by Mike Tyson
“I hope Rory doesn’t take the firing personally. Rory is still part of my life. It’s up to him what role he wants to play in my life.”
I got my answer when Don and John and Rory issued their own statements.
“I love Mike and he knows it, but there are often outside forces and individuals that will try to capitalize on Mike’s frustration that comes from his layoff as a result of the suspension,” Don said.
John and Rory seemed to be in denial. “I think there is sometimes a frustration and misunderstanding that can occur in the best of friendships and business relationships, and that’s how we categorize this,” they said in their joint statement.
There was my answer. Rory had cast his lot with two scumbags. I had been let down and betrayed by someone I would have died for. But I’d been betrayed before and it was time to move on. I never talked to Rory and John again.
We began to clear up the mess that Don had created. One issue was with Showtime. Jeff concluded that they owed me money, but they seemed to think it was the other way round. He called up the Showtime guys and screamed and yelled and got them to come out to a meeting in California with our legal team.
All the Showtime executives cared about was getting their bonuses at the end of the year. But there was nothing we could do; we had a valid contract with Showtime.
I was a little less polite to the Showtime execs. I wouldn’t kowtow to them. I didn’t think of them as big executives. I’d get on the phone with them and just threaten to kick Jay Larkin’s ass. They’d be saying, “You can expect a letter from our lawyer.”
“Fuck your lawyer in the ass, motherfucker,” I’d scream.
It was a good thing that I had been seeing a shrink since December. Monica had set me up with Dr. Richard Goldberg, the chairman of the psychiatric department at Georgetown Medical School. At first I was a little reluctant to open myself up to a middle-aged Jewish man, but he was really a terrific guy and I benefited a lot from my visits with him. Goldberg diagnosed me as suffering from “dysthymic disorder,” which was basically chronic depression. He got that right. He put me on Zoloft and I was doing well, considering the circumstances. Of course, I was supplementing his drug regimen with some of my own extracurricular drugs too.
I’m sure that the Zoloft had some bearing on me not going postal when I got into a weird confrontation at an all-night restaurant in Maryland. I had been hanging out and getting high at this club DC Live in Washington. When the club closed, I went to get a bite with this woman Adoria, who was the director of VIP relations at the club, and her coworker and Jeffrey Robinson, a mutual friend of Adoria’s and mine. We got to the restaurant at about five a.m. and were seated at a table. Then Michael Colyar, some comedian we had met at the club, came in with his “bodyguard” and two black women in their thirties. They wanted to sit with us, so the manager moved us all to a bigger table in the main room. These women had an attitude from the start, so I tried to ignore them. But when a pretty young European woman came over to our table and asked to take a picture with me, the black chick in the red dress started going off on me.
“I hope you’re enjoying your Mike Tyson ‘celebrity’ bullshit,” she said.
Meanwhile, the hot European chick was putting her arms around me and posing.
“My own sisters don’t show me love like this,” I told Adoria’s coworker.
Now the woman in the red dress went berserk.
“You’re not going to praise white women and disrespect black women while there are two black queens here,” she said.
“Yeah, you’re not going to disrespect all black women while you have that white bitch in your arms,” her friend in the black dress said.
I tried to ignore them but the woman in red just kept going.
“You ain’t nothing. You’re just a ghetto nigga who managed to get some money,” she said. “I’m a correctional officer and if you had been in my prison, I would’ve had your ass in lockdown.”
“Fuck you, you bitch.” I couldn’t take her shit any longer. She was bringing me down from my high.
Adoria got up and told the comedian to get those bitches out of the restaurant. He started escorting the one in red out, but she still had to get in some bullshit.
“You ain’t nothing, nigga,” she said.
“Yeah? I’ll jump over ten lying black bitches like you, to get to one dead white ho,” I said.
That made her go postal. She grabbed a cup of coffee from a nearby table and threw it on me, ruining my zebra-striped shirt. I jumped up and accidentally knocked a section of the table to the side and some glasses and dishes fell to the floor. I was so irate that my friend Jeffrey had to hold me back.
