by Mike Tyson
“That’s okay. Listen, can I tell you something? It doesn’t faze me what anyone says about me. Michael and Tyson are two different people. To my children and my wife I am Mike and Daddy. But I am Tyson here. Tyson is just a freak, somebody who generates a ton of money. No one knows me, no one has any kind of consideration for my feelings, my pain, anything I’ve ever been through in my life. You have no iota who I am or what I am. They don’t even know why they cheer for me. Why, because I’m a good fighter? Because I stand up for myself? Tyson is not who I am. I become that person, but I am Mike and Daddy, and that is more important to me.”
“And the only time you are that other person is when you are in the ring, yeah?”
“Right now! I am Tyson right now.”
“The guy?”
“Yeah, I’m the guy that’s gonna make the whole freak show happen on the twenty-ninth. Everyone is going to come and watch me kill somebody, or beat somebody up, or knock somebody out. Tyson is the ticket, Tyson is the moneymaker. Not too many people care about Michael personally, because Michael is just some nigga out of Brownsville, Brooklyn, that just happened to make it one day, or was lucky. Where I come from, I am the piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe. God has blessed me, I don’t know, he put me in this situation to be around, I don’t know, I guess you guys are supposed to be decent people, right?”
I couldn’t walk the streets of London because we’d start a riot, so we went shopping by car. One time, we stopped for a light and when people saw I was in the car, they started rocking it. Other people were diving headfirst into the car. It was like a scene out of a third-world country where the dictator was trying to leave and the crowd was doing everything to block the car, even tear the roof off. But these people were showing love.
“We love you, Mike! We love you!” they were screaming.
It was like Beatlemania. A lady friend was with me and it looked like she was going to take a heart attack.
“Damn,” she said, turning around to look at me. “Who the fuck are you?”
We got back to our hotel, but the crowd just swarmed under the window and started chanting. They wouldn’t leave until I went out on the balcony and gave them the thumbs-up and saluted them. I thought I was fucking Charlemagne.
I had some vocal detractors too. I got no support from the ladies’ groups. They would boycott my appearances. I was invited to visit Britain’s parliament, but all the lady M.P.s protested. Maybe it was because when I visited Madame Tussauds wax museum, I called the statue of Winston Churchill “another damn limey.”
But I enjoyed fighting the protest groups. I relished being an international fucking pig. I felt like Dillinger. Because I had such a disgusting reputation, the gangsters in any country I went to would open up their clubs for me to hang out in.
“Fuck them motherfuckers, Mike,” they’d say. “We’re with you.”
I had met an awesome Russian girl at my hotel who saw my jewelry and told me to visit her at Graff Diamonds, the highest-end jewelry store in the world. She worked there translating for the Russian oligarchs and their wives when they visited the store. I went there with my fight promoter, Frank Warren, who was the Don King of Europe. She waited on me and she started flirting. She asked me what I was like as a boy and I told her, “I used to rob people and steal.”
“Stop playing!” she said.
“No, really. I broke into houses and robbed people at gunpoint.”
I also picked up the girl and slept with her a few times before I had to go to Manchester to fight. I wasn’t really worried about the fight. You could see that Francis wasn’t training seriously; he came in at 243 pounds. He had gone to some army camp to get in shape and he got fatter. I don’t think that the English press thought much of his chances. The London Daily Mirror gave him $50,000 to put an ad for their paper on the bottom of his boxing shoes. They got their money’s worth. I knocked Francis down five times in the first four minutes of the fight before the ref stopped it.
When I got back to London, I called up my Russian girlfriend. While I was talking to her, I could hear some guy in the background saying, “Who is that, Tyson?” She hung up and came right to see me at my hotel. I started getting nervous. She had told me when I first met her that she was seeing this Chinese arms dealer named Michael.
Oh shit, I thought. I am fucking dead.
I was convinced he was going to follow her to my hotel. When she got there, I immediately barraged her with questions.
