One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Boxing purists agreed, but the public would need some convincing. Tyson’s face was splashed across newspapers and magazines; it filled America’s television screens and radio airwaves. Boxing fans weren’t only tracking Tyson’s ring career—they were also following his much-publicized rocky marriage to TV actress Robin Givens, which was becoming more tumultuous by the minute. The name Spinks hadn’t been this irrelevant since Leon and Michael were boxing out of the DeSoto.

  To make the fight happen, Lewis would have to cross a number of bridges he’d burned when pulling Michael out of the HBO tournament. He figured he could patch things up with HBO—its executives would surely be interested in a spectacle of this size—so he started talking with Tyson’s co-managers, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton. Jacobs handled the boxing decisions, Cayton the financial ones.

  The pedigrees and deal-making styles of the negotiators, Rock Newman remembers, were worlds apart. “You had Butch, who was an absolute maniac madman, and he’s negotiating against Jacobs and Cayton, who fancied themselves these sophisticated, cerebral businesspeople,” Newman says. “They truly looked down their noses at Butch. Cayton was just utterly condescending. Both Cayton and Jacobs were very deliberate in their speech, in their enunciation and articulation. They’d use a [fancy] word every now and then and Butch would say [in a high-pitched voice], ‘Motherfucker, what the fuck does that mean? What the fuck is he talkin’ about?’ I remember Cayton saying, ‘If nothing comes out of this, I will have learned how to say motherfucker.’”

  Ill feelings were not limited to one side of the table. Wallace Matthews of Newsday quoted Lewis as saying that Cayton and Jacobs should be “generous with us instead of trying to play the great white fathers and dictating to us.”

  Matthews now says, “That was Butch’s nice quote about them. Behind the scenes he said, ‘They’re a couple of cold-blooded, reptilian motherfuckers.’ He especially hated Cayton. God, did he hate him.”

  Discussions began in earnest in January 1988. Lewis sat across from the two negotiators he so despised, working to get their offer into a range he found acceptable.

  At one point Cayton looked at his watch. “It’s 11:42,” he said. “Our final offer is five million dollars. You have three minutes to accept this offer or the fight won’t take place within the next twelve months. More importantly, we won’t talk for the next twelve months.”

  Lewis looked at his own watch. “So let me understand. If I don’t take this offer by 11:45, which I’m not going to do, we can’t talk again until 11:45 on this day one year from now?”

  Cayton looked back at his watch. “That is correct.”

  Rock Newman and the rest of Lewis’s staff were praying Lewis would put aside his pride and make the deal.

  “Internally, we all were urging Butch, ‘Make this fuckin’ deal, man,’” Newman says. “But he put his balls up on the goddamn table and steadfastly refused.”

  Once again the fight was as good as dead, but Lewis continued pounding on its chest. He figured that if he could land Ali back in 1976, he could revive this fight now—he just had to figure out how. He found his answer when he took the negotiations out of the boardroom and onto his own turf: the street.

  “Butch called us together and said, ‘We gotta go guerilla,’” recalls Newman. “Going guerilla involved paying somebody in the Tyson camp to give us Tyson’s schedule—whether he was going to a basketball game, whether he was going to a bordello. Wherever [Tyson] was, we always knew. He couldn’t step out of a car, he couldn’t turn around, he couldn’t go to a game, he couldn’t go to a club, he couldn’t go to a party where we didn’t have somebody saying, ‘You know, you a bitch, man, you scared of Michael Spinks.’ [Sometimes] we would send females. More than once Tyson was at a club and a female would ease up to him and say, ‘You’re acting like a bitch not fighting Michael.’ He was like, ‘No, you the bitch.’ It was down and dirty, man. I’d be getting calls [from the mole] at two, three o’clock in the morning. I’m telling you, it was clandestine shit. [We paid that guy] somewhere around $75,000.”

  In Bad Intentions: The Mike Tyson Story, author Peter Heller wrote, “During one encounter in Los Angeles, Tyson almost fought it out with a guy who wouldn’t let him off the hook about not fighting Spinks. Coincidentally, Butch Lewis was in the same restaurant at the time. As more and more people asked [Tyson] why he was avoiding Spinks, Tyson grew madder and madder. Was all this orchestrated by Butch Lewis? When asked, Lewis just laughed and said, ‘No comment.’”

