Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  At the press conference after the match, I was asked about Don and John and Rory cheating me out of millions of dollars.

  “I did a little screwing too,” I said. “I guess what goes around comes around.”

  Someone asked me about the way I pulled the unconscious referee out of the ring.

  “I’m on parole. For the record, I didn’t slam the referee. I politely took him out of the ring and put him on the mat.”

  Austin and I told the press that we had been secretly working together all along, but I kind of undermined the credibility of that by continually referring to him as Cold Stone instead of Stone Cold. I was so high that I had the munchies.

  In May, we announced that I was forming my own record label, Iron Mike Records. With the help of Irving Azoff and John Branca we would find a major label to distribute our artists’ work. In the meantime I had Jackie Rowe handling the business end. We also added my former lawyers and financial managers at Sidley Austin to our lawsuit. I was hoping to get something from these lawsuits soon because I was paying out lots of money to defend myself from all the lawsuits that were coming in against me. Besides the two women in the restaurant, I was being sued by my former tiger trainer, the company that owned a house in L.A. that I backed out of buying, my jeweler in Vegas, my Vegas house contractor, that quack Dr. Smedi, and even Kevin Rooney, my old trainer.

  The craziest lawsuit was filed by Ladywautausa A. Je, a wacky black broad who would have her assistant photograph her with unsuspecting celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. I had come out of a meeting with a filmmaker when she lifted her leg up against me and had her guy take a picture. Next thing we knew, she was filing a suit for sexual battery claiming that I pressed my body against hers, “pulling up her body suit saying, ‘Take a picture of this.’” As soon as we produced a few witnesses she dropped the case. But it got publicity.

  I did great with the Smedi suit. He sued me for the original $7 million he claimed I owed him, so we countersued and he wound up paying me $50,000. I didn’t do as well with Rooney. Despite the fact that he claimed to have an oral agreement in which he was to be my “trainer for life” and despite the testimony from many friends of Cus’s who said that Cus had become disenchanted with Rooney and wanted to replace him, the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a $4.4 million award that a jury had given him years earlier.

  So it was time to get back in the ring. I had sat out a year by then. Jeff had been talking with Dr. Elias Ghanem, who was the head of the Nevada boxing commission. I loved Dr. Ghanem. He was an Israeli-born Lebanese man who came to the States with nothing and built up an amazing medical practice because he was a throwback—a doctor who really cared about his patients. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret—he treated all the Vegas stars. He loved boxing too. He assured Jeff that I would be able to get my license back because my punishment was “a little over the top.” After the Holyfield thing, he took me aside.

  “You fucked up, but it’s going to be all right,” he told me.

  Shelly had decided that we should get a license in New Jersey. He was unaware of Jeff’s maneuverings and Shelly and I had good relationships with Larry Hazzard, who was a former referee and the current New Jersey boxing commissioner. Jeff was against going to New Jersey but he was in no shape to intervene. So on July twenty-ninth I appeared before the New Jersey Athletic Control Board for a hearing. You would have thought Saddam Hussein was testifying. I walked into the building holding hands with Monica and we were cheered by most of the spectators but booed by the six protestors from the National Organization for Women who protested me pretty much everywhere I went.

  Inside the hearing room, there were enough cops lined up to stop a full-scale riot. They must have been pretty scared of me. The hearing went well at first. Monica testified that “boxing is his passion and he really, really, really misses it. He needs boxing and I think boxing needs him.” Then it was former heavyweight contender Chuck Wepner’s turn. He cracked up the whole room when he recalled referee Tony Perez’s instructions before Wepner fought Muhammad Ali in 1975.

  “He didn’t want me to choke or rabbit punch. Those were my two best punches.”

  Bobby Czyz testified that even though I had snapped in the ring, I should be allowed to continue fighting.

  “A piece of the street came out in him,” he said. “If I hit a guy and his eye fell out, I would eat it before I gave it back. That’s the kind of mind-set you have to have as a boxer. Mike is not anywhere as bad as all them people say. He made a mistake. I also know he has changed considerably. Mike Tyson has gone out of his way to cut out the evil forces from his life.”

  They even showed a video that Camille, who was ninety-three by that time, had made, up in Catskill. She said that I continued to support her and call her my “white mother.”

  My own testimony started out on the right foot. I told them that I was foggy from the repeated head butts by Holyfield.

  “I just snapped. Nothing mattered anymore at that particular point.” I got all choked up and had to compose myself. “I’m sorry for what I did. I wish it never happened. It will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  But then at the end of my testimony, the assistant attorney general, Michael Haas, kept battering away at me, wondering why I had bitten Holyfield. He kept asking me over and over again if I could do something like that again.

  “This ordeal ruined my life internally,” I said, trying to contain my anger. “You think I want to do it again?”

  I was supposed to read a closing statement, but that creep had gotten under my skin.

  “I don’t want to say it now because I’m angry,” I told my lawyer, Anthony Fusco Jr. “You know what I mean, man? Fuck it. Why do I got to go through this shit all the time?”

