by Mike Tyson
“I’m a big strong nigga that knocks out people and rapes people and rips off people. I don’t know nothing about being the heavyweight champion, the only thing I know is how to fight. I am a nigga, right? No, really, really, really, I’m not saying like I’m a black person, I am a street person. I don’t even want to be a street person, I don’t even like typical street people. But that is just who I became and what happened to my life and the tragedies in life that made me that way. The pimps, the hos, the players, the people who have been cast aside, the people who have been lied to, the people who have been falsely accused, the people who were on death row and killed for crimes they never committed. Those are my people. I know it sounds disgusting. Those are the only people who showed me love.
“But I’m Mike, I’m not malevolent or anything, I just am. And I just want to live my life and I know you guys talk some bad stigma out there about me, but you know I’m going to make sure you talk about me, and your grandkids and kids after that are going to know about me. I am going to make sure of that. They are never going to forget about me. Your great-grandkids are going to say, ‘Wow, wasn’t that a bizarre individual?’
“I feel sometimes that I was not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don’t do God’s work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? I’m a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me? I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss ‘Why are you acting like that?’ Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that. They’d throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he’s coming back to save us. But they don’t understand that when he comes back, these crazy, greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again.”
What was I, Lenny Bruce now? These reporters were sitting there taking all this down, parsing every word to get to the true essence of me, but what was so obvious was that this was the Maui weed talking. I was stoned out of my mind. End of story.
I did a ton of crazy interviews, and they culminated with my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox. Rita Cosby interviewed me. She was combative, asking me the most outrageous questions just to get me to say something crazy so that O’Reilly could go ballistic and take something I said out of context and put me down.
“Are you an animal?” Cosby asked me during the interview.
“If necessary. It depends on what situation am I in to be an animal … If I’m fighting because I’m constantly being assailed against by your cohorts or people in the street because they feel that they have the right to assail me because of what people write in the papers, because of the courts, then you’re correct and you’re right.” I told her that I would tell my kids that they were niggas and that “this society will treat you like a second-class citizen for the rest of your life, so there are certain things that you must not get upset for. But, you must fight.”
“Are you evil?” she asked.
“I think I’m capable of evil like everyone else.”
She also seemed to enjoy asking me about my financial state.
“I do need the money. That’s why it’s called ‘money’ – because we all need it. It’s our god. It’s what we worship, and, if anybody tells me anything different, they’re a liar. Stop working, just live on the street and show me how much God’s going to take care of you.”
“Where does the rage come from?” she finally asked me.
“You’re so white. Where does that rage come from?” I replied.
Lennox and I fought in Memphis on June eighth. Wherever that rage had come from, by then it was gone, even despite the fact that on the day of the fight, Monica served me with more divorce papers. Besides getting served, I was being sued up the ass by everybody. I had my little baby boy there with me because his mother had flipped on me so I was taking care of him. I was a mess. But still, my dressing room before the fight had a party atmosphere. It was packed with people. I’d never kissed babies or laughed or posed for pictures before a fight when Cus was around, but that was what was going on that night.
Shelly had gotten rid of Crocodile and Tommy Brooks and they had brought in a new trainer, Ronnie Shields. Crocodile came to the fight and stopped in to see me before it began. I grabbed him tight and hugged him.
“Croc, I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m so tired.”
When they were making the introductions in the ring, they cut it in half with twenty yellow-shirted security guards who formed a wall between me and Lennox. The fight started and I was aggressive in the first round, stalking him around the ring and making him hold me so much that the referee had to warn him. But after that round, something strange happened. I just stopped fighting. It was as if my mind had shut down. Ronnie Shields and my other trainer Stacy McKinley were shouting instructions at the same time, but I didn’t hear a word either of them said.
It was very hot in the arena and I got dehydrated. I couldn’t seem to start. As the rounds progressed, I stood there in front of him and got hit. I knew I wasn’t in any condition to beat anybody, especially a fighter of Lennox’s superb skill level. I had only fought nineteen rounds in the past five years. All those years of snorting coke and drinking and smoking weed and screwing around with massive amounts of women had finally taken their toll.
A lot of my close friends and associates thought that I had been drugged during the fight, I seemed so passive. I was in a fucked-up mood and it was hard for me to throw punches. It was as if all those heroes, those boxing gods, those old-time fighters had deserted me. Or I had deserted them. All of my heroes were truly miserable bastards, and I emulated them my whole career, a hundred percent, but I was never really one of those guys. I wish I was, but I wasn’t.
By then I had spent years in therapy with different psychiatrists and the whole purpose of my therapy was to curb all my appetites, including my appetite for destruction, the one that had made me Iron Mike. Iron Mike had brought me too much pain, too many lawsuits, too much hate from the public, the stigma that I was a rapist, that I was public enemy #1. Each punch I took from Lewis in the later rounds chipped away at that pose, that persona. And I was a willing participant in its destruction.