I threw some money on the table and we left. I heard later that the comedian and the two women sat and ate for another hour, laughing and making fun of me. When a guy from the next table asked her what had happened, she told him, “I called Tyson an ignorant motherfucker. I will not tolerate him being disrespectful to black women. I just don’t appreciate Tyson talking and laughing with these whities while he has sisters at his table.”
I knew all this because when I got home that night, I called Jeff Wald and he immediately called the owner of the restaurant and tracked down the customers and the staff and got depositions from all of them. Those two women wanted to harass me and goad me into a lawsuit. That didn’t work but that didn’t stop them. First their attorney contacted my attorney and asked for $20 million. Nine days later, the two shrews filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against me claiming that I verbally and physically abused them after my sexual advances towards one of them was spurned. They were claiming assault, battery, defamation, and emotional distress. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t even speak to the reporters at the press conference. But their ambulance chaser could.
“These women were put through a horrendous ordeal, cursed, verbally abused in a situation in front of a fully packed restaurant.”
He changed his tune a bit when he got all the depositions we had collected. By the end of the year, they offered to settle for $2 million, then they went down to $850,000. Eventually we paid the woman in red $75,000 and the other one $50,000. We had to settle. My name was mud. I was the arrogant nigga who nobody liked, especially upper-middle-class people. It was a bad time for me. I’m sure that if someone had killed me, they would have gone free.
By the end of February I had new management in place. I hired Jeff Wald, Irving Azoff, and Shelly Finkel, an old friend of mine who used to manage Evander Holyfield, to be my advisors. They would split the standard manager’s fee of 20 percent three ways. I would be taking home a lot more money without Don taking his cut. When I fought Holyfield and my purse was $30 million, I wound up with only $15 million because Don was taking $9 million and John and Rory were splitting $6 million. Don was also helping himself to 30 percent of the bonus money from Showtime and the MGM Grand.
But it got worse. King was getting all the income from the site fees and from foreign telecasts. Don also had all these side deals with Showtime that were predicated on bringing me to the table. So they paid him to promote non-Mike Tyson events because of my name. The Showtime deal also allowed either Showtime or Don to audit the books, but barred me from doing so!
On March fifth, we sued Don in U.S. District Court in New York for at least $100 million. That same day, my lawyer John Branca sent me a pep-talk memo. “This will give you an opportunity to establish your PLACE in HISTORY – to be a leader in seeking to redress the wrong-doings and injustices perpetrated by Don King, not only on you but on many other fighters during the last two decades. As such, you would secure your place not only in boxing but also in social and cultural history in the manner of an Arthur Ashe or Curt Flood. The success of what we are doing depends entirely on your STRENGTH and your conviction. Don King will look for and exploit any weakness in you. This will require DEDICATION and PATIENCE and could take three years in court with Don King but if you stay committed, you will win.” Branca and Jeff
Wald also mapped out a strategy to boost my income with a clothing line, a record label, merchandising deals for posters, and an autobiography.
Four days later, we sued John Horne and Rory Holloway for another $100 million. By inducing me to sign the deal with Don while I was in prison, which was illegal to begin with, they made $22 million each on my fights after I got out. If they had been real managers, they would never have allowed me to sign off on any of the deals that Don brought to me, especially the revised deal that gave him 30 percent of my bonuses. Instead of being locked into Don for four years, I would have been a free agent and could have worked on a fight-to-fight basis with the promoter who offered me the most money. But it was my fault for hiring a failed stand-up comedian and my wingman to steer my career. Cus once told me, “Hey, there’s animals disguised as human beings out here and you’re not sophisticated enough to decipher the two.”
I didn’t expect to hear anything from Rory, but I was amused to read what John Horne had to say after we sued his ass.
“Mike Tyson could never appreciate what we were trying to do. Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist, a felon, and we made him the biggest deal in boxing. If he lives for a long time maybe he’ll understand what an achievement that was. Mike, I am not your bitch. I stood by you out of love and loyalty only.”
