Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  “Hey, I don’t want to get in your face,” I said calmly. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your friend. I didn’t do anything to her.”

  I figured that if I fucked this girl, she couldn’t testify against me the next day.

  “Hey, it’s no problem, sister. Why don’t you and me go for a ride in the Rolls?” My strategy worked. The girl didn’t testify.

  In January I also had to appear in court for a deposition in connection with Cayton’s suit versus Don King. Thomas Puccio, a famous attorney, was Cayton’s man. He asked me about the Spinks fight payment and I told him that I couldn’t recall if I had been paid. When Puccio showed him that I had been paid my full twelve million dollars, I couldn’t recall what I did with the money. I didn’t even have my own accountant at the time; I was just using Don’s. I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to protect myself. All my friends were dependent on me. I had the biggest loser friends in the history of loser friends.

  But the deposition got interesting when Puccio asked me about Jimmy and the revised managerial contract I had signed right before he died.

  “I had total trust, implicitly, totally, with every soul of my body, in Jim,” I testified. “I signed that agreement because Jimmy asked me to sign it. I always trusted Jimmy, I never believed my listening to Jimmy would all come down to this, and being here facing you. I didn’t understand Cayton was my manager, because Jimmy, by some means, I can’t understand why, Jimmy had me sign this. Like I said, I trusted him and I signed it. I wanted to fight in the glory of Jim, I loved Jim,” I said. “He could have informed me about Mr. Cayton being my manager, which he didn’t.”

  But Puccio kept pressing me. He grilled me about the specific terms of my contract with King. I had no idea what was in the contract. Do you think I read that shit?

  “You’re stressing me out,” I told Puccio.

  The truth was, I was more interested in putting the moves on Puccio’s hot young assistant lawyer, Joanna Crispi. I told her she had a nice ass and I kept trying to get her attention. I’m sorry you have to read about this. What was I thinking? You can’t do shit like that. But I did.

  My own litigation with Robin was still in the courts, but that didn’t keep us from seeing each other. Whenever I was in L.A., I’d stop by for a booty call. I once drove up to her house in my Lamborghini Countach. I knocked on the door and there was no one there. That was odd. So I went back to my car, when I spotted Robin pulling up in her nice white BMW convertible. I should have recognized it, I bought the motherfucker. Great, I can still get my quickie in, I thought, but then I spotted a white silhouette with flowing blond hair in the passenger’s seat. Shit, it was probably one of her girlfriends from Head of the Class. But I looked closer and saw that it was a dude. Someone she was probably giving head to. They pulled up and got out of the car and I saw that the guy was Brad Pitt. When Brad saw me standing there in front of the house, you had to see the look on his face. He looked like he was ready to receive his last rites. Plus, he looked stoned out of his gourd. Then he went all pre-Matrix on me. “Dude, don’t strike me, don’t strike me. We were just going over some lines. She was talking about you the whole time.”

  “Please, Michael, please, Michael don’t do anything,” Robin was crying. She was scared to death. But I wasn’t going to beat no one up. I wasn’t trying to go to jail for her, I was just trying to get in some humps before the divorce.

  “Come back later, Mike,” she said. “I’ll be home, come back later.”

  It was what it was. Brad beat me to the punch that day so I went back the next day.

  That wasn’t the last time I saw Robin. While I was training for the Bruno fight, Robin was shooting some B movie up in Vancouver. She kept calling me for help, saying she was being stalked. I wanted to be by her side to protect her. I ditched my security team and immediately flew up there. I was grateful to get out of town because I was tired of training anyway. I was in full romantic mode, so I walked up to the hotel carrying a big bottle of Dom Pérignon. Suddenly I was surrounded by a swarm of reporters and camera crews. Robin had set me up. She had told the media that I was the one stalking her. They were swarming me, asking why I was stalking her, so I acted on instinct. I transformed my champagne bottle into a bludgeon to escape with. Of course, I scared a few reporters and broke a really expensive camera in doing so, which set me back a few pennies. I spent the night with Robin, but I was so disgusted by her behavior that I left the next morning. That was the official end of my relationship with her.