“Will Michael get mad? Is Michael the jealous type?”
“To hell with him,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. He’s just a pain in the ass. But he does have a lot of money and he takes good care of me.”
Jackie Rowe was in the room and she put some street shit on this naïve girl. The Russian girl was so overwhelmingly beautiful that she had never learned how to play games. But this time she had to because she was going to lose her sugar daddy if she did anything rash. I was going back to America the next day. I wish she could have come with me but that was impossible.
“No, no, no, no,” Jackie told her. “You have to go back to him and tell him that everything is all right. Don’t pull your head out of the lion’s mouth abruptly. You’ve got to pull it easily out. Look, you need that money. Mike is going home. Don’t lose that guy.”
She took care of it. I knew that the guy was going to take her back. She was really an awesome lady.
I went back to the States, but it wasn’t long before I got in trouble again. On May eighteenth, I was with my barber friend Mack chilling at Cheetahs strip club in Vegas. Back then when I wanted to get my head clear, I went to a strip club. That’s just what people did back in the early 2000s.
So I was sitting on a couch at the back of the club next to the DJ booth, talking to my friend Lonnie who was one of the managers. This stripper came up to me and asked me if I wanted a lap dance. I didn’t want anything from her, but she was persistent. She kept insisting she give me a lap dance. She approached me a number of times, then she tried to sit down on my lap. I put up a hand to stop her and she teetered on her high heels and fell on her backside. I think I also called her a “skank” and a “dirty whore.” She went back to her dressing room, embarrassed.
From the dressing room she called her husband and told him what had happened. He called the police and claimed that me and my entourage were at Cheetahs right that moment manhandling the strippers and throwing them around the club. The Vegas police dispatched eight cars to the scene. I talked to one of the cops who told me that when he was working the Vice division, strippers wouldn’t take no for an answer. They were just hustlers trying to milk men dry. The cops took her aside and grilled her and she admitted that I never struck her and that she was fine, she was just embarrassed. She told the cops that her pride was hurt and she told me that if I had thrown her $500 this never would have happened. “After all this embarrassment I should be able to get something out of this,” she told them. The cops then left and because there was no incident, they didn’t charge me with anything. She finished her shift, doing lap dances and pole dances.
I guess she went home to her scam artist husband and he got to her because the next day she changed her story and filed a police report that claimed that “Tyson reached out with his open hand and punched/shoved her in the chest area causing her to literally fly across the room and land on the floor. She stated she was stunned and Tyson proceeded to call her a ‘skanky whore’ and ‘a bitch.’ She said she received bruises from the incident.” The police then reopened the investigation and again found no merit to her claim, calling her allegations “completely unfounded.”
But that didn’t stop her. She sued me a few months later. In the suit she said, “Tyson’s violent and painful blow sent [her] several feet across the floor and caused her to fall on her tailbone, with the heel of her shoe sharply striking her leg as she landed on the floor.” She claimed emotional distress, bodily injury, and stress in the marital relationship that curtailed the
ir marital activities.
The case dragged on. The following April I had to give a deposition. I was not amused having to sit there and listen to her lawyer’s bullshit questions. He was asking me to recount the situation when she approached me.
“You’re sitting, if I understand it, and I’ll try to make this short, you were sitting on, I guess, the couch area next to the deejay booth?”
“Yes.”
“And how did she come at you?”
“She’s a tramp. She insisted on giving me a lap dance. I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t want a lap dance. She went away and came back and she was insisting. She tried to thrust herself upon me. I put my hand out.”
“Did your hand come in contact with Miss Bianca?”
“Yeah, it could have, but from her being aggressive. My hand was out there for her to keep her distance away from me, not from me being aggressive, no.”
He kept badgering me. I called him a piece of shit and a fucking dick. He called for a recess and huddled with my lawyer. We had offered him ten grand to settle the case, they were asking for forty. When they came back from recess, he told me he wasn’t going to keep me anymore.
