Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  “He didn’t want me to choke or rabbit punch. Those were my two best punches.”

  Bobby Czyz testified that even though I had snapped in the ring, I should be allowed to continue fighting.

  “A piece of the street came out in him,” he said. “If I hit a guy and his eye fell out, I would eat it before I gave it back. That’s the kind of mind-set you have to have as a boxer. Mike is not anywhere as bad as all them people say. He made a mistake. I also know he has changed considerably. Mike Tyson has gone out of his way to cut out the evil forces from his life.”

  They even showed a video that Camille, who was ninety-three by that time, had made, up in Catskill. She said that I continued to support her and call her my “white mother.”

  My own testimony started out on the right foot. I told them that I was foggy from the repeated head butts by Holyfield.

  “I just snapped. Nothing mattered anymore at that particular point.” I got all choked up and had to compose myself. “I’m sorry for what I did. I wish it never happened. It will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  But then at the end of my testimony, the assistant attorney general, Michael Haas, kept battering away at me, wondering why I had bitten Holyfield. He kept asking me over and over again if I could do something like that again.

  “This ordeal ruined my life internally,” I said, trying to contain my anger. “You think I want to do it again?”

  I was supposed to read a closing statement, but that creep had gotten under my skin.

  “I don’t want to say it now because I’m angry,” I told my lawyer, Anthony Fusco Jr. “You know what I mean, man? Fuck it. Why do I got to go through this shit all the time?”

  “Relax, relax.” Fusco tried to calm me down.

  Fuck them. I just felt like being like a prick. I was tired of suppressing my rebellious side. I thought about Bobby Seale and the Chicago Seven, who didn’t take any shit from their judge.

  Despite my outburst, we were sure that Jersey would grant me my license even though New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco tried to butt in. Vacco was part of a group that included Senator John McCain who were trying to clean up boxing. They had held hearings in Washington and I had even submitted a statement blasting Don.

  “My financial career was placed in the hands of a promoter and manager who were allowed to run amok. The opportunity for abuse is gigantic. Fighters can wind up like slaves.”

  McCain had introduced a bill to create national regulations over boxing. So Vacco was complaining that Jersey shouldn’t license me until Vegas did.

  “I would be very offended if they actually licensed him or permitted him to box in New Jersey,” Vacco told the press. Then he told the reporters that he would personally deliver that message to the Jersey attorney general.

  All this controversy worried Jeff and the others, so on August thirteenth, on the eve of the New Jersey Control Board meeting to decide my fate, my advisors withdrew my application.

  I was mad at the world and I was getting high every chance I got. At the end of August, Monica and I were driving near her house and someone rear-ended her Mercedes because the guy behind him rear-ended him. The guy got out of his car and came around to our driver’s side and started mouthing off at Monica, then he started shouting at the guy who hit him. I just got of the car and started beating the shit out of everyone involved. I kicked the first guy in the balls and then I slugged the guy who hit the first guy. Monica was yelling and I had to be restrained by my bodyguard who was in the car in front of us. I feel so bad about this now, but I was going through a real depressive phase of my life. Can you imagine that? I had a wife and kids, but I felt hopeless.

  We got back in the car and Monica drove away. Someone had called the police and they pulled us over a few miles from the scene. I was as high as a kite and I started complaining about chest pains and then I told them that I was a victim of racial profiling. They offered to take me to a hospital, but I told them that Monica was a doctor so they let us go. I actually did go and get checked out in a local hospital but I was fine. Since the cops weren’t on the scene of the accident, all they could eventually charge me with if the other guys decided to press charges was misdemeanor assault.

  They did. On September second, Richard Hardick, the guy that rear-ended us, filed an assault charge against me for kicking him in the groin. The next day the other guy, Abmielec Saucedo, filed for getting punched in the face by me.

  Everyone working with me was worried about this case. We were getting ready to try to get our license back in Vegas, but how would the commissioners react to my road rage? What’s worse, I was still on probation in Indiana. If she wanted to, Judge Gifford could haul my ass back to the IYC to serve another four years.