  Our divorce was finalized on February fourteenth. Ironic, huh? Robin got some cash money and got to keep all the jewelry I had bought her, which was worth a fortune. Ruthless took some of Robin’s booty and opened up an indie film production company in New York.

  Robin also tried to keep my Lamborghini. She took that car and put it in her garage and then had someone put cement blocks into the ground in front of the garage door so we couldn’t get it out. But that was no problem for Howard. He hired some private investigators who were ex-Mossad agents and they had the car out in twenty minutes without waking up anyone.

  I was free of Robin officially, but instead of being elated, I was really down. I didn’t want to be married to her anymore but I felt humiliated by the whole process. I felt like half a person. I had endured the dark side of love – betrayal – and I was ashamed because it had played out in front of millions of people. This was the first time I had made myself vulnerable to someone else. Here was someone I would have died for and now I didn’t even care if she died. How does love change like that?

  But it was time to go back to fighting. The entire boxing industry was waiting for my next fight. We had brought the whole entertainment base back to the sport. My fights were sold out the minute they were announced. Everybody was going to Vegas to hang out at the MGM Grand. The place was packed like sardines when we were there. The word was out that I’d go to the mall at the MGM Grand and spend two hundred and fifty thousand the night before the fight, so there were all these Mike Tyson look-alikes there. They’d do my walk. I’d be in the room sleeping and there were all these Tyson sightings. Every high roller from around the world was there. Billionaires, actors, actresses, hustlers, they were all there. There’d be whores sitting next to U.S. senators ringside.

  But I was in no shape, especially mental, to fight. Bruno should have kicked my ass. I just didn’t care anymore. I was tired of fighting. I didn’t have Cus’s system in my head. But I put up a good front. At one of the first press conferences before the fight I tried to sound upbeat.

  “I’m happy to be back. I’ve gone through a lot of distractions recently, but I really think it’s good for someone to go through something like this. Actually, I’ve been through this pain before but this time it was publicized,” I said. “I know I learned a great deal about myself and had to deal with adversity. My main objective now is to get back on top. It doesn’t matter if I’m famous, or recognizable. You can’t be on top if you don’t perform and I plan on performing again and getting back on top.”

  But the reporters just wanted to know about my storybook romance with Robin and what happened.

  “Hey, I went through a stage, fell in love, and I might fall in love again, but not the same way.”

  I showed a little more bravado as the fight approached.

  “People say ‘poor guy’ about me. That insults me. I despise sympathy. So I screwed up and made some mistakes. ‘Poor guy’ sounds like I’m a victim. There’s nothing poor about me.”

  We put Rory and John Horne up at the Hilton a few weeks before the fight. A few days later, they were wearing gold watches and jewelry from the hotel shops.

  I didn’t train particularly hard for the fight. I had sparred with Bruno when I was sixteen at Cus’s and had gotten the best of him then. I had no strategy to fight him. I knew I could pick off his jab and he couldn’t hurt me with his power punches. At the weigh-in, Bruno attempted to stare me down, so I pulled my shorts down and showed him
my pubic hair.

  When the fight began, I felt a little rusty but I was punching pretty hard. I dropped him with the first punch. Then I got a little reckless trying to finish him off and I misanticipated his speed and he hit me with a left hook and a short right. People made a big deal that I was wobbled with the punches, but that wasn’t so. It was just za-bang and then I was back in charge. I almost finished him off at the very end of the second round. After that, he held me after every punishing blow I got off. With a minute to go in the fifth, I wobbled him and then spent the next forty seconds stalking him. He was ready to go and I got him against the ropes and landed a devastating right uppercut, and Richard Steele stopped the fight. He was out on his feet.

  In the postfight interview, I lorded over my opponents.

  “How dare they challenge me with their primitive skills?” I sneered.

  I was quoting Apocalypse from the X-Men. I was just a big kid, quoting a comic book.

