by Mike Tyson
Rory and John would come to me. “Mike, listen, the man’s sixty-something years old. You keep hitting him, you’re going to give him brain damage. He told us to call you and let you know he ain’t going to come around if you keep hitting him, so just chill out.” So I had to chill out.
They all thought I was crazy. I wasn’t training. I was partying too much. And then having barely trained, I’d go fight a guy and still knock him out. You know, I might have for that moment of time been crazy. I’m so far away from that person now. I’m, like, Whoa, fuck, I was crazy.
I really believed that I was the baddest man on the planet. I was kicking Don’s ass thinking I was fucking John Gotti over here. Don used to try to get me to go see a doctor. He’d say, “Mike, you need to go see a psychiatrist, brother. Something ain’t right here.” He actually got me to see Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Bill Cosby’s guy, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He was a real erudite didactic guy. Poussaint asked me what my problem was and I started saying crazy shit to him. “Fuck it. I don’t care about living and dying, I don’t give a fuck.” That guy was so bourgeois and regal he made me sick to my stomach. He got the fuck away though. He ran out of the house and never came back.
When I think about all the horrific things that Don has done to me over the years, I still feel like killing him. He’s such an asshole. He’s not a tough guy. He’s never been a tough guy. All the tough-guy things he’s done have been through him paying someone to do it for him.
I didn’t care what anybody thought about me then. I was just living every day the way I wanted to. I was like a cowboy gambling with life. I wanted to be the villain and I had become that person. Boxing Illustrated magazine published an article, “Is Mike Tyson Becoming the Most Unpopular Heavyweight in History?” Dave Anderson from the New York Times wrote a column, “Who Is Out There to Stop Tyson?” The press was turning on me and I loved it. I was such an irritant. I needed more people to fight.
The press despised me by then. I’d spit at them, yell at them; that was just who I was. I’d tell them, “You just say something back. You could sue me but you’re going to have to use that money to buy yourself a fucking wheelchair with the fancy motors and toilet because that’s what you’ll be going around in.”
“How dare you talk to me? You never fought a day in your life and you’re here judging people. Who are you? You’ve never even put on a pair of gloves. You got your job from your brother. The only things you can do is drink and cheat on your wife. You’re just some fucking derelict that writes for a newspaper.”
Don signed me to fight Razor Ruddock next. The hotels in the States weren’t interested in paying big fees for that fight. Trump felt burnt by my last quick KO over Williams. So King found some guys in Edmonton, Canada, to pay a $2.6 million site fee. We were scheduled to fight on November eighteenth. But after hanging out in New York, I went out to L.A. and resumed nonstop partying there. I wasn’t too interested in fighting Ruddock. I had seen him fight Michael Weaver and he boxed brilliantly against him. But he never fought like that again. He turned into a knockout artist. In his fight before he was scheduled to fight me, he had been floored in the second round by Bonecrusher Smith and then he got up to knock him out impressively in the seventh.
I started training for the fight in Vegas in September but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to fight anymore. We moved camp to Edmonton in mid-October. I wasn’t in training. I was just sleeping with women. I didn’t even want to leave my room. I got my friends to grab a random girl and bring her back to my room. I didn’t care how she looked or what her name was. When we were done, she’d leave and another random girl would come. I finally told Don to make some excuse and postpone the fight. We used my bronchitis. I could have easily fought with it but when a doctor would see my X-rays he’d get alarmed. We called the fight off on October twenty-sixth and flew back to Vegas. Don had found some doctor to certify that I had contracted pleurisy. Pleurisy? What the fuck is pleurisy? I was worried that it was a venereal disease.
Don started looking for an easier matchup for me. He decided to take me to Japan in January to fight Buster Douglas, who he thought would be a pushover. Then he struck a deal with Evander Holyfield’s people and set up a match with him in June 1990 at the Trump Plaza. I’d walk away with $25 million for that fight. Cayton, who was still my manager of record, was happy to hear that.