  I appeared before the Vegas commission on September nineteenth. I drove up to the hearing on one of my motorcycles, wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. All my lawyers in their suits were waiting for me outside and when I got off my bike, I threw my helmet down on the ground. The lawyers ran off, they were scared shitless of me. Jeff Wald and I cracked up.

  It was a very contentious hearing. My lawyer Dale Kinsella was pounding on the enormous fine they had levied on me and how much my financial situation was fucked. I pretty much let my lawyers and character witnesses do the talking. When I did answer some questions, I’d look over to Dr. Ghanem, and if I was about to say the wrong answer, he’d subtly shake his head as if to say, “No, don’t say that, don’t say that.” The hearing lasted six hours and after it was over Dr. Ghanem met the press.

  “In six hours Tyson did not blow up,” he said. As if that was a major accomplishment for me.

  The commission didn’t rule on my application that day. In fact, they passed a motion that I had to submit to a detailed psychiatric evaluation before they would even vote on reinstatement. They gave me the choice of clinics and I chose the Massachusetts General Hospital.

  So I called up two of my L.A. girlfriends and had them fly out and meet me in Boston. I was staying in a hotel and then I’d go to the clinic at Mass General every day and get tested. The night before I was to start my treatment, I picked the girls up at the airport in my limo, then I had my limo driver score some coke. We partied like crazy every night I was there.

  I went to the hospital that first morning in a pissed-off mood. I was directed to meet my doctors in what looked like an upscale waiting room or even someone’s living room. I figured I was getting the VIP treatment.

  “Man, this is bullshit,” I said. “I don’t deserve to be here with all these motherfuckers.” Everyone else in the room looked a little wary of me.

  Just then, a white woman, about twenty-nine, came up to me. She reminded me of Velma from Scooby-Doo. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and had that bowl haircut and big horn-rimmed glasses. She sat down next to me and looked concerned. I figured she was one of the professors from the psychiatric ward.

  “What’s wrong? You seem down,” she said.

  “They think I’m crazy because I bit this nigga’s ear, but they don’t know. The only reason I bit him is because he kept head-butting me and the referee wasn’t calling it and I felt desperate and I had no choice.”

  She thought for a minute.

  “You were in a fight,” she said calmly.

  I was high as a kite but those words penetrated to my core like some ancient Zen wisdom.

  Fuck, I was in a fight. I felt cured immediately. She said it so authoritatively. I was amazed that she totally understood me, after just a few seconds with me. That’s why they must pay these shrinks the big bucks, I thought.

  Just then my euphoria was interrupted by a nurse.

  “It’s time for your meds, Nancy,” the nurse said to the woman I was talking to.

  “Shove ’em up your ass,” she snarled and she knocked the medication out of the nurse’s hand. The nurse then gestured and two big attendants came out and put the lady into a straitjacket. She was fighting these two guys until they finally over
powered her.

  Then I looked around the room. There was a guy drooling in the corner, talking to himself. I realized that I wasn’t in an upscale waiting room, I was in the psychiatric unit and everybody in there, including the Velma lookalike from Scooby-Doo, was as crazy as a motherfucker.

  The Vegas commissioners were due to rule on my reinstatement on October nineteenth, so my lawyers were working overtime to reach a settlement with the two guys from the road rage incident. I wound up paying each guy $250,000 on signing the settlement agreement and they’d each get an additional $150,000 from Showtime following my first fight after the suspension. They also each signed an affidavit that affirmed that although it was their belief that I was the person who struck them, because of their “disorientation and the confusion that surrounded the events that occurred that day” they couldn’t “be absolutely certain that it was Mr. Tyson who struck me.”

