Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I felt bad that Kiki couldn’t have come and made her hajj. We didn’t talk for a couple of weeks after she had left Europe. We both felt that this might be the end of our marriage. I called her from Mecca and was all apologetic and we vowed to stick through it and work it out.

  Kiki, deep down in her heart, is a Christian; she was raised that way. Her characteristics are Christian characteristics. Her mother married an Imam and they made a dramatic switch to being in a hijab. Kiki is free-loving. She wants to be involved with the world but she still has her conscience of Islam. But as a black female American she’s not going to tolerate her husband having four wives as the Koran says you can have.

  • • •

  In December, I went to Asia with Farid. I was being named China’s boxing ambassador. I was on my best behavior in China. One guy came up to me and told me that he supplied all the stars that came over to China with weed.

  “You can’t be my friend,” I told him. “You must be trying to set me up. You know that they’re going to kill you for smoking a joint here.”

  After China, I went to Bangkok to film The Hangover Part II. There was controversy even before the film started shooting. Mel Gibson was signed to do a cameo as a Bangkok tattoo artist, but Zach and other cast members went to Todd and got him thrown off the picture. I wouldn’t have gone that far. I met Mel Gibson once and he was a gentleman to me. Of course, his drunk anti-Semitic rant was deplorable, but I wasn’t so quick to judge anyone. When they asked me for a reaction to his firing, all I could say was, “We all have that guy—a Mel Gibson—in us.”

  Kiki was too pregnant to come with me to the shoot and it was a shame because she would have loved Thailand. Everything was beautiful. We shot my scene on an island and I had a great room in the Four Seasons with a spectacular view of the water. On our way in from the airport, an elephant popped into the road out of nowhere. I had lost a hundred pounds by then, so I was excited to film my climactic scene where I sang “One Night in Bangkok.” It was night and day from my first experience with Todd and the other actors. I was totally sober now and enjoying every minute on the set. Before, when I was high, I’d be telling people to run around and get me things. But now I didn’t even come out of my room unless they needed me. Todd and them probably thought that I was just a motherfucker trying to kiss ass, but I was so grateful to them for what they had done for me. God, I owed those guys so much.

  I got back to Vegas and I spent most of January with Kiki, waiting for the birth of our son. We had gotten through our rough patch and now we were really getting along. Kiki had gone into contractions at twenty-seven weeks, so they had her on bed rest with some medication and then she had to go in to get the baby’s heart monitored once a week. I went to every appointment with her and rubbed her belly all the time. I really like being with Kiki. And I wanted to be a good parent. I didn’t know if it was in me but I really had the desire. The baby had to be induced so we checked into the hospital on the night of January twenty-fourth, and our son Morocco arrived about noon the next day. I left the hospital the night we arrived at about four a.m. to go home and exercise and change. I got all dressed up nice and went back to the hospital.

  “You look nice,” Rita said.

  “It’s a big occasion. Today my son is being born,” I told her.

  I was in the room when he came out. I sat down at Kiki’s side because both she and I didn’t want me to be right up in her birth canal. I sat on the sidelines and whenever Kiki would look over I’d make funny faces. I couldn’t believe how nervous I got. But he finally came out, all eight pounds, thirteen ounces. And he was a good-looking baby right from the get-go.

  I had another great fortune that year. I was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in June. I never thought that I’d have been put in the Hall of Fame. No one in boxing liked me by then, I had such a bad reputation. There were guys who had started boxing after me and they were in the hall already so I just realized that I’d never get that honor. I knew how those old fighters must have felt. Down and out, broke, just waiting day by day for a call that might never come.

  But my phone rang in February and the guy on the line said, “You’ve just been voted into the Hall of Fame.” When the call was over, I just hung up the phone and started crying. I had been obsessed with boxing my whole life. I used to go to sleep cradling my boxing gloves. That’s all I wanted to be. It feels so stupid now to think I would be this great fighter, one the world had never seen, another Achilles. My arrogance, my ego got so whacked out, that’s why I just had to shut it down. It pushed me to accomplish so many things, but I shut it down, because I want to keep my family.

  But to be honest, and not from an egotistical perspective, just from my understanding of the history of the game, it’s going to be difficult to find a guy like me that could generate the money and income like I did in my time. Fighters today don’t understand the sport, they don’t understand how to entertain the people, they’re not scholarly enough to examine the past, and not only to find out about the fighters, but who they hung out with. Gene Tunney and Benny Leonard hung out with George Bernard Shaw. Mickey Walker and Harry Greb were with Hemingway.

  Regardless of what anybody said—“Mike Tyson is horrible, he’s a bum”—I represented all the old-time fighters. I never let the people forget who they were. If I hit a guy with one of the punches I learned from Benny Leonard or Harry Greb, I’d always give them credit. Guys like Joe Gans and Leonard and John L. Sullivan were the first, and the first always have to be acknowledged. They made boxing an art.

  I was happy to have been voted in, but I was uncertain whether I should go to the ceremony. I was probably a little bitter that I had been passed up before. But my friend Dave Malone was visiting me and he gave me a little speech.