  “Relax, relax.” Fusco tried to calm me down.

  Fuck them. I just felt like being like a prick. I was tired of suppressing my rebellious side. I thought about Bobby Seale and the Chicago Seven, who didn’t take any shit from their judge.

  Despite my outburst, we were sure that Jersey would grant me my license even though New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco tried to butt in. Vacco was part of a group that included Senator John McCain who were trying to clean up boxing. They had held hearings in Washington and I had even submitted a statement blasting Don.

  “My financial career was placed in the hands of a promoter and manager who were allowed to run amok. The opportunity for abuse is gigantic. Fighters can wind up like slaves.”

  McCain had introduced a bill to create national regulations over boxing. So Vacco was complaining that Jersey shouldn’t license me until Vegas did.

  “I would be very offended if they actually licensed him or permitted him to box in New Jersey,” Vacco told the press. Then he told the reporters that he would personally deliver that message to the Jersey attorney general.

  All this controversy worried Jeff and the others, so on August thirteenth, on the eve of the New Jersey Control Board meeting to decide my fate, my advisors withdrew my application.

  I was mad at the world and I was getting high every chance I got. At the end of August, Monica and I were driving near her house and someone rear-ended her Mercedes because the guy behind him rear-ended him. The guy got out of his car and came around to our driver’s side and started mouthing off at Monica, then he started shouting at the guy who hit him. I just got of the car and started beating the shit out of everyone involved. I kicked the first guy in the balls and then I slugged the guy who hit the first guy. Monica was yelling and I had to be restrained by my bodyguard who was in the car in front of us. I feel so bad about this now, but I was going through a real depressive phase of my life. Can you imagine that? I had a wife and kids, but I felt hopeless.

  We got back in the car and Monica drove away. Someone had called the police and they pulled us over a few miles from the scene. I was as high as a
kite and I started complaining about chest pains and then I told them that I was a victim of racial profiling. They offered to take me to a hospital, but I told them that Monica was a doctor so they let us go. I actually did go and get checked out in a local hospital but I was fine. Since the cops weren’t on the scene of the accident, all they could eventually charge me with if the other guys decided to press charges was misdemeanor assault.

  They did. On September second, Richard Hardick, the guy that rear-ended us, filed an assault charge against me for kicking him in the groin. The next day the other guy, Abmielec Saucedo, filed for getting punched in the face by me.

  Everyone working with me was worried about this case. We were getting ready to try to get our license back in Vegas, but how would the commissioners react to my road rage? What’s worse, I was still on probation in Indiana. If she wanted to, Judge Gifford could haul my ass back to the IYC to serve another four years.

  I appeared before the Vegas commission on September nineteenth. I drove up to the hearing on one of my motorcycles, wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. All my lawyers in their suits were waiting for me outside and when I got off my bike, I threw my helmet down on the ground. The lawyers ran off, they were scared shitless of me. Jeff Wald and I cracked up.

  It was a very contentious hearing. My lawyer Dale Kinsella was pounding on the enormous fine they had levied on me and how much my financial situation was fucked. I pretty much let my lawyers and character witnesses do the talking. When I did answer some questions, I’d look over to Dr. Ghanem, and if I was about to say the wrong answer, he’d subtly shake his head as if to say, “No, don’t say that, don’t say that.” The hearing lasted six hours and after it was over Dr. Ghanem met the press.

  “In six hours Tyson did not blow up,” he said. As if that was a major accomplishment for me.

  The commission didn’t rule on my application that day. In fact, they passed a motion that I had to submit to a detailed psychiatric evaluation before they would even vote on reinstatement. They gave me the choice of going to the Mayo Clinic, the Menninger Clinic, or the Massachusetts General Hospital. The decision was a no-brainer. One of Irving Azoff’s fraternity brothers was the head of psychiatry at Mass General.

  So I called up two of my L.A. girlfriends and had them fly out and meet me in Boston. I was staying in a hotel and then I’d go to the clinic at Mass General every day and get tested. The night before I was to start my treatment, I picked the girls up at the airport in my limo, then I had my limo driver score some coke. We partied like crazy every night I was there.

  I went to the hospital that first morning in a pissed-off mood. I was directed to meet my doctors in what looked like an upscale waiting room or even someone’s living room. I figured I was getting the VIP treatment.

  “Man, this is bullshit,” I said. “I don’t deserve to be here with all these motherfuckers.” Everyone else in the room looked a little wary of me.

  Just then, a white woman, about twenty-nine, came up to me. She reminded me of Velma from Scooby-Doo. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and had that bowl haircut and big horn-rimmed glasses. She sat down next to me and looked concerned. I figured she was one of the professors from the psychiatric ward.

  “What’s wrong? You seem down,” she said.

  “They think I’m crazy because I bit this nigga’s ear, but they don’t know. The only reason I bit him is because he kept head-butting me and the referee wasn’t calling it and I felt desperate and I had no choice.”

