by Mike Tyson
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, which were charged to my bill. I was told that they were even stealing towels from the hotel.
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.”
Now the motherfucker was just copying Cus.
“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? He wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him. He tells the truth by accident.
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 everywher
e 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 riding 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 you killed, Don gets people killed,” 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 because they thought Don could get them killed. 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.
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 a liar and betrayer. 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.