by Mike Tyson
In October, Oprah asked me to do her show. The DVD of my documentary had been released in August so everyone was telling me it was a great chance to promote that. But I had just started my serious diet and I was still as big as a house. But I had never been on Oprah before so I did it. We touched on everything in that interview—the death of Exodus, my rocky relationship with Robin—Oprah even brought out Kiki and baby Milan. But when we talked about the ear-biting incident with Evander, Oprah really got animated.
“When you apologized did you feel the apology?” she asked me.
“No, I did not. It wasn’t sincere, it was insincere and stuff.”
“Thank you for saying that because when I heard it, I didn’t think it was,” she said. “Why did you do it? Because you thought you had to do it?”
“Probably. Everybody on my crew was getting on my nerves. I said, ‘Okay, I apologize.’ Really I was more offended for apologizing then, because it was so insincere. I just always wanted to have a place to sit down and talk to him and shake his hand and just express myself to him.”
“Have you talked to him?” she asked.
“No, I think when I see him sometimes he’s a little leery of me, you know.”
After the show aired, Oprah was inundated with letters and calls. Some people were irate because she had a convicted rapist on the show, but the majority of the e-mails and calls were positive and supportive. They felt me and understood where I had been coming from. And Evander called Oprah and asked her to set up a show where we could reunite. Oprah jumped all over that and a week later I was back in Chicago.
It was great seeing Evander. We both came from sewage and became established and esteemed fighters. I got a chance to truly apologize to him in public and we both were able to show young kids that if we could come together hopefully that could be an example for all of them to stop killing one another in senseless violence.
Oprah got feedback from one more person. Robin had been out of the limelight for a while, so she called to protest the portion of my first appearance where we discussed her. Oprah had shown a clip of Robin berating me while I stood by mute on 20/20.
“Why did you sit there the whole time?” Oprah asked me.
“I don’t know, I was just overwhelmed,” I said.
“Were you surprised she was saying those things?”
“Yeah. I truly wanted to sock her at that particular moment, but I just didn’t do it.”
When I said that the whole audience laughed.
Robin was irate. She even got Oprah to put her on the show to rebut me and jump-start her career again. I was helping everyone out there.
All of our friends called to tell us how great the appearances with Oprah went. But I didn’t have the heart to watch them. I was so self-conscious of my weight then it would have depressed me too much.
But I stayed on my vegan diet and kept working out and slowly but surely the pounds began melting away. Then in late January of 2010 I went out to a bar in the ghetto of Las Vegas and a friend of mine was there and one thing led to another and I did some blow. I hadn’t slipped in six months by then. I don’t know why I let my guard down and let the devil in but I did. I didn’t do a lot, but it was still coke. I went home pretty early that night and Kiki was awake and she immediately could tell that I had gotten high. She didn’t yell and scream and curse me out and threaten to leave the house with the baby like she had the previous times I slipped. She just went to sleep in Milan’s room. I kept coming back there to talk to her, I felt so guilty. I didn’t want to let her down and I especially didn’t want Milan to ever see me fucked up.
“So you did coke tonight, didn’t you?” Kiki asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Fuck. Dammit, Mike, come on. You’ve got to go back to rehab. We have to end this.”
“No, please give me another chance,” I said. There was no way I wanted to go back to that trailer park hell of a rehab.
“You’ve got to go in the morning,” she insisted.
“I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. Just give me one more chance.”
She did. And I haven’t had a drink or a line of coke since then.
We still had an income problem. In February we went to Europe where I did a talk in England and a meet and greet in France. In Switzerland I was paid to make an appearance at a big club and just hang out. But first we went to Italy, where I appeared on their version of Dancing With the Stars. I was hesitant to do it but they kept upping the ante and we needed the money. When Kiki saw my partner, she wasn’t too pleased. She was an attractive Italian girl and she was all flirty with me. I was trying to get my cigarettes out of my pocket once and she said, “No, I’ll get them,” and I got nervous when she touched me. Kiki could watch our rehearsals from behind a two-way glass mirror and I could feel her looking at me through that glass. I started sweating and the girl tried to wipe my sweat off with her hand and I was, like, “Oh shit!” I wasn’t interested in this young lady and I knew that things were boiling in Kiki’s mind from my past behavior. But it all came out all right—we did our one number and made it through without embarrassing ourselves.