So I threw myself back into partying. In November I got to meet some of the greatest celebrities imaginable when I participated in a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Sammy Davis Jr.’s showbiz career. I had such a great time. I talked to George Burns and Milton Berle about Fanny Brice and Ruby Keeler and Al Jolson. George was so old he had actually worked with Fanny. I hung out with the whole Rat Pack. Those guys really liked me a lot.
But meeting these guys couldn’t hold a candle to meeting my boxing idols. Of any celebrity I met around that time I was most in awe meeting Max Schmeling. He was in his mideighties when I met him. It was fascinating to talk to him about boxing. We talked about Dempsey and Mickey Walker. He told me that Joe Louis was the greatest fighter and also the greatest man. When he heard that Joe Louis was bankrupt, he left Germany and went to Harlem to look for Joe. Can you imagine an older white guy going to all the clubs in Harlem looking for Joe Louis? By the time I met him, Schmeling had become a billionaire, he owned all the rights to Pepsi in Germany. But what was so fascinating about him was that he still loved boxing. Everywhere he went, he’d take copies of his old fight films with him.
I loved old fighters. When I learned that Joey Maxim, the former light heavyweight champ, was working as a greeter at a Vegas hotel, I’d go visit him every other week and talk to him about his career. He was so mad that he was never introduced at ringside at any of the big fights at the Hilton, so I made sure they did that from then on. I never looked at guys like him as being bums or down on their luck. I looked at him as being bigger than me. It wasn’t like I was some big shot doing him a favor coming in; I was in awe to be there with him. I was just so happy to see him and touch him. When I went home that first night, I cried.
On January 8, 1990, I got aboard a plane to fly to Tokyo. Kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to fight; all I was interested in then was partying and fucking women. By the time we left, I had put on thirty pounds. King was so worried about my weight that he offered me a bonus if I would make my usual weight when we fought in a month.
I didn’t consider Buster Douglas much of a challenge. I didn’t even bother watching any of his fights on video. I had easily beaten everybody who had knocked him out. I saw him fight for the ESPN championship when I was on the undercard and he got beat by Jesse Ferguson, who I had knocked out in my first fight on ABC. I felt like my heroes Mickey Walker and Harry Greb. I read that Greb was so arrogant he’d tell his opponents that he hadn’t trained because “you are not worth me sweating for.” So I followed his lead. I didn’t train at all for the fight. Anthony Pitts was there with me and he would get up early in the morning and run with my sparring partner Greg Page. But I didn’t feel like it. Anthony would tell me that he’d see Buster out there, digging in with his army boots on, snotsicles hanging off his nose, getting in his run.
I couldn’t eat since I was overweight and I wanted to lose the weight and win the bonus from Don, so I drank the soup that was supposed to burn off fat. And then I had the cleaning ladies for the main course. It was ironic, because you go to Japan and the women seem so shy and introverted, but fortunately I ran into some unconventional Japanese ladies. People would ask me if I learned any sexual tips from the Japanese women, but I didn’t have time to learn. This was no sex education course; this was a guy trying to get his rocks off.
I didn’t even have to pay the maids to screw them. But I did tip them heavily because I had a lot of that Monopoly-looking money they had over there. They must have been appreciative because they’d come back and sometimes bring friends.
“My friend
would like to meet you, Mr. Tyson, sir. She would like to accompany us, sir.”
Besides having sex with the maids, I was seeing this young Japanese girl who I had had sex with the last time I was in Japan for the Tony Tubbs fight. Robin would go out shopping and I would go upstairs in the stairwell with her.
I had her do the same thing this time. There were too many people on my floor and I didn’t want Don or Rory or John or Anthony to know my business. They might have scared her; she was very shy around people. In the two years since I had seen her, she had matured a great deal.
So that was my training for Douglas. Every once in a while, I did show up to work out and spar. I was sparring with Greg Page ten days before the fight and I walked right into a right hook and went down.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Greg asked me later.