  I was scheduled to fight again in July, but HBO wanted to sign me to a lifetime contract. I was constantly the slave nigga. They needed me just like the head slave on a plantation. Just imagine that shit; these suits were fighting over me to rip my soul apart.

  I started training for the fight in Ohio. I had bought a house right near Don’s. On May thirty-first, the HBO guys went out to Don’s to talk about the proposed deal. I didn’t show up. I had been partying the night before.

  King met with the press and painted a rosy picture of our relationship.

  “It’s a family affair, where togetherness, solidarity, and unity prevail. Mike understands he has to be better than he is. My job is to be honest with him. He’s the man, to allow him to make his own mistakes,” he said. “He has to grow up like everyone else, it’s all about Mike growing up and I can’t wait to make him independent of me.”

  “I do not try to emasculate him, decide what is right and wrong for him. He decides, I’m not his father, but the heart of the father, that many kids in the ghetto don’t have. I could relate to what Mike Tyson is suffering.”

  What can I say about this guy? Now the motherfucker was just copying Cus.

  I hadn’t shown up by lunchtime so they started the meeting without me. I rolled in about four in the afternoon, wearing black-and-white-striped lederhosen that Dapper Dan had made for me.

  I didn’t give a shit about that meeting. I was so bored in Ohio. Sometimes I would get a gun and shoot up the cars on Don’s estate. One of the reasons that I was out in Ohio was that I had been banned from a lot of clubs in the city. I even got Paulie Herman kicked out of his own club. He was an investor in the China Club and Paulie and I were there one day and something happened with me and a woman. I think I bossed around a waitress and got mad because she was slow bringing us our champagne. She ratted me out to the boss and he came back to our table and threw us out. So we went to Columbus and Paulie opened the place and we drank there.

  Hope spent a lot of time in Ohio with me. I’d have girls come in and out, but it was nice to have someone nurturing like Hope when the other girls left. I’d wake her up in the middle of the night and she’d make us some sandwiches and we’d just talk. I remember telling Hope, “A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I can’t even make myself a sandwich.” I always had people there to do things for me. It was a lonely and depressed time for me.

  Then another one of my so-called friends stabbed me. José Torres’s book about me finally came out. It originally was supposed to be an authorized biography, but when I got with Don, we withdrew my cooperation. Next thing I knew it was a tell-all book filled with dirt and lies and distortions about me. He had a scene in the book where we were supposedly walking and talking about women and sex and he had me say, “I like to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed. It gives me pleasure.” I never said that about women. I said that about my opponents in the ring. Torres was just a pervert. The book was filled with inaccuracies like that.

  I didn’t bother to deny the stories when the book first came out, but I did comment on Torres’s betrayal. “He’s your friend, he’s hugging you, tells you how much he loves you and he’ll die for you but now I have to make some money so I’m going to cut your throat and leave you to bleed to death.”

  While we’re on the subject of blood, I became preoccupied with AIDS at this time. My next fight was in Atlantic City on July twenty-first. Part of the preparation for the fight was to take an AIDS test. Because boxers often bleed, they were trying to protect the referees, the cornermen, and the other boxer. I was scared to take the test. I was always sleeping with nasty girls so I thought I had AIDS. They came to test me and I just refused.

  “Take the fucking test, Mike,” Don would plead. “You don’t got that shit.”

  “How do you know? What symptoms show that I don’t have it?”

  What Don didn’t know was that a childhood friend of mine had died of AIDS. My friend and I both had unprotected sex with the same girl. And then the girl died of AIDS too. We all used to go to this one club and the bouncer knew that I was close to the girl, and whenever I’d show up at the club, he’d just look at me.

  “Yo, Mike. How you doin’? You look like you been losing weight.”

  I just knew that behind my back he was telling people I was sick with AIDS.

  AIDS was everywhere in our lives then. One of my childhood role models had contracted it. We called him Pop, we didn’t even know his real name. He was a flamboyant gay guy, about five years older than me. He was a big-time moneymaker because he dressed immaculately with big furs and rings and diamonds so nobody in the stores would think he was stealing anything. Pop would only hang out with women when he was getting down. He didn’t like bringing us around because we would wake the place up. But he was always generous and would break us off some.