When I got back to the States, I did a guest appearance on Entourage. I had seen Jeremy Piven when I was talking to Jamie Foxx at a club in Vegas a while back but I was too high to approach him and shake his hand. A little while later I got a call that they wanted me to appear on the show as one of Ari Gold’s clients, complaining that he wasn’t getting me enough work. It was a fun cameo and two of my kids got to be in the scene, so that was great for them.
All of the cast and crew were awesome and we bonded with Doug Ellin, the creator. Kiki and her brother had created a TV show idea loosely based on a boxer like me and she pitched it to Doug and he loved it. Entourage was winding down and he was looking for another project. So he got another TV writer with a track record attached and they all worked on a pilot for HBO and Spike Lee came aboard to direct it. It was called Da Brick, and it got a lot of buzz, but in the end HBO passed.
In July I was hired to make an appearance at a film festival in Kazakhstan. Then we planned to make a pilgrimage to Mecca after that. Right before we left, Kiki found out that she was pregnant again. We had been discussing having a second child and I thought it would be nice for me to see Kiki go through her whole pregnancy since I didn’t get to do that the last time because she had been in prison.
But things didn’t work out so well at the festival. We were there for the premiere of a Weinstein brothers film, and they had brought a few celebrities out for this. Kiki and I got into a huge fight right before we did the red carpet, then another fight at the cocktail reception before the film. So when the screening was over Kiki went straight back to the hotel and went to her mother’s room.
I came into the room a few minutes later.
“Look, I don’t want to be married to you anymore, all right?” I told her.
“Fine, I agree,” she said.
Kiki looked for a flight back to the States and there was one leaving in a few hours. We hadn’t even been there for a full day but now she, Milan, and her mom flew back home. I really didn’t think that this marriage was going to work out.
But I still had a religious pilgrimage to make. My old cellmate Farid was back working with me and he was a Muslim too, so we left the next day for Mecca. I was really looking forward to the hajj, although I was not your typical Muslim. I was born a Catholic, that’s what my mother was. Even though he wasn’t around much, my father was a Southern Baptist and he made sure that me and my brother and sister got baptized. I was ten when they took me for my baptism. It was one of those deals where they put their hands on you and praise God and then you’re supposed to faint. I didn’t want to faint.
“If you don’t faint that means the devil is in you,” my auntie said.
“I ain’t gonna fucking faint,” I insisted.
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��Look, if you don’t faint, that means the devil is in you and they’re going to tie you to a burning stake,” my sister added.
“What?” I said.
As soon as that reverend touched me, I fell down like I was shot.
My brother and my sister went to a rinky-dink little Catholic school. I think I even did too but I don’t have much recollection of that other than the nuns whooping my ass. We weren’t super Catholics but I basically did whatever my mother told me. Do the wrong thing and you’d burn in hell for eternity. Eat the body of Christ, drink the Kool-Aid. I was just a poor black bastard waiting for the Kool-Aid to come. I just knew that church was the place where you could go to pray to God that the other kids in the neighborhood wouldn’t beat my ass.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that everything was a hustle. The preacher’s I knew were the best-dressed guy in the poorest neighborhood with the flashiest car and he was fucking everyone’s wives and sisters and daughters. And they all adored the preachers. The preacher was still the most respected man around. We would talk and laugh about him but when he told us to march somewhere to do something, everybody was doing it. That was the power he had. We knew he was a dirty motherfucker but when he said “March” we all did. Because we knew deep inside that if we had his power we would do the same thing.