It went eight rounds and I got tagged with a solid right hand and I went down. I was bleeding from cuts over both of my eyes and from my nose. The ref counted me out. Jim Gray interviewed both of us at the same time after the fight. During the interview, Emanuel Steward, Lennox’s trainer, interrupted Gray.
“I’m still one of Mike’s biggest fans,” he said. “He’s given me so many thrills, going back to Roderick Moore. You’ve given all of us a lot of excitement. He’s the most exciting heavyweight in the last fifty years.”
“How sorry are you guys that this fight didn’t occur many years ago when you, Mike, were at your best and you, Lennox, weren’t quite as old either?” Gray asked.
Lennox was starting to answer and I wiped some of the blood off his cheek.
He said, “Heavyweights mature at different times. Mike Tyson was a natural at nineteen. Nothing stood in his way and he ruled the planet at that time. But I’m like fine wine. I came along later and I took my time and I’m ruling now.”
“Mike, are you sorry that this fight didn’t take place years ago?”
“It wasn’t meant to be. I’ve known Lennox since he was sixteen. I have mad respect for him. Everything I said was to promote the fight. He knows that I love him and his mother. And if he thinks that I don’t love and respect him then he’s crazy.”
“So you’re saying that a lot of the behavior was just to sell tickets and that doesn’t represent your true feelings?” Gray seemed shocked.
“He knows who I am and he knows that I’m not disrespectful. I respect this man as a brother. He’s a magnificent, prolific fighter.”
The little gesture of me wiping the blood off Lennox’s cheek was seized on by all
the boxing writers. They thought that I had been heroic in defeat. And for the first time, a lot of them seemed to see the human behind my façade. Almost.
“Tyson is a despicable character. A rapist, a thug you would not want within an area code of your daughter. But it’s going to be just a little harder to despise him now,” a nemesis from Sports Illustrated wrote.
As soon as the fight was over, I got right back into my vices. I had met an attractive Dominican girl named Luz. She had come to the Lewis fight with some other guys and we started hanging out. She lived in Spanish Harlem in New York and I moved in with her that fall. And I was right back in my environment. Abandoned buildings, the dope man on the street, people were OD’ing, a fat lady was pushing an addicted newborn down an alley, niggas with beers shooting at one another. That’s my element, sorry.
It was bad for me to be in my element, but once I was there my senses sharpened. I was paranoid, on the move, I was in survival mode. Once I moved into Spanish Harlem, I became Brownsville Mike again. People were feeding me. My drugs were free. I started hanging out in the drug dens.
How did I get from slapping a motherfucker five and letting him take a picture with me to being right there in the dope den where the naked women are packing the bags of coke? How did I get there, sniffing the coke and the man is going, “No, that shit is for the dumb crack niggas. This is the flakes. You’ve got to try the flakes, Poppy.” I took one hit of that shit and my eyeballs froze.
I’d go down to the restaurant that was on the corner and they’d give me free food. I’d be eating all the rice and beans and they were plying me with liquor and it was still early in the morning. Some of my gangster friends would come to visit me. They’d be in their Rollses and fancy cars.
“What the fuck are you doing up here with these bitches?” one of them asked me. “Come live in my house.”
“No, I’m good right here, nigga,” I said. “This is my woman, I’m good.”
“Mike, you got to watch these niggas up here,” he said.
“Nah, man. These people are good,” I told him.
I was hanging with those people and deep in my heart I knew I belonged there at that moment because that was how I felt about myself. Because in the hood it was different – people might feed me for free and give me drugs and take care of me, but if something went down, I was there with them. I had my vices and the people in the neighborhood understood my barometer.
I was juggling at least twenty girls at that time. Sometimes their worlds collided and I bore the brunt of it. Someone I was dating heard that I had been with someone else. Now, you would think a girl would be out of her mind to put her hands on Mike Tyson. But when they got mad they didn’t give a shit. They’d hit me and scratch at my face. Then when you thought that it was all over and they’d cooled down, the next thing you know, a rock hits you in the head and she was mad as a motherfucker all over again.
On January 13, 2003, my divorce was finalized. Monica got the Connecticut house, her house, and $6.5 million from my future earnings. Eventually she would get a lien on my Vegas house. She was pretty hostile towards me at this point, but I didn’t care about giving her the money. I’m a street guy; I was going to be out in the streets hustling.
Even though my heart wasn’t in boxing anymore, I still had to make some money. I had Shelly get me a fight on February twenty-second against Clifford Etienne. A week before the fight, I went to get a tattoo that became my most notorious tattoo. I told the artist, S. Victor Whitmill, aka Paradox, that I wanted a tattoo on my face. I hated my face and I literally wanted to deface myself. I suggested tiny little hearts all over it. It wasn’t some ploy to make me more attractive to women; I just wanted to cover up my face. But Victor refused to do that; he said that I had a good face. He came up with that Maori tribal design and I told him I’d think about it. The more I thought, the more I liked the idea of putting a tattoo that was used by warriors to scare their opponents in battle on my face. So I went with it.
