurs the boundaries of himself in their contradictions and their justifications. Toback seizes this, lays the man over the top of himself in split screen, throwing you directly into the confused, uncertain space of his head.

"Since he is a fractured, multiple personality, I felt that the only way of aesthetically and stylistically finding a good structure for him as a subject of a cinematic portrait would be split-screen and multiple voices," he says. "I'd experimented with both techniques before in Harvard Man and in Black & White, and had grown increasingly intrigued by that method, so I thought if ever it was warranted, it's now."

For Toback, there was never any temptation to introduce the sort of talking heads you might have had in the great boxing films of the past, like say a Norman Mailer equivalent.

"I would probably not have wanted to make that movie," he explains. "That ends up being a kind of journalistic exercise, which would not at all have appealed to me.

"The only vague moment of temptation I had with that, and it wasn't a real one, because it would have blown the whole movie stylistically, was to allow Alan Dershowitz, who was one of the most prominent criminal lawyers and law professors in America, to say what he has said many times, which is that the rape conviction was the single worst miscarriage of justice in his forty years of following and participating in criminal cases. And that any lawyer who thought that it wasn't should go back to law school, only try a different one from the one he went to the first time."

If you are to look at the film as either an attempt to sell a "true" version of Tyson, or as a journalistic enquiry, this is an inherently fatal flaw in Toback's approach. If he were to include Dershowitz, Toback could and should have included a thousand others who have said just the opposite. But that is a different film. It is not this one. I asked him if any ground rules were laid down on other side when it came to the topics of the rape charges, or Evander Holyfield's ear, or any of the other critical junctures in the story.

"None," he says. "I just threw them out as subjects and treated them the way I treated everything else, which was to throw them out as subjects and let him go.

"That to me was the way to do the movie, not to try in any way to get him to say this or that, or cover a subject he hadn't, but to give him the subjects that I considered of fundamental interest, introduce those subjects, and then just let him go."

The end result, as Oates put it, is to turn Tyson into something like an abstract piece of art. We do not know the objective truth of the man, but then nor does he. Tyson himself did not know that this was the film that would result.

"He had no clue," Toback said. "It was actually remarkable, I showed it to him in a screening alone, the two of us were sitting there. He said 'it's like a Greek tragedy, the only problem is that I'm the subject'. One of the things that I knew would make the movie riveting is the elegiac consciousness and tone that he has."

The version of Tyson I walk away from the film with isn't the one I've carried with me over the years, built first on those playgrounds and bridges and later in the writings of the intellectualisers of the sport. This Tyson is a man who has lived a life dominated by insecurity, and by childhood traumas he has never been able to get past. For better or worse, this is what has defined the rest of his life.

"He gives you a very vivid sense of that in his description of his childhood," Toback agrees. "This sense of a short fat kid being bullied and pushed around. That whole story of the neck of the pigeon being broken by some bully and how he managed to summon up the courage and the strength to knock the guy out, but still was always haunted by his sense of himself as someone who was, at any given moment, going to be pushed around and bullied."

From the streets to juvie, Tyson found it impossible to trust in anybody. It wasn't until he fell into the boxing ring, and eventually under the wing of Cus D'Amato, that he found direction and people to believe in. The version of the D'Amato story told in this film — Tyson's version of it — is disputed by many people who were there at the time. His depictions of D'Amato as the last great hope he had for a righteous life aren't shared by people like former coach Teddy Atlas. But objective truth, here, is not the point. The passing of D'Amato, for Tyson, was the end of innocence.

"Everything from that point on was without any guiding force," Toback explains. "It was with Tyson on his own, or taking the advice and direction of people who were both uninterested in his welfare and, in practical effect, leading him down very destructive paths.

"It would have been possible to be uninterested in him personally and yet not be a destructive influence, but unfortunately he had both the lack of interest, and destructiveness, or at least people playing up his own capacity for self-destruction, which was clearly highly developed."

Toback knew him over those years, and was watching this happen. But Tyson at that time was moving in a different world.

"I knew that when he was with Don King, then Robyn Givens, that he was off in a different place," he says. "It was very hard to communicate with him in any serious way during that period of time."

To me, the kid who still knows nothing about boxing, it seems clear that Tyson was the last great heavyweight champ. If, in sporting terms, he was never a great to be mentioned in the same breath as Ali or Marciano, then at least in legend, in the possession of that myth of being the one true Heavyweight Champion of the World, he sits alongside them in our memories.