People ask me if my faith in God was shaken by seeing so many of my friends getting killed but it wasn’t like that. In most cases, if any of my friends got killed it was because they were looking to kill somebody too or violate someone in a different way. That was an unwritten rule of the game. Make a mistake that led to your death, that was the chance you took.
It’s funny how I got to Islam. When I was younger, my friends and I used to beat and rob Muslims on the street. We hated Muslims.
“Fuck you, talking that bullshit like you a foreign nigga,” we’d say.
So this is what God does to me now. We always become that which we mock. And now some day it’ll be my turn. Somebody will come after a Muslim and beat my ass.
I became fascinated with Islam by watching the Muslim guys in jail. I wanted to grow in jail and I always enjoyed listening to people and getting educated. I loved learning the essence of Islam and becoming committed to it, loving the world and all of God’s creatures. That’s why I don’t kill the hawk or the falcon no more. I used to shoot them out of the sky and make traps for them when they would come for my pigeons. But then I realized that they were God’s creatures. This was the way God intended them to be. If you love Allah, you have to love all his creations. I guess most Muslims believe that Satan created the pig but I think even the pig is Allah’s creation and you have to love it. (That don’t mean you have to eat it.)
So I slowly embraced Islam. I wasn’t any revelation guy. I just slowly realized that a Muslim was just who I was. I treat everybody the way that I want to be treated. What I want for myself, I want for everyone I like. When I first got involved with Islam in jail I was very hostile and I became too extreme a Muslim. I was too violent and I was projecting that violence on my religion. Islam is not about war, it’s a religion of humanity. I didn’t think that at first. I was hostile. If you didn’t believe what I believed, you were the enemy. I was just bitter at the world. But then I had to go and do some research and some studying and I found out that wasn’t the way to go. That’s why I became more humble, more subservient, because that’s what Islam is truly about. Islam is all love, peace, and submission. Because you submit in peace, it doesn’t mean you’re weak, but it’s just being humble to God.
One thing that I learned from Islam is that we all have our own individual relationship with God. God is not going to send someone to hell for my mistakes. So God and I have to deal with my own salvation. When you get down to it, all religions say the same thing, that we should just love our fellow man. My little guys like Christmas. Do I tell them that that’s bad, that it’s a pagan holiday, that we don’t celebrate Christian holidays? No, I don’t say that. I say, “Hey, let’s get some Christmas toys, then we can have Christmas every day.” They know I’m Santa Claus. If they like listening to Christmas carols, it’s fine. Besides my family and my mother, everyone I know is a Christian or a Jew. If I go to ten houses here in town, I don’t think one of them would be a Muslim household. But when I go to pray, everyone is going to be a Muslim.
They say that only Muslims are going to be in heaven. If I go to heaven and there’s only Muslims and I’m not with my friends that I know and love, I don’t want to be there. I want to be in a place where I can laugh and fight with all my friends and loved ones, no matter what their religion is. I don’t want to be in heaven with a bunch of guys who believe in the same God but who I don’t know. I want to be with some people I can trust, even though we’ve got different Gods, the world is bigger than our religion. How am I going to do good if I am in heaven and I am praying all the time? My knees are messed up, my head is messed up and I don’t see none of my friends and I’ve got to eat lamb and figs all the time in heaven. Do we have to have twenty billion Muslims in heaven, or a trillion Muslims? Bottom line, I don’t want to go to heaven if it means I’m going to be alone. I’m serious, take me to hell where all my friends are, where the people I knew and respected when I was living are going to be.
Some people claim to have intimate knowledge of God but I certainly don’t. To me, God is inconceivable. We were created in God’s likeness? We can’t even think that we’re on his level. Is God a pig, a liar, a pervert? That’s what we are. We’re sex addicts, drug addicts, control freaks, manipulators, and narcissists. If this is what God is, we’re fucked.