A few days later, Don opened up one of my sparring sessions to the public for $60 a head. I never saw any of that money, of course. At the time, I didn’t even know he was charging people. We were supposed to spar for two rounds but I looked so bad that Aaron Snowell and Jay stopped it after one and closed the session. Don was pissed off. He wanted to make a buck. He had no idea I was so out of shape. Don knew nothing about fighting. He couldn’t tell the difference between a guy in shape or out of shape. He didn’t even know how to tie a boxing glove.
The day before the fight I weighed in at 220½ pounds, my heaviest fighting weight to date. But I still got my bonus. The day before the fight I also had two maids at the same time. And then two more girls, one at a time, the night before the fight.
I wasn’t following the story but apparently Douglas had a lot of motivation to do well in this fight. In July of 1989, he had been born-again. And then his wife left him, his baby momma got a terminal disease, and early in January while he was in camp his mother died. I didn’t know any of that and I didn’t care. HBO was making a big deal about Douglas fighting for his mother, but my arrogance at the time was such that I would have said that he was going to join her that night.
We fought at nine a.m. because of the time difference back in the United States. Half of the arena’s sixty-three thousand seats were empty. Don was a lousy promoter. As soon as I got with him, everything just sunk. He was a dark cloud.
It wasn’t the usual Tyson going into the ring. It was obvious to anyone who was watching that I really didn’t want to be there. The fight started and I fought horribly. I was punching as hard as shit because I knew if I caught him right he wasn’t going to get up, I didn’t care how big he was. But I was hardly throwing. It was the least amount of punches I’d ever thrown in a fight. He used his jab and his reach to throw me off my game and then when I tried to throw body shots, he just held me. He fought very well that night. But I was an easy target for him. I wasn’t moving my head at all.
He wasn’t intimidated by me. In fact, he was the one punching after the bell and on breaks. He was fighting dirty but that’s just part of boxing, everyone did that. After the third round, I went back to my corner and it was obvious that Aaron and Jay were in over their heads.
“You’re not closing the gap,” Aaron said. “You’ve got to get inside, you’re flat-footed in there.”
No fucking shit. Why don’t you try to get inside? The guy had a twelve-inch reach advantage on me.
“Get back to what you know,” Jay said. “Do it. Let it go.”
Easy to say when you’re not getting punched. I kept staring at the floor.
Douglas rocked me in the fourth and the fifth. During the fifth round, my eye began to swell, but when I went back to the corner, they didn’t even have the End-Swell to keep my eye open. I couldn’t believe it when they filled what looked like an extra-large condom with ice water and held it to my eye.
I was exhausted by the sixth round. My left eye was totally shut. But Buster looked tired too, especially when the seventh round began. But I couldn’t get to him. In the eighth he wobbled me and had me against the ropes in the last twenty seconds. I was looking for one punch by then. I was still rocked by his punches, I couldn’t focus but I saw an opening. For the whole fight he had eluded me whenever I saw openings and I couldn’t bridge the gap, but by then he was tired too and he couldn’t move. So I threw my trademark right uppercut and down he went.
Then I got screwed. The timekeeper was Japanese and the referee was Mexican and they spoke different languages and couldn’t coordinate the count. When the ref was saying “five,” Douglas had actually been on the canvas for eight seconds. So he got a long count. I had to take the short end of the stick. That’s just part of boxing but I think I was really screwed. I don’t want to take anything away from Buster. He had so much courage and guts that night. I had hit him with an awesome shot. Anybody else’s head would have been sent to the space shuttle if they had experienced that punch. I was so spent that I couldn’t follow up on the knockdown the next round. He came back strong. When the tenth began, I hit him with a straight right to the jaw but then he unleashed a barrage of punches at my head, starting with a right uppercut. I was so numb that I didn’t even feel the punches, but I could hear them. My equilibrium was shot. Then I went down.