And he also said this, “Don King is a great man. When you hear people ripping him, they’ve never had lunch with him. Don King respects my ability and I respect him.”
Even though I had my advisors working on my career, three women – Shawnee, Jackie Rowe, and Monica – were doing a lot of the day-to-day work. I didn’t want Monica to get involved in the boxing world. She shouldn’t have to get infected by that bug. I attracted scumbags. They may have been sophisticated and good at what they did, but they were still scumbags because big money was involved. Monica just wanted to protect me. I see that now, even if I didn’t understand that at the time.
Shawnee and Jackie were something else. They were both big, brash women. Jackie was totally street. We were cut from the same cloth. Instead of talking all political to executives like, “Mike is the biggest attraction out there and MGM should be more than happy to …” she’d say stuff like, “You motherfuckers should be licking this man’s ass.” Shawnee wasn’t as crude as Jackie, but she could be cruel. Dealing with Shawnee and Jackie was more than Latondia could handle. She got sick of being bullied around and quit. I was still barely involved in my own shit then. I was just out there getting high, throwing my life away.
I was hurting for money, so I sold off sixty-two of my vehicles, including some sports cars, six Ducatis, and four Honda trucks, and realized $3.3 million from the sale. My new team had gotten involved in the WWF deal and we renegotiated that now that Don wasn’t in the picture. Instead of a $3.5 million fee, I wound up with $6 million and 35 percent of the pay-per-view buys in excess of one million. I was really looking forward to working for the WWF. When I was a kid, I’d watch wrestling all the time on WNJU, Channel 47, the Spanish UHF station.
I got a lot of criticism for appearing at WrestleMania, but it was really one of the highlights of my life. People were saying that their wrestling was bullshit, but that $6 million check wasn’t bullshit. I was supposed to have reffed for the WWF at a Hulk Hogan match back in 1990, but they used Buster Douglas instead after he knocked me out.
I had so much fun promoting this event.
The WWF wanted me to do MAD TV and the writers even wrote up some suggested sketches. One had me hosting a Martha Stewart-type show on the new Lifetime channel, which had branched into sports.
“I find simple flower arrangements bring a little touch of spring in the middle of winter,” they had me say. “See, here I’ve taken these lovely irises and added a touch of pansies.”
One of the wrestlers would correct me and say that you can’t mix irises and pansies and then we’d get into a fight.
Another proposed skit was a fake commercial where a guy at a party tries to tell an interesting story but he just can’t. Everyone leaves him sitting alone and then the voice-over comes in.
“Has this ever happened to you? Well, not anymore. Because Mike Tyson will come to your house and punch you in the face!”
Then I punch the guy in the face. They cut to the party again and the guy is fucked up, swollen face, bandages all over, black eye, and he can barely talk. But as he struggles to speak, he’s the center of attention.
“So if your life is really boring, just call us and Mike Tyson will come over and punch you in the face!”
Jeff and Irving and Shelly put the kibosh on doing that program. I would never have gotten my license back if I’d done it.
We went to a few different cities to do live events to promote the show on March twenty-seventh. In Boston we held a huge outdoor rally in City Hall Plaza. It was awesome. The crowd went crazy screaming and cursing at me and Shawn Michaels and Steve Austin. They held up signs like TYSON BITES and EARS FEAR TYSON. Austin had called me out and pushed me at an earlier appearance, so now I jumped into the ring while Michaels and two of his comrades in D-Generation X had Austin against the ropes. I kicked him in the shins a few times and then planted a big wet kiss on his forehead.
