The conventional wisdom is that, in crushing defeat, Mike Tyson might have found his inner humanity. Which is fine, as far as it goes -- redemption being its own reward and all that.

	Mike Tyson was gracious in defeat, but he was soundly beaten.

His apparent conversion in the face of Lennox Lewis' persistent right hand, however, causes those folks who like their sports to adhere more closely to the hero-vs.-villain story line to seize up in fright. Tyson had gone to such lengths, after all, to make himself a cartoon character, Dr. Evil With Martin Luther King Tattoos, that he had created a niche for himself.

But now? He's a good second-tier heavyweight boxer with occasional temper management issues. He's equal parts Riddick Bowe and Rocky Graziano, and nobody is going to pay 55 scoots to watch his next fight, no matter what Shelly Finkel and Ross Greenburg think.

But that's boxing's problem. Having lost its last great foil, the sport's most devoted fans are now stuck in the Where-Does-Lewis-Fit-In-History argument, an occasionally interesting but ultimately unsatisfying debate.

As for those fans who for whatever pathological reason needed Tyson in character, though, the simple act of his kissing Lewis' mother after the fight cost them their souvenir hate keychain. They are the folks who thought the Olympics were better when the evil could be found in the Russians rather than the pockets of the soggy old men who ran the IOC, who hate the Yankees because they're the Yankees, and think Shaquille O'Neal is a disgrace because his pituitary gland ran the table and Todd MacCulloch's didn't.

Tyson, though, was the best pure villain of all, because he played to type so well, and while his redemption may be good for his soul and for those who believe all people can be saved, those who prefer their bad guys static need to find other places to vent.

They need bad guys, and they need them now. Sadly, there are none.

Oh, a few folks try to pin Bud Selig or Don Fehr, but Selig is still fronting for the baseball owners who pay him and as such is more to be pitied than loathed, and Fehr is such an amorphous public figure that almost nobody outside Seamhead Heights could pick him out of a lineup.

O'Neal may be burdened by his size and his Burger King ads, but that hardly rises to the level of evil, unless you're, say, MacCulloch, Aaron Williams or Jason Collins. To them and them alone, he is an utter bastard. Most other folks don't go much farther than, "Well, he's too damned big," and that hardly rises to the level we're after.

John Rocker had his run, although his was a single act, and one of First Amendment-enriched silliness. In the immortal words of Bill Veeck, he generalized when he should have specified, but he actually doomed himself not with his tongue but by the far more serious crime of losing the movement on his fastball. That'll teach him.

So who, then? Jose Canseco hasn't even written his book yet. Barry Bonds is still an unpleasant media subject but nowhere near the lightning rod he was before he hit 73 homers, and his moods tend to spike and ebb. Randy Moss is a seasonal phenomenon at best. Marty McSorley got buried for caning Donald Brashear but has mostly disappeared from everyone's radar. Tiger Woods still has far more fans than detractors. John McEnroe was, but isn't any longer. Rasheed Wallace is done after one round of the playoffs and keeps a positively subterranean profile anyway. And rioting fans, whether they be in Moscow or Mexico City, are mostly a cliché.

Then again, it's hard to be the bad guy every day. It takes too much energy. It takes too much devotion to the craft because there can't be any down time. And worst of all, to win universal enmity, you have to be a good enough athlete to make people care enough to wish you ill. Once you achieve that ill, though, you're done.

And that's where Tyson is today. He wasted much of the prime of his career in prison, which is a fairly evil way to go, and the rest of it doing enough silly, stupid and offensive things to ignore the demands of the craft. He had three big fights after Buster Douglas, and he lost them all. He is now Sonny Liston after Second Ali, and he has no place to go. He has shown his gentler side in defeat, he has been hailed as noble for, of all things, taking his beating like a man, and while it is never smart to say never, the heavy betting is that he can never stimulate our national anathema gland in quite the same way again.

Which of course may have been the plan all along anyway. But if that were so, then why let Lennox Lewis tap out the words to "God Save The Queen" on his face? Maybe Tyson realized, perhaps as late as the third round Saturday night, that he no longer has the energy to be America's villain, and he decided to leave the job to someone else.

But there is nobody else. He was it, the platinum standard in hot-button construction and implementation. There was no neutrality, no ambivalence. His best rebuttal to everything was, "Yeah, but I'm the baddest man in the ring."

But he wasn't. He hasn't been for years. He was built on a brief but glorious past, superb hype, and his willingness to be America's Nightmare.

And now that he apparently isn't so willing anymore, there is nobody on the horizon to clear the bar he set, let alone raise it.

But we're sure somebody will want to give it a go. The pay, after all, is fabulous.

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