  My next fight was against Carl “the Truth” Williams. He was a 12-1 underdog and I didn’t think he posed any real threat to me. To stir up some interest in the fight and to make some quick cash, Don had set up a 900 phone line. When you called in, you were supposed to get exclusive information about me for your money. It was really just a tape recording of Don interviewing me.

  “If you beat Carl Williams, who will you fight next?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  And people paid for that shit.

  The fight itself didn’t last as long as that 900 phone call.

  Williams kept throwing his left jab and I pinched to the side and simultaneously threw a left hook that landed square on his jaw. He went down and got up, leaning against the ropes for balance. The ref asked him a question and didn’t like what he heard and stopped the fight. The fight had lasted two seconds longer than the Spinks fight. I was surprised that the ref stopped it. I didn’t think Williams was hurt that bad. But as I told Larry Merchant after the fight, I would have been all over him. I was always the most dangerous when I had someone hurt.

  Merchant asked me who I would fight next and he threw out a whole list of names including Holyfield, Douglas, and Dokes.

  “Come one, come all. No one can get close to me. I’m the best fighter in the world,” I said.

  “Don told me if I knock this guy out, he’s paying me a hundred thousand dollars,” I told Larry. Don squeezed his way into the camera frame. “When is this going to happen?”

  “At the post press conference,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” I got so excited. “My church can use that money,” I said.

  We collected that cash and put it in our bag and Craig Boogie and I went to Mount Vernon directly after the fight to hang out with Heavy D and Al B. Sure! We hung out at Heavy’s house with his parents for a few hours and then we went to the city to spend that money at the churches of our choice – first Columbus and then every club from Harlem to downtown. I stayed in New York partying for a month after that fight.

  Of course, I went right back to Brownsville and spread some of the wealth in my hood. And sometimes Brownsville came uptown to us. I was rid
ing up Madison Avenue in my limo with my old friend Gordy. I looked out the window and saw this man and woman in long expensive fur coats walking quickly down the street chased by a manager from one of the expensive stores on Madison Avenue.

  “Hey, come back here! Come back here!” the manager was yelling.

  Then I looked closer and I realized it was Pop and his friend Karen. Gordy and I laughed our asses off that even though he had AIDS Pop was still doing his thing.

  I really went over the top in the years we had Team Tyson. I wasn’t operating on a logical basis in my mind. I truly thought I was a barbarian champion. “If you don’t like what I say, I will destroy you, tear your soul apart.” I was Clovis, I was Charlemagne, I was one mean son of a bitch. One of my bodyguards actually began to think that his name was “Motherfucker” because all he’d hear was “Motherfucker, get me this” or “Let’s go, motherfucker.”

  That was a wild camp in Ohio. Everybody was getting their ass kicked around. I was that kind of ruler. Nobody was getting fired, we were just kicking ass. I remember kicking Don King in the head so hard that EB said it looked like dust came out of his Afro.

  One Sunday I told Don, “Man, I ain’t never seen a million dollars in cash. You better go get me a million dollars.”

  “But the bank is closed, Mike!” Don said.

  “You got connections. Go open the bank and get my million dollars! I want to see it in cash,” I warned. Man, I was fucked up. I was just making shit up, finding a reason to kick Don in the head.

  “Don’t do that, Mike. Don’s going to get angry and fuck you up,” everybody would say.

  “You all afraid of him?” I said. Bam! I kicked him in the head.

  One day Ali and a few other people were at Don’s house in Vegas. I used to hear stories that Ali and Larry Holmes and a lot of other boxers were scared of Don. I respected them and wanted them to know that Don was nobody to be scared of. I would say deplorable things about him in front of everyone just to prove how worthless he was. I don’t know if that was the real motivation for me whupping his ass. I was a young immature kid then and I just felt like doing it.