by Mike Tyson
I’d have parties in my room and order steaks and lobsters and caviar and Cristal. I’d invite up the biggest dope dealers and hustlers and we’d shoot dice. I’d whoop their asses in the dice game and then talk shit to them.
“Is that all the money you got, nigga? I thought you were a big-time motherfucking player out here in L.A. This is what happens when you fuck with the Iron One. You think I’m just a fighter? I’m a hard stonecutter nigga, man. You may as well go play Lotto; you ain’t gonna win nothing from me.”
I lived it up in that suite for two years. Partying my ass off, getting high on weed and coke, having my girls come up. I ballooned up in weight from all the late-night eating.
Right after I signed up with K-1 that August, they put out a press release that I was going to fight Bob Sapp, a 6'5", 390-pound ex-NFL player who was one of the K-1 stars. But I was never going to fight no kickboxer.
“It might be nice,” I told the New York Times when they called me. “But under the Marquis of Queensberry rules. I don’t really feel like getting kicked in the head, you know?”
Then I showed up at the big K-1 fights at the Bellagio in Vegas on August fifteenth. Right after Bob Sapp won his match, he called me into the ring and challenged me.
“I’ll do it right here,” I told the crowd. “Get me a pair of shorts and I’ll fight him tonight with the Marquis of Queensberry. Sign the contract, big boy.”
This was wrestling shit talk. I loved doing these appearances.
A few weeks after I moved into the Beverly Wilshire, I went to Neverland to see Michael Jackson. It was nice hanging out with Michael. He was very low-key then. He asked me what I had been doing and I told him that I had been taking it easy.
“Rest is good. Rest is just real good, Mike,” he told me. “Get as much as you can.”
I didn’t know then that he couldn’t sleep at all.
It was weird, everyone was saying that he was molesting kids then, but when I went there he had some little kids there who were like thug kids. These were no little punk kids, these guys would have whooped his ass if he tried any shit.
In April 2004, I made a joint appearance with Ali at a big K-1 event. Again they announced that I had signed with them to fight and that I’d make my debut that summer. One of their stars had a press conference and said he looked forward to fighting me.
“I would accept a fight under boxing rules,” Jerome Le Banner said. “But as soon as I am in the ring I’d do whatever the fuck I want … Western boxing or not, I will kick him … Tyson has already bit an ear, now he’s gonna eat a size twelve foot.”
I would have been crazy to fight those monsters. I’d rather go back to my hotel suite and just chill.
My bankruptcy was winding along. In June, Don finally settled the suit. The bankruptcy judge let him pay only $14 million. He had played everybody once again. I didn’t get no film rights or anything. Monica was the first to get paid out of the settlement. The bankruptcy lawyers wound up costing $14 million. They got paid ahead of the IRS. I was still up shit’s creek, so I had Shelly get me a fight. He chose an English boxer named Danny Williams and we signed to fight in Louisville on July thirtieth. Williams was the former British heavyweight champ who was on the comeback trail. He had knocked out his last two opponents, but he had lost to Julius Francis so I wasn’t too worried about fighting him.
I had to do press again. A couple of weeks before the fight, I was my usual optimistic self when I met them.
“I guess the thing I am most curious about, Mike, is where you find serenity in your life?” I was asked.
“I don’t know. I’m realizing that I am not the only person that has been in a situation. You have to understand I have lost everything and I mean everything. Anyone I ever cared about, anybody I ever loved, romantic, I’ve just lost everything. My money, home, I’ve lost everything. The people who love you, you just chase them away by being so belligerent and crazy. You have to lose it all. And I think at some point of your life you wish you could receive them back but I guess that is part of our growing pain. We lose people that we love and care about the most in order to start our life off fresh, with a brand-new start.”
