by Mike Tyson
He actually tried to fight in the next round, but he didn’t last long. I dropped him with a left hook and then chopped him down with several punches when he got up.
“His bicycle got a flat tire,” Merchant cracked. When Jimmy came into the ring after the fight, he commented on Ratliff’s running. “I felt his breeze,” I said.
Soon it was official. I was to fight Trevor Berbick for his title on November 22, 1986. I had more than two months off between fights and Jimmy and Cayton decided to have me make the talk show circuit to promote the fight and my career. I started out going on David Brenner’s Nightlife. David was a great guy and he treated me with the utmost respect. He predicted I would be the next heavyweight champ, but as nice as that was, it meant more to me when his other guest, the great former champion Jake LaMotta, made the same prediction.
“Without a doubt, the next heavyweight champ of the world,” Jake said when he came out and hugged me. “And if he doesn’t do the right thing, I’ll give him a beating. You keep it up, pal; you’re going to be like Joe Louis, Marciano, maybe even better.”
My heart soared when I heard that.
Then Brenner asked Jake a question and his answer was very prescient.
“Let’s say Mike becomes the champ. What advice would you give him?”
“The best advice I could give him is keep yourself busy and make believe you’re in jail for a couple of years,” Jake said. “Stay away from all the garbage out there. There’s a lot of garbage out there.”
“Why does it have to be garbage?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, guys like you and I, we attract garbage,” he said.
I did The Joan Rivers Show. I loved her and her husband, Edgar. They both made me feel so good. I felt their energy was real. That was one of the best times of my life. During our interview Joan asked me if I had an Adrian, like in the movie Rocky.
“No girlfriend,” I answered.
“When you go into training, do you give up sex?” she asked.
“No.”
“See, ’cause my husband always tells me he’s in training,” Joan cracked.
I did The Dick Cavett Show and Dick demonstrated some aikido on me. He asked me to hold him by his wrists.
“The eighty-seven-year-old founder of aikido can get away from the grasp of the world’s strongest man,” he said and he did a slip move and escaped my grip.
“But no mugger’s gonna hold you like this,” I protested.
I was so charming on these shows, just the way Jim and Bill wanted me to be. But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be a villain. I wanted to model myself on Jim Brown, the football player. When I first started hanging out in bars in the city I’d see older professional football players who played with Jim Brown. They were talking about him like he was mythical.
“Hey, if he came in here and something wasn’t cool – the smell of the place, the music that was playing, the volume of the people’s conversations – if something just wasn’t cool in his mind, he would commence to destroying the place.”
I was listening to this thinking, Fuck, I wish I was a bad motherfucker and had people talking about me like that. If Jim’s going to destroy you because he doesn’t like the smell of the place, I’ve got to come in and kill a motherfucker in here.
As the November twenty-second date came closer, I began to train seriously. I trained for a month in Catskill and then we moved to Vegas. Right at the start, Jimmy and Cayton gave me a VHS tape of Berbick’s fight versus Pinklon Thomas, the fight he won to become champion. I watched it and reported back to Jimmy.
“Was that tape in slow motion?”
I was arrogant, but I really felt that my time had come. In my sick head, all the great old-time fighters and the gods of war would be descending to watch me join their company. They’d give me their blessing and I’d join their club. I was still hearing Cus in my head, but not in a morbid sense, just supportive.
This is the moment we’ve been training for since you were fourteen. We went over this over and over again. You can fight this guy with your eyes closed.
I knew Berbick was rough and tough and hard to fight because he was the first man to go fifteen rounds with Larry Holmes in a title defense. Larry had knocked everyone else out. I just wanted to decimate Berbick. Then everybody would take me seriously, because at that time, everybody thought I was fighting tomato cans and fluff; they said this guy’s not a real fighter, he’s just fighting easy fights, so that’s why my main objective was to decimate him. I wanted to take him out in one round – I wanted to hurt him real bad.
Kevin and Matt Baranski were just as confident as me. We were firing on all cylinders. And I was firing on one more. I looked at my underpants a day before the fight and I noticed a discharge. I had the clap. I didn’t know if I had contracted it from a prostitute or a very filthy young lady. We were staying at Dr. Handleman’s house again so he gave me an antibiotic shot.
Later that day, Steve Lott and I went to rent some VHS tapes.
“Mike, what would Cus say about this guy Berbick?” he asked me.
This was Steve’s way of putting me in Cus’s shoes, getting me to think like Cus. What Steve didn’t know was that I didn’t have to think like Cus; I had Cus in my head.
“He’d say that this guy was a tomato can,” I answered. “A bum.”
I was such a prick at the weigh-in. I was glaring at Berbick every time he was within sight. He’d come over to shake my hand but I’d turn my back on his outstretched hand. When I caught him looking at me, I’d bark, “What the fuck are you looking at?” Then I told him that I was going to knock him out in two rounds. He’d pose with the belt and I’d yell out, “Enjoy holding the belt. You won’t have it too much longer. It’s going to be on a real champion’s waist.” I was so disrespectful and offensive. For some reason I just didn’t like Berbick at that time. Plus, I wanted that belt. That green-eyed monster set in.