  Michael had also campaigned for the fight. Lewis had told him that a matchup with Tyson would be a great way to cap off his career in terms of both glory and money, so Michael had gone on Late Night with David Letterman in June 1987, a week after the Cooney fight. A white bandage above his right eye marked the site of Cooney’s headbutt.

  Letterman asked Michael which boxing organization he represented.

  “I represent T.H.E.”

  “T.H.E.?”

  “Yeah. The heavyweight champion. That’s my title.”

  After a hearty laugh from the studio audience, Michael went on to say that he wanted to fight Tyson because the public wanted it.

  “It makes good business sense to take on Tyson,” he said. “And it brings me one step closer to having my career come to an end.”

  Letterman treated the comment as a straight line, getting a laugh by suggesting that Tyson’s punching power might terminate Michael’s career on the spot. Nonetheless, it was clear that Michael was looking to wrap up his life in the ring. He’d been a reluctant warrior since signing on with Lewis back in the projects. After thirty-one professional fights, he didn’t want to push his luck. He’d seen what had happened to Joe Louis’s mental health, Muhammad Ali’s motor skills, and Leon’s wallet. He wasn’t about to follow in their footsteps.

  Boyhood friend James Caldwell says, “We had talked years before and [Michael] was mentioning that he didn’t want to stay in the game so long that he ended up in a bad position down the road mentally or physically.”

  Steffen Tangstad remembers, “After [our] fight Michael came to Norway and told me that he’d been in the game for so long he was looking for a way to get out of the business and ‘ride out into the sunset like a lonely cowboy.’”

  Michael’s eagerness to leave the sport was tempered only by an intense fear of going broke. He had seen plenty of poverty at Pruitt-Igoe. According to Rock Newman, Michael had vowed to Lewis he’d never blow his money and had developed a nearly pathological fear of spending it.

  “Butch had a nickname for Michael,” says Newman. “He called him ‘Slim’ and ‘Skimmer.’ That had something to do with Michael being so tight [with money]. Butch controlled everything. I don’t know if Michael ever wrote a check in his life.

  “We were on a long promo tour for the Cooney fight. We went from Boston to New York to D.C. to Miami [all in the same day] and I didn’t eat the entire day. I think I grabbed a couple of grapes in D.C. Michael and I got in the limo in Miami. And Michael had a long black coat on and he’s sitting in the limo eating a cookie. I saw inside the pocket on that big-ass coat he had a big bag of Oreo cookies. So I said, ‘Mike, I’m starving, gimme some of those cookies.’ He went in that bag and he pulled out one cookie.”

  Childhood friend Jesse Davison shares similar stories. “I remember a time Michael came home and his mama asked him for some money and he started fussin’. I said, ‘Michael, that’s your mama, you’re supposed to help her pay the gas bill, the electric bill. Let her have some money.’ He used to hide his money in a pouch [points to the inside of his pant leg]. It had a key on it. He’d say, ‘Turn your head, Jesse,’ and then he’d open his wallet. He’d get out three or four hundred dollars and hand it to me. ‘Here, Jesse, take my mama to the store.’”

  There’s no doubt the Tyson fight would fill Michael’s pouch and then some, but Tyson’s co-manager Jim Jacobs still wasn’t onboard. He’d been dragging out the negotiations purposely, figuring that the delay w
ould help lessen Lewis’s financial demands. But the fifty-eight-year-old Jacobs, who’d suffered from leukemia for many years, suddenly developed pneumonia and passed away at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

  Tyson’s cornerman Steve Lott remembers how Jacobs’s death broke the stalemate. “The unforeseen happened. Jim [Jacobs] died,” Lott says. “Shelly Finkel got involved and was kind of putting the fight together behind Bill Cayton’s back. And because Shelly was handling closed circuit around the country, he wanted the fight made, so he offered Butch a lot of money. Then he went to [Tyson] and said the fight can be made and [Tyson] said, ‘Bill, I want the fight.’ So Bill had to make the fight.”

  With the bout on, Butch Lewis looked as prescient as Nostradamus. Michael, who was originally slated to fight Tyson in the HBO tournament for somewhere in the neighborhood of two million dollars, would now make $13.5 million. After taxes and expenses, he’d pocket a little less than half that amount. Add that to the cash he’d taken home against Cooney, and he’d be able to take his ride into the sunset. And he had Butch Lewis to thank.