I was doing drugs right up to the fight. I went into the fight weighing 232, but I was in pretty good shape. My entourage was gone when I walked into the ring. I had made my security guy Rick one of my cornermen. I rocked Williams in the first round and almost had him out, but he was a smart fighter and he held on to me and got through the round. With thirty seconds to go, I felt something snap in my left knee after I threw a punch. I found out later that I had torn my meniscus, so I was fighting on one leg from the second round on. I still managed to rock him in the second round, but I couldn’t move and be elusive and he started pounding me pretty good to the body. In the third round the ref deducted two points from him for low blows and a late punch.
By the fourth I was just out of gas and was a stationary target. He unleashed a barrage of punches and between my knee and my lack of conditioning I couldn’t move. A final right hand sent me down. Then I was sitting up against the ropes, watching as the ref counted me out. That fight really killed my spirit.
I went back to Phoenix to Shelley’s house and I had an operation on my knee. I was in a wheelchair for a while and then on crutches. Of course, that was another excuse to do drugs. I spent the next few months in a deep depression, just hanging out in the backyard and flying my birds.
I came out of seclusion in October when I went to New York to see the Trinidad-Mayorga fight at Madison Square Garden. I was there with my friend Zip and a new bodyguard from the Bronx. When we walked to our seats in the Garden, the people at the fight went nuts. They hadn’t seen me for a long time and they were losing it. I got a standing ovation. I love Zip like a brother but Zip didn’t understand that the people were just showing appreciation for me. He got so excited.
“We’re back, Mike, we’re back!” he said. “They’ll be calling you for commercials soon. They’ll get you in movies. We’re going to have that big book deal. You’re a hell of a man to overcome this, brother. We’re back!!”
Forget the fact that I was a full-blown cokehead, we were back.
After the fight, we went to the after-party in a downtown club. I was sitting drinking with Zip when he pointed to the dance floor.
“Check your security out,” he said.
I looked and saw my new bodyguard all hugged up dancing with a white girl while he was holding a champagne bottle. We stayed for a while and then me, Zip, the bodyguard, and the girl went back to the hotel.
Zip and I were chilling in the room, smoking some weed, when there was a knock on the door.
I answered. Some guy was standing there.
“Mike, your security is in the elevator and he’s butt naked.”
“What!!”
Zip and I rushed out to the elevator and we saw that the security guard was lying in the elevator and his pants were down around his ankles. I had Zip pull up his pants and put him back in his room. Then we went to our room.
A few minutes later the cops came. They told me that they had the whole incident on the surveillance cameras. The girl that my bodyguard had picked up had accused him of rape, but when they saw the footage, they saw her slipping him a Mickey and pulling his pants down. She was setting him up to rob him. So there wasn’t going to be any charges or bad publicity.
I shut the door and we smoked some more weed. Then minutes later, there was another knock on the door. I looked through the peephole and saw four more cops.
“Hey, hey! Stop! Leave me alone, I’m finished talking to you guys! I didn’t do nothing, I just talked to the cops! Please leave me alone.”
Later that night I had the limo take Zip home and I went along for the ride. He was still bummed out from the bodyguard thing.
“Man, we were almost back, Mike,” he said. “Almost back. We’d have been in the movies, we’d have been commentating fights. We were almost back and this dumb-assed motherfuc
king security guard fucked it up, Mike.”
I got in trouble myself a month later. I was in Phoenix staying at a hotel with my regular security guy Rick. Some of my Arizona friends took me out, and Rick stayed back at the hotel. We went to the Pussycat Lounge in Scottsdale and got wasted on coke and booze. We were all fucked up when we were leaving the club and were walking across the street when we saw a car coming fast at us.
“I’m going to jump over the car,” I told one of my friends. So I stopped in the middle of the street but the driver stopped too. I jumped up on his hood, got on my hands and knees, and started yelling and pounding the shit out of the car. The guy got out of his car to yell at me, but when he saw that it was me, he ran back into his car. My friends pulled me down and told the driver that he was okay. But the next day he looked at his Toyota and noticed there were dents all over the hood, so he called the police. I got charged with a misdemeanor criminal damage count but Darrow got involved and the guy got paid off.