I was also mad that Berbick’s trainer Angelo Dundee was bragging that Berbick would beat me. Cus was always so jealous of Dundee, who had trained Ali, because he got all the media attention. Cus didn’t think he deserved it.
“Berbick has the style to do a number on Tyson,” he told the press. “Trevor is licking his chops at the thought that for once, he won’t have to chase, that Tyson will be right there in his face. Trevor is a good body puncher and he has twenty-three KOs to his credit. He’s confident and so am I. I think he’ll stop Tyson in a late round.”
I couldn’t sleep the night before the fight. I was on the phone a lot, talking with girls who I liked but never had sex with. I tried to take my mind off the fight by asking them what they were doing but all they wanted to talk about was the fight. Then I got up and started shadowboxing in my room.
The day of the fight I had some pasta at one o’clock. At four, I had a steak. Then some more pasta at five. In the dressing room I had a Snickers bar and some orange juice.
Then Kevin wrapped my hands and put on my gloves. It was time to walk to the ring. It was chilly in the arena so Kevin cut a towel and draped it over my neck. I was wearing the black trunks that I had changed to a few fights ago. I had to pay a $5,000 fine since Berbick was wearing black, but I didn’t care. I wanted that ominous look.
I was the challenger so I had to go out first. They were playing a Toto song for my entrance but all I could hear in my head was that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight”: “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord / And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all of my life, oh Lord.”
I went through the ropes and I started pacing around the ring. I looked out at the crowd and I saw Kirk Douglas, Eddie Murphy, and Sly Stallone. A few minutes later, Berbick entered wearing a black robe with a black hood. He was projecting cockiness and confidence, but I could feel that was all a façade, an illusion. I knew that this guy was not going to die for his belt.
Ali was introduced to the crowd and he came over to me.
“Kick his ass for me,” Ali told m
e.
Five years earlier, Ali had been beaten by Berbick and retired after the fight, so I was more than happy to comply.
“That’s going to be easy,” I assured Muhammad.
Finally it was time to fight. The bell rang and referee Mills Lane motioned us into action. I charged Berbick and began peppering him with hard shots. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t moving and he wasn’t jabbing; he was standing right there in front of me. I threw a right hand near the beginning of the fight square on his left ear, trying to bust his eardrum. About halfway through the round, I staggered him with a hard right. I swarmed him and by the end of the first, Berbick seemed dazed. He had taken some really, really good shots.
I went back to my corner and sat down. Because of the antibiotic shot, I was dripping like a Good Humor bar in July. But I didn’t care; I was in there to nail Berbick. Besides, one of my heroes, Kid Chocolate, fought with syphilis all the time.
“Move your head, don’t forget to jab,” Kevin said. “You’re headhunting. Go to the body first.”
Ten seconds into the second round, I hit him with a right and Berbick went down. He sprang up immediately and came right back at me. He was trying to fight back but his punches were ineffective. With about a half a minute or so left in the round, I hit him with a right to the body instead of an uppercut and then I shot the uppercut but I missed him. But I threw a left and hit him in the temple. It was a delayed reaction but he went down. I didn’t even feel the punch, but it was very effective. He tried to get up but then he fell back down and I noticed that his ankle was all bent.
No way he’s gonna get up and beat the count, I thought.
I was right. He tried to get up a second time and he lurched across the canvas and flopped down again. He finally got up but Mills Lane hugged him and waved him off. That was it. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in history.
“It’s over, that’s all, and we have a new era in boxing,” Barry Watkins, the HBO announcer, said.
“Mike Tyson did what Mike Tyson normally does. And that’s fight,” Sugar Ray Leonard added.
“That’s with a capital F,” Watkins said.
I was just numb. I couldn’t feel anything. I was conscious of what was going on around me but I was just numb. Kevin hugged me. José Torres came over.
“I can’t believe this, man. I’m the fucking champion of the world at twenty,” I said to him. “This fucking shit is unreal. Champion of the world at twenty. I’m a kid, a fucking kid.”
Jimmy came into the ring and gave me a kiss.
“Do you think Cus would have liked that?” I asked. Jimmy smiled.
Don King, whose son managed Berbick, came over to congratulate me. Then I looked out over the audience and started to feel arrogant. Yeah, we did it, I thought. Me and Cus did it. Then I started talking to Cus.
“We did it, we proved all those guys wrong. I bet Berbick don’t think I’m too short, does he?” Then I realized that Cus would have hated the way I fought.
“Everything else you did in the ring was garbage,” I heard him say in my head. “But the ending was so resounding that it’s all people will remember.”
It was time for the postfight interviews. I had to acknowledge Cus. I was the best fighter in the world at that time, and I was his creation. Cus needed to be there. He would have loved to have told off those people who wrote him off as a kook. He would have said, “Nobody can beat my boy here. He’s only twenty but nobody in the world can beat him.”