  “Listen, man, this is your fucking honor. But you’re not only doing this for you, you’re doing this for Brownsville, you’re doing this for everyone in the hood. It’s a great accomplishment. You came from the hood and you made it to the fucking Hall of Fame. Get out there and do this.”

  He was right. When I was up there getting introduced I thought about Cus. When I was fourteen, I used to always ask him, “Do you think I’ll be in the Hall of Fame?” Cus marveled at my dedication to everything about boxing. He used to tell everyone, “I never saw anybody that had so much enthusiasm about boxing like this guy.” I knew the history of the sport inside and out. I knew that most fighters that I had seen wound up broke and destitute or working a menial job. I knew that was going to happen, but I just wanted to be in that fraternity with those guys. Even though they were dead or senile, people still talk about these guys in the barbershop.

  There is no sport in the world that is more passionate than fighting, when it is done correctly. You want to fight your brother or your father because the guy you’re rooting for is you. He’s representing your whole barometer about how you feel and think. Mixed martial arts are more popular than boxing now because you see so much passion in the cage. Boxers don’t have that passion anymore. There’s no guy that really has the heart to say “Not only do the gods deliver me and vex me, but one day I will reign with them.” Today’s guys don’t say that shit, they don’t have the balls, they spring from a milieu too meager to comprehend my kind of reality. They don’t want to do that because they’re afraid they will fail and people will laugh at them. That’s why today’s fighters don’t get the total respect because they’re afraid to really grab true greatness. They look at boxing as a check, they don’t see it as something noble. They want money and adulation. I wanted adulation and immortality.

  What makes an exciting fighter is his ability and willingness to want to hurt the other man. That makes for great fights and superstars. When I was in the ring I projected myself as an animal. Like a dog in a pit, I was there to entertain the audience. The more I hurt someone, the quicker I hurt him, the more adulation I got from the crowd, and I fed off t
hat. Today they don’t dream about hurting their opponents. It’s like the wussification of boxing. Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, those guys were going to die for that belt, you’d have to kill them to get it from them.

  A lot of people have pronounced the death of boxing, but I think that’s a little too premature. Boxing will come back, trust me. It’s been around almost two hundred years, legally. It’s not going to die easy. Just wait until we see the next really great heavyweight fighter. That will be a sight that we’ll want to see again and again.

  At the end of June, Kiki and I decided to renew our vows. It was my idea. We never had a proper wedding. My birthday was at the end of June and Kiki’s was in the middle so I came up with the idea of inviting people to come to a joint birthday celebration. Then we’d surprise them with a wedding. At first we were going to have only about twenty-five people come but then it mushroomed to over 250. We rented a ballroom at the M Resort in Las Vegas, just minutes from our house. Kiki hired this great wedding planner. We had a cocktail reception that we both attended for about ten minutes and then we snuck off and changed into wedding attire and Rita made the announcement to the crowd.

  “I know you guys think you are here for a party, but actually Mike and Kiki are going to renew their vows,” she said.

  Then the curtain parted and you could see the beautiful aisleway for the wedding. The crowd went crazy. And right before we walked down the aisle, we got into a stupid fight.

  We were in the back getting ready to come out and Kiki was going, “Shut the fuck up.” And I was saying, “Fuck you. You shut the fuck up.”

  “I don’t want to marry you,” she said.

  “I don’t want to marry you either,” I replied.

  We were just nervous. You don’t realize the nerves that are generated from reciting your vows in front of all those people. I’d been married twice before but this was the first official wedding for both of us.

  But we went ahead with the ceremony and then we had a nice reception. And afterwards, Kiki and I got into another fight. So on our second wedding night, I wound up sleeping on the couch in the suite and Kiki was in the bed. We were always getting into these stupid little rifts, we were both so hotheaded. But in the morning everything was fine and we went home.

  It was good that we made up, because Kiki and I had been working for a while on a new vehicle for me. After the HBO pilot wasn’t picked up, we decided to try something else. In October of 2009, Kiki and I had gone to the Venetian to see Chazz Palminteri do his one-man show A Bronx Tale. We were both just blown away by the way he could captivate the entire audience for an hour and a half just by himself.

  On the way home, I was inspired.

  “Wow, this is almost like what I do when I go over to Europe or Asia,” I told Kiki. “People would ask me questions and I’d go for so long on that one question that the other people would get mad because they couldn’t get their questions in. It’s funny, I hate looking at myself but I love talking about myself. I think I can do this. But, baby, my show is gonna be a little gut-wrenching.”

  Kiki was so excited. When she got home she immediately started writing down a few pages, the intro to the piece. The next day I read it and it was awesome. She wrote what I would have said if I had written it myself.

  But it turned out to be a long arduous process, because Kiki would want to sit down and write and I would try to avoid her because it was painful talking about all the personal ups and downs of my life.

