Forget former manager "Cuss" D'Amato's death, chewing Evander's ear and saying he wants to eat Lennox Lewis' children... or rape and prison, or Robin Givens, or divorcing Michael Steele's lil' sis' or Don King's machinations. The crux of Mike Tyson's odyssey squeaked from his own lips in James Toback's 2009 documentary 'Tyson': "Unless you have an addictive personality," he self-diagnosed, "you can't understand how someone can throw away three or four hundred million dollars. I must either exist at the top of the world, or at the bottom of the ocean."

Perhaps he's swimming out of the abyss, towards some equilibrium on the surface. Mike Tyson claims the mountaintop of insanity is in the past. I'd like to think he's now bobbing on the waves, off shore... indeed waving to us on the beach. And astonishingly, we're turning from our own kidney-punching and below-the-belt shots about politics, money and culture, to wave back.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King was just someone driving too fast, after enjoying too much good cheer with his friends. Stacey Coon, Lawrence Powell, Ted Briseno, Tim Wynn and Rolando Solano were just LAPD cops. George Holliday was just somebody trying out his new-fangled video camera. Then came a car chase on the Foothills Freeway in Los Angeles. By March 4, 1991, all of these people became symbols of America's modern failure to confront its ugliest goblin -- racism.

CNN reporter Don Lemon writes the first draft of this troubled history with his documentary 'Race and Rage – The Beating of Rodney King,' debuting Friday, March 4 at 8:00p.m. ET and PT on CNN. CNN is the only major U.S. news outlet to interview King on the 20th anniversary of his assault by LAPD officers.

I had a chance to speak with Don Lemon on the afternoon before his documentary would air. Speaking from CNN's Atlanta headquarters, Lemon affirmed the conflict inherent in remaining a dispassionate reporter examining King's beating, the Simi Valley jury acquittal and the riot of 1992, while being a black man in America. He wants audiences to draw their own conclusions from the documentary. Yet Lemon also states that anyone, black or white, could understand the outrage.