"Is there any athlete," Joyce Carol Oates asked in 1992, "however celebrated in his own sport, who would not rather reign as the heavyweight champion of the world?". I'm sure Wladimir Klitschko and his brother Vitali are fascinating characters, and probably excellent boxers (with all of their doctorates and politicking, and the nicknames Dr Steelhammer and Dr Ironfist in their possession), but how many kids these days are replaying their punches under the bridge? How many dogs do we meet called Klitschko? Not twenty years later, it seems Oates' rhetorical question has found itself with a different answer.

"I think there's no doubt whatsoever that boxing's heyday is over," Toback says. "First of all, boxing has always been, in the public consciousness, coterminous with the heavyweight division, and you had these iconographic figures who, if you take them as a group, were probably more prominent than the president of the United States. The great champions going back from John L. Sullivan to Corbett, to Jack Johnson, to Dempsey and then Louis, Marciano, Ali and then Tyson, there is no way that that era, or anything close to it, is going to come back. For a number of reasons."

Such as?

"Well I think one of them is that, like film for instance, which is a dying artform — or let's say one that's being supplanted and complemented by competing artforms that might be offshoots of it — first of all there is Ultimate Fighting.

"But in addition to Ultimate Fighting, there is this dilution of the intensity by these competing other forms. You have too many divisions, too many fighters, the various other sports of physical competitivesness which have become prominent, and even primary. When boxing was in the era of Dempsey, Tunney, Johnson, there was basically no football, no professional basketball, there was really just boxing and baseball. Now there's all the rest of this competition."

What Toback doesn't mention as having contributed to the death are the stories of boxing in the eighties and nineties that turned the public away. The intertwined stories of Mike Tyson, and of Don King, certainly no friends but co-stars in a tragedy played out in whichever casinos would take them (which, by the end, had them fighting in Kansas).

Though the competing sports he mentions may now be more popular than boxing, though they may draw the sponsors away, and the viewers who long ago gave up, there is one thing they will never have. They will never have that heavyweight champion of the world.

"That's true," Toback agrees. "The hope is for people who love boxing is that someone will come along to reignite interest but I don't know who that fighter would be. He certainly doesn't seem to be vaguely on the horizon today."

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.

Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.

Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.

The blur of Germany gave way to the streets of Buenos Aires. The Americas are my home now for the next two months.

A travel writer, a bad one, would lead off a description of Argentina as he would of India, or Australia, or anywhere. Something about a teeming mass of contradictions. It probably says something like that in the introduction to the Lonely Planet. It is not, to be fair, a country that makes much sense. It confuses me. Buenos Aires is the shell of a city built to be one of the greatest in the world, but the vast expanse of Nueve de Julio seems built mainly to ferry lost potential from one end of town to the other, 18 million people on either side trying to figure out exactly what the city is for.

Much has been written about Argentina's economic collapse. It is not the place of a drifter in town for ten days to attempt to explain it here. For an interesting primer, you might like to listen to an interview I did a couple of years back with Avi Lewis about The Take, the documentary he made here with Naomi Klein about worker-reclaimed factories and life rebuilt in the shell left behind by an economy that drove over the border to Uruguay in the back of trucks. Or you might not. The implosion of the peso was just the latest in a long line of misfortune and misadventure to befall the Argentine Republic. Draw threads of a history in words like junta, Malvinas, Peron, Dirty War, the Colonels, coup after coup, a country lurching always in different directions in search of an identity, a basis in faith or in power. But I don't know enough about all of that, not really. I won't pretend to. Maybe you should look to the evolution of the paintings of Berni, or read up on the villas miseria that skirt the fringes of the city's ever-so-European veil. The films of Adrián Caetano, give those a shot as well. Or just do as the locals do and turn to the idea of Carlos Gardel, paint him on your walls and put your faith in a lost tango.

What I do see in the shadow of the collapse -- Carlos Menem still in the news, the junta also -- is maybe a story for the rest of the world on the brink of one. A middle-class country whose flooring and foundations were, not without warning, removed. Dreams of prosperity, inflated by tricks of banking and the market, shown to be little more than air. Though I can't say I didn't go looking for that, that I'm not forcing a narrative on a city I don't know.

