Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I was hoping that Robin didn’t hear that. Holy shit, the minute she came into that room, she had taken me off my square. There I was, jumping off the stage, going over to her and the cast in my cool hip nonthreatening black man persona.

  “Hi, guys. How are you all doing?”

  That’s the phony shit that Cus was talking about. So I had to go back and forth between my megalomaniac shit and my nonthreatening shit and it was confusing even me. It’s hard trying to be two motherfuckers at once in one place.

  “You motherfucker, I’m going to kill you, nigga.” “So how are you doing, my love?”

  I was defending my two belts that night, so I was psyched but I wasn’t overconfident. Pinklon was a former champion only beaten once by Trevor Berbick and that was a fluke. I got off good that night and almost knocked him out in the first round. But in the second, third, fourth, and fifth he was coming back. He probably won a few of those rounds. He had a masterful, hard jab, but he was just tap, tap, tapping, and getting points.

  Between the fifth and sixth rounds, Kevin got on me in the corner.

  “Are we going to fight or are we going to bullshit, huh? Fight or bullshit.”

  I told Kevin that Thomas was getting tired right before the sixth round.

  In the sixth I got off a devastating left hook that exploded on his chin, but he was such a disciplined and composed fighter that he acted like it didn’t faze him. But I had watched all the great fighters, Robinson, Marciano, I knew that if I hit you right, you’re hurt. I don’t care how much of a poker face you have on. So I just threw everything I had at him, maybe a fifteen-punch barrage, and I came up with that resounding knockout. He was knocked-out cold and once he fell onto the floor, he was so gutsy he tried to get up. But I saw the pain on his face and I knew he wouldn’t make it. That might have been the most vicious knockout of my career. It was like hitting the heavy bag, I wasn’t worried about anything incoming. Just think about how much character he exhibited. All that pain on his face and he’s still trying to get up. I thought, Damn. You want some more?

  Even though I won the fight with a masterful knockout, I wasn’t pleased with my overall performance, and I began questioning the fights that Jimmy and Cayton were lining up for me. Cus wanted to work with me on certain things before he died. But these guys didn’t care, they just threw me in with anyone. Cus might have thought that the Pinklon match was too soon and he might have put me in with someone else. I didn’t look good that fight even though the knockout was resounding. Cus would have been angry with me. But I didn’t have that anymore. I didn’t have to worry about somebody ripping my fucking ass out in the dressing room if he didn’t like what I was doing. I didn’t have to listen to anybody. You know how easy it is to relax when you don’t have to give a fuck?

  After the Thomas fight, I had more time to spend with Robin. We had sex, but it wasn’t passionate. She’s not the type to be sucking on your toes and all that shit. She’s pragmatic. But I just thought she was an adorable girl. Until she caught me cheating. I was constantly cheating on her and constantly getting caught. I wasn’t too suave. She’d see lipstick on the crotch of my sweatpants.

  Then it was on.

  “Fuck you. How could you do this? Aggghh,” she’d scream and charge me, throwing punches and trying to kick me in the balls. She was relentless. I’d get frustrated and I’d slap her and figure that would end things, but it didn’t. She’d fight back harder. She wasn’t a Brownsville girl, she was a suburban girl, but don’t underestimate her. She had been in a few fights. These moments reminded me of my mother’s dysfunctional relationships with men.

  The truth is I was sick of fighting. I was sick of fighting with Robin and I was sick of fighting in the ring. The stress of being the world’s champ and having to prove myself over and over just got to me. I had been doing that shit since I was thirteen. And it wasn’t just the time I spent in the ring. Whether it was during a fight or in camp sparring, I had always fought guys who were more experienced than me. Normally when you see a champion sparring somebody or even fighting someone, he’s fighting somebody who is inferior to him who he can handle with ease. But my sparring partners were constantly trying to hurt me. That was their instruction. If they didn’t do that, they’d be sent home. When you start training, you’re scared. You ain’t going to go out and play and party because you know you have to fight this guy and the last time he gave you a fucking headache. You’re not going to go outside to the bar around the corner and visit no girl. You’re going home, you go in the tub, you’re going to concentrate on how you are going to box this guy the next day. That was my life and I was tired of it.