  Before my hearing on October nineteenth, one of the commissioners insisted that my psychiatric records be made public. This was a load of bullshit and my lawyers fought it tooth and nail, but there was some obscure law and there was no way they could vote me back unless we released the findings. Now everyone in the world could see just how low my self-esteem was. Even though I was chronically depressed, the doctors said, “Mr. Tyson is mentally fit to return to boxing, to comply with the rules and regulations, and to do so without repetition of the events of June 28, 1997. While we take note of the impulsivity, emotional problems, and cognitive problems outlined above, it is our opinion that none of these, alone or in combination, render Mr. Tyson mentally unfit in this regard.”

  In other words, I was a sick motherfucker, but I could still get in the ring and try to beat the shit out of somebody.

  I had Magic Johnson with me at the next hearing. He was interested in getting into boxing promotion and he was certainly a very nonthreatening black man to these commissioners. But when he got into how he would handle me, I started to get irritated.

  “Mike knows money, but he doesn’t understand it and I hope to teach him to understand it. He needs to become a businessman. Mike is the only guy I know who can make one hundred or two hundred million dollars but would rather not have it. He would rather give it away. He has to get a money manager and that is what I would bring to the Mike Tyson team.”

  But I kept my cool. And that same day the commission voted 4–1 to restore my license.

  Now I could get back in the ring and make some money. I was $13 million in the hole to the IRS by now. That might freak out a lot of people, but I was used to getting multimillion-dollar payouts, so I knew I could rebound. It’s funny, right around this time my new accountants discovered an IRA account in my name that over the years had appreciated to over a quarter of a million dollars.

  The accountants began to dig around and found out that Cus had set up that account for me back in Catskill. When they told me it was Cus, I cried like a baby. For the first time in my life, I understood what “It’s the thought that counts” meant. Cus must have known I’d screw up my money. I never thought anyone loved my black ass. It restored some kind of faith in mankind for me at that point.

  On December first, we pleaded no contest to the Maryland road rage misdemeanor charges. Since we had settled with the two guys, my lawyers were convinced that I would get a slap on the wrist at my sentencing, which would be sometime in February of 1999.

  My first comeback fight was scheduled for January sixteenth against the South African fighter Frans Botha. He was nicknamed the White Buffalo and he was no tomato can. He had actually won the IBF title in 1995, but he later tested positive for steroids and they stripped him. Then he fought on the undercard of my first fight with Holyfield and put up a great fight for Michael Moorer’s IBF belt until he was stopped in the last round, so I wasn’t taking him lightly.

  Four days before the fight I sat down in Vegas for a series of satellite TV and radio interviews. My first interview was with Russ Salzberg with Channel 9 back in New York.

  “Mike, Botha’s a 6 to 1 underdog. Any concerns on your part?” he asked.

  “I don’t know nothing about numbers. I just know what I can do. I’m going to kill this motherfucker.”

  “Okay,” he said, a little taken aback. “You take into the ring a lot of rage. Does that work for you, or does it work against you at times?”

  “Who cares? We’re going to fight anyway. What does it matter?”

  “Well, for example, rage against Evander Holyfield worked against you.”

  “Fuck it! It’s a fight! So whatever happens, happens.”

  “Mike, you gotta talk like that?”

  “I’m talking to you the way I want to talk to you. If you have a problem, turn off your station.”

  “You know what? I think we’ll end this discussion right now,” Russ said.

  “Good! Fuck you!”

  “You got it. Have a nice fight, Mike.”

  “Fuck off! Asshole!”

  “You’re a class act, buddy.”

  “So’s your mother.”

  Part of the reason I was so belligerent was that I had been taken off my daily dose of Zoloft a week before the fight.

  I was so rusty for that fight. It was a horrible night for me. Botha was holding me continually. He clinched me in the corner at the end of the first round and I leveraged his left arm with my right arm and I tried to snap it off. I’m a real dirty fighter. I shouldn’t say this, but it’s true. I think I really wanted people to talk about how dirty and vicious I was. When they asked me after the fight whether I was trying to intentionally break his arm, I just said, “Correct.”

