by Mike Tyson
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, but obviously, as things turned out, they were wrong.
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 four
th 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.”
So we bought some ice cream and walked up Columbus Avenue.
“Enjoy this now, Mike,” Pete said. “Because soon you’re not going to be able to do this anymore.”
Now I couldn’t go out without getting mobbed. I might sneak out to a club before one of my fights and the people in the club would start busting me.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Mike?” they’d say. “We’re going to see you next week, motherfucker. You’d better win. I can’t believe your ass is not in training.”
I might see a pretty girl there and I’d ask some guy, “Who is that girl?”
“Fuck that bitch, Mike,” the guy said. “I don’t know who she is, but I’ll bring her to the fight. Just go train, nigga.”
It was worse when I’d be on the streets of Brownsville. A lot of guys there had no control over their emotions and they took the notion of disrespect very seriously. I’d be standing there with some guys and some stranger would come up to me.
“Hey, what’s up, man?” he’d say all friendly.
I’d do that white shit, “Hey, how are you doing?” but one of my friends would freak.
“Hey, Mike, you know him?”
“Nah.”
“What the fuck you talking to him for?”
They didn’t like to see no man suck up to another man. They’d tell someone who came up to us, “Get the fuck away from him. Leave him alone.”
People in Brownsville didn’t like their space being invaded. That’s bad news in the hood, but that’s par for the course when you’re a celebrity. So I was at war with myself, my own instincts. I was uncomfortable in my skin, as the rehab people say. Sometimes it got ugly too. More than once, I’d be in a bad mood and an obsessive fan would follow me around.
“I love you, Mike. Can I get an autograph?” he’d say.
“Get the fuck away from me you fucking freak,” I’d say and kick his ass. To be honest, I wasn’t meant to be a famous guy.
When I recount these stories, I can’t believe what a disrespectful ignorant monster I was then. All that fame shit just makes you feel hollow if you’re not grounded. Add to that the boozing and the girls and it all began to affect my performance. Guys who I should have been able to knock out in one round would go five, six, sometimes the distance. There was no way that someone could be a sexual Tyrannosaurus and the world’s champion. You have to willingly surrender one of them. You could have sex at any age, but you can’t always be a world-class athlete. But I stuck with the sex.
I was just a miserable person then. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be with me. I didn’t want to be with me. I think that my mother handed down her depression to me. I didn’t know what I was doing when I was the champion. I just wanted to be like my old heroes. I didn’t care if I was going to die tomorrow. I had read a book about Alexander the Great when I was younger. He would rather have a few years of glory than a lifetime of obscurity. So what did I care if I died? I never had no fucking life, what did I have to look forward to?
I had everything I wanted, but I wasn’t happy within myself. The outside world wasn’t making me happy anymore. I didn’t know how to get it from the inside, because happiness, as I realized later, is an inside job. So in this state of despair I did the last thing I should have done. I got married.
I got married to Robin because I believed she was pregnant and I was thrilled to become a father. That’s the only reason. The problem was that Robin didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Jimmy Jacobs did. And he found out when Ruth, Robin’s mother, called him to tell him.
I tried to do the honorable thing, but it was the smuck thing. I was El Smucko. Maybe I should have been a dick, like the rest of the black men. No way, Jose. You remember the old Maury Povich Show when the ladies accuse the guy and say, “You are the father of this child”? I should have said, “Naw, see you on Maury.” But I wasn’t that guy. I was the guy who put diamonds under her pillow, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy her. So when we were at the NBA All-Star game in Chicago in February of 1988, I took her to the house of this priest I knew and had him marry us on the spot. I didn’t even ask her if she wanted to get married, it was just an impulsive thing. She played coy and I had to give her a little lightweight intimidation, at least that’s what I thought, and then she agreed and Father Clements married us in the hallway of his house and then we went to my friend’s club to celebrate.
When we got back to New York, Ruth had already called Jimmy and threatened that she was going to fly us to Vegas to get married unless we were immediately legally married in New York. Jimmy wanted to delay it so we could sign a prenup but I was so smitten that I didn’t care about any prenup. So we went to City Hall, got a lic
ense, and got legally married. Right away, there was talk about finding a suitable mansion for the three of us to live in. Robin had always told me that she and her mother came as a package.
Around this time I met the legendary world-famous pimp/author Iceberg Slim. I wish I had met him before I married Robin. He would have set my ass straight. I was out in L.A. one night at a club and I ran into Leon Isaac Kennedy. We were talking and he nonchalantly mentioned that Iceberg had told him something.
“Excuse me, do you mean Iceberg Slim the writer?” I said.
Leon told me he was his friend, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought Iceberg was a mythical character. He had gotten his name because he was sitting in his favorite bar, high on cocaine, when someone shot at the guy next to him. The bullet grazed his friend and then went right through Slim’s hat. But he didn’t flinch, he just took his hat off and inspected the entry and exit holes. His friends thought that he was so cool he should be named Iceberg.
So I told Leon that I wanted to meet him and he picked me up the next day and we drove to Iceberg’s apartment. He was living in a shitty little pad in the rough part of Crenshaw. He was in his seventies and he was living alone. I sat down and talked with him for seven hours straight. We talked about his life and his books. I thought that he would talk like a crude street guy but he was very erudite and spoke nobly. He enunciated each syllable precisely. I was thinking that he became a self-educated man when he was in prison, that he just learned these words from a dictionary. But I later learned that he had gone to college first before he went into the life. He showed me his baby and childhood pictures and he was just a cute, lovable little kid. Berg was an extremely interesting character. You never would have thought you were talking to someone so steeped in the world of vice.