  I’ve always been a depressed kind of person, but this stress was just making it worse. I was moody all the time. I had to go right back into the ring the first day of August, so I had to start training with hardly a break. I got to camp in Vegas and I got homesick. I missed hanging out and partying in Albany with Rory and my other friends. It came to a head a little more than a month before the Tony Tucker fight. This was going to be the biggest fight of my career, the fight to unify all three titles.

  I pulled Steve Lott aside one day in the gym.

  “I’m going to retire,” I said.

  The pressure was getting to me. Big clumps of my hair were falling out from alopecia, a nervous condition. I didn’t even care if I got a third belt. Robin wasn’t exactly an anchor of stability for me; we were always fighting and temporarily breaking up. I was stressed out just from walking down the street. Guys would come up to me and say that they had bet their lives on me and I had to win or else they’d lose their house and their wife would leave them. I didn’t want to let those people down.

  I guess I just never thought I was good enough for the job. I was too insecure to be that dominant person. Between fights I was going to these really bucket-of-blood places, in the middle of Bumfuck, Florida, and I’m strutting in there and all these motherfuckers got their guns up. And I’m talking shit and starting fights. I’ve got all these diamonds on me, they should have beaten my ass and robbed me. They could have killed my fucking ass. Praise be to Allah that these people never killed me. You could put me in any city in any country and I’d gravitate to the darkest cesspool. Sometimes I’d go alone with no security. But I never got shot, never got stuck up. I always felt safest when I was in the hood. People would always ask me, “Mike, you ain’t scared down there?” I’d say, “Shit, I’m scared on the Vegas strip.” I was just so at home there. I’d see a lady and her kids out late at night in the freezing cold and it reminded me of my mother and me.

  So about a month before the Tucker fight I disappeared from camp and went to Albany and started partying. I partied for two weeks straight. I told my friends at a nightclub that I was retiring. But Jimmy got me on the phone and started threatening me. Everyone would sue us if I didn’t make the fight. I should have retired then, but I didn’t have control of my own life. What did those guys know about my life? Jimmy thought that Robin might be good for me, that she’d settle me down. I guess that Robin was a better deceiver than Jim was.

  I got back to training about two weeks before the fight. I had been partying hard in Albany and I never got into real tip-top shape. In the first round, Tucker hit me with an uppercut that backed me up. Everybody made a big deal about it, but I didn’t feel it at all. It was just me making a mistake. In the fourth round, I took control of the fight and I won almost every round after. The fight went the distance. While we were waiting for the decision, Tucker came over to Rooney and me.

  “You’re a damned good fighter. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a chance to fight me again,” he said.

  “You think you won?” Rooney said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  Then Tony started praising Jesus. But it didn’t help. I won a unanimous decision but I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel good about anything at that point in my life. Larry Merchant must have
picked up on that while he was interviewing me on HBO after the fight.

  “For a guy who just won the undisputed championship of the world, you’d think you’d be a little happier.”

  “As long as you make mistakes, you don’t have the means to be happy,” I said. “I’m a perfectionist and I want to be perfect.”

  After the fight, Don King threw a hokey “coronation” to celebrate me winning the unified title. I didn’t even want to go to it, but Jimmy told me it was part of doing business so I attended. I felt like I was a piece of a freak show. Chuck Hull, the ring announcer, had changed into a medieval English costume. He was surrounded by six mock Beefeater trumpeters wearing Elizabethan blue-velvet costumes with feathered caps. They paraded my two “victims” down a red carpet, “Sir Bonecrusher” and “Sir Pinky.” Then Hull spoke.

  “Hear ye, hear ye! By order of the people of the world of boxing, in this glorious year of nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, it is hereby proclaimed that in lands near and far, one man above all others shall stand triumphant in the four-corner-square ring of battle, hereby trumpeted as the ultimate world heavyweight champion.”