  I won only one round of the first four and in that round Richard Steele deduced a point from me. The Showtime guys – Kenny Albert, Ferdie Pacheco, and Bobby Czyz – all thought that Botha was getting to me with his holding and was turning it into a street fight. But after the fourth round, I told Crocodile and my new trainer Tommy Brooks that he was getting tired and I could get to him. Apparently, Ferdie Pacheco didn’t believe that.

  “Tyson looks like he’s in slow motion. He can’t get off two punches. That’s the mark of a shot fighter, he can’t get off punches. Oh!”

  I didn’t need two punches. Just as Ferdie was saying that, I hit Botha with a right hand square on his jaw. He crumpled to the canvas. He tried to get up but he couldn’t beat the count. Then he careened into the ropes and collapsed back on the canvas. It was an ugly fight, but I redeemed it with a resounding one-punch knockout. Botha went down like he had been shot with an elephant gun. The White Buffalo just got poached.

  There was intrigue with my team now too. Shelly and Shawnee had gotten together and ganged up on Jeff and Irving. Jeff was still recuperating from his surgery and had to go back to L.A. to coproduce Roseanne Barr’s new show, so he pretty much left the picture. My career was in the hands of Shelly, Shawnee, and Jackie Rowe.

  And the Maryland judicial system. I showed up in a small court in Rockville on February 5, 1999. I was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a black vest. Monica was there with me, along with at least a dozen of my lawyers and advisors. I had pleaded no contest to the charges and my attorneys had worked out a deal that would avoid jail time. I’d just pay a fine, be put on probation, and be ordered to do community service. But then I got fucked again.

  The new district attorney, Doug Gansler, and his assistant prosecutor, Carol Crawford, showed up in court with an eleven-page document that made me sound like I was a Nazi war criminal. Crawford especially seemed to loathe me. She was a very masculine-looking woman with a severe short haircut. She seemed hell-bent on taking out her anger towards all men on me. I was her showpiece.

  Instead of keeping up their end of the deal, these two fools trotted out every derogatory thing they could pin on me, including quotes from Teddy Atlas saying that Cus had spoiled me as a kid. They quoted from my own interviews, including the Playboy interview from 1998 where I told Mark Kram, the writer, that I was “a very hateful motherfucker” who
would “blow one day.” Then they cited Kram himself when he wrote that I was “the darkest figure in sports” that he had ever encountered.

  “This comment is noteworthy from a man who met with the reviled boxing legend Sonny Liston, an ex-con who died of a drug overdose in suspicious circumstances, and, coincidentally, one boxer the defendant has expressed an affinity for,” Gansler and Crawford wrote in their memo in aid of sentencing.

  They even turned around my psychiatric report from Mass General that, except for the depression, gave me a clean bill of health.

  “Perhaps we can’t find something ‘wrong’ with the defendant beyond that which one might find ‘wrong’ with any neighborhood bully. For this bully, however, the world is his playground. One commentator, clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth, Ph.D., may have provided the greatest direction for the court. After reviewing the Kram interview comments by the defendant, Mr. Butterworth commented, ‘If he’s telling us all he’s going to do this, we’d be idiots not to see it coming.’ Although we do not punish prospectively in this jurisdiction, the Court must always consider the safety of the defendant, as well as the public, in sentencing appropriately. The defendant is nothing less than the time bomb buried in our own backyard.”

  Can you believe this shit? What was this, Stalinist Russia? These two fools wanted to use an interview where I blew off steam and a diagnosis from this Dr. Butterworth who never laid eyes on me to put me behind bars before this “time bomb” blew up. Anybody could see that these people were just out to abuse me, but no one cared because they probably thought I deserved this.

  “Although we do not punish prospectively in this state” – but that’s exactly what they were arguing for – “executed incarceration, as a starting point, will address the twin goals of punishment and deterrence. Rehabilitation, through the fine programs of this jurisdiction, may be commenced while incarcerated and followed during any probationary period. Given the defendant’s denial of responsibility, his defiance, his comments on his character, and his predictions of future conduct, the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation may never be achieved. However, for at least the period of incarceration, the public at large will be protected from his potential for violence.”