  She thought for a minute.

  “You were in a fight,” she said calmly.

  I was high as a kite but those words penetrated to my core like some ancient Zen wisdom.

  Fuck, I was in a fight. I felt cured immediately. She said it so authoritatively. I was amazed that she totally understood me, after just a few seconds with me. That’s why they must pay these shrinks the big bucks, I thought.

  Just then my euphoria was interrupted by a nurse.

  “It’s time for your meds, Nancy,” the nurse said to the woman I was talking to.

  “Shove ’em up your ass,” she snarled and she knocked the medication out of the nurse’s hand. The nurse then gestured and two big attendants came out and put the lady into a straitjacket. She was fighting these two guys until they finally overpowered her.

  Then I looked around the room. There was a guy drooling in the corner, talking to himself. I realized that I wasn’t in an upscale waiting room, I was in the psychiatric unit and everybody in there, including the Velma lookalike from Scooby-Doo, was as crazy as a motherfucker.

  The Vegas commissioners were due to rule on my reinstatement on October nineteenth, so my lawyers were working overtime to reach a settlement with the two guys from the road rage incident. I wound up paying each guy $250,000 on signing the settlement agreement and they’d each get an additional $150,000 from Showtime following my first fight after the suspension. They also each signed an affidavit that affirmed that although it was their belief that I was the person who struck them, because of their “disorientation and the confusion that surrounded the events that occurred that day” they couldn’t “be absolutely certain that it was Mr. Tyson who struck me.”

  Before my hearing on October nineteenth, one of the commissioners insisted that my psychiatric records be made public. This was a load of bullshit and my lawyers fought it tooth and nail, but there was some obscure law and there was no way they could vote me back unless we released the findings. Now everyone in the world could see just how low my self-esteem was. Even though I was chronically depressed, the doctors said, “Mr. Tyson is mentally fit to return to boxing, to comply with the rules and regulations, and to do so without repetition of the events of June 28, 1997. While we take note of the impulsivity, emotional problems, and cognitive problems outlined above, it is our opinion that none of these, alone or in combination, render Mr. Tyson mentally unfit in this regard.”

  In other words, I was a sick motherfucker, but I could still get in the ring and try to beat the shit out of somebody.

  I had Magic Johnson with me at the next hearing. He was interested in getting into boxing promotion and he was certainly a very nonthreatening black man to these commissioners. But when he got into how he would handle me, I started to get irritated.

  “Mike knows money, but he doesn’t understand it and I hope to teach him to understand it. He needs to become a businessman. Mike is the only guy I know who can make one hundred or two hundred million dollars but would rather not have it. He would rather give it away. He has to get a money manager and that is what I would bring to the Mike Tyson team.”

  But I kept my cool. And that same day the commission voted 4–1 to restore my license.

  Now I could get back in the ring and make some money. I was $13 million in the hole to the IRS by now. That might freak out a lot of people, but I was used to getting multimillion-dollar payouts, so I knew I could rebound. It’s funny, right around this time my new accountants discovered an IRA account in my name that over the years had appreciated to over a quarter of a million dollars.

  The accountants began to dig around and found out that Cus had set up that account for me back in Catskill. When they told me it was Cus, I cried like a baby. For the first time in my life, I understood what “It’s the thought that counts” meant. Cus must have known I’d screw up my money. I never thought anyone loved my black ass. It restored some kind of faith in mankind for me at that point.

  On December first, we pleaded no contest to the Maryland road rage misdemeanor charges. Since we had settled with the two guys, my lawyers were convinced that I would get a slap on the wrist at my sentencing, which would be sometime in February of 1999.

  My first comeback fight was scheduled for January sixteenth against the South African fighter Frans Botha. He was nicknamed the White Buffalo and he was no tomato can. He had actually won the IBF title in 1995, but he later te
sted positive for steroids and they stripped him. Then he fought on the undercard of my first fight with Holyfield and put up a great fight for Michael Moorer’s IBF belt until he was stopped in the last round, so I wasn’t taking him lightly.

  Four days before the fight I sat down in Vegas for a series of satellite TV and radio interviews. My first interview was with Russ Salzberg with Channel 9 back in New York.

  “Mike, Botha’s a 6 to 1 underdog. Any concerns on your part?” he asked.

  “I don’t know nothing about numbers. I just know what I can do. I’m going to kill this motherfucker.”

  “Okay,” he said, a little taken aback. “You take into the ring a lot of rage. Does that work for you, or does it work against you at times?”

  “Who cares? We’re going to fight anyway. What does it matter?”

  “Well, for example, rage against Evander Holyfield worked against you.”

  “Fuck it! It’s a fight! So whatever happens, happens.”

  “Mike, you gotta talk like that?”

  “I’m talking to you the way I want to talk to you. If you have a problem, turn off your station.”

  “You know what? I think we’ll end this discussion right now,” Russ said.

  “Good! Fuck you!”

  “You got it. Have a nice fight, Mike.”