  The hype for the Spinks-Tyson fight, which was promoted under the banner “Once and for All,” spilled out of America’s newspapers and cable boxes. Real estate mogul Donald Trump, host of the Atlantic City spectacular, predicted the live gate alone would bring in $12.3 million, which would make it the largest in boxing history. Sixteen hundred U.S. venues signed on for the closed-circuit feed. Thirteen hundred passes went out to the press. If Trump was to be believed—and no one seemed to be disputing him—the fight was on its way to grossing more than one hundred million dollars.

  With the bout growing closer, both training camps moved their headquarters from the Catskills to Atlantic City. As reporters searched for compelling prefight stories, the two Mikes could not have displayed more opposite personalities.

  Mike Tyson: “I’ll break Spinks. I’ll break them all. When I fight someone I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him. People say that’s primitive, that I’m an animal. But then they pay five hundred dollars to see it …. I’m a warrior…. If I wasn’t in boxing, I’d be breaking the law. That’s my nature.”

  Jim Lampley: “A great deal of Tyson’s persona in those days was constructed, was theatrical. The perception was larger than life. The way he bounced Tubbs off the canvas in Tokyo, the fact that a single punch caused Berbick to fall to the canvas three separate times. This was the highlight reel of [Tyson’s] early knockouts. Obviously those people had extremely questionable credentials, but he was flying them through the air, knocking them for loops. There was a comic book quality about [Tyson].”

  Michael was afraid of Tyson and had no qualms about saying so. “The fear is always there, especially at night,” he told Earl Gustkey of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s in the background. When I’m in bed at night, and the fight suddenly comes into my mind, my heart rate goes up and I can’t sleep. I’ll put the fight out of my mind, for a minute or two. Then it comes back…. Hey, I’m not talking just about Tyson… I go through this before every fight.”

  Author and boxing writer Thomas Hauser had gone to the kickoff press conference for Tyson-Spinks. “[The two fighters] walked out together,” Hauser recalls. “Michael was sort of mock-crying, saying [in a high-pitched crying voice], ‘I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go.’ He was trying to make a joke out of it, but you could see that he had already come face to face with [Tyson], and [Tyson] had given him that ugly look, and Mike was horrifically scary in those days.”

  On June 26, 1988, the night before the Spinks-Tyson showdown, ABC cleared airtime to carry the weigh-in live, marking the first time a weigh-in had been covered in such a fashion since Ali took on George Foreman in 1974. The event, held at Trump Plaza, was a dud. As Brian Schmitz reported in the Orlando Sentinel, the air inside Trump Plaza had so little electricity that “Don King’s hair fell.”

  The lack of buzz had less to do with the public’s expectations than it did with Michael’s demeanor. He simply had no bravado. The best he could do was show up in an oversize white straw hat and raise his arms in victory in front of the standing-room-only crowd. But when he stepped on the scale wearing nothing but a pair of white slacks, he looked like a true heavyweight, and the scale agreed. It read 212¼ pounds.

  Tyson, in shiny black trunks, was next. Between the glowering expression on his face and the bulging muscles rippling through his upper body, he had the look of a guy who wrestled steer in his spare time. The scale registered 218¼ pounds and his height was marked at five-eleven, although the naked eye said he’d had the benefit of a generous measuring tape.

  The two fighters did not exchange so much as a glance. The tensest moment came when Robin Givens, who had gone public with a purported miscarriage two weeks earlier, showed up in a black leather dress and her own entourage.

  Tyson made no statements regarding his private life, but before leaving he spoke briefly with reporters about the upcoming fight. His words reflected the old-school teachings of his trainer and mentor Cus D’Amato, who had taught him to unleash his inner rage in the ring.

  “This is a hurt business,” Tyson said. “When you see guys like Trump, Kennedy, and Rockefeller—bluebloods—when they come to a fight, regardless of what they may represent, they come to see someone get hurt, and my objective is to inflict as much punishment as possible.”

