Having failed to work a deal with Carmen Basilio, Mike Tyson met the real world halfway and signed a contract for a tune-up fight with Ray Mercer.

Basilio is in his 80s. Mercer is 40. Hey, any baby boomer in a storm, eh?

The idea, as has been reported by the last few boxing writers left in America, is for Tyson, the weirdball gift that keeps on giving, to beat Mercer to a fare-thee-well that leads to two showdowns with heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis next year. And best of all, Lewis has no promoter at present, and you have a pretty good sense of who's sitting in the front row of desks waving his upraised hand at the teacher, desperate to be recognized.

A hint: His hair has been used as a model for 4-H Club hayrides since the early '70s.

Now a few people, weary of the hyperactive desperation of the fight game for anything, that puts Tyson back in the ring, find this a minor outrage. They complain that Tyson has done next to nothing to earn another championship fight other than sit around and be Mike Tyson.

They are, of course, wrong to be outraged. Boxing can embarrass itself much more comprehensively than this. Boxing has embarrassed itself much more comprehensively than this.

And that's why boxing survives. Not because it is "the sweet science," or that it is the most primeval of entertainments, or because it is the truest test of a man. None of that Joyce Carol Oates-on-a-three-day-crank-bender lyricism.

Boxing survives, and at the heavyweight level even thrives on occasion, because it is so willing to mock its most ardent defenders. It demands that they suspend their belief systems and well-trained sense of plausibility, and do it cheerfully.

In other words, boxing fans are basically told to eat a sludge on dark rye, enjoy it, and ask for more, only this time with fries.

And the best thing about it is, they do as they are told because they want to. Every time.

Why else would a Mike Tyson fight have any appeal, given the layers of rust on his resumé? Why else would it be such a given that Lewis must fight Tyson to validate his own career? Why else would a tune-up fight necessarily have to involve a man only 10 years away from AARP card?

Why? Because Carmen Basilio isn't available.

Sound silly? Oh, please. What could be sillier than 30 years of Don King, a man whose word is . . . well, a man whose word results in another word?

But because King gives great press conference (and give the man his due, he is purest brilliance when the audience is made up of sportswriters), he can still rope them in, even though both Lewis and Tyson regard him with the same warm feeling most people have for stickup men.

What could be sillier than the ongoing reputation of Mike Tyson as the heavyweight fighter of the age when he fights the average of a round a year?

But because Tyson gives great scare, because he once was believed to be the logical inheritor of the history of boxing, knowledge and brutality in dark trunks and sleeveless sweatshirts, because in his brief prime he was Sonny Liston taken to the next step, and because nothing else has even approached his potential, wasted or no, people still want to see if he has anything left?

And if every heavyweight is going to be 40 anyway, "anything left" is a very relative term.

This keeps us coming back to Carmen Basilio, who wasn't a heavyweight when he fought but surely must be now.

It's a what-the-hell world, this boxing, and reach and weight and technical skill and power really matter only some anyway. Boxing is all about our willingness to be conned, and the more brazen the con, the better. We haven't reached the absolute outer limit of absurdity yet, any more than we are reaching the end of the universe.

But we do hold our nose and await developments. So, we presume, does Carmen Basilio.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.