Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  Around that time I called up Shelly Finkel, one of the few human beings in the boxing business.

  “Shelly, I feel like I’m going to kill either Robin or Cayton.”

  Shelly immediately called Cayton and told him to talk to me and Robin, but Cayton told Shelly that I should come to him. He couldn’t even be a friend to me when I needed him.

  I felt that Robin and her mother had me set up from the beginning. They had me down, but they just couldn’t hang in and stay married long enough, especially when there was no baby.

  So that’s when they started to implement Plan B.

  On June thirteenth, two weeks before my big fight with Spinks, Wally Matthews from Newsday got a call from an Olga. Olga was Ruth’s assistant, her slave girl, but she claimed to be a vice president at Ruth’s company. Well, she had an office, let’s put it that way. An office paid for by the major investor in her company. Olga told Matthews that Ruth and Robin were getting crucified in the press and she wanted to set the record straight. I physically abused both Ruth and Robin, Olga claimed. But she said it wasn’t my fault. I just wasn’t socialized.

  Now, being a good reporter, Wally told her that he needed someone to go on the record. Olga said she’d get back to him. The next day she said Ruth and Robin wouldn’t go on the record but that it was all right with them to print it. Wally said that wasn’t good enough, he needed someone to quote. That night Olga called back and gave him Robin’s sister’s number in Portugal where she was attending a tennis tournament. He called Stephanie and she confirmed everything. She said I showed up to Robin’s sitcom set in L.A. drunk, that I broke lights and cursed and hit Robin in the head with a closed fist. “He knows how to hit her, and where to hit her, without causing any real damage.” Yeah, like I’m some kung fu master. But Stephanie added that it wasn’t my fault because I JUST WASN’T SOCIALIZED.

  Now Wally felt like he was being played. It was like Olga and Stephanie had been reading from the same script. So Ruthless invited him to her “office.” Wally went there and it was all dark and spooky like a witches’ coven. Even the walls were dark. Winston, their attorney/lapdog, was there and he told Wally that he couldn’t use his tape recorder. But my man was a sly, slick dog. Wally reached into his pocket and turned on his hidden tape recorder. Ruth said that she was going public with all this because of Cayton. She wanted to make me understand the business end of things so that Robin and our children and I would be well provided for.

  “Truly I’ve grown to love Mike,” she told Wally. “Clearly he loves Robin and he loves me.”

  But Cayton had poisoned the press against her, and she had received death threats and obscene phone calls, she claimed. She went on for an hour. And then, surprise, surprise, Robin showed up at the office/coven.

  “Oh, Mom, I didn’t know you had company,” she gushed. “I didn’t know the press was here!”

  Within seconds Robin was crying. Yes, she sobbed, Mike had hit her.

  “So that is true?” Wally asked.

  “You can’t quote me, it must be off the record,” Robin said.

  But then she said, “Mike has changed tremendously in the year and five months I’ve known him. I really feel Michael has NOT BEEN SOCIALIZED. He’s only twenty-one and he’s a young twenty-one.”

  The next day, Wally called me in A.C., where I was training, to get my reaction to my wife and mother-in-law’s story. He left a message and I called him back.

  “What’s the problem? What’s so urgent? Am I in trouble?”

  I listened as Wally told me of the charges that I physically abused Ruth and Robin. Of course I denied all that bullshit. But then he asked me how I felt about my family’s revelations.

  “I feel great. You opened my eyes to a lot of things here. You can’t say bad things about a person, call them an asshole, and then say you love them. What they’re saying basically is that I’m useless. I can’t understand it. Maybe I’m not the man for them. You know what I mean? Maybe I’m not man enough for them. I’ll get by somehow. I always find a way to get by.”

  Wally’s article was due to hit stands in the Sunday paper, so on Saturday the two women came down to my training camp. They didn’t want me to read the story before they could prep me. They just claimed that they were misquoted. And El Smucko believed them.

  “Bill will be dead and gone in ten years, but I’ll still be with my wife,” I told the press. “He’s trying to embarrass us, he’s trying to make it look like I can’t control my wife and that they’re gold diggers.” Robin was there and she got her two cents in. “They’re trying to destroy us; they want to say who I slept with, instead of asking about Mike’s business. This is the day we decided about Cayton.”

  “He’s a snake, a ruthless guy,” I said.

  “Bill is finished,” Robin vowed.

  Meanwhile, Ruthless was quoted in another article. “I’m his surrogate mother, not his manager. I’m the glue that holds my family together. If I fall apart, we all do.”

  These were some delusional hos. Meanwhile, Don was lurking behind the scenes, waiting for the women to do the heavy lifting of getting rid of Cayton so he could swoop in. He actually told me that the women would overplay their hand. While all this was going on, José Torres was still trying to worm his way into the picture and manage me. I truly was the Golden Goose. Michael Fuchs from HBO called me “a cash register in short pants.” I squelched the idea of José managing me in the New York Post, so he went out and got a book deal with Time Warner with a $350,000 advance, which was big bucks then. Four years earlier José had promised Cus that he would write a book on how I had been molded into a champ. José was supposed to share the money from the book with Camille, but now he was selling the book to the publisher as an authorized biography of me.

  So this was the shit I was dealing with going into the Spinks fight. A day before the fight I was asked about the circus going on around me.

  “I hate them all; writers, promoters, managers, closed-circuit, everybody. They don’t give a fuck about me, they don’t give a fuck about my wife, they don’t give a fuck about my trainer, my mother-in-law, my stepmother, my stepbrother, my pigeons. Nothing concerns them but the dollar, so I don’t want to hear anything. We’re friends, that’s bullshit, I don’t want no friends, there’s no such thing as personal friendships. I can go in the street and fight, I don’t need anybody to manage me. It’s too late for that stage, I’m too mature. All I need is a trainer. I’ll go in the street and make a million dollars in a street fight.”

  God, I was lost. I talked about moving to Monaco, anyplace that was far away where I could go and be welcome. I did an interview with Jerry Izenberg, a veteran reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger. He saw how much distress I was in. He asked me what I thought about when I did my morning runs.

  “I think about Cus and some of the things he told me and how right he was about some things. And how he’s not here anymore to help me. And then I think about certain things and it occurs to me how much more fun it used to be. It wasn’t about money then so much. We were all like a family. We were together but then suddenly he died and everything became money, money and I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

  And then I grabbed Izenberg and buried my head in his chest and started crying hysterically. I cried so much that Jerry had to go to his room and change his shirt.

  But all these distractions made me more focused in the ring, where I could escape this bullshit. I was knocking out guys right and left during sparring. Right before the fight I was back to my usual self. I told the reporter for the Boston Globe that “I’ll break Spinks. I’ll break them all. When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him. People say that’s primitive, that I’m an animal. But then they pay five hundred dollars to see it. I’m a warrior. If I wasn’t into boxing, I’d be breaking the law. That’s my nature.”

  I guess I was getting to Spinks with all this bravado.

  “A
little terror in your life is good,” he told the press at the final prefight press conference.

  I was totally confident going into the Spinks fight. But I still didn’t get the respect I deserved from the people in the street, who had followed Spink’s boxing accomplishments longer than mine. I’d be walking around in New York or L.A. before the fight and guys would come up to me.

  “Spinks is going to knock you out, nigga. He’s going to whoop your ass.”

  “Are you on drugs?” I said. “You have to be an extraterrestrial to believe that shit.”

  They were just haters.

  I heard that Roberto Duran wanted to come to the fight and I got very excited. I told Don to give him two tickets if he would come to my dressing room so I could meet him. He did one better. He came to my hotel room the day of the fight. I was so happy to meet my hero that I just knew that I was going to win after that. He was with his friend Luis de Cubas. De Cubas started giving me all this advice like, “Go right out and fuck him up from the opening bell.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Duran said. “You take your time, boy. Use your jab. Just go behind your jab.”

  The night of the fight, the Spinks camp tried to fuck with my head. Butch Lewis, his manager, came in to observe my gloves being taped.

  “No, no, you gotta take that glove off and retape it,” Lewis said after Kevin was finished. “There’s a bump in the tape.”

  “I’m not doing nothing. Fuck you,” I said.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Lewis said. “Retape that glove.”

  “I’m God, I don’t have to do nothing,” I sneered.

  “Well, you’re gonna do this, God,” Butch said.

  “Fuck you,” Rooney said.

  We finally called in Larry Hazzard, the New Jersey boxing commissioner, and Eddie Futch, Spinks’s trainer, and they okayed the tape job.

  But I was pissed.

  Spinks entered the ring first. I decided I’d work on his mind a little bit, so I entered the arena to the sound of funeral music. I walked slowly up to the ring. I looked at the audience like I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to create this whole ominous atmosphere of fear. I was one-hundred-percent aware of the audience when I was moving. My every thought was to project my killer image. But I also wanted to be one with the audience. I started doing my out-of-body stuff so I could be one with them, so when I got into the ring I could just lift my arms and the audience would go nuts. Then I would see my opponent’s energy leaving him slowly.

  Robin had Winston serve Cayton with a lawsuit at ringside. She was wearing an electric red low-cut dress and she sat next to Don. Of course he was delighted when she told him about the lawsuit. Norman Mailer was at the fight. He wrote something interesting later: “Tyson looked drawn, not afraid, not worried, but used up in one small part of himself, as if a problem still existed that he had not been able to solve.” Norman was right, but I had more than one problem.

  As soon as I entered that ring and looked over at Spinks, I knew that I had to hit him. He wouldn’t look at me during the ring instructions. As we were waiting for the bell to ring, Kevin told me that he had bet his share of the purse that I would knock Spinks out in the first round. When the bell rang, I went right at him. I stalked him for a while and we traded blows and I knew he couldn’t hurt me, I couldn’t even feel any of his punches. About a minute in, I got him on the ropes and hit him with a left uppercut and knocked him down with a right to the body. That was the first time that Spinks had ever been to the canvas in his whole career. I knew the fight was over then because I had been dropping my sparring partners all week with body punches. And he had gone down from a punch that I didn’t even think was that solid. He got right up and took the standing eight-count and we resumed. Three seconds later he threw a wild punch and I unleashed a right uppercut and it was over. I walked back to my corner with my hands outstretched, palms up. All the great old fighters did that, it was a gesture to demonstrate humbleness, but in my mind I was still the greatest.

  At the postfight press conference, I said that I could beat any man in the world and that, as far as I knew, this might be my last fight. I meant both those statements. I certainly didn’t want to fight again until I had everything in my life situated. By then, I pretty much knew I had to get rid of the women and my management team. I needed a fresh new start.

  We had an after-party and all the celebrities showed up – Stallone and Bruce Willis and Brigitte Nielsen. I was walking around the room when I saw my sister Denise holding court at one table. Uh, oh, I better leave because somehow I know I’m going to be embarrassed, I thought. I tried to sneak away, but then I heard her booming voice, “Mike!” I kept walking, pretending I didn’t hear her. “Mike! Mike, you motherfucker, you’d better get here right now.” I went back to the table. “Mike, get me a Diet Coke. And hurry it up!” my sister said.

  “Yes, Niecey,” I said. Some things never changed.

  My sister was an awesome person. She was always worried about me. She probably wanted to beat up Robin and Ruthless but I didn’t want her to do that. Niecey was a simple woman. She was so happy to meet entertainers like Oprah and Natalie Cole. And she loved putting me in check in front of them like she did ordering me to get her a Diet Coke. People would be saying, “Look, there’s Iron Mike,” and she’d be bossing me around.

  I’d be in Los Angeles and my sister would call. “Hey, Mike, I need to get me a mattress.”

  “Okay, I’ll send someone over to get you one,” I’d say.

  “Well, I don’t know those people. Mike, you’ve got to come and get it.”

  My friend Shorty Black had a little rinky-dink bar in Queens, but my sister made it sound like the biggest thing in the world. “I’m going to Shorty’s tonight,” she’d tell me.

  I offered to get her into Bentley’s or the China Club or any of the happening clubs in the city but she was content to go to Shorty’s.

  I had dedicated the fight to Jimmy Jacobs. Afterwards I had to make my usual stop at Cus’s grave. After every defense of my title, I’d go up there with the big bottle of champagne and celebrate with Cus. Cus loved champagne. Rooney always loved to get after me about that.

  “Stop putting the damned bottle on Cus’s gravesite,” he’d tell me. Every time he saw a Dom Pérignon bottle by the grave, he knew it was mine.

  Things got crazier after the Spinks fight. Cayton was indignant because he got sued, but nobody in the press thought it was wrong for Jim and Bill to hand me over like I was a piece of property. If anyone was betrayed it was me. With Jim gone, there was no way that I would have wanted Cayton to be my manager. And if Cus had still been around, Cayton would have been long gone. Cus never liked Cayton because he had done some work with the IBC, Cus’s mortal enemies.

  The women had enlisted Donald Trump in their camp as a consultant to advise them, but that turned out to be a bad move. He wasn’t a boxing guy. He didn’t know anything about negotiating purses, ancillary rights, foreign rights, TV deals. There were too many people who were making money off of me to let this bickering continue for long. In July, Bill renegotiated his contract and went down to 20 percent for his managerial fee and 16 percent on endorsements and commercials. One of the reasons that everyone settled was that my purse from the Spinks fight had been held up by the lawsuits. So now I got my check for ten million dollars and Bill got his five million.

  Everyone was pressuring me to get back in the ring, but I was in no hurry. I was supposed to fight Frank Bruno in London but at the press conference to announce the settlement with Cayton, I stunned everyone.

  “I think I’m going to pass on the Bruno fight and take six to eight weeks off to relax. I just don’t feel like fighting now,” I said.

  I was spending more and more time with Don King by that point. I had gone to Cleveland in May and stayed at his house for a few days. Don had gotten me to sign a promotional agreement with him, but we kept it hushed up until after the Spinks fight. He had played all of us perfectly.

/>   Sometime that year Don had taken me to see Michael Jackson perform. Don had done promotions for Michael and his father, so he took me backstage after the show. I had met Joe Jackson at some of my fights because he was a player. So we were backstage and Michael was by himself, standing in the corner, waiting for his car to come. Nobody could get near him. But he saw that I was surrounded by people wanting my autograph. I wanted to shake his hand before he got in that car, so I walked over to him.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Jackson? It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said.

  He paused for a second and looked me over.

  “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” he said.

  He shat on me that night. He knew who I was. But I couldn’t be mad, I thought it was beautiful. I couldn’t wait to try that line on someone.

  When Don King came to New York on August sixteenth, he dropped the bomb that I had signed an exclusive promotional contract with him. Bill went ballistic and threatened to sue. The women were pretty much out of the picture by now. They had lost their bid to take over my business. So they were continuing their Plan B – paint me out as some kind of monster and get a great divorce settlement. Throughout the summer, Robin kept giving interviews claiming that I was violent with her. But when the reporters would ask for documentation, they couldn’t back up her bullshit claims.

  The women’s next plan was to get me committed to a psychiatric ward, which would allow them to take control of my finances. Ruthless kept trying to get me to see this shrink she knew. I refused to see him. So they talked to him on the phone and he diagnosed manic depression.