The bad news is that Mike Tyson will not fight Clifford Etienne on Saturday night.

The really bad news is that he might never fight again. Then, where will we be?

	Mike Tyson has thumbed his nose to the boxing establishment before, but this time it could be his ultimate undoing.

We've invested a lot in the slow, painful decline of Tyson as a sporting and cultural figure. We've listened to the hyperactive rants and the abject apologies. We've seen the bite marks -- twice. We've seen the awe of his fists, and the ignominies. We've seen the art gallery grow from one shoulder, down both arms and now on his face.

And now, we may finally be looking at his disappearance as a relevant curiosity.

Put another way, if Tyson retires, we won't get to see the earnest and well-meaning face of Shelly Finkel any more.

Tyson has a case of the flu, which because he is a boxer could mean anything from hoof-in-mouth disease to don't-want-to-train-any-more.

But because he is Tyson, he allows us to let our minds run even freer than that, to corners we try not to peek into too often. The murderous threats, the bite marks, the incomprehensible rants ... it's how we know him best. And then we end up making ourselves feel dirty, as though we woke up and realized we have taped and intend to keep every episode of "Joe Millionaire."

And now it's all coming apart for Tyson, most remarkably of all in the one place he seemed to feel safest.

Boxing fans, the ones most willing to forgive him his trespasses in search of one more evening's amusement, have finally hit the wall with this crypto-flu. Tyson needing a fight with Clifford Etienne in hopes of getting a fight with Lennox Lewis ... I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up.

And now people have stopped trying.

Some folks stopped long ago. Boxing purists, perhaps, and people who don't enjoy slow-motion train wrecks. Others hung in, mesmerized by the rumor of Tyson even long after the delivery stopped, just because there was no interesting alternative.

There still isn't an interesting alternative. Lewis and/or Vladimir Klitschko? Well, no. They're just the two best heavyweights still around, is all. What people want is Tyson, the 25-year-old Tyson who looked like he had beaten the number, and not the Tyson they see today.

They came too late. Way too late. Tyson's end game, which had taken on a morbid fascination for awhile when it looked like it would be a spectacularly bad one, is now just a slow fade like a thousand others.

Maybe this Etienne fight was a bad idea anyway. Just the mention that Tonya Harding was scheduled to fight on the undercard cheapened the whole idea, turned it into a bad Cirque du Soleil.

And yet, because a win over Etienne would have pushed Tyson into yet another title fight gave the event a glow it could not generate on its own.

But now it seems like the event itself is doomed, leaving people to suggest that Tyson just doesn't feel like fighting any more.

That's not how we figured this was going to end. Tyson was going too fast for too long, and surely would explode in a shower of flesh and shrapnel. He wasn't going to end by not fighting Clifford Etienne. He would always be able to clear the top rope of the ring, if nothing else.

So now we're stuck, at the end of the Tyson era with a Tyson we can't recognize, one that doesn't fit anyone's stereotype. One who has just, well, had enough of all of it.

He doesn't go out as America's menace, or America's punch line, or America's great tale of unfulfilled promise.

He just goes out, leaving the one unanswered question, "What the hell?"

And when you think about it, that's quite a question with which to close the story of Mike Tyson. What the hell, indeed.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com