  Add to Tyson’s “crazy killer” persona the fiasco that was his personal life. He spoke openly of how he’d become unglued since D’Amato died in 1985. Now his marriage was imploding. Multiple news stories hinted that Givens had taken control of Tyson’s life. Word leaked out that she had tried to fire cornerman Steve Lott, and that she was in the process of replacing Bill Cayton with Don King.

  “I had written a story, ‘The Troubled Times of Mike Tyson,’ or something, maybe a week before the Spinks fight,” says Newsday’s Wallace Matthews. “And this was a story where Robin Givens told me that Mike was beating her up. And I had several meetings with her and her mother, and spoke with her sister. And they all painted the same picture of Mike as violent and abusive and out of control. So I had all of his stuff on tape and I was trying to get in touch with Tyson to get a response, and at the time Mike wasn’t talking to me. So I reached out to Jose Torres, who was close to Mike. And I said, ‘Look, Jose, I gotta talk to Mike. It’s really important. I’ve got something very damaging from his wife.’ And I remember Jose saying, ‘Ohh shit. Ohh shit.’ So about ten minutes later, Tyson called me and denied [the accusations]. He just sounded horrible. And at the end of the conversation, he was in tears and he said to me, ‘Listen, man, thanks, and I’m really sorry that we had to talk.’ And as soon as I put down the phone, I said this guy is not in his right mind.”

  On the day of the fight, Monday, June 27, Tyson shut down. He refused all but one interview request, that of Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg. Washington Post writer William Gildea and the Star-Ledger’s boxing beat writer Chris Thorne went with Izenberg to Tyson’s hotel room. There, the champ was holed up with his trainer, Kevin Rooney.

  Izenberg loosened up the tight-lipped Tyson as Gildea, Thorne, and Rooney looked on. “So, Mike, where do you run in the morning?”

  “On the boardwalk,” Tyson said. “It’s flat.”

  “What do you think about when you’re running?” Izenberg asked, steering the conversation toward boxing. “Do you think about how you want to fight Michael Spinks? About how you expect him to fight?”

  “Oh, no,” Tyson said. “Mostly I think about Cus. I think about Cus talking. His voice.”

  Izenberg knew virtually everybody in the boxing game, and D’Amato was no exception. He started imitating the trainer’s high, whiney voice.

  Tyson laughed. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “We used to have fun. Now it’s all about the money, the money, the money. Why did Cus have to die? Why did Jimmy [Jacobs] die on me?”

  When telling the story no
w, Izenberg says, “This is a guy who’s just been married, and his trainer, who’s supposed to be the closest guy in the world to him, is standing next to him. And then he says to me, ‘There’s nobody in the world I can talk to. Nobody.’

  “And he leans forward and he puts his head on my chest and he starts to cry. And he cried so hard that I had to go upstairs to my room and change my shirt. It made a helluva story ’cause the column I wrote [the next day] started, ‘The heavyweight champion of the world cried yesterday.’”

  Hours before the extravaganza, sports reporter and broadcaster Dick Schaap told the nearly ten million viewers of ABC World News Tonight, “It is a classic showdown. The most intriguing matchup of undefeated heavyweight kings since the first Ali-Frazier fight, and possibly the richest fight ever. Minimally Tyson will earn more than twenty million dollars, Spinks more than ten. And it is the taste of money that has in recent days inspired Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and People to devote covers to Tyson, and to his bride Robin Givens, an actress educated at Sarah Lawrence, hardly the typical silent and stoic fighter’s wife.”

  By 10:30 p.m. Convention Hall in Atlantic City was buzzing, as reporters, cameramen, and spectators waited for the fighters to make their entrances. But neither Spinks nor Tyson had come out of his dressing room. The HBO commentators first attributed the delay to a problem with the wraps on Tyson’s hands, and then to a standoff between Spinks and Tyson (ostensibly caused by Spinks’s insistence that he was the real champion and, as such, should enter the ring last). Had the public been privy to the actual goings-on, the 4:1 odds might have swung even more in Tyson’s favor.

  Tyson cornerman Steve Lott remembers the scene. “Butch Lewis came running into the locker room saying, ‘No one was here to watch the hands being wrapped. And I demand that the hand wraps be taken off Mike Tyson and put back on.’ At that point the commissioner, Larry Hazzard, was called from ringside. There was a big brouhaha between Butch Lewis and Larry Hazzard.”