I still had no money when the New Year rolled around. Shelley was pregnant again and in March we had a daughter we named Exodus. I called the other Shelly and told him I needed to make some quick money. He set up a fight with a palooka named Kevin McBride in Washington, D.C., on June eleventh. But he was a big palooka, 6'6" and 271 pounds.
A reporter from USA Today came out to my home in Phoenix after one of my sparring sessions and I unburdened myself on his ass.
“I’ll never be happy. I believe I’ll die alone. I would want it that way. I’ve been a loner all my life with my secrets and my pain. I’m really lost, but I’m trying to find myself. I’m really a sad, pathetic case. My whole life has been a waste – I’ve been a failure. I just want to escape. I’m really embarrassed with myself and my life. I want to be a missionary. I think I could do that while keeping my dignity without letting people know they chased me out of the country. I want to get this part of my life over as soon as possible. I want to develop my life into missionary work. I’m not going to be a Jesus freak. But that’s what I’m going to give my life to. I love Jesus and I believe in Jesus too – and I’m a Muslim. Listen, I’ve got an imam, I got a rabbi, I got a priest, I got a reverend – I got ’em all. But I don’t want to be holier than thou. I want to help everybody and still get some pussy.
“In this country, nothing good is going to come out of me. I’m so stigmatized there’s no way I can elevate myself. I was depressed after my last fight. I was hanging out with a lot of prostitutes and stuff. I felt like scum, so I hung out with scum. I was getting high all the time. But you realize you’ve got to put all the drugs away and deal with reality.”
I never should have been in that ring. I was missing wildly, I was standing still, I had no stamina. It was an ugly fight. At the end of the sixth round McBride just leaned on me when we were on the ropes and I went down on my ass. I just sat there with my legs sprawled out. The bell rang and I could hardly get up. McBride’s corner was working on a cut that he got from a head butt. I sat in my corner and told my new trainer Jeff Fenech that it was over. I wasn’t going out for the seventh round.
Jim Gray came over to me to do the interview.
“Mike, first let’s start with you. Did you want to continue?”
“Well, I would like to have continued. But I saw that I was getting beat on. I realized, I don’t think I have it anymore, because, um … I got the ability to stay in shape, but I don’t got the fighting guts, I don’t think, anymore.”
“When did you recognize that, at what part of the fight?”
“I don’t know, early into the fight. I’m just sorry I let everybody down. I just don’t have this in my heart anymore.”
“Did you feel as though you had it coming into the fight?”
“Um, no, I’m just fighting to take care of my bills, basically. I don’t have the stomach for this no more. I’m more conscious of my children. I don’t have that ferocity. I’m not an animal anymore.”
“Does that mean we won’t see you fight again?”
“Yes, most likely, I’m not gonna fight anymore. I’m not gonna disrespect the sport anymore by losing to this caliber of fighters.”
“Why did you come out so passive?”
“I’m not taking nothing away from Kevin. I don’t love this no more. I haven’t loved fighting since 1990, but Kevin, congratulations on your career and good luck. And I wish you the best and make a lot of money.”
I met the boxing reporters for the last time after a fight. I walked into the interview room and they gave me a standing ovation.
I told them to sit down and I repeated the same stuff I had told Jim Gray. I wasn’t going to fight anymore because I didn’t want to disgrace the sport.
And then I left the arena as a boxer for the last time. And I forgot about doing missionary work or contributing to society. I just said to myself, “Wow, this is over. Now I can go out and really have fun.”
Back when I was ten years old, I was doing a robbery with this older guy named Boo. He had me go through the window of this guy’s house and we hit the mother lode – big-ass TV, nice stereo, some guns, and some money. Boo knew I was a good little hustler. He’d have me lure guys who wanted to fuck a little boy into a room and he and his friends would be there to smash him and take his money.