  Then Don King gave one of his typical wild shit speeches. He just wanted to be more famous than the fighters. Then they paraded all the HBO executives and the fight promoters down the red carpet. A children’s choir sang. They got celebs like Dennis Hopper and Philip Michael Thomas to hand out trophies to every minor functionary there. When it was my friend Eddie Murphy’s turn to hand out a trophy, he ad-libbed, “The man whipped everyone’s butt and he ain’t got a trophy. All the white men got trophies. I don’t understand.”

  They were saving the best for last. They put a chinchilla robe from Le Nobel furriers around me, then they had Ali place a jeweled crown on my head, studded with “baubles, rubies, and fabulous doodads,” King said. They gave me a jeweled necklace and a jeweled scepter from Felix the Jeweler.

  “Long live the heavyweight king!” Don screamed. I felt like a circus clown. Then they asked me to give a speech. What the fuck could I say?

  “Does this mean I’m going to get paid bigger purses?” I cracked. “Pleasure to be here. I came a long way. I look forward to defending the title as long as I can.” I felt like such a smuck.

  I had extra motivation for my next fight. I was going to fight Tyrell Biggs in Atlantic City on October sixteenth. I was still jealous of him having a gold medal from the Olympics when I was shut out. Now the boxing writers started turning on me. They were writing shit about Biggs being able to beat me. Wally Matthews of Long Island’s Newsday wrote, “There are doubts about how good Mike Tyson really is.” They thought that my extracurricular activities outside of the ring might be stunting my growth.

  A week before the fight, I got interviewed about it.

  “I never really hated anybody. I think I hate Tyrell Biggs,” I said. “I want to give him a good lesson, I want to hurt him real bad.” What I really meant was that I wanted to fuck up the darling of America. I wanted to be the villain, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want my gold medal. Plus, Biggs had dissed me at an airport once. We were flying together to the Olympics in L.A. He was going to fight and I was just going to observe and have a good time. Some fan came up to us. “Good luck at the Olympics,” he told us both.

  “What? You mean on this flight, not his fight. He’s not fighting at the Olympics,” Biggs said.

  Shit like that stayed with me then. I trained so hard. I was motivated to kick his ass. I don’t even like talking about this fight. It was seven rounds of heartless punishment. I elbowed him, low-blowed him, punched him after the round was over. That was my dark, stupid, ignorant side, my side that I’m ashamed of, coming out. I prolonged the punishment over seven rounds. I was a young, insecure kid and I wanted to be special at someone else’s expense.

  “I could have knocked him out in the third round, but I did it very slowly. I wanted him to remember it for a long time,” I told the reporters after the fight. “When I was hitting him in the body, he was making noises like a woman screaming.”

  I was just being a jerk. I did hear him make some hurt noises but he wasn’t screaming.

  I had a personal stake in the fight after that too. Cus and I had been talking since I was fourteen about beating Larry Holmes. He had given me a blueprint—hit him with the right, behind my jab. I thought I would become part of boxing history by taking Holmes out and avenging my hero Ali’s defeat, like Sugar Ray Robinson avenged Henry Armstrong by beating Fritzie Zivic.

  Three weeks before the fight, Kevin gave me a warning.

  “Holmes is a better fighter than Biggs and you trained harder for Biggs than you’re training for this,” he told me. “You better step it up.”

  So I did.

  I went to the prefight press conference but I was bored. I always hated those things. Sometimes I’d even fall asleep at them. There was nothing I wanted to hear. I just wanted to fight; I didn’t want to go through all of that stuff. Don King would be talking all this bullshit and gibberish, making up these fake fucking words. “The matrimony of fisticufftis and delishmushnisifice of illumination, critation and emancipation.” Who wanted to hear that shit?

  But at this press conference, I decided to snub Holmes. I was very offensive. So Holmes got arrogant.

  “I’m going down in history, not Mike Tyson, he’s going down in history as a son of a bitch. If he do happen to win the fight, down the line he’ll destroy himself.” I guess he was Nostradamus that day.