“I don’t need to be here anymore, because your client is a liar. You don’t want to keep me here, I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said.
The case went to arbitration when their attorney claimed that we had accepted the forty-grand settlement. The arbitration judge ruled against her. They appealed. We arbitrated again and she got $8,800, plus I had to pay the arbitrator $1,615. And my attorney charged me $25,000. That was the most expensive lap dance I never had.
By June, I was back in Phoenix training for my next fight. I was in a really bad mood and I was taking it out on my probation officer who was a really nice woman. But I didn’t get my ass thrown back in jail thanks to one of the greatest lawyers I ever came across. His name was Darrow Soll and he was a Jewish cat, a former Green Beret. He didn’t look like a badass; he was big but not muscular big. He was solid. We really bonded. Darrow was a really smart lefty, ACLU-type guy. He told me his father had been killed by one of those white Aryan supremacists, but he would still defend Aryan Nation guys. Darrow would take up the cases of the black guys who were on death row unjustly and not even charge them, even though he was broke to the teeth half the time. He was a wonderful man.
He was connected in the Phoenix law scene and helped smooth out a lot of shit for me over the years. My probation officer Erika was trying to get me to do more community service, but two different places refused to take me, so I yelled at her a couple of times on the phone. But Darrow chilled her out and told her that “medication” problems were causing my bad behavior.
“Good news. After much discussion Erika agreed to omit Mike’s verbal outbursts from her reports to her supervisor. She did this in large part because Mike was apologetic in his last meeting with her,” he wrote in a memo to my team.
Now my English promoters were worried about that bullshit lawsuit from the Cheetah girl. If I had had a bad probation report I might not have been allowed back into the U.K. to fight Lou Savarese. I was due to leave on June sixteenth, but I was back in New York because one of my best friends Darryl Baum got murdered on June tenth. People called him “Homicide” but I still called him by his original street name, “Shorty Love.” He hated that name because he hated anything that would make him seem soft and vulnerable. Shorty Love was from my neighborhood and he had a really notorious street rep for hurting people. I would always see him hanging around with the tough guys in the neighborhood. These guys were damn-near grown and he was just a little kid, but it was like he was the leader.
They called him Homicide because he was a knockout artist when he was twelve years old. He’d go up to someone on the street and knock them out with one punch and rob their jewelry or their sheepskin coat. In 1986, he went to jail on a two-to-six-year sentence for robbery. He was so violent in jail that he wound up serving twice his time. He finally got out on December 31, 1999. When he got out, I broke him off some money and bought him a nice Rolex and a chain and a Mercedes-Benz. I also offered to give him a job as one of my security men. I just wanted him to get off the streets and straighten out his life.
“Hang out with me,” I told him. “Don’t do that shit no more, we could get some money.”
“I ain’t going to take no fucking money from you, Mike,” he said. “Too many people took money from you.”
Shorty Love was gangster to the core. He wanted to be in that life. He got involved in a drug dispute between two rival gangs and they shot him dead six months after he got out of jail. Isn’t it crazy? All of my old friends, they all got murdered or they killed somebody. They were good people just caught up in drugs, sex, and death. That’s what my life was all about, being reckless.
I paid for Shorty’s funeral. I rented out this big luxurious Italian funeral home in Brooklyn and we had to add three other rooms because so many people showed up to pay their respects to him.
So I reluctantly got on that plane to England to make my fight.
Once I got to Scotland my mood lifted. The fight was in Glasgow and the reception for me there was overwhelming. I was doing some blow before the fight and I smoked some pot. There was no problem with the blow because that leaves your system right away, but for the pot, which stays in your system, I had to use my whizzer, which was a fake penis where you put in someone’s clean urine to pass your drug test. Jeff Wald’s assistant Steve Thomas used to travel with me and contribute.