The night of the event, I entered the Fleet Center wearing a D-Generation X T-shirt. During the match I was openly rooting for Michaels from ringside. When Austin got knocked out of the ring, I threw him back in. Then the referee in the ring got knocked out. I got into the ring and dragged him out. It was back and forth between Michaels and Austin, but finally Austin pummeled Michaels to the canvas. The ref was still unconscious. So I jumped into the ring and instead of attacking Austin, I counted Michaels out, making Austin the new champ. We celebrated together and he gave me an Austin 3:16 T-shirt. Michaels regained consciousness and confronted me for my betrayal. I floored him with one punch and then draped the Austin T-shirt over his body and Steve and I walked out with our arms around each other.
At the press conference after the match, I was asked about Don and John and Rory cheating me out of millions of dollars.
“I did a little screwing too,” I said. “I guess what goes around comes around.”
Someone asked me about the way I pulled the unconscious referee out of the ring.
“I’m on parole. For the record, I didn’t slam the referee. I politely took him out of the ring and put him on the mat.”
Austin and I told the press that we had been secretly working together all along, but I kind of undermined the credibility of that by continually referring to him as Cold Stone instead of Stone Cold. I was so high that I had the munchies.
In May, we announced that I was forming my own record label, Iron Mike Records. With the help of Irving Azoff and John Branca we would find a major label to distribute our artists’ work. In the meantime I had Jackie Rowe handling the business end. We also added my former lawyers and financial managers at Sidley Austin to our lawsuit. I was hoping to get something from these lawsuits soon because I was paying out lots of money to defend myself from all the lawsuits that were coming in against me. Besides the two women in the restaurant, I was being sued by my former tiger trainer, the company that owned a house in L.A. that I backed out of buying, my jeweler in Vegas, my Vegas house contractor, that quack Dr. Smedi, and even Kevin Rooney, my old trainer.
The craziest lawsuit was filed by Ladywautausa A. Je, a wacky black broad who would have her assistant photograph her with unsuspecting celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. I had come out of a meeting with a filmmaker when she lifted her leg up against me and had her guy take a picture. Next thing we knew, she was filing a suit for sexual battery claiming that I pressed my body against hers, “pulling up her body suit saying, ‘Take a picture of this.’ ” As soon as we produced a few witnesses she dropped the case. But it got publicity.
I did great with the Smedi suit. He sued me for the original $7 million he claimed I owed him, so we countersued and he wound up paying me $50,000. I didn’t do as well with Rooney.
Despite the fact that he claimed to have an oral agreement in which he was to be my “trainer for life” and despite the testimony from many friends of Cus’s who said that Cus had become disenchanted with Rooney and wanted to replace him, the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a $4.4 million award that a jury had given him years earlier.
So it was time to get back in the ring. I had sat out a year by then. Jeff had been talking with Dr. Elias Ghanem, who was the head of the Nevada boxing commission. I loved Dr. Ghanem. He was an Israeli-born Lebanese man who came to the States with nothing and built up an amazing medical practice because he was a throwback – a doctor who really cared about his patients. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret – he treated all the Vegas stars. He loved boxing too. He assured Jeff that I would be able to get my license back because my punishment was “a little over the top.” After the Holyfield thing, he took me aside.
“You fucked up, but it’s going to be all right,” he told me.
Shelly had decided that we should get a license in New Jersey. He was unaware of Jeff’s maneuverings and Shelly and I had good relationships with Larry Hazzard, who was a former referee and the current New Jersey boxing commissioner. Jeff was against going to New Jersey but he was in no shape to intervene. So on July twenty-ninth I appeared before the New Jersey Athletic Control Board for a hearing. You would have thought Saddam Hussein was testifying. I walked into the building holding hands with Monica and we were cheered by most of the spectators but booed by the six protestors from the National Organization for Women who protested me pretty much everywhere I went.
Inside the hearing room, there were enough cops lined up to stop a full-scale riot. They must have been pretty scared of me. The hearing went well at first. Monica testified that “boxing is his passion and he really, really, really misses it. He needs boxing and I think boxing needs him.” Then it was former heavyweight contender Chuck Wepner’s turn. He cracked up the whole room when he recalled referee Tony Perez’s instructions before Wepner fought Muhammad Ali in 1975.