  We broke all records for ticket sales. All the celebs were there—Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, Don Johnson, Kirk Douglas.

  I got so wound up warming up in my dressing room that I literally punched a hole in the wall. I’m just an animal sometimes. I turn from a rational to an irrational person in a tenth of a second. I think about being bullied as a kid and having my money taken from me. I didn’t intend to put my hand through the wall, but I hit it a good shot. I had been warming up and I knew the wall was pretty solid. I was hitting it, pow, pow, pow, and then, boom! My hand went right through it.

  I had quite a few girlfriends at the fight. Robin was there and so was Suzette Charles. But I was sneaky enough to get other girls in too without my management even knowing. I’d get two tickets for this dude, but his daughter was my girl. Another one came with her brother. I was devious.

  I made my entrance without music. I was all business. They brought Ali into the ring to wave to the audience. He came over to my corner. “Get him,” he said.

  The bell rang and we went at it. I was beating Holmes every round. He hadn’t trained enough, so he was scared to throw a punch. In the fourth round, I was on the ropes and the referee said, “Break.” As soon as he said that, I threw that two-punch combination that Cus used to talk about. POW, POW, and he went down. He got back up but he was hurt. All I had to do was touch him, I didn’t even have to hit him on the chin, he was going down. I was going full speed ahead and he was avoiding most of the punches. He was very difficult to hit because his arms were so long he could catch your punches in the air. But then he made the mistake of throwing an uppercut and he got caught in the rope and, BAM, I knocked him out. I tried to help him up but his corner wouldn’t let me near him.

  So I leaned in and said, “You’re a great fighter. Thank you.”

  “You’re a great fighter too, but fuck you,” he said back to me.

  “Fuck you too, motherfucker,” I said.

  At the post press conference I was very modest.

  “If he was at his best, I couldn’t have stood a chance,” I said. I hadn’t turned over a new leaf and become humble overnight. I was quoting Fritzie Zivic, the great champion, who said that after he beat Henry Armstrong. You’ll notice that I’m always quoting my heroes, it’s never me talking.

  After the fight I was honored to have Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson visit me in my dressing room. I loved Barbra.
She was from Brooklyn too.

  “I think your nose is very sexy, Barbra,” I told her.

  “Thank you, Mike,” she said.

  Can you imagine me, a twenty-one-year-old kid, living my dreams like this? Barbra Fucking Streisand coming to my dressing room to see me? Cus always told me that anything I ever saw on TV I could have. And that included women. Robin wasn’t the only girl I met like that. If I wanted some exotic car I could call any place in the world and they’d custom design it for me and put it on a boat and ship it to me.

  That’s the way I started getting my clothes. Besides the great old fighters, I used to use the tough Jewish gangsters as role models. Guys like me who had no core identity would emulate other people’s lives. If I read that Joe Louis loved champagne, I started drinking champagne.

  I was enjoying the perks of fame. I’d see a beautiful girl and I’d say, “Hey, come here, talk to me, do you like this car?” It might have been a Mercedes. And she would say something like, “Wow, this is a beautiful car.”

  “Do you really believe this is a beautiful car?”

  “Oh, man, I would love to have a car like that,” she’d say.

  “And I would love to have you. I think a fair exchange is operative, right? Come with me.”

  It worked every time.

  When I wasn’t training, I’d wake up and open up a bottle of champagne and order up some caviar, some lox, some egg whites. I’d have one or two beautiful women in the bed and I’d put some Billie Holiday on the stereo. I was living in a fantasy world. I never had to wait in line to get into a restaurant or a club. I’d date beautiful models, hang out with the jet-setters. This was the world Cus wanted me to be part of. But he also wanted me to hate the people in that world. No wonder I was so confused.

  After a while, the perks of fame began receding and the magnitude of my renown became a burden. I’ll never forget one time when I was just starting my professional career, I was hanging out with Pete Hamill and José Torres. Pete said, “Let’s go for a walk.”