After this heist, Boo took me to the pad of this older black lady. She was an unscrupulous, evil-looking person, but when I got to know her she was really kind and considerate. There were a bunch of guys in the place lying around and nodding out. Boo gave her some money and she gave him an envelope with some white powder in it. I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he put the powder into a spoon and heated it up with a lighter. When the shit started bubbling, he took out a syringe and sucked the liquid up through the needle. Then he tied off his arm and he was about to inject the shit into his vein when he turned to me.
“Turn around, baby, turn around, baby,” he said to me.
He didn’t want me to watch him shooting up heroin.
Later, when we left the shooting gallery, he slapped me on the head.
“I better not ever hear or see you doing this shit or I’m going to kill you dead, little motherfucker. Do you hear me?”
Of course, that made me want to do heroin even more. When an old heroin head would tell me not to fuck with dope, I’d be thinking, Why is that? So that they can have it all to themselves?
I tried heroin once when I was younger. I smoked it and it made me feel really bad. I had to throw up. Just looking at junkies was enough to put me off heroin. I could look at a heroin addict and see that his soul was gone. You figure that’s what you have to look forward to.
I started buying and sniffing coke when I was eleven but I’d been drinking alcohol since I was a baby. I come from a long line of drunks. My mother used to give me Thunderbird or Gordon’s gin to make me go to sleep. When I was ten, my friends and I would buy bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, Bacardi 151, Brass Monkey, the real cheap shit that kills your guts. We also started smoking weed and hash and even opium and angel dust. I even did some blotter acid once when I was young. We did some jostling when we were high on acid but that didn’t work out so well. We’d be snatching shit and laughing and running.
“The cops, the cops, they’re coming.” We’d laugh and hide under a car.
Except for one two-year stretch and the time I was in prison, I always drank. Which was not surprising since all my role models who I had read about were raging drunks. Mickey Walker, Harry Greb. My heroes were these white, Irish drunks. They were the guys who would be in a bar drinking and laughing while their opponents were running and doing rope work.
Booze brought out the worst in me. When I got drunk, I’d become totally emotionless and careless about other people’s feelings. I’d fight with anyone, even cops. Anybody that knew me would say, “Don’t let Mike drink. Give him some pot, just don’t let him drink.” If I got high on pot, I was happy and I was ready to cry and give you all my fucking money. Just as long as you don’t t
ell me not to get high, because if you tell me to stop getting high, then I’m mad at you. If you’re okay with me getting high, then it’s “You sure you don’t need that nice Porsche out there?”
I really think that one reason that I started doing so much coke was because I was in a lot of physical pain from my boxing career. I know some hockey players who told me the same story. When you have that kind of pain, you can’t be friendly with anybody. You’re like a lion with a hurt paw. When an animal gets hurt, they know that the other animals will attack them. That’s how I felt when I was in pain, vulnerable and scared. So you get some coke and then you’re in the room alone with the coke and you want a woman in there, because you feel so bad about doing the drug that having a woman is going to kill the guilt.
I had no problem getting cocaine, even when I was totally broke. I knew a lot of the big drug dealers when they were little guys just coming up and I showed them some love. Now they’re multimillionaires and they own big clubs, so when they see me they treat me real good. But I treat them as if they were still those little guys. I’d just say, “I’m going to go somewhere, run me some of those little packages.” Or I might have just met an absolute stranger that knows the drug man and they’d say, “Give Mike two eight balls on me.”
When you start doing coke, you can see that people who you’ve known all your life and you’d never suspect are doing coke also. I was once drinking with a major celebrity when he turned to me.
“You got any powder?” he asked me.
“What??”
I was trying to be discreet. How the fuck did he know I was doing blow?
“Yeah, I got some. But how did you know?” I asked him.
“People that do it know the people that do it, Mike,” he said. “We have radar.”
When you have cocaine, you could be in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the fucking night, snorting your blow, and out of nowhere a bitch pops up in a bathing suit. Coke radar. The women that I was around loved coke so much we even started naming it after them. If you wanted some coke, you’d say, “Where’s that white bitch at? I want that ho.” We’d also call it “blondie” or “white girl.”