“This is the moment I waited for all my life since I started boxing,” I said when the press conference started. “Berbick was very strong. I never expected him to be as strong as me … every punch I threw was with bad intentions. My record will last for immortality, it’ll never be broken. I want to live forever … I refused to lose … I would have had to be carried out dead to lose. I was coming to destroy and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, which I’ve done. I’d like to dedicate my fight to my great guardian Cus D’Amato. I’m sure he’s up there and he’s looking down and he’s talking to all the great fighters and he’s saying his boy did it. I thought he was a crazy white dude … he was a genius. Everything he said would happen happened.”
Someone asked me who my next opponent would be.
“I don’t care who I fight next,” I said. “If I’m going to be great, then I’m going to have to fight everybody. I want to fight everybody.”
Even Dundee praised me after the fight.
“Tyson throws combinations I never saw before. I was stunned. I worked with Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, but I’m seeing from Tyson a three-punch combination second to none. When have you seen a guy throw a right hand to the kidney, come up the middle with an uppercut, then throw a left hook?”
I didn’t take that belt off that whole night. I wore it around the lobby of the hotel. I wore it to the after-party, and I wore it when I went out drinking later with Jay Bright, my roommate at Cus’s house; Bobby Stewart’s son; and Matthew Hilton, the fighter. We went to a dive bar in Vegas called The Landmark, across the street from the Hilton. Nobody was in there, but we just sat and drank all night. I was drinking vodka straight and I got truly smashed. At the end of the night, Matthew passed out and I went around to different girls’ houses, showing them my championship belt. I didn’t have sex with them, I just hung out with them for a while, and then I’d leave and call another girl and go over to her house and hang out. It was crazy. You have to understand that I was still only twenty years old. And when you think about it, a lot of my friends were only fifteen or sixteen. That wasn’t a big difference at that age. Now all of a sudden, because I’m champion of the world, everyone expected me to be a totally together guy because of the title and what it represents. But I was just a little kid having fun.
And I was lost. By the time I won the belt I was truly a wrecked soul because I didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t have Cus. I had to win the belt for Cus. We were going to do that or else we were going to die. There wasn’t any way I was leaving that ring without that belt. All that sacrifice, suffering, dedication, sacrifice, suffering. Day by day in every way. When I finally got back to my hotel room early that morning, I looked at myself in the mirror wearing that belt, and I realized that I had accomplished our mission. And now I was free.
But then I remembered reading something Lenin wrote in one of Cus’s books. “Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.” That was a statement I should have taken into consideration in the years that followed.
“My name is Mike Tyson. I’m a professional fighter. Boxing is a lonely sport. The sparring, the training, and especially the roadwork, give me plenty of time to think. One of the things I think about most is how bad drugs are and how much they hurt people. Well, we can get rid of drugs if each of us, one by one, decides to say ‘No.’ It’s a small word with a big meaning. Say it, SAY NO TO DRUGS!”
That was a public service announcement I did for the Drug Enforcement Administration to be broadcast right before my first title defense in 1987. I also did PSAs for New York State. They showed me hitting a heavy bag and then turning to the camera. “That’s right, stay off crack, so you can win.”
The irony of all this is that while I was filming these spots, I was financing my friend Albert in his crack enterprise back in Brownsville. Right around the time that Cus died, I started giving Albert five thousand dollars here, twenty thousand there, just so that he didn’t have to work for someone else. I wasn’t a partner and I never wanted any return from my investment. I was just worried about his safety. Albert and I had grown up and robbed and stolen together. I didn’t want him to worry if one of the dealers he was working for said, “Where’s my shit?” The drug business in Brownsville in the ’80s was like 1820s slavery. When you’re working for these guys, your life meant nothing. If you had that man’s package, you couldn’t quit when you wanted to. Once you held that hand and made that deal, you were his property.
I thought about getting Albert
to come to work with me. But guys like him were just too antisocial. They didn’t believe in hanging out, carrying no bag, being a yes-man, kissing ass because I was champ. Nobody was going to be bossing him around. The only thing we knew was violence in Brownsville, even with people we love. Albert was much too hard-core to be part of my entourage. He wasn’t going to do a Mike Tyson “Yes, ma’am, how are you doing? May I help you?” Guys like him would get angry and they’d have no control over their emotions. So rather I said, “Here. You take this money.”
But my plan didn’t work. A young Turk ready to get his meat shot Albert and a couple of my other friends in 1989. They were only twenty at that time and there was also a sixteen-year-old who wanted a piece of the dream. The Benz, the girls, and the status killed them. There was a lot of dying then. I paid for a lot of funerals.
I did two things right away when I went back to New York after winning the title. I went up to Catskill and showed my belt off everywhere. I wore it outside for three weeks, sometimes even sleeping with it on. One day I walked into the kitchen and told Jay Bright to come with me for a ride. There was one more person I wanted to show the belt to. I told Jay to drive to the liquor store and I gave him some money to buy a large magnum of Dom Pérignon champagne. Then I had him drive to Cus’s grave. When we got to his stone, we were both crying. We both said a little prayer and then I popped the cork and we both took a big swig and then I poured the rest of the bottle on Cus’s grave, left the empty bottle on the grass, and left.