Sometimes I think that this life is just an illusion. Just think that I lost a child, and I think about that and it’s like she never existed. I say, what about my baby? What about Cus? I think about him all the time. They’re both a big part of my life, I think about them all the time. The more I think about these spiritual matters, the more I know that I know nothing.
The concept of God is too complicated for me. When I think of spirituality, I go from my Muslim perspective. I just don’t understand religion and God. I want to, but I don’t. I’m not going to go for “Oh, yes, let your mind believe and listen to the words in your heart,” because people that lead blindly are blindly led. I’m just not going for that bullshit, I’m just not doing it. You can make it sound different, but it just boils down to the fact that you’re following somebody that you don’t know exists. Even if you say, “I don’t believe in organized religion. I’m more into spirituality.” Whose concept of the spiritual are you listening to? Your self-taught spirituality? If that’s the case you’ve got a fool for both the student and the teacher. Look, people tell us who God is and we believe what they tell us.
I can’t conceive what people tell me about God. It doesn’t regulate to my piercing soul. But there must be some design to this universe. Chaos is overwhelming so there has to be some balance to allow us to focus in this maniacal atmosphere. But most religious people who go to church are exploited for business purposes. That’s what I believe. So I have to have my own salvation with God. I love the concept of loving Allah. I don’t know if it’s a true reality, but it’s a concept that I’m in love with and I think it’s good.
Going to Mecca and Medina was an amazing experience. I got closer to my faith but in some ways I was put off by the actions of some of my brother Muslims. When I got there they immediately started broadcasting my visit to show off that Islam was a better religion than Christianity or the rest of the religions. It wasn’t about me becoming a better person, it was more like, “We’ve got the Mighty Mike Tyson making hajj here.” They didn’t care about me as a person, they just cared about their publicity agenda. I was just a dumb nigga being used, that’s all I’ve ever been in my life.
“We’re going to make America know that you’re a good Muslim,” they actually told me.
In my mind I was saying, Shit, I wasn’t a
good Christian, how am I going to be a good Muslim?
Religion has to be in the man, a man can’t be in the religion. It really was almost juvenile, seeing all these religious figures in Islam fronting like, “My prophet is better than yours.”
But despite the political agendas, I felt good there. Anybody would feel like that there. Hundreds of thousands of people, all dressed the same, all there to worship and humble themselves. I was in a state of harmony, so I was harmonious.
• • •
Being there helped me get my head together and put me in an Islamic frame of mind. It helped me focus on what I had to do when I got back home. How I had to lead my life. Not necessarily an Islamic life but a purer life, with no more drugs and no more drama. It was really a recharging of my spiritual batteries. I needed to go there.
At hajj, I realized that I could never be a good Muslim in the strictest pious sense. I brought a lot of baggage into the religion with me. But I could listen to the teachings of the Prophet and try to live my way on the same path. Judge people on the goodness of their hearts. It’s hard for me to be that way. If you really practice Islam in its purest form you’re a doormat. I don’t like to live my life that way. That’s beyond being pious, that’s being humble. And none of us can truly be humble. If you mention the word “humble” that in itself tells us that you’re not humble. Man is not meant to be humble, he’s meant to be humbled.
I couldn’t be humble when they pushed me to the front of the line to kiss the black stone. The stone itself is the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba, the ancient stone building in Mecca towards which Muslims around the world pray. On the hajj you’re supposed to circle the stone seven times and kiss it if you can. There are so many pilgrims though that some people who’ve been going to Mecca their whole lives have never kissed the black stone. I kissed it four times in thirty minutes. I’m there and they’re splitting the people like the Red Sea and bringing me right up to kiss it. They’re pushing these pious people to the side so I can put my dirty-assed, diseased coke-licking mouth on it. It made me feel horrible. They’re trying to get us to feel better than everyone else and to love the religion. But when they do things like that to me, I’m saying, “You let us get in front of all these beautiful people? I don’t want to be involved.” Like Groucho Marx said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”