It is one thing to wrap a BMW around a sycamore. The cost of what he was charged with in Indianapolis last week could be all of his athletic career and most of his life. Tyson could be in prison until 2055, his 88th year, if he is convicted on the one count of rape, two counts of “deviate sexual conduct” and the one count of confinement for which he was indicted by a Marion County grand jury. The alleged victim is an 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant, who spent time with Tyson in is hotel room when he was in town to promote the pageant last July. Tyson denied the charges, saying, “I love women … My mother is a woman.” His lawyers, who include Vincent Fuller, the Washington attorney who handled John Hinckley Jr.’s landmark insanity defense, say they expect the fighter to be vindicated at his trial in January of 1992.

Tyson’s mask never cracked as he was booked and released on $30,000 bail. He bore no resemblance to the wild man witnesses describe as roaring through town guzzling Dom Perignon and Corona beer and allegedly groping half the women in the contest. (Pageant organizer J. Morris Anderson called Tyson a “serial buttocks fondler” in a $552 million suit he filed against the former champ.) In a video made to promote the pageant, Tyson rapped, “I’m in a dream / Day after day / I see beautiful women /In such an array.” The closest he came to showing emotion last week was to say he was “worried”-though he expressed no concern about the woman in question, whom he referred to by name as TV cameras rolled. “This is an additional invasion of her privacy,” said her lawyer, David Hennessy, “and it’s pathetic.”

Some newspaper editorials said the same thing about promoter Dan Duva’s insistence that Tyson’s Nov. 8 fight against champion Evander Holyfield would go on as scheduled. Several news agencies reported that the National Organization for Women had organized boycotts of the bout-but that disinformation, claims NOW vice president Rosemary Dempsey, traces to a rival boxing promoter who has no reason to wish the projected $100 million fight well. “The women’s movement is being cynically manipulated,” says Dempsey. NOW’s position, she says, is that Tyson has the right of due process and that “the question of whether there should be a fight trivializes the issue of rape.”

Those charged with wringing every dollar from the matchup are listening closely to such statements. “What I’m getting,” says Mark Taffet, senior vice president of TVKO, Time Warner Sports’ pay-per-view outlet, “is a sense that we should rethink the way the fight is marketed.” Sponsors such as Budweiser and 7-Eleven have stayed on, but a promotional clip of Tyson snarling will probably be scrapped. “We want to emphasize the event now,” Taffet says, “not the attributes of the boxers.” However many buy the $40 broadcast, the Tyson trial will probably prove an even bigger draw. Tyson’s lawyers seem likely to attempt a consent defense. “The woman knows what happened. I know what happened,” Tyson said. Edward Gerstein, one of the alleged victim’s lawyers, says he expects Tyson’s legal team to try to discredit his client publicly, as is happening in the William Kennedy Smith rape case. One thing they can’t do, though, because of Indiana’s shield law, is to wage a smear campaign against the woman in court. Tyson’s lawyers thus will have to spar and parry, and not brawl their way through the case. It’s one approach that has never suited their client’s style.