We start in La Boca, beneath the stadium. The area is protected by a perimeter of tourist-driven streets, fat North Americans with SLRs slung over shoulders, asking for them to be stolen, eating overpriced facsimiles of parilla-cooked beef and watching tango displays that even I, hardly a trained connoisseur of duende, know to be utter rubbish. But push beyond these, and so many microwave-reheated empanadas, and another town reveals itself. Humidity reconstitutes the general universal stench of a port, salt-water rolled in with ship oil and spoiling stock in long-locked containers, perhaps sealed before 2002, never to be reclaimed. The guidebook told us not to go here, for we'd likely be killed, but since when does one read the manual beforehand?

The warehouses and the factories now are -- at least officially -- empty. Dead spaces for dead, abandoned industries. Like the crumbling mansions just up the road in San Telmo, they've been shuttered and left to be reclaimed in a more prosperous future, always just around the corner. But unofficially, this area overflows with life. Poke your eyes through the door of any one of these vast buildings, you'll see a community, semi-shanty to be sure, but a real town nonetheless. On the streets, fat dogs spread themselves on concrete in futile attempt to find cool, cartoneros stack their hauls on the corners. Teenagers, I suppose these are the criminals and corner boys the guidebook author warned me of, drink from their Quilmes longnecks and throw a half-interested stare our way, something of a "keep on drifting, amigo, you can be here, you can stick your nose in for a second, but don't linger too long". On one corner, a grand old colonial bank building is hollowed out, repurposed as something that seems to be a community market space. I have fantasies for a moment of America five years from now, Chicago and Manhattan corner-banks retooled for same purpose. Presidents on radio, offering new deals and new hope, getting caught up in labour disputes in meantime.

But look, this isn't the Buenos Aires I'm in, it's just the one I'm looking at, the one that intrigues me. I'm staying in another part of town, in Once, just north of the gorgeously named Plaza de Miserere. This was another area I was warned not to venture into, not for tourists, locals only, full of thieves and villainy, the lady in the hostel said. But I'm here staying with two people deeply in love, in an apartment building part-Kafka, part-Jodorowsky. They've put up sheets for me, built a quiet room in the corner of their studio. That strange familiar smell of turpentine and animal that is the trademark of every tiny apartment of an artist and his cat. They show me the other side, the beautiful people, their bars and their parties. We go to the launch of a model-turned-illustrator, somebody else is launching wallpaper, I kiss many people on the cheek but have no language beyond a ¿Cómo estás? to offer them. They do their best with offering their English to me, we talk about artificial intelligence and the weather, skirting the safe topics on the language barrier. It's a good town, this well-heeled bohemian one. I like these people. I like their brand of late-night fun, sponsored as it is by terrible pre-mixed alcohols. I'm introduced to a celebrity TV chef, my friends are big fans and promises are made for the exchange of recipes. Her friend remembers me as the guy dancing like a crazy man the night before, very drunkenly, at an odd-smelling nightclub that was apparently, on all other nights of the week, intended for stripping, not hipster CD launches.

Here I feel comfortable, at peace. We sit for hours on grass and we talk. We journey to the nearby countryside. We crash country club art launches and drink champagne. We spend afternoons swimming and eating asado with family. My ghosts are not here. In a shabby old theatre we watch Juana Molina create beautiful mayhem with her loop pedals. A strange, peculiarly Argentinian sort of star, a wacky sketch-comic turned indie icon. Watching her live, slowly building fragments of discord into the controlled structure of a song, it reminds me of that strange game about a time travelling robot, in which your objective is not to get to the end of the level, at least not initially, but to make seemingly nonsensical moves that will allow future incarnations of yourself to get there safely. Too often, I'm reminded of time travelling robots.

Most cities you can get to know at least a little simply through the extended application of sneaker-sole to sidewalk, drifts and diversions through cultural pockets and stories written only in the brickwork. But, no matter how much I walk the streets of Buenos Aires, something at the centre eludes me. I get the feeling that even years of attempted flaneurie in this town would turn up little of meaning to the non-porteño. But such mystery is a little seductive. I think she got her claws in, more than a little, but though I feel the sharpness and just a small trickle of blood, I'm wary of what she's offering.

We drive to the airport, past roadblocks and buses of football fans guarded by phalanxes of motorcycle police caressing their shotguns. Not certain this was ever South America I was in, direct flight now back to the homeland and the winter cold. Home for Christmas, to the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves.