by Mike Tyson
“Extremely volatile temper. He has got a side to him that is scary. Michael is intimidating, to say the least. I think that there is a time when he cannot control his temper and that is frightening to me, or to my mother and to anyone around, it’s scary.”
I wasn’t on drugs right then but it felt like it. I couldn’t believe the shit she was saying.
“What happens?” Barbara prodded.
“He gets out of control, throwing, screaming …”
“Does he hit you?”
“He shakes, he pushes, he swings. Sometimes I think he is trying to scare me. There were times when it happened that I thought I could handle it, and just recently I have become afraid. I mean very, very much afraid. Michael is a manic-depressive, he is, that is just a fact.”
Can you imagine sitting there hearing this shit from your wife, knowing that an audience of millions would see it? Saying our marriage has been “torture, it’s been pure hell, it’s been worse than anything I could possibly imagine.” I was fuming, but trying to keep cool. This was the ultimate betrayal.
“I don’t know what Mike Tyson would be without my mother. She’s been the glue that kept us together,” Robin went on. “If we left Michael, and I do come with a package, my mom, my sister, that’s how I am, he would undoubtedly be alone and I don’t want that to happen. He would have gotten so, so bad that I think maybe one day he would have been more deliberate and killed himself or hurt someone else. That undoubtedly, unquestionably would have happened.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never dealt with anything of that particular magnitude before. When I look back at it now, I can’t believe I sat there and didn’t say anything. But then again, if I would’ve started smashing her fucking face and going crazy in front of the cameras, that’s what they would have wanted. So I stayed cool. I know they expected me to go crazy on television and start ranting and raving. That was the whole plan I think. But it backfired on them.
My friends were indignant at what Robin did on that show. I was getting hundreds of irate calls. I was still angry a few days later. Robin and Ruth and I were in the New Jersey house when I got so angry that I started breaking glasses and plates and throwing and shattering empty champagne bottles. Olga was there and she called the police. The cops came and I met with them at the front door. I was polite and told them everything was all right, I just wanted to be left alone. Then the cops split up and one stayed with me and the other one went with Robin. She showed him the damage in the kitchen. The cop who was with me told me that Robin was concerned about me because of the damage I had done to the kitchen.
“I own this house and everything in it,” I started yelling. “I can do anything I want to my property. If I want to break something, nobody can stop me.” Then I picked up a large brass fireplace ornament and threw it through the glass window next to the front door. Right then, their pal the shrink called.
“Do you want to talk to your doctor?” the cop asked me.
I ignored him and kept walking into the next room. The good doctor told the cop that Robin and her crew should leave the house and I should be committed for a psychiatric exam. The cops then rounded up the women and they moved to the driveway to go to their car so Robin could go to the police station and file a report. I stormed into the driveway.
“Fuck you all. You’re scum. Get off my property and fuck off,” I screamed. Then I got into my Rolls-Royce and started driving through the dense backwoods of my property. I wasn’t even on a paved road. I just wanted to get away from all of them.
The next day Robin and her mother left for L.A. My friend Mark Breland, the boxer, wanted me to make up with Bill Cayton and shake his hand. Shelly Finkel and Cayton had brainwashed Mark. They told him I was really messed up and they convinced him to come talk to me. We went up there and Cayton was very concerned about the manic-depressive label so he set up an appointment for me with Dr. Abraham Halpern, the director of psychiatry at the New York United Hospital Medical Center in Port Chester, one of the top psychiatrists in the world.
Halpern saw me for an hour. Then he called and spoke to Camille, Steve Lott, and Bill Cayton. He was certain that I didn’t suffer from manic depression. When Halpern called their shrink to see why he had diagnosed me as a manic-depressive, he started backpedaling. He said I wasn’t a full-fledged manic-depressive, I merely had a mood disorder, something he called “Boxer Syndrome.” That was a new one for Freud.
I was relieved that a much more prominent psychiatrist had cleared me of manic depression, but I wondered why Bill made such a big deal about seeing me to Mark. He really had nothing to say. I went there under the pretense that something big was going to happen and then I got there and he was real ambiguous on what he was trying to say. My relationship with Bill had run its course.
So when all the dust cleared, there was Don still standing. I had no illusions about him. When Robin used to ask me about Don, I’d say, “Look, I know how to control a snake. This guy is a snake, but I know how to control a snake.” Don did have his good points. Two days after the women split for the coast, Don took me around to each and every one of my bank and brokerage accounts. He had them take Robin’s name off of each account and switch them back to me. That was fifteen million right there.
The people in the banks disliked those women so much that they were thrilled to help us. We were up there partying with the bank president and all the bank workers – popping champagne and ordering in pizzas. “Fuck them bitches,” I shouted as we downed our bubbly.
That 20/20 show really backfired on Robin and her mother. After we split up, I went to a wrestling show in Chicago and when I walked in and sat down, I got a standing ovation from the audience. People were coming up to me, telling me what ugly shit they had done to me on the Barbara Walters show. I also got tons of sympathy pussy. Women would approach me and say, “Oh, God, I can’t believe what the horrible woman did to you. Please let me hold you, let me suck your dick, let me take care of you.” I’d say, “No, ma’am, it’s all right, no. Okay, well just suck it a little, ma’am, not much.” That whole year was crazy.
I was severely traumatized by that relationship. Those were cold broads. It was my first relationship and I wanted to just cancel it out, but love leaves a black mark on your heart. It really scars you. But you have to take chances to keep growing as an individual. That’s what life is all about. And I always had the newspapers to vent to. A guy from the Chicago Sun-Times asked me about Robin and her mother.
“They use them but they don’t like or respect black people. The way they talk about black people, you’d think you were living with the Ku Klux Klan,” I said. “They thought they were royalty. She and her mother wanted so much to be white, it’s a shame. And they were trying to take me away from the people I grew up with and throw me into their kind of high-class world.”
I was making changes in my life on all fronts. Bill was still technically managing me, but he was out of the picture. Maybe things would have been different if Jimmy was still alive, but after he died nobody could stop me from doing what I wanted to do. Looking back on it, I don’t think Jimmy and Bill were evil. I think they were businessmen and they were more seasoned than I was. But I was in way over my head and they took advantage of that too. But they were control freaks. As I got older I wanted my liberation, I wanted to do my own thing. If I failed or succeeded, it didn’t matter, I just wanted to do it on my own.
And then I got caught up with this other piece of shit, Don King. Don is a wretched, slimy reptilian motherfucker. He was supposed to be my black brother, but he was just a bad man. He was going to mentor me, but all he wanted was money. He was a real greedy man. I thought I could handle somebody like King, but he outsmarted me. I was totally out of my league with that guy.
I met Don through Jimmy and Cayton. So if I got involved with Don it was mostly their fault. When you really think about it, Jimmy and those guys let Don see how weak they were with me. They involved him in our business and he saw an o
pening. Without sounding egotistical, the whole Tyson thing was too big for Jimmy and Bill; it was probably even too big for Cus. They never saw anything like me. Nobody in the entire history of boxing had made as much money in such a short period of time as I did. I don’t know how he would have handled this thing. I was like some really hot, pretty bitch who everybody wanted to fuck, you know what I mean? It was just that Don got to me, but if it hadn’t been Don, it would have been Bob Arum or somebody else.
With Cus and Jim gone I didn’t care about any of those people. So I thought, Whoever gives me the highest bid, whatever I wanted, I’ll go with them. It became a game to me. Everybody was thinking about themselves, so I might as well think about myself. All my friends from my neighborhood were dying and dead anyway, so I was trying to have some fun. I had no anticipation of having a long life. I was too much of an irritant. You catch me in one of my irritating moods and you might get shot. I was living a fantasy life, going from country to country, sleeping with beautiful strangers. That shit began to take a toll on me.
Don gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. He was handling the business and making deals behind my back, but I wasn’t his bitch. He was very smart in instilling in me the auspices that it was me and him against the world. “Black man, white man, black man, white man.” He was always spouting some bullshit that the white motherfuckers were no good and that they were out to kill us all. I actually started believing some of his shit. I played into that stuff. He contaminated my whole barometer.
Anybody could have looked at Don with his hair and his big mouth and his ghetto-fabulous flamboyant style and seen that he was a sick motherfucker. But I was confused back then. All joking aside, if Cus had been alive, he would have gone with King to promote me. Cus hated Bob Arum, King’s rival. I don’t know why. I didn’t think Arum was worse than Don but Cus told me, “Nobody could be worse than Arum.”
I got a lot of flak for going with Don. I was with my friend Brian Hamill at Columbus one night. De Niro was there, sitting at a table, and Brian and I were standing near him. Brian was going off on me signing with King.
“What the fuck are you doing getting involved with Don King?” he was almost yelling. He wasn’t saying it for De Niro’s benefit, but Bobby could hear every word.
“Do you know how many black fighters he’s robbed? You know the history.”
“Brian, I’ve got so much money, I don’t give a fuck,” I said.
And I didn’t then. I didn’t know how long that ride was going to last. I was just living my life day by day. But I knew that I loved being champ and I felt that nobody could do that job better than me. I would destroy anything in front of me. If you were in the same occupation and we weighed the same, you would be dead. My whole job was to hurt people. Jim and Bill tried to tone that down, but Don was with the program. So when I started hanging out with Don, boom, the whole public perception of me changed. Now I was a bad guy.
In October of 1988, Don took me to Venezuela for the WBA convention. Then we went to Mexico for the christening of Julio Chavez’s son. That trip was a real revelation for me. We took a day trip to the pyramids and this little kid came up to me, begging. The guides we were with said, “No, Mike, don’t give them money.” But how couldn’t I? A hundred dollars was nothing to me, but it meant everything to the kid. So I gave him some money and he was so appreciative. I was thinking, Wow, this is a good kid, and I went to touch his hair and it felt as hard as a rock. It felt like he hadn’t washed his hair in years. You could have hurt someone with his hair. Then we went to Culiacán and I saw more kids begging. I bought clothes for this one kid and next thing I knew he was bringing around three more friends and then twenty more of his cousins were coming by for clothes. That’s why I liked that one kid, he never came by himself; he always brought his friends and relatives, and every time I bought them all stuff.
It was just like in Brooklyn when I bought sneakers for those street kids. These Mexican kids had never left Culiacán and I dressed them and we were all hanging out. I had so much money and the clothes that I was buying were so cheap. You just knew you were going to hell if you didn’t spend money on those children. By the time I left we had a crew of over fifty kids that were dressed up sharp.
Before I went to Mexico, I had such a big chip on my shoulder. I had never known anyone poorer than me. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being poorer than I had been. I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything in my life.
So many of my problems stemmed from thinking I deserved shit after being so poverty-stricken growing up. Cus was always trying to get me to transcend myself and separate myself from my ego, get out of my own head. But it was hard. Hey, I deserved that car, I deserved that mansion, I deserved a bad bitch. When I got with Don, I had to have the top-of-the-line cars and lots of them. I was getting the best Lamborghinis and a bulletproof Hummer that had been owned by some Saudi prince. I was going to Bristol to the Rolls-Royce factory and they were designing my custom Rolls for me.
Cus wouldn’t have approved of all that. If a guy had a convertible, Cus thought he was a selfish pig. We’d see a nice car and I’d say, “Wow, that’s a cool car, Cus.”
“Nah, that guy is selfish,” Cus said.
“Why is he selfish?” I’d ask.
“He drives that two-seater so he doesn’t have to drive more than him and his friends around.”
Cus had an old beat-up van that could hold twelve people. That’s just the way he was.
We would have had a great reality show back in 1988. I say this with all modesty, I started the whole bling-bling look with my customized stretch limos and collection of Rolls and Lamborghinis. P. Diddy and them were trying their best to get in our camp, but we set the tone. I started the trends that were followed by today’s hip hop moguls. I was the first to buy Rolls-Royces and Ferraris. In 1985 what other black guy in his twenties was buying these kinds of cars – legally? And I didn’t have just one. I had a fleet of them. These up-and-coming hip hop stars used to throw after-parties for our fights. They didn’t even know what Bentleys were. They thought those were old man’s cars. And back in the ’80s, I was gutting them out and putting Gucci and refrigerators in them. I even put a hot tub in one of my limousines. I know I was the first to put a fax machine in a car.
“You got the contract. Okay, we’re in the car. Fax it to me.”
We used to buy pieces of jewelry that cost two, three million. I’d buy a girlfriend a piece of jewelry for a million five. After every fight, my crew would go out in fur coats and stretch Rolls-Royces. When I bought that house in Bernardsville, New Jersey, I invited my friend EB over and said, “Nobody’s macking like this.” Everybody was always jealous of me because I used to throw my wealth in their faces. Yet I did share. If I ate, everybody around me ate. But they were still jealous. In all of my houses, everything was Versace, from the furniture to the walls to the comforters to the sheets to the towels to the ashtrays to the glasses and the plates.
I met Versace through an Italian journalist who came to interview me in Catskill. She was a very attractive woman who was a few years older than me, and I took her upstairs and we had sex and I saw that she was wearing Versace underwear.
“I model for him,” she told me. “I can get you all the clothes you want. I’ll introduce you.”
Versace was the coolest. He offered to send me clothes but I was too impatient.
“If you just wait, I’ll send you everything for free,” he’d tell me.
“Send me what you can and I’m going to buy what I can, okay?” I told him.
I was living out the fantasy. I’d go to London or Paris to get some clothes and all the salespeople would run out of their stores.
“Champion! Champion!” they’d shout, trying to get me to g
o into their place. I was taking the Concorde to see a girl, and we’d walk down the street and the whole city stopped. They literally had to drag us into the stores, we were so mobbed.
In Vegas it was worse. I’d go to the Versace store in Caesars and the whole mall would shut down. I was flourishing with all that attention. I was looking around at the clothes and I didn’t think, Thank you very much, I was looking mean at the people in the store. I didn’t even bother trying on clothes in the dressing rooms. I’d just strip down to my underwear in the middle of the store. I was ripped to a shred back then and hundreds of people would be watching me try on clothes through the store window. I’d see a girl in the crowd that I liked and I’d say to one of the salespeople, “Let her in, please.”
She’d come in.
“Do you want to stay here and help me pick out things? Do you need anything?” I’d ask her. When I’d finish shopping, I would have dropped $300,000 cash money that visit. Versace got mad at me.
“This guy spends too much money,” he’d tell whoever we were with. But he was no one to talk. That guy spent more money than I did.
It’s funny that they make a big deal about Kanye West dressing up his women. I did the same thing. I always liked to dress my girls. I think it went back to my childhood. I used to watch my mother dress the prostitutes who came over. She’d try various wigs on them and then different outfits. So that’s what I did. Not because I was such a fly guy but because I used to see my mother do it with the girls. I even taught Don how to dress. He was dressing like he came right out of the movie Super Fly back then.
“Nigga, you can’t be with us, you dressing like this. We have an image to uphold, Don, we are fly niggas. You are a bum,” I told him. “You’re a big man, you should dress different. Versace is the future, Don.”
That whole gangsta rap image formed around me. I was bringing that attitude to the world. I represented that era. Even Don got freaked out by the image I was portraying at that time. Near the end of 1988, Don tried to soften my image by having Jesse Jackson baptize me in Chicago. That was all bullshit. After the baptism, I took one of the choirgirls back to the hotel and fucked her.