  We used to get couples massages at the M Resort, and one day the masseuse gave us a card from this guy from New York named Adam Steck who was working out in Vegas. He told the attendant to tell us that he wanted to produce a one-man show with me. We called him and had him over to the house and he pitched us the idea. It was serendipity, because we had already started working on a one-man show. Adam had produced big hotel shows in town like Thunder from Down Under and a drag queen show called Divas Las Vegas. Adam brought in a director named Randy Johnson. Kiki wrote the whole script, but they gave Randy cowriting credit because he had a name already. By early 2012 we had a show ready to go.

  We had a one-week run from April thirteenth to the eighteenth at the MGM Grand. I had so much fun on stage. The burden wasn’t all on me. We had a jazz singer and a live rock band. They’d play the opening number and then I’d get introduced and the crowd went wild. I’d go into my monologue, but we had the piano player still there so I could play off him. The band played “Midnight at the Oasis” but we changed the lyrics to “Midnight at the Ho-asis,” and everyone danced around. I was a party boy on stage, a real black Wayne Newton up there. I was talking about sad things in my life but it was delivered with a devil-may-care attitude. It was Vegas, I had my band, and I was busting off.

  The show got great reviews. We had a dream that maybe we could tour it around the country and just maybe we could even get to Broadway with it. The day after the show closed Kiki and I flew to the U.K. for one of my meet and greets. Then we went to Poland because I had an endorsement deal with an energy drink company. While we were in Poland, I got a call from Spike Lee. One of his people had seen the show and loved it. So Spike had called the producer Jimmy Nederlander, and he wanted to bring it to Broadway with Spike directing it. By June we were rehearsing, and in August we had a ten-day run on Broadway.

  Spike’s version was a lot darker than the Vegas show. Spike wanted it to be gritty, a true one-man show, just me up there with some slides on a big screen behind me and some recorded musical segues. I actually preferred the Vegas version but people seemed to enjoy Spike’s direction as well. We took Spike’s show on the road, touring all over the country in 2013.

  Getting on stage to bare my soul is a lot like going into the ring to box. I can’t wait to get on stage but I’m also frightened to death. I’m like a racehorse just ready to burst out of the starting gate. I get out on the stage and I’m in control but also out of control. I have to rein myself in so I don’t talk too fast. I wasn’t born to do this but I learned to love it. Like almost everything else in my life, Cus was a big influence on the one-man show. I inherited Cus’s ability to tell stories. I’m not nearly as good as he was but I have that ability because Cus would regale me with classic boxing stories that were epic in scope, legendary tales of adventure and betrayal.

  I’ve always had the profoundest veneration for great accomplishments. Money never meant anything to me but stories of great accomplishments always inspired me to rise to the highest occasions. Entertaining people doesn’t come as easy for me as boxing did. I hate what acting makes me do but I love how it makes me feel. I would do almost anything to achieve the accomplishment of entertaining someone.

  I approached doing my one-man show the same way Cus taught me to approach boxing. I don’t get involved emotionally with that person up on the stage. You have to be emotionless but you also have to do it with all the passion you possess. All my problems in life came when I was Mike Tyson and thought I deserved shit—a beautiful woman, a cool car, a mansion. That’s when I got in trouble. I was always too impressed with my emotions. And soon the emotions became delusions. So I’ve spent my whole life since I met Cus trying to transcend myself.

  But it was impossible to maintain that façade when it came time in the show to talk about Exodus. I had spent more time alone with Exodus than with any of my other children. I really knew her well. She was a true free spirit. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t break down and cry about my angel. I wear an earpiece during the show and Kiki sits backstage and gives me verbal cues when I need them. When it would come time to talk about Exodus, a beautiful picture of her would come up on the giant screen. Kiki would always say, “Look back at the picture.” But I couldn’t do that and still be able to get through the show.

  In early 2013, I made two guest appearances on highly rated TV shows. On February sixth they aired my appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I played Regg
ie Rhodes, a murderer on death row who gets a reprieve when he reluctantly testifies that the man he killed had sexually abused him when he was a child. I was so psyched for that role. For once I wasn’t playing myself. They had to spend an hour putting makeup on my face to erase my tattoo. It was such a privilege to work with such great actors on that set. But then, before the show aired, more controversy got stirred up.

  A woman started an online petition to force NBC to cancel that showing or boot me off the episode because I was a convicted rapist. She got a lot of publicity for this and her petition was signed by more than six thousand protestors, including NCIS star Pauley Perrette. My publicist suggested that I respond.

  “I’m sorry that she has a difference of opinion, but she’s entitled to it. I’m sorry she’s not happy, but I didn’t rape nobody or do anything like that and this lady wasn’t there to know if I did or not. I don’t trip on that stuff, I’m not trying to get rich and famous, I’m just trying to feed my family. Why should they care? Since I am clean and sober five years, I haven’t broken any laws or did any crimes. I’m just trying to live my life.”

  That was my Uncle Tom response. What I really felt was that I had been broke for ten years. I had a family to feed and support. I’m not going to get rich from doing special-guest appearances on TV shows. What do these people want, for me to die? How am I going to make a living? If I can’t work mainstream, do they want me to do porn?

  Luckily, the creator of the show didn’t buckle down to pressure. Dick Wolf issued a statement.