When I hit the canvas, my mouthpiece came out and as the ref was counting, I was trying to stumble to my feet and grab the mouthpiece at the same time. I was operating on pure instinct. I was totally out of it. The ref hugged me after he counted to ten. I walked back to my corner totally dazed. I was chewing on my mouthpiece but I didn’t even know what it was.
“What happened?” I asked my corner.
“The ref counted you out, champ,” Aaron said.
I knew it was inevitable. I was fucked from early on that fight. I didn’t do the postfight interview with HBO, my head was still ringing. I must have had at least one concussion.
Within minutes Don had organized a meeting with the WBC and WBA officials. Then he called his own press conference.
“The first knockout obliterated the second knockout,” he ranted. Jose Sulaiman, the president of the WBC, suspended recognition of anyone as champion because the ref had failed to take the count from the timekeeper. The referee admitted that he had made a mistake. Sulaiman immediately called for a rematch. By then, I was conscious enough to join the press conference. I was wearing sunglasses to hide my mangled eye and holding a white compress to my swollen face.
“You guys know me for years, I never gripe or bitch. I knocked him out before he had me knocked out. I want to be champ of the world. That’s what all young boys want,” I said.
I went back to my hotel room. There was no maid there. It was weird not being the heavyweight champion of the world any longer. But in my mind it was a fluke. I knew that God didn’t pick on any small animals, that lightning only struck the biggest animals, that those are the only ones that vex God. Minor animals don’t get God upset. God has to keep the big animals in check so they won’t get lofty on their thrones. I just lay on my bed and thought that I had become so big that God was jealous of me.
It was a long flight back from Tokyo. My eye was still fucked up so I was wearing these big dark sunglasses that Anthony Pitts gave me. During the flight I talked to Anthony.
“So I guess you’re going to leave me now,” I said. The addict in me was saying “I’m doomed. My world is over.”
“Mike, I’ll never leave you,” he said. “You can’t fire me and I can’t quit so we’re stuck together. You watch, you’ll be all right when the swelling goes down.”
We went straight to Camille’s house when we landed. I’m a weird dude, I go right back to the basics. Home to my moms. The next morning Anthony got up at seven a.m., and when he went downstairs I was already doing sit-ups and push-ups.
“Oh, now you want to train? After the motherfucking fight,” he said.
“Man, I’m just trying to stay focused,” I said.
I talked to Camille later. She had been at the fight watching from the front row and she thought that I looked like I was in a daze.
“Y
ou didn’t throw any vicious punches,” she said. “You looked like you wanted to lose. Maybe you just got tired of it.”
She was probably right. I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.
So I hung out in Catskill and played with my pigeons and read about my heroes. How Tony Zale had come back from Rocky Graziano. How Joe Louis came back to demolish Max Schmeling. How Ali came back from exile. How Sugar Ray Robinson just bridled at seeing the word “former” in conjunction with his name. My narcissism started working again and I started thinking that I was from these guys’ bloodline. I knew that it was inevitable that I would get back those belts. I was going to go away to some destitute place and learn this masterful trade and come back and be better, like in all those great Shaw Brothers karate movies. Ain’t that some bullshit? I was just a sewage rat with delusions of grandeur.
Meanwhile, the whole boxing world was in turmoil. The day after the fight, every major newspaper abhorred the idea that Douglas wouldn’t be recognized as the new champ. As soon as he got back to the States, Jose Sulaiman recanted. And Don was reduced to begging for an immediate rematch. He was banking that Evander Holyfield, who was the mandatory challenger, would take a nice sum to step aside to let me fight a rematch. But Holyfield’s people knew that if Evander beat Buster, Don would be on the outside of the heavyweight picture looking in.
Then there were the reporters who couldn’t contain their glee that I had lost. That little slimy coward Mike Lupica from the New York Daily News saw me as some Satan figure.