I trained much harder for this fight than the Lewis fight. I came in under 225 pounds, nine pounds lighter than for Lewis. Etienne had a good record and he was in the top ten of both conferences, but he had a weak chin. He’d been knocked down ten times in twenty-six fights.
There was a documentary crew trailing me around for a film. They filmed me as I gulped down my prefight meal.
“I hate Mike Tyson. I mostly wish the worst for Mike Tyson. That’s why I don’t like my friends or myself. I’m going to extremes. Maybe in my next life, I’ll have a better life. That’s why I’m looking forward to go to the other world – I hate the way I live now. I hate my life now.”
I didn’t know why I was more focused for this fight than for the fight with Lewis. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. The bell rang and I charged Etienne and we came together on the ropes and I pulled him down on me. I think that I had hurt him with one of my first punches. We got up and I ducked one of his punches and threw a counter that landed square on his jaw and down he went. I thought that he could have gotten up. I didn’t think it was a great punch that could knock someone cold, but I don’t really know because it was really precise. After he was counted out, I helped him get up and we hugged. Clifford whispered something in my ear.
Jim Gray came into the ring to do the interview.
“He said something to you in your ear that nobody could hear, what exactly was it that he said?”
“To be honest, he said, ‘You need to stop bullshitting and be serious, you’re not serious, that’s why you are out here playing around.’ He said the truth.”
“And he is right, isn’t he?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, he is. I am just happy to be back in Memphis and give a decent show and I am glad brother Clifford gave me a fight and people don’t understand the business when you show your love and respect, when you fight one another, because that is how we elevate our lifestyle.”
“Mike, were you really sick this week? What was the problem?”
“I broke my back.”
“What do you mean by that, you broke your back?”
“My back is broken.”
“A vertebrae or a portion …?”
“Spinal.”
“You did that in sparring?”
“No, I did it by a motorcycle accident. The doctor discovered, I was doing my sit-ups, 2,500 a day with my twenty-pound weight, and one day I couldn’t move anymore. And I just asked the doctor, ‘What is wrong?’ And he said, ‘Believe it or not your back is broken slightly.’ ”
“Are you in pain right now? Did you take some type of injection? How did you make it to this fight?”
“I can’t take injections; you know they’re going to test me. But all praise be to Allah, I don’t know. I’m just happy that I’m fighting and I’m punching well and accurate.”
“Were you ready for this fight, Mike, I mean your trainer Freddie Roach advised you four days before the fight, not to fight. Were you ready?”
“No, but I’m obligated, I’ve got to be a man and fight. I canceled too many fights in my career, and I don’t want anybody to think I was afraid. And I needed the money, I am always in need of money, and I am glad the both of us did it. I have so much respect for him as a man, he is a friend of mine.”
Gray started asking me whether I was going to fight Lewis again. That was the speculation: another big Lewis fight to make a lot of money.
“I’m not ready to fight him now. I’m not interested in getting beat up again. I don’t know if I want to fight anymore if I have to fight Lewis next fight. I want to get my shit together. I’m so messed up; I just want to get my life together.”
I carried that morose attitude with me back to my hotel suite, trailed by my documentary film crew. I did a video conference call with my kids to see if they had seen their daddy win. Then I kicked the camera crew out of my room and started partying with my pimp/gangster friend. He had brought some of his girls with him along with another girl who was a friend of a friend. I ha
d a few snorts of coke and smoked some weed and my mood lifted. We had a few bottles of Dom Pérignon open. My friend was telling one of his war stories and we were all laughing and the girl who was a friend of my friend joked and said, “Oh, you’re full of shit, nigga.”
BOOM! My friend grabbed that Dom bottle and clocked her on the head with it. I tried to stop him, but he was too fast. The blood was bursting out of her head like an oil geyser.
I was thinking that my life was ruined. We were in the South. The girl was screaming like crazy, and she was married to a very well-known celebrity. My friend was going to have to kill these people and I would be associated with all this. Then all of a sudden, my friend and the girl were talking all pleasant with each other. That was just how that pimp-ho shit goes.
I had picked up another $5 million from the Etienne fight, but I was still in massive debt. My lawsuit against Don King was still making its way through the court system and Don was getting nervous about me having my day in court. So he started reaching out to me. I didn’t have any long-standing contract with Shelly, so I was a free agent of sorts at the time. Don figured he could woo me and show me a little cash and I’d come back to him and drop the lawsuit.
I was consumed with getting money. I couldn’t wait years for the lawsuit to play out; I needed money right then. Instant gratification wasn’t quick enough for me. So I reached out to Jackie Rowe to help me deal with Don. Jackie was like a pit bull. I’d say, “Baby, get me this,” and she’d go out and get it done. And then I’d go get high.
In April of that year, I had Jackie talk Don into buying me three Mercedes-Benzes. I had him put one of them in Jackie’s name, one in Luz’s name, and the other in my friend Zip’s name. We were playing Don, telling him that if he’d come through with cash and cars, maybe I’d drop the lawsuit. So Don would set up a meeting thinking he could fool me into signing some new agreement to settle the case for peanuts and I’d wind up robbing or beating him each time.