I was high as a kite the day before the fight. They dressed me up in a kilt and I saluted the crowd from the top of a Mercedes-Benz. I was jumping up and down on the roof of the car screaming, “Champion! Champion!” and the people went crazy. A German man came up to me and told me it was a German car, trying to impress me that it was expensive.
“Big fucking deal,” I said. “Oh, so this is what you did with the money that you stole from the Jews? You bought cars?” I shouldn’t have said it; that was just me being political and disgusting.
Savarese was an interesting opponent for me. He was no tomato can. He had gone the distance and lost a split decision to George Foreman in 1997. In 1998 he knocked out Buster Douglas in one round. He had thirty-two KOs in forty-two bouts, but I didn’t think he would pose any problem for me.
The bell rang and he went down from my first punch, a looping left hook that hit him up on the temple. He got up and I was all over him. He was on his way down again when the ref got in between us. I didn’t realize that the ref was actually stopping the fight, so I kept punching and I accidentally hit him with a left hook and knocked him down. The British broadcasters later joked that that particular ref could never take a punch.
I was one of those spoiled-brat fighters. I thought I could get away with things like hitting the ref and not getting in trouble. But this particular time I really wasn’t trying to hit the ref. I was just being mean until I hurt Savarese. I was really psyched up when Jim Gray from Showtime interviewed me after the fight.
“Mike, was that your shortest fight ever?”
“I bear witness there is only one God and Mohammed blesses and peace be upon him as his prophet. I dedicate this fight to my brother Darryl Baum, who died. I’ll be there to see you, I love you with all of my heart. All praise be to my children, I love you, oh God, oh man, what?!”
“Is this your shortest fight ever, in any time? Amateur, professional, ever?”
“Assalamu alaikum Maida. I don’t know man, yeah, Lennox Lewis, Lennox I am coming for you.”
“Is it frustrating to train like you did and then have this over in seven or eight seconds?”
“I only trained probably two weeks or three weeks for this fight. I had to bury my best friend and I wasn’t going to fight, but I dedicated this fight to him. I was going to rip his heart out, I am the best ever, I am the most brutal and the most vicious and most ruthless champion there has ever been, there is no one could stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No! I am Alexand
er, he is no Alexander. I am the best ever, there has never been anybody as ruthless. I am Sonny Liston, I am Jack Dempsey, there is no one like me, I am from their cloth. There is no one that can match me, my style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable and I am just ferocious, I want your heart, I want to eat his children, praise be to Allah!”
With that, I stormed away. I was doing all this ranting because I was losing my mind. I was getting so high, my brain was getting fried. I was taking phrases from the Shaw Brothers karate movies like Five Deadly Venoms. I was quoting from Apocalypse, my favorite cartoon character. He was just a black badass and he always spoke so nobly. “Watch me and tremble as I bring the purity of oblivion to your world.” I was a little guy but I talked big like that. I was talking that WWE wrestling patter, eating his babies. I thought I was a tough badass but I was really just a showman in my blood.
Back in the States my parole officer worried about my comments after the Savarese fight and about an alleged confrontation with the promoter of the fight, Frank Warren. Darrow smoothed it all out. I was even allowed to associate with Ouie.
One of the conditions of my parole was to see a psychiatrist, so I met with Dr. Barksdale and his associate in Tempe, Arizona. The meeting didn’t go so well. But once again, Darrow came to the rescue.
“It is my understanding that the initial meeting with you and your partner may have been rough,” he wrote Barksdale. “Notably, however, Mike telephoned me last night on an unrelated issue and explicitly asked whether he could see you and your partner again. I must tell you that, based upon my experience with Mike, this was quite encouraging.”
I was back in Vegas. One of the reasons why I was in such great shape for the two fights in the U.K. was that I had taken to walking thirty miles a day, sometimes in 105-degree weather. I usually walked alone, but I had some foolish friends who thought that it might be a joyride to walk with me and pick up girls along the way, but it wasn’t like that. There was no talking, no stopping, I was just zoning out. One friend of mine